The Crasher (7 page)

“This is incredible, swan.” Johnny took the magazine into the kitchen. “Is she really a friend of yours? I’d love to see her
again.”

Dolores stuck out her tongue. “I bet you would.”

“No, seriously… according to this piece she’s been married for quite a few years to someone in the DEA, but she pulled off
something few people ever live to see, trapping all those murderous drug guys…”

Dolores finished arranging a container of Beluga in a well of crushed ice. “I know, I can hardly believe it. It sounds as
if everything was just a front… her gorgeous home in Beverly Hills, her jet…”

“Jet?”

“Yes, jet!” Dolores’s dark eyes opened wide in appreciation. “It was gorgeous—in green and gold. She gave me a lift once to
Vegas, said she was meeting some men who had more money than Fort Knox. I wanted her to introduce me…” Dolores smiled at
Johnny coquettishly. “Before you swept me off my feet, of course, but she said they were too deadly.” She gave
a mock shiver. “I thought she meant deadly boring… but I guess from reading this she meant it literally.”

“In a way, I can’t believe
Time
running this story. Her mission may be accomplished, nabbing this big fish for the government, but surely she’ll have to
pay for it now everyone knows who she really is.”

“That’s what I thought, but they don’t give her real name and you can’t see her face…”

Dolores giggled again, as Johnny pretended to reel back. “Who needs a name or a face with a body like that staring out of
the page? Next time we go to California, can we look her up?”

“She may not even live there anymore. In any case, she’s married… so don’t get any ideas…”

One idea was still uppermost in his mind: to make a commitment to Dolores. But something held him back.

“I wonder if my father knows her?”

“I’m sure he does, baby. I thought you said your father knows everybody.”

Johnny promised himself he’d ask him at the next opportunity.
Time
had broken this big story, but that wasn’t the end of it, he was sure. With somebody as intrepid as Rosa Brueckner, there
would be other missions, other mountains to climb, other incredible stories to write. For
Next!?
Why not?

As they ate and drank, Johnny held Dolores’s hand and occasionally leaned across to kiss her. “What did you want to tell me,
swan?”

She looked sorrowfully at the piece of foie gras on toast she held in her perfectly manicured fingers.

There was a dramatic silence he knew he wasn’t expected to break.

When she raised her beautiful head to look at him, her eyes were liquid with tears, but even that didn’t warn him of what
she was about to say. “I’m broke, Johnny. I’ve run out of money, my inheritance. I don’t know how it happened. I’m not even
sure I can pay my rent next month and…” A tear
rolled down her pale cheek. “I think I’m pregnant. We’re going to have a baby in the summer…”

Over three thousand miles away, outside Lausanne, in a small, private Swiss clinic,
Time
magazine had just been delivered to Suite 42/43.

Although the occupant of the suite, the clinic’s most important patient by far, could have written the story himself, give
or take a few unimportant details, his eyes, the only part of his face not hidden by bandages, followed every word slowly,
painstakingly, as if to memorize them.

He’d never met Rosa Brueckner, although her name had come up once or twice over the past couple of years. It was easy to say
no woman would ever fool him, but he seriously doubted it. It was the oldest problem in the world. The reason regimes that
had everything going for them, from Perón’s Argentina to Hitler’s Germany, collapsed. Greed. Too much, too easily, too fast.
People at the top got lazy, slack and, zap, it was over.

He’d been expecting something like this Brueckner-Uchobo fiasco since that asshole Pablo Gavira turned himself in to the Colombian
authorities on the promise he wouldn’t be extradited to the U.S. The American press had gone orgasmic over the story, with
that fucking correspondent, Quentin Peet, who thought he was a cross between Sir Galahad and James Bond, divulging that Pablo,
the idiot, was being held “in his hometown of Engivado, ten miles from Medellin, in a ‘prison’ so luxurious, Buckingham Palace
might be found wanting in comparison.”

Gavira would have to be exterminated; Uchobo, too, if the chance came up. As for the Brueckners of the world, death was too
pleasant a punishment for them. There were other, more meaningful kinds of living-death to remind them to stay out of other
people’s business.

He’d been promised the bandages would be off today. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry, which surprised and relieved the highly
qualified plastic surgeon entrusted with the job.

No one had expected him to be such a model patient, forced because of his special circumstances to stay in one place for nearly
ten days, but he enjoyed being unpredictable. It kept people on their toes, and after the first painful seventy-two hours,
he’d realized it was the first time in years he’d had plenty of time to think, to plan.

Outside his corner suite sat Hugo Humphrey, six feet eight inches of brute force, whose handshake was enough to give those
chosen to experience it nightmares for months. Hugo had been with him in the operating theater to ensure the surgeon kept
his word and used only a local anesthetic.

“Surgery is performed inside the nose under a local anesthetic to prevent the patient from bleeding as much as he would under
a general anesthetic. This also keeps the face as natural-looking as possible while the operation is in progress.”

That information had been the determining factor to go ahead. He’d never lost consciousness in his life. It had been the one
thing about the face change that had bothered him. All the same, not trusting anyone, he’d told Hugo to watch everything from
soup to nuts, only warning him not to get rough with the doctor if, as he’d been told might occur, he ended up with black-and-blue
eyes for a few days.

As it happened, he hadn’t, which, having read everything he could on rhinoplasty, was evidently a sign of the surgeon’s ability.
No bruises weren’t just an indication of good healing capacity, which he knew he had from the life he’d led; they reflected
the surgeon’s skill. Nose bones have a good memory. Those advising him on such matters had chosen well, a surgeon who had
handled the delicate nose bones with such finesse, they would never resume their previous position, a surgeon who, because
of his own checkered past, would never talk.

Soon, another heavyweight guard would relieve Hugo for a few hours, but there was no one as dedicated as he was. In his opinion,
another of Hugo’s major assets was his keen antipathy to women.

Lucky Hugo. Although no woman would dare try to fool him, he sometimes wished he could leave them alone, too. Would his new
nose and the few other alterations just carried out make him more attractive to women? As if he cared. His old nose had never
stood in the way of his conquests. How could it when he was, as Randela had once described it, “literally filthy rich.” The
delicious, but far-too-smart-for-her-own-good Brazilian had pointed out one day that truckload after truckload of dirty crumpled
dollars, pounds sterling, lire, yen, pesetas, and marks pouring into Colombia from drug deals had given new meaning to the
phrase, just as a new one—money laundering—had had to be invented to make use of it.

If Randela had had the sense to shut up and to stay alive, how surprised she would be to know that it was she who had first
given him the idea that, when it became expedient to take on a new identity, he should go to a plastic surgeon.

He could remember it as if it were yesterday. They’d just made love and he’d noticed something different about her thighs.
There was simply less of them, and finally she admitted she’d had some body work done, some thigh trimming, from the most
famous slicer in the world at that time, a Doctor Ivo Pitanguy in Rio de Janeiro, so deft with the knife, according to Randela,
women flew to him from all over.

He’d thought it was her national pride speaking, but he’d checked it out and sure enough, Pitanguy was indeed then the top
doc in that field.

Hugo knocked and put his head around the door. “The doc’s here, wants to see you. Okay, boss?”

The man who didn’t believe in words when actions would do nodded.

“How are you feeling?” asked the doctor.

He nodded okay, to the doctor, too.

“Good, good. This morning you will see your new look for the first time. I think you will be pleased. In three to four weeks
when everything is perfectly healed, your new profile will look as if it has always been in residence.” The doctor examined
the bandages. “Very good. In about an hour then.” He paused. “Any questions?”

“I’ll be leaving today.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement.

When the doctor left, the patient smiled. New profile was a good description of what lay ahead. He’d been giving a lot of
thought to his profile in general and his name in particular during his layover. Of course, in common with the other patients
in the clinic, he was using an alias, one of many he’d used over the years.

Now he’d made a final decision. Just as he had reduced the large nose he’d lived with all his life, so it was time to reduce
his extra-long, difficult to pronounce real name, the one he’d been born with in Georgia, Russia, sixty years ago.

For the life of respectability that was imminent he would shorten it to one syllable, one that everyone could say—and remember—a
name with resonance.

When he arrived in New York with his new profile, his name would simply be Svank.

Bumper-to-bumper to the Queens Midtown Tunnel, and Ms. Ginny Walker, eighteen this past December, poked her tongue out at
the huge billboard, which nobody could miss and her mother had been raging about for months. It was the first time she’d had
an opportunity to study it, so for the moment the intense traffic jam didn’t bother her.

YOU’RE GOING TO NEW YORK DRESSED LIKE THAT? Charivari, the Manhattan fashion business, was asking the provocative question
in fifty-foot-high letters.

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, Madame Charivari, I am,” she thought, “and it may interest you to know, if you catch Elsa
Klensch’s fashion coverage on CNN tonight, she will probably describe me as one of those ‘dressed to kill’ at the New York
fashion shows today.”

The ad really upset her mother, who after all was a major player in the fashion business these days, working for Scaasi, one
of the few celebrated custom designers left. According to
her mother, Scaasi evening dresses were the price of a station wagon, but then, Ginny figured, they did need an awful lot
of expensive fabric. His most famous client, Barbara Bush, First Lady until she’d been replaced in January by Hillary Clinton,
was apparently svelte in comparison to some of his others.

Her mother thought the ad was offensive, condescending, but Ginny, after a few minutes staring out of the stationary cab,
decided it didn’t bother her. If it made women take a second look in their suburban mirrors before setting out for the big
city, she was all for this kind of confrontation.

It was part of the “say-it-as-it-is” New York challenge, something she felt physically—energizing, yet terrifying—every time
she saw the incredible Manhattan skyline just waiting to devour her. It didn’t happen often. Only on the rare occasions, as
now, when she crossed the East River by cab.

The subway was her usual loathsome mode of transport, suffocating, but usually swift, delivering her for the last eighteen
months to the drudgery of Pace business school. There, as usual because of her December birthday, she was the youngest in
the class; and because of her height, also as usual, she was among the tallest, towering over all the lumpy girls, and, alas,
many of the guys.

They’d moved to Queens in the fall of ‘91, after a disastrous few months in Boston, where to her excruciating embarrassment
she’d discovered her father was using “Harvard” in his “business” address, although they’d lived miles away from the college
and, of course, had nothing to do with it anyway.

It had been the worst time of her life, but at least it could go down in Walker history as the year her mother had FINALLY
HAD ENOUGH.

Unemployed, hearing through the pins-and-needles network about an opening for an experienced fitter at Scaasi, Virginia Walker
had left the house one morning, glowing references in hand, taken the shuttle to La Guardia, and storming the couture citadel,
despite stiff competition, walked away with the job.

Her mother had announced now she was the one moving on to a “new opportunity”—in New York City—and, thank the Lord, was taking
her daughter with her. The Walker School could move, too, with its founder and chairman of the board, or it could stay exactly
where it was—in no-win “Harvard” country.

Ginny had been on cloud nine, thinking they were going to live in Manhattan, but it was financially out of the question—certainly
for the first few years, Mother said. She’d felt a lot better when she’d realized that Queens, although a borough of New York,
was actually situated on Long Island.

In
People
magazine she’d read that it was where Donna Karan, another of her fashion idols, had grown up—“miserably,” nicknamed “Popeye”
and “Spaghetti Legs”—for obvious reasons. Describing herself as a “social misfit,” Karan hadn’t joined in the usual school
activities, longing for the day when she could focus on something she was good at, fashion designing. Ginny found it comforting.
And with a mother also in the fashion business, Karan and she seemed to have a lot in common.

It was Fashion Week in New York City and if the traffic ever allowed her, Ginny was on her way to see the show of another
American designer she was wild about, Calvin Klein.

The tiny beads of perspiration she kept wiping from her upper lip with her best linen handkerchief had nothing to do with
any heat in the taxi. There was no heat.