Do Not Disturb (73 page)

“Mr. Tisch doesn’t have children of his own,” an adorable, wispily blonde girl of six lisped in finale. “But he’s been like a father to me. Thank you, Mr. Tisch. I hope you enjoy your party.”

The screen went blank, to wild applause. Anton, still hamming up his surprised and embarrassed shtick, was beckoned up to the podium by Saskia. At yet another prerehearsed cue, the press were ushered farther forward, and space was miraculously created for the TV crews with their bulky boom mics and camera equipment. Only once the media were all in place did Anton start to speak.

“I won’t bore you with a long speech,” he said, taking the microphone, “not least because I had no idea they were going to spring this on me.” He wagged an admonishing finger at Saskia. From their various posts, Lucas, Honor, and Sian all cringed. “So I have nothing prepared. But I would like to say a few words of thanks, off the cuff, as it were. To all of you,” he held his hands out magnanimously, “for being here tonight to help celebrate the Herrick’s remarkable achievement.” More cheers. “To my loyal staff, especially Ms. Petra Kamalski, my outstanding manager here, whose hard work is in large part responsible for this happy occasion.”

Despite herself, Petra flushed with happiness. He’d singled her out publicly, without giving Saskia even a passing mention. Knowing how crushed her rival would be filled her with a warm inner glow.

“But most of all, I’d like to thank the children, like little Leila whom you saw there, with whom it has been my honor and privilege to work over the last twenty years. I can truly say that they have given me more, far more, than I have ever given them.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” muttered Sian.

Reaching for the perfectly pressed white handkerchief in his breast pocket, he dabbed at his eyes with one swift gesture: manly but compassionate. It was a bravura performance. Even Lucas, at the back of the audience, was impressed.

The applause for his speech, respectable at first, swelled to an almost deafening crescendo. Standing on the podium, basking in the adulation, it took some seconds before Anton realized that it wasn’t, in fact, he who was the focus of this rapturous reception, but Tina Palmer, who had somehow appeared behind him onstage. Wearing a (for her) conservative creation in blue-gray bias-cut silk, she nevertheless looked every inch the star, with Elizabeth Taylor–size diamonds at her throat, ears, and wrists and her blonde hair piled on top of her head in a solid hair-sprayed mountain. The drag queen look that Lucas found so off-putting up close seemed to evaporate with distance, as well as on camera. To the partygoers below, and all the viewers at E! and beyond, Tina looked Screen Siren perfect.

She was holding up an enormous bouquet of lilies, freesias, and roses, a vulgar but impressive riot of color finished off with a red silk bow the size of a small child’s head. Leaning forward, she presented it to a bewildered Anton. More than a little annoyed to have his limelight so shamelessly usurped, but with the spotlights trained firmly on him, he had little option but to smile and take the flowers, which obscured him from view almost completely. As he reached for the bouquet, Tina deftly relieved him of his mic.

“What the hell is going on?” hissed Saskia, stepping forward and looking officious. “You shouldn’t be up here.” But Tina held her ground, shooing her away with all the languid unconcern of a cow flicking its tail at a fly. Saskia reviewed her options silently for a moment, then withdrew into the shadows. Tina Palmer was bona fide A-list these days. She could hardly have her manhandled from the stage.

Watching proceedings from the audience with a rigid-jawed stare, Petra shared Saskia’s sense of impotence. Tina was clearly up to no good, but there wasn’t a lot they could do about it, not unless she really overstepped the mark.

“I apologize for this unscheduled diversion,” breathed Tina huskily, channeling her best Marilyn Monroe. “But given my own work with UNICEF, I felt it was appropriate. I believe many of you here tonight are familiar with my work.”

Suddenly a still from her infamous porn movie flashed up on the screen behind her. The crowd gasped as one, then erupted with laughter.

“Thank you; you’re too kind,” giggled Tina, camping it up.

Honor, who’d worked her way to the front of the crowd, blushed scarlet. The naked image had been her idea—a surefire attention grabber—and she was relieved Sian had managed to commandeer the projector as planned. But looking at her sister like that, all creamy, udder-sized breasts and candy-pink nipples, still floored her with embarrassment.

“Anyway, given my own charity work—and Mr. Tisch’s involvement with it, of which more later,” Tina smiled mysteriously, “I felt I couldn’t let this evening pass without a small, personal tribute. So if you’ll bear with me…Sian?”

Inside the summerhouse, converted by Saskia into a makeshift projection room for her tribute film, Sian’s hands were shaking like someone in the final stages of Parkinson’s. Thanks to Honor’s careful planning, everything had gone seamlessly. As soon as the credits rolled on Anton’s biopic, she’d been able to slip unnoticed into the building and lock it from the inside. But now that she was actually here, with her finger on the button both metaphorically and literally, she felt sick as a dog. Media from across the globe were lined up outside, their cameras trained on the screen behind Tina:
her
film,
her
story. Back in London, Simon would have already gone to print. The first copies of the
News of the World
would be on the newsstands within hours, with her exclusive exposé plastered all over the front three pages. It wasn’t just Anton Tisch’s life that was about to be changed forever. It was hers, too. Christ, she hoped she hadn’t fucked up the editing. Weaving her extra footage into the film they already had had been painstaking work, and everything had been so rushed this afternoon at Honor’s cottage. What if she’d somehow cut out something crucial? Or what if they had technical problems? Basic editing she could just about do, but Sian was no technician.

Seconds later, she had the surreal experience of seeing her own face pop up in front of her, on-screen.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” Sitting in a black leather chair in a nondescript white room, she spoke directly to camera. “My name is Sian Doyle. I’m a journalist. And I’d like to show you all another side to Anton Tisch.”

The camera panned outward to show a very young girl sitting opposite her in a second, identical black leather chair. Bug-eyed and visibly shaking with nerves, she was hauntingly beautiful but didn’t look a day over fourteen.

Up onstage, Anton’s hands tightened involuntarily around his bouquet. He didn’t even notice when the thorns from the roses skewered his palms and blood began to trickle over the flowers’ plastic wrapping.

“Find Petra,” he mouthed urgently over his shoulder to Saskia. “I want this stopped. Now!”

“At first, I thought Mr. Tisch was just being friendly. I was very grateful to ’im for trying to help me,” said the girl, in a childish whisper littered with cockney cadences. “The first pictures I done was all right. Tasteful and that. But then there was this other man, Bill or Billy I think ’is name was, who worked for Mr. Tisch on his website. He wanted me to do…other things.” She looked away. “He showed me pictures what some of the other girls from the home had done.”

Three stills filled the screen in quick succession, all of nude underage girls in sickeningly graphic sexual poses. A collective gasp of disgust erupted from the crowd.

“These images were posted on a website that’s a wholly owned subsidiary of the Tischen Group.” Sian was talking directly to camera again. “All three of these girls spent time in care homes paid for by Anton Tisch. All three were known personally to him.”

“This is preposterous!” spluttered Anton. Dropping the flowers on the ground, he made a lunge for Tina’s microphone, but she stepped back, whipping it away like a matador taunting a bull. She had no idea what any of this was really about—Honor’s explanations earlier about some sort of movie exposé sounded boringly convoluted to Tina. But she was definitely starting to enjoy being a part of it now.

Those of the guests who weren’t still reeling with shock began giggling as they watched Tina Palmer evading Anton’s grasp. Aware that he was starting to look like a laughingstock, as well as a pedophile, Anton cut his losses and stormed offstage.

“Where’s Petra?” he roared at the hovering staff behind the podium steps. “Can none of you switch off this fucking thing?”

“Whoever’s in the summerhouse has locked it from the inside, sir,” piped up one brave soul. “They’re trying to break in there now. Saskia’s got a bunch of guys down there.”

Back in the summerhouse, Sian could no longer hear her own projected voice over the frenzied rattling of the door behind her. As well as locking it, she’d managed to wedge it shut with various bulky items of furniture, but the guys outside weren’t giving up in a hurry. Aware that she was running out of time, she made an executive decision to skip the next section of footage altogether and cut straight to the finale. Activating her wire for the first time that evening, she sent a warning message to Lucas.

At the back of the garden, he clutched his ear, trying to make out what she was saying through the heavy crackle. “Need a minute. I’m g…second tape. Can you get Tina…cover?”

Getting the gist, he stood up on an empty champagne crate and waved a prearranged signal to Tina.
Please God let her have remembered…

In fact, he needn’t have worried. With Sian reloading the tape decks, the screen faded to black, but Tina stepped forward quite unfazed and kept everyone occupied with a little show of her own.

“The story doesn’t end there, folks,” she said huskily, her diamond choker dazzling in the spotlight. “In a moment, our lovely hostess, Sian, will be back with some even more shocking revelations.” The crowd oohed and aahed. Their earlier disgust apparently forgotten, Tina had suddenly transformed them into gullible participants in a cheap reality show. “But in the meantime, I’d like to share my own personal experience of Mr. Tisch,” she went on. “Unfortunately for me, his interest in the sex-tape industry wasn’t entirely restricted to teenagers. I now know that Anton Tisch himself was personally responsible for my own debut in the adult movie world. That’s right.” She gave a wounded pout, preening for the TV cameras all the while and making sure she kept her chin firmly down. “He was the one who entrapped me, not poor Lucas Ruiz,” she wagged her finger playfully at the press, “whom you awful swine were so quick to blame at the time.”

A shocked murmur rose up from the hotel industry people scattered among the crowd. No one in the US would forget in a hurry how Lucas had been pilloried over that tape, and the self-righteous fever of condemnation that had swept the business at the time.

“But the good news,” said Tina archly, “is that we’ve raised over two million dollars to date, ladies and gentlemen. Well, I guess it’s primarily the gentlemen I have to thank.” Another loud burst of laughter. “So please, keep watching!”

She might be best known as a porn star, but there was no doubt Tina Palmer was East Hampton’s sweetheart tonight.

“And on behalf of UNICEF and the poor children of Africa, I’d like to propose a toast of my own: to Anton Tisch. A
true
humanitarian!”

Just as the roars of applause were dying down again, the screen behind Tina lit up once more.

“Atta girl,” whispered Lucas under his breath. He’d lost radio contact with Sian again, but she’d obviously come through.

“We now come to the final, and most disturbing aspect of tonight’s short film.” Still in her black chair, talking straight to camera, Sian’s clear, steely voice filled the night air. “Most of you probably don’t know much about Azerbaijan, so let me fill you in on the headlines. It used to be part of the Soviet Union. It’s got a lot of oil—expected oil revenues over the next twenty years of around a hundred and twenty billion dollars. And it’s run by one of the most corrupt regimes on the planet. Oh,” she added, breaking into a rare smile, “and it’s where Anton Tisch first made his fortune.”

A couple of stills followed of rugged, mountainous scenery, some enchanting coastline, and vast pipelines built to ship the country’s oil to the West. But just as people were starting to wonder quite where Sian was going with this geography lesson, another, horrifying image filled the screen. It was the body of a young boy, no more than eleven or twelve, his torso riddled with bullets, still clutching an ancient Kalashnikov rifle to his chest.

“We don’t know his name.” Sian’s voice, somber again now, drifted out of the speakers as they cut to more shots of dead children, some burned and tortured beyond recognition. “Or his. Or his.” Relentlessly the pictures kept coming. A number of people in the audience looked away.

“I think I’m gonna be sick,” said the starlet to her friend.

“What we do know, and what I can prove, is that Anton Tisch supplied arms to boys like these, children forced to become armed warriors against President Aliyev’s ruthless regime. And this is what he bought with the profits.”

A shot of Anton’s stunning Geneva mansion loomed into view, followed by one of another child soldier, this one still alive but malnourished, his eyes wide with terror and confusion. More of the same followed: Anton’s yacht, and a pile of rebel bodies;
Anton smiling as he shook hands with President Bush, and an Aliyev labor camp, complete with emaciated faces pressed up against the barbed wire. Then the screen abruptly went black.

“They must have got into the projection room,” mumbled Lucas to himself, trying in vain to raise either Sian or Honor on their wires. So much for state-of-the-art communications technology. But it didn’t seem to matter. They’d been on air long enough to get the point across. Within seconds, pandemonium broke loose. Everybody wanted a piece of Anton, but he seemed to have melted into the melee. Happily, Tina was still up onstage and more than willing to step into the breach in his absence, sacrificing herself to the media feeding frenzy.

“Tina, can you prove any of this?” yelled reporters, thrusting microphones and cameras at her from all angles. “Who is this Sian Doyle? How do you know her?”