The Sam Gunn Omnibus (107 page)

I
explained to my
wife that I had to have cocktails with Sam Gunn and a few of his associates
before dinner. She frowned with distaste, but accepted the situation.

“Business before pleasure,” she
said grandly. Then added, “So long as it’s not monkey business with that little
womanizer.”

Sam’s reputation was known
everywhere, even among corporate wives. Especially among corporate wives.

The Godfather’s suite was only a
few doors down the corridor from our own. I gave my wife a peck on the cheek
while she was deciding which of the necklaces laid out on the dressing table
before her would be best to wear with the gown she had bought earlier that
afternoon. She barely nodded as I took my leave of her. Good thing, too,
because Ms. Chang opened the door to her Godfather’s suite when I pressed the
buzzer. She was wearing an ankle-length sheath of glittering metallic black,
its skirt slit up to her shapely hip. If my wife had seen her, real hell would
have broken loose over my head.

Ms. Chang gestured me into the
suite’s thickly carpeted sitting room. Four rather lumpy-looking men in dark
suits looked me over as if they had X-ray eyes. No one spoke a word. I stood
uneasily by the door for a moment. Then in came Sam from the adjoining room,
with the Godfather at his side, both of them in tuxedos.

He didn’t look Sicilian. I mean, he
wasn’t a heavy, swarthy, sour-faced man. Not at all. Don Guido Alexandreivich
Popov was as slim as a saber blade. His thickly luxuriant hair was a light
sandy blond; his eyes a piercing light gray. He wasn’t much taller than Sam,
and several centimeters shorter than I. Yet he radiated power, a self-assurance
that comes from having enormous resources at your command.

Ms. Chang performed the introductions.
Popov’s handshake was firm without being blatantly muscular. His eyes searched
mine as he smiled and said, “So where’s my twenty bill?”

I m
ust have
blanched, because he laughed and added, “I don’t expect it this evening. Relax.
Have a drink.” His voice was slightly scratchy, rough, as if his vocal cords
had been damaged.

As he directed me toward the bar,
Ms. Chang said, “Actually, it’s twenty point six billion. As of the opening of
business tomorrow morning.”

Popov shrugged. “Twenty, twenty
point six, let’s not quibble.”

One of the dark-suited thugs
slipped behind the bar and poured him what appeared to be a tumbler of spring
water. Sam asked for a pinot grigio and Ms. Chang ordered vodka, neat. I needed
a whisky, badly, but I decided that I should keep my head clear.

“I’ll have the same as Mr. Popov,”
I said to the man behind the bar.

He glanced at Popov, who smiled and
tapped me on the shoulder. “I’m used to drinking grappa,” he said. “Are you?”

“Grappa?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“It’s the Italian version of
acetylene,” Sam piped up. “You can use it to burn through bank safes.”

Popov laughed, a grating, painful
sound. “Maybe you’d prefer something else, Mr. D’Argent.”

I
settled for
sparkling water.

Popov gestured me to a chair by the
window. He took the one opposite me while Sam and Ms. Chang nestled in the love
seat between us.

He took a sip of his drink. “I need
it for my throat. Soothes the vocal cords.”

Or burns them out, I thought. But I
kept my thoughts to myself. Sam sat by Ms. Chang’s side, grinning like a
schoolboy on a date with the prom queen. The musclemen in their dark suits
stayed back by the bar, silent as ponderous wraiths. An uncomfortable silence
enveloped the room.

“So,” Popov said at last, “how are
we going to resolve this situation?”

“I don’t see how you can expect
Rockledge Corporation to pay a debt that Sam’s run up,” I said, as firmly as I could.

“He’s your partner,” said Popov. “You’re
legally responsible.”

“We never approved the loan he took
from you.”

“Makes no difference.”

“It does, legally.”

“I guess it’s a little unusual for
you,” Popov granted, “but it happens all the time in my business.”

“It’s not that unusual in the
legitimate world,” Sam said. “It’s the ‘deep pockets’ ploy. Go after the guy
with the deepest pocket of money.”

Popov nodded and beamed at Sam like
a prospective Godfather-in-law.

“But Rockledge didn’t incur this
debt.”

Popov shrugged.

“It would ruin my career if I so much
as asked my CEO to pay it.”

He shrugged more elaborately.

“I can’t do it,” I said.

“That’s too bad,” Popov replied. “I
had hoped to avoid making a mess.”

“You can’t murder the entire board
of directors!” I said. “You’d never get away with it. And what good would it do
you, anyway?”

Popov sighed patiently, then ticked
off on his fingers, “One: We’ll get away with it. We make a business out of
getting away with things like this. Rockets blow up sometimes. It’ll be a
tragic accident. Two: Rockledge will have to find a new CEO and a whole new
board of directors. Guess who owns enough Rockledge stock to take control, once
the old board is out of the way?”

I
felt stunned. “You?
You wouldn’t! You couldn’t!”

“He would and he could,” Sam said. “Trust
me on that.”

“I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could
throw
a ... a...
a
herd of buffalos!”

“Now, now,” Popov said placatingly,
“let’s not get emotional here. We’re talking business.”

“You’re talking murder.”

“But it’s business, not personal. I’ve
got nothing against you, personally. This is strictly business.”

Sam’s face suddenly lit up. “But
suppose that, instead of business, we made it a sporting proposition.”

“What do you mean, Sam?” Ms. Chang
asked, shifting slightly on the love seat to rub against Sam like a purring
cat. It was enough to raise my already high blood pressure an extra few points.

“Uncle Guido,” Sam asked, “have you
ever played cards for a twenty-billion-dollar stake?”

“Twenty point six,” Ms. Chang murmured.

Popov stared at Sam as if he didn’t
understand what the little devil was talking about. Then a slow smile of
recognition crept across his craggy face.

“Double or nothing?” he asked.

Sam grinned. “Why not? What’ve we
got to lose?”

Before I could object, the two men
shook hands on it.

Popov got to his feet, and the rest
of us did, too. “I understand you have a dinner engagement, Mr. D’Argent.”

“Yes, I do, but—”

“Enjoy your dinner.” He turned to
Sam. “What do you say to meeting me in Dante’s Inferno at midnight, Sam?”

“Okay by me.”

“Double or nothing,” Popov reminded
us.

“Okay by me,” Sam repeated.

Of course it was okay by him! He’d be
playing with Rockledge’s money!

Dinner that evening was the
longest, dreariest, most nerve-racking meal I’ve ever had. I couldn’t eat a
bite, but nobody seemed to notice or care. My wife and Mrs. CEO were seated
next to one another and chattered away happily. The CEO himself sat at my other
side and made broad hints about how I was about to take a big step up the corporate
ladder. Even his wife allowed that if I made it to the board of directors I could
sit beside her. I thought to myself that getting higher in the corporation merely
gave me more leg room when I hanged myself.

I
couldn’t let the
board of directors get on that rocket that Popov was going to blow up. It would
be easy enough to keep my wife and myself off it; I could always claim that I had
some details about the resort to take care of. But how I could keep the CEO and
the rest of the board off the rocket without telling them of the fix that Sam
had gotten me into? It would be bad enough to confess that I’d put the
corporation into this mess, but to admit that it was Sam Gunn who’d led me by
the nose into it—that would be unbearable.

And there was Sam, the miserable
little rat, with the exquisite Ms. Chang at an intimate candlelit table for
two, far on the other side of the restaurant. They seemed totally absorbed in
each other.

Desperate times call for desperate
measures, I told myself. Excusing myself from the table while the dessert
course was being served, I made a beeline for the men’s room. It was positively
opulent, but I had no time to

admire
the faux marble paneling and asteroidal gold plumbing fixtures. Locking myself
into a booth, I slipped my phone off my wrist and called Popov.

He
was apparently still in his suite, and still in his tuxedo. In the wrist phones
minuscule screen I couldn’t see if anyone else was in the room with him.

Popov
smiled when he recognized my face. “Mr. D’Argent.”

“I
have a proposition for you, sir,” I said, without preamble.

“A
proposition?”

I
took a deep breath and plunged in. Popov listened in
silence. Finally, when I was finished, he nodded solemnly.

“I’m
wary of Sam Gunn, also,” he said, in his harsh, painful rasp. “I don’t believe
his intentions toward my niece are entirely honorable.”

“He’s
about as honorable as Jack the Ripper,” I said.

Popov
pursed his lips. “This will break my Ilyana’s heart.”

“Better
now than later, when Sam betrays her.”

“Yes,
I suppose so,” he said slowly.

It
took several more minutes, but at last he agreed to my proposition. Then I placed
a quick call to Rockledge’s legal department, back at corporate headquarters on
Earth. The chief counsel didn’t like being disturbed during her dinner hour,
but once she heard what I wanted her to do she willingly agreed to do it.

“We’re
partnered to S. Gunn Enterprises?” she yelped. “You’d damned will better get
out of
that
deal!”

By
the time I got back to the dinner table, everyone was having coffee and
liqueurs. It was past eleven
pm
when my wife and I finally
got back to our hotel suite. The phone’s message light was blinking, and before
I could get to it my wife called out to the phone to play the message.

Sam’s
impish face came up on the screen, looking dead serious for a change. “Pierre,
monjouer aux
cartes,
can you come up to my office right away? It’s
important. Any time before eleven-thirty. Please.” And his face took on such an
expression of distress that my wife looked troubled.

“The
poor man looks as if his heart is going to break,” she said.

More
likely his gall bladder, I thought, but I kept it to myself. Has he found out
about my deal with Popov? I wondered.

“I’m
not going to Sam’s office,” I grumbled. “Not at this time of night.”

“But
he said it’s important.” My wife has her faults, and one of them is a soft
heart. Show her a picture of a puppy or a kitten and she’ll buy whatever’s
being pushed. Sam was playing the puppy, of course. I realized that he must
know more about me and my wife than I had ever suspected.

Grumbling, I went through the motions
of phoning him back; no answer. Not even a video mail system where I could
leave a message.

“You’d better go to his office,” my
wife said. “And quickly, it’s nearly eleven-thirty.”

I
got as far as the
elevator at the end of the corridor. Sam was waiting for me there, his
woebegone look replaced by an expression of impish glee.

“I didn’t think you’d want to miss
the big card game,” he said, waving his hand in front of the elevator’s
heat-sensitive call button. He didn’t know a thing about my Popov deal; he was
grinning like a kid playing hooky from school.

“My wife—”