The Secret Price of History. Gayle Ridinger
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with Suzanne. Boka's assassination had put a stop to the cash needing to be laundered by their sheltered companies in financial paradises, but if Van Buren uttered another word he'd sue her for slander for a million dollars and win, covered by Senator Frank. "I will honor every debt with personal capital." Another look at Suzanne. The time had come for their announcement. Calm. Calm and cool, he told his seething self.
"Why, Mr. Brandeau, you must be very, very rich indeed," Martina Van Buren purred, then added, "Or I suspect there is a political game going on here."
The other three—les cochons—sat up in their chairs.
Stupid bitch. Didn't she know that this little fire could burn her own house down? And for another thing, Brandeau resented her alarming his men. He had never let any man under him—not in business nor in his militia years—see anything but his determination. That had gone even more so for villagers. They'd got more than determination—they'd got ruthlessness.
"Let me fill you in," he began blindly. But then his daughter rose gracefully from her chair, walked over to Martina and placed a hand—a hand with lovely, crimson-painted nails and two silver rings—on her right shoulder, and somehow he knew she was more on target than a military bomber.
"If my father has continued to go ahead with our corporate growth plan, Martina, it's because he foresees coming into possession of a great sum of liquid cash in the very near future." Suzanne smiled round the table as if informing cousins of a common inheritance. Then she tossed her head in a way that for another woman would communicate impatience but for her signalled a resetting of her body's sensibilities, her glossy black hair sweeping into its resting place like a pulled velvet stage curtain.
It was not the first time Suzanne Brandeau had interjected into financial discussions a strange, altered moment of physical persuasion. The enticement included her perfume, which reached their noses gradually, the way the smell of a maiden's rose bath would the nearest window. When she had been 16 or 17 she'd wanted, literally, to be a fragrance—not overwhelming but enthralling—and to move through all men as a smell. The difference was that today, as the men in the room watched, Martina Van Buren and Suzanne alone were negotiating the future of the company. Even Brandeau was staying out of it, albeit with a knowing look on his face.
Ignore her, Martina thought. All the successful family-run businesses she'd ever dealt with had skeletons in their closets. Europe was full of companies like this, even Holland. She hadn't gotten where she was today by blowing the whistle every time. Of course, if she found out that the Mafia was involved, that would be different. Stop smelling the roses, she commanded herself.
"Martina, I'm asking you to give us three months. Of course there is a risk, as there is for all grand schemes. But at the same time I want to reassure the Board that we Brandeaus will put up our equity."
"I should go to the District Attorney, of course."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I should, I said."
But she made it clear she wouldn't. It was merely for the record, seemingly said without vehemence. Martina Van Buren was making a calculated decision not to challenge the Brandeaus further.
"Ah." Suzanne sat back in her chair.
Martina hated her coy half-smile. It irked her that Suzanne, and of course the men present, believed that she'd been seduced. Far from it. Indifferent as she felt this moment, she fully expected a return wave of indignation.
As Martina Van Buren left the room, Suzanne remained immobile, as if reality---this reality that she had wanted—might not gel if she as much breathed for a minute or two. The room only became alive when Brandeau tossed his fountain pen on the table and strode to the ceiling-to-floor windows, where he stared at the view of the other hotel palaces of Las Vegas; it was the sign that it was all right for the male members of the Board to reach in their pockets for their cell phones to switch back on and check for messages. They muttered more than talked, in the way of a departing movie audience, and on their slow way out, they were bumped from behind by Suzanne, charging out to find Fumihiro, her bodyguard.
Her lips mouthed "Three!" and her eyes were glowing.
Fumihiro raised three fingers on both hands and waved them about.
From in front of the elevator, Martina Van Buren, already experiencing the first lappings of bad feelings, witnessed the scene. It dawned on her that the funny-looking Samurai with those weight-lifter's shoulders and willowy legs of a marathoner might be an important pawn for understanding where all this money of Brandeau was coming from.
Wise to keep an eye on him.
She felt less in a no-win situation thinking that.
Las Vegas - July 22, 2008
A Las Vegas policeman was questioning the ER doctor who'd been on duty at Valley Hospital that night. The doctor kept staring at the floor and the policeman was growing increasingly impatient. Forty-eight hours had passed and other than this ER doc he still had no clue as to the victim's identity. No hotel or private individual had phoned in that time to report a room splattered with blood. No missing person report had been filed.
The policeman had checked the FBI archives. There had been a few similar cases in the last few years, all occurring during more or less the same time of year, in Atlantic City, Niagara Falls, and a small town just outside New Orleans. Interpol in Europe had reported an episode in Montecarlo.
'The serial killer of the casinos,' the policeman had thought to himself.
Then he'd seen the listing of two identical murders in South Carolina, where casinos didn't exist. All the bodies had still had shoes on their feet—tremendously high-heeled platform shoes, which may have meant these murdered women had been prostitutes. Certainly they'd all been tortured.
The distinguishing detail about this case was that according to the nursing staff, the victim before her death had muttered something to this Emergency Room doc.
"Maybe she said 'stop him.' Or maybe I just imagined it as she was taking her last breath."
The policeman was disappointed.
"Come on, Doctor. Let's give this girl a name at least."
"What do you expect me to do?" the intern retorted. "The girl doesn't have any more fingers and so no fingerprints. The girl doesn't have any face left, so there's no making up a sketch for the newspapers. She doesn't have teeth so there's no checking dental records. There's only the DNA to go on. So go ahead and check that against all of the population of Nevada and see if you come up with a close relative! You guys will never find the assassin, get it? Never."
Rome, Italy - July 25, 2008
The useless wear and tear on tires was a trademark of the Italian Police force. Pointless machismo that Special Inspector Filippo Dardanoni couldn't stand. Nine times out of ten the crime had already happened, and it made no difference to solving the case whether one arrived on the scene at two-hundred miles an hour or at a less-than-cinematographic speed.
Dardanoni was in a nit-picking mood all around when he arrived in front of the church of Santa Prisca in the Aventino quarter. In the small square tarred over as a parking lot, he found three other police cars, a handful of curious bystanders, and an aggressive platoon of TV reporters acting as if they'd lucked on the crime of the century. He had no time or patience for anyone in his sight line, and what made it worse was that they were all Romans. Romans were notoriously sloppy or approximate on the job, and Dardanoni, who hailed from Milan in the North, found plenty of daily examples to confirm this. There were this morning, for instance, a glaring number of problems with how the police were marking off the crime zone and guarding the area—starting with the fact that they were arrayed in the wrong spots, and by God if he also hadn't seen a cop or two passing information to the reporters.
He needed such goings-on this morning as much as he needed a hole in his head. Especially if what his superiors had told him on the phone was true.
"Ispettore!"
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