Requiem For a Glass Heart (27 page)

“That,” Stepanov said, “is a puzzle.” But he didn’t seem too bothered by it. It didn’t seem to cause him any anxiety. He looked at his empty glass.

“You want some more?” he asked, holding up his glass.

W
HEN THE DOORBELL CHIMED IN
I
RINA’S SUITE, IT STARTLED HER
awake. She had fallen asleep on the sofa, curled up in her robe, unaware that she had gotten chilled by the air-conditioning sometime during the past hour. When she awoke she was cold, and she wasn’t entirely sure what she had heard. Then the chimes sounded a second time.

Expecting Stepanov or Izvarin, she stood, snugged up her robe, and walked through her bedroom to the door. When she opened it, two dark men were standing in front of her, one of them holding a finger in front of his lips. He was young and handsome. Italian.

The two men came into the room, and Irina closed the door. One of the young men leaned close to her ear.

“Please, Don Carlo and the Chinese wish to see you,” he said softly and slowly, his breath warming her ear, his cologne reminding her of his youth. “Please don’t talk. Dress. You will be safe with us.”

And she knew she would be.

They escorted her down the hallway to a stairwell and then followed her all the way to the basement, where they made their way to the hotel’s kitchens. From there it was a short walk to the loading docks at the rear of the chateau, where the three of them stepped through the open doors of a
laundry van. The van pulled away and left the grounds of the hotel, and within ten minutes they were pulling into the underground parking garage of a hotel near the Greenway Plaza. When the laundry truck stopped, they stepped out and got into a dark Mercedes. The driver started the car, and they circled up the maze of ramps and left the garage.

Knowing nothing of the city, Irina had no idea where they were going. The large car was gloomy inside. One of the young men sat in the front seat with the driver and the other sat in the back seat with her, well over into his corner. These were Bontate’s Sicilians. A radio emitted short bursts of communication. No one spoke. They were taking their job very seriously.

Though they remained in the city, they drove for what seemed to be miles through thickly wooded streets, the car’s headlights illuminating a green corridor ahead of them. The houses were large, even grand. High walls sprang up on either side of the lights, and they passed gated drives with entry lights set into the stones, softly lighting the driveways. The car slowed and then turned and slipped through a set of narrow gates. Irina saw guards standing in the green shadows cast by landscape lights.

They stopped at the front door of a modern home, a seemingly new two-story structure that was nestled among ancient trees. Its angular facade was oddly backlighted, so that it seemed to hide its contents behind a flat front embossed with simple interlocking geometric designs.

The young men escorted Irina up three short flights of three steps each set into a thick groundcover and entered the house from an entry positioned at a right angle to the facade. They came into a high, vaulted foyer; a stairway of seven red granite steps rose to another level. On either side of the stairs a waterfall took up the rest of the space in the enormous entry, each fall descending over scores of terraces of polished black granite that rose nearly ten feet high and easily twice that in width. Though the water slipped over the granite at a gentle velocity, its sheer volume produced a resonating, soft burbling, an aural magnet that reflexively drew her attention away from everything else.

Still following the two Sicilians, Irina made her way up the steps and down a broad, straight corridor with oblique lighting from the floor and the ceiling. The beams of pale light
from above and below converged rapidly at the far end, where a huge stone circle was embedded in the wall, forcing one to turn either left or right. But before they were halfway down the corridor they turned aside, where two red doors parted, retracting into the walls, and Irina was ushered into a large sunken rectangular room where Wei Tsing and Carlo Bontate were sitting amid plush mandarin-red modern furniture.

Wei stood and came toward her, up three steps, extending a hand, which she took. He kissed her hand.

“Welcome to my home,” he said, and held her hand as they stepped down into the living room.

Bontate stood as they approached. He was wearing a suit, and a well-cut suit too. He looked rather handsome, with his sun-darkened skin off-setting the dark suit and white shirt. His hair was carefully barbered, and his amber eyes settled on her as he stood and shook her hand. He did not smile, but his beautiful eyes handled her gently.

“Would you like anything?” Wei asked softly. He was once again wearing a white dinner jacket, dark trousers, and opera slippers.

“Nothing,” Irina said.

“Then, please, sit down,” Wei said, waiting until she did before he sat also, as did Bontate.

Irina looked at the two men in front of her. “Sergei said you would contact me. I didn’t expect it would be this way. Or this late.”

“Oh, we keep very late hours,” Wei said comfortably. But there was no small talk. He got right to the point. “We need to decide how all of this is going to happen. The logistics of coming and going.”

“Coming and going where?” Irina asked.

“Here,” Wei said.

“Sergei hasn’t told you anything different, has he?” Bontate asked.

“So far he’s told me nothing,” she said.

“You don’t know where he’s staying,” Wei said, asking with a statement.

She shook her head. “I rather thought we might have our meetings at the chateau.”

“That would require us to move about too much,” Wei said. “Though we are not in the same predicament as Sergei, neither do we wish to advertise our presence. This is more
discreet. We can guarantee you won’t be followed here and therefore can guarantee our anonymity. Don Carlo’s men will always arrange your passage from the Chateau Touraine by whatever means they deem necessary. Sometimes they will bring you directly here, sometimes they will transfer you to my people somewhere in the city. The point is, they will always provide your transit to guarantee you are not followed.”

“We have people staying at the chateau also,” Bontate said. “We know about Izvarin and Volkov. What are they doing here?”

“I have no idea.”

“What is Stepanov doing here?”

“I don’t know. Sergei said he had business with him.”

“Who is the woman? Did she come from New York with him?”

She shrugged. “I have no idea. I haven’t yet spoken to either of them, or to Izvarin or Volkov. Anyway, you know Stepanov better than I do, and I understand that that is his habit.”

They looked at her, Wei with a vague smile on his smooth lips, Bontate as sober as a village priest.

“Wei and I have talked,” Bontate said. “We want this series of meetings to end in four days. Like Sergei, we would like to be gone as soon as possible. We brought a substantial number of security people, and regardless of how careful we might be, such a number will inevitably attract attention.”

“As soon as Sergei contacts you,” Wei said, “we want you to tell him we want his response to the following proposals. It is understood that this is the first of numerous meetings among us with the purpose of developing broad cooperative efforts. We have already put our accountants through a rigorous examination of the financial potential in these plans, and all of us agree it can be enormously beneficial. But these are first steps. We want to develop them methodically, carefully. The days of gangsterism are history. What we are doing now is developing a more efficient way to cultivate the potential of the American market.”

“You don’t have to remember all of this,” Bontate said. “Before you leave we will give you a laser-disk recording of this meeting, which we want you to give to Sergei. The disk has … certain properties designed for security. It cannot be
read by common machines. Sergei has all the technological details and has access to the proper equipment.”

“Number one,” Wei began, “we agree, as in previous conversations, that Sergei can have the right to move in on all the East European entities already operating in the U.S.—the Albanians, Yugoslavs, Serbs, Croats, all of them. We agree that these countless free-lance groups need to be brought under an oversight organization.

“Number two, Carlo will provide RICO legal consultants. Any of us who are developing enterprises that will put us in danger of susceptibility to these statutes must meet with his legal consultants in setting up the enterprise. This has two obvious benefits. First, the consultants will be able to provide legal advice that can help us avoid stupid mistakes. Second, meeting will keep the three of us informed about what the others are doing, the directions in which they are moving, so we don’t overlap enterprises and create unnecessary violence. It also means that if we are planning enterprises that could benefit from mutual cooperation, we will be able to see it early enough to make the most of such arrangements.

“Number three, all international operations—any enterprise that requires regular trips across American borders—are to be coordinated through my international unit. Once again, we can benefit from established transshipment lanes whether we are handling drugs, arms, money for laundering, any kind of product. There is no need to duplicate efforts, that is, to have the drug operations develop their own networks, the arms and munitions dealers develop yet others, and on and on. My international unit will be responsible for coordinating all border crossings. This means both Carlo and Sergei will have to give up some traditional connections to their operations with the Colombians, the Mexicans, and other Latin Americans. The Latin Americans will have to be informed of this in detail. Some of them will not want to cooperate. We will have to explain to them how this is going to benefit not only us but them as well.

“Number four, the issue of legitimate business enterprises. Our laundered funds are going to have to be invested more intelligently than in the past. We must distribute capital investments more wisely. We have received the report from the accountants regarding adjustments in our shell companies. With the new changes in the U.S. Congress, our people feel
there are new opportunities for us if we re-examine our shell companies’ strategies. We can explain this in more detail after we agree on the basic premise that we hire these people to oversee this for us. Remember, these are men educated at Harvard and Stanford, Americans who understand the subtle complexities better than we do. We’re letting too much money get away from us because we are not placing our funds in the most efficient high-yield opportunities. We can do better.

“Number five, regarding a centralized counterintelligence section …”

Irina sat listening to this methodical list of planned criminal enterprises that these three powerful men had begun to put together. It was clear that international organized crime was going to be guided from boardrooms. The only place it would appear to the public to be “criminal” was at the street level, where the coarser elements of these money machines did their dirty work. She could not help thinking of the misery these men were creating for common men and women all over the world, the suffering they sowed in order to reap prosperity for themselves. They rested in luxury, their pampered bones cushioned by the sighs of anguish rising up from the millions they disregarded, the countless number to whom they laid waste to satisfy their insatiable avarice.

Wei droned on. As in Paris, occasionally a silent maid would drift in on stockinged feet and leave a drink or a platter of canapés. These young women appeared to be Hispanic, though they were dressed like the maids in Paris, their white stockings adding a strange note of another age to the modern setting. Wei would stop long enough to eat a few bites and then move on. He never referred to notes, never paused or hesitated to deliberate over a word or phrase, never uttered a superfluous syllable.

Bontate sat on the other side of him, a dark figure amid the scarlet, and watched her. He smoked. He drank-—wine, she noticed. Occasionally he ate canapés. His amber eyes were slightly heavy but never dull, never anything but shrewd and calm, as calm as they had been when he had held his lover’s hands in Palermo.

Eventually Wei finished. He picked up a fresh snifter of brandy just delivered by a dark maid.

“When will you be able to deliver this to him?” Bontate asked Irina.

“I haven’t any idea. He said he would contact me.”

“Well, this elaborate secrecy seems a bit theatrical to me,” Wei said, piqued at the inconvenience and ignoring the irony of such a complaint coming from him. He glanced at Bontate and then back at Irina. “Remind him of the four days.”

“I will,” she said. “When I have a response, how will I contact you?”

Bontate answered. “An American named Bob Davis checked into the suite across the hall from you shortly after you registered. You must communicate through him. Just knock on his door. Do not call him. A man staying with him is an electronics specialist. We have spent a very large sum of money on various members of the hotel staff for access to various rooms and for information.” He lighted a cigarette. “For instance, we know that the FBI is watching all of you.”

Irina was stunned, and it must have showed in her face.