This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (11 page)

Ed Osborne was on his feet too. “For Christ’s sake, Colsen, the minute you walked into the room I knew you were the wrong counsel. You’re playing ‘you’ve been bad boys’ games and we’re talking megamoney deals here. Don’t you grasp the situation? The junk bonds are the Corey Trust’s death knell. This merger has got to take place. Unless of course you have a
‘white knight,’ to buy the trust right out of this so-called corporate raid. Either put up or shut up.”

No one spoke. Osborne poured himself a glass of water, drank it, and sat down. Once Ralph was seated again as well, Carmel Colsen rose and, palms of her hands on the table in front of her, leaned dramatically forward to face the three men, now seated before her. She said, very calmly, but with a voice that dripped disdain, “I do not have to
prove
anything, not a single thing, to you men. You had your eyes on power and money. So you made such blatantly criminal moves that you have done all the work for me. Your rampant inside trading has overshot. You had the gall to think you didn’t need to cover your tracks. The cushy executive contract that was to be enforced once your merger was approved for instance. The golden parachute package you
gentlemen
awarded yourselves, for $32.8 million, stating that you will leave the company after it is taken over by American Agristar, is a prime example. Not bad profits, Osborne, for a man who was made an executive, illegally I might add, just five days ago.”

Ralph Werfel, whose face, in addition to being so swollen now as to be unrecognizable, was ashen pale, was far from crushed. He made a vain attempt to rise and say something, but was stopped by the roar of Carmel’s voice.

“Don’t you move. Don’t say a word. And especially not that as vice president of the Corey Trust you had every legal right to do as you saw fit for the long-term health of the trust. That right was revoked when the Corey Trust needed to use a ‘shark repellent’ and changed their bylaws to ward off predators. The bylaws of the trust you protected yourself with have been null and void for some considerable time. If you should have any question about that, forget it. I have a civil court writ against you, a federal court writ against you, and a SEC subpoena for questioning, in the hands of three law officers. They’re in the conference room waiting to be called in here to present them. You have no choice. Neither of you.”

“You’ll pay for this, Corey. You may have blown my deal, but no one dumps on American Agristar and gets away with it.” Ed Osborne said as he shoved papers into his Gucci case. “They want some of your trust’s holdings and they’ll get them one way or another. You can bet your bottom dollar on that. You may be rid of us and our deal, buster, but you still
haven’t saved your company. Unless you do have a white knight. And I doubt that.”

“Can’t we talk about this alone, Adam? asked a distraught and confused Ralph.

“No. It’s all been said.”

“You wouldn’t have come out so badly. Wealthier and more powerful than you have ever been or hoped to be. Is that so bad?”

Adam pushed back his chair and stood up, looking down at the man he once trusted so completely. Ralph Werfel cowered in his chair, and put his arms up to his face as if to protect himself. Adam read the fear in the man’s eyes, reached out and gently lowered Ralph’s arms. Adam shook his head in disbelief.

“It’s over, Ralph. You have nothing more to fear from me. For my part, we will keep this scandal as quiet as possible. I suggest you do the same. Not for my sake, for yours. Just go away. I don’t ever want to see or hear from you again.”

Adam walked from the boardroom.

After Ed and Ralph had signed several documents, one a waiver of all rights to sue Adam Corey for assault and battery, she passed the cashier’s check to Ralph Werfel.

“Now, Mr. Corey would like you to leave the building. Turhan, would you see these men to the street?”

7

J
osh found his father sitting on his favorite bench in Central Park. It was just inside the park, near the Plaza Hotel. From that particular bench Adam, surrounded by trees and grass and shrubs, could feel the buzz of the city and see the whizz of the traffic plying Fifth Avenue, hear the muffled sounds of the city and the water splashing in the fountain in the Grand Army Plaza to the side of the hotel.

There were other things Adam enjoyed from that vantage point: the scent of the fresh green of the park diffusing the exhaust fumes of the buses, taxis, and cars, the line of horse-drawn carriages waiting to drive romantics through the park, that zone of green within the steel and glass city that Marlo
referred to as “an adult’s answer to
Alice in Wonderland
,” or “Decadent Disneyland.” Her occasional cablegram, “Arriving Decadent Disneyland faster than March hare,” meant she’d be in New York within hours. Then there were the joggers and the runners going by in the park, and the sleekly groomed beauties of New York, clicking along the pavement in their high heels.

All kinds of women, luscious and less than luscious alike, rushed around the streets nearest the Plaza: into Bergdorf’s, out of Bergdorf’s; in and out of F.A.O. Schwarz; up and down Fifth Avenue they rushed. In for the hair, out for shopping. In for a facial, out for more shopping and another designer shopping bag. In for a pedicure, out for what? More shopping.

Delicious women loaded with pretty boxes and shopping bags, taking only enough time out from New York’s main occupation to go up the stairs of the Plaza Hotel for midday sex or lunch: a cheese soufflé? A Caesar salad? Oysters Casino? If in season, Crab salad if not. Down the stairs to finish the day off. How? Shopping, of course.

An army of fast-moving, intelligent, interesting, clever survivors in Halstons and Trigères, and Calvin Kleins, and Ralph Laurens, and Saint Laurents, and Lagerfelds and whatever other label of
haute couture
was being thrust upon them by the “
treasure
of a saleslady.” Frequenting the
top
and most assuredly
right
department stores, the fashion cathedrals — Bergdorf’s, Bendel’s, and Bonwit’s — where the faithful worshipped with their credit cards.

Adam never tired of watching the streets, dense with women and a smattering of his own sex. It had changed little in the twenty-five years he had enjoyed his bench; but the women had: they were more exciting. The vast platoon of attractive women around the Plaza was no longer just wealthy wives, mistresses, girlfriends. It was well peppered with successful lady executives, professional women, artists, secretaries with more power than their bosses, who carried themselves proudly twice over: first for being a woman, and second for not having to be
just
a woman.

Adam adored them. He smiled to himself thinking of the many delightful women he had spotted and picked up over the years from his bench. Ah, there was nothing like the wonderful romantic interlude. It was irreplaceable. It encapsulated
everything exciting about romance for a man: the courtship, the chase, immediacy, conquest, sexual involvement without emotional involvement; intimacy, without being intimate, being understood without having to talk about your feelings, no threat of demands for honesty and openness that women are so fond of imposing, freedom from having to open up and love, most of all the thrill of the unexpected, and the brevity of an interlude.

Adam bought an iced yogurt from a vendor peddling past the bench, leaned back and let his gaze follow a young beauty with blond hair, tall and willowy. In a thin white cotton dress with the sun behind it her one-thousand-dollar-an-hour mannequin’s body was revealed. When she turned around to apologize to a man she bumped into, Adam had a glimpse of that American-beauty-type face, born, bred, and fed in the country’s corn belt, honed and tanned into the California calendar girl, who still, with or without her clothes, looked fresh from the fields. He registered her as perfect material for the romantic idyll, but that was all, because his eyes settled upon another candidate walking up the Avenue.

She was older, extremely well turned-out in a red linen jacket that hugged her every curve, and a black linen skirt that molded itself around her. Her legs were a marvel — long, bare, and shapely. She was sauntering along the Avenue, window-shopping, in a pair of tarty black high-heeled sandals with an ankle-strap tied in a small leather bow.

Every step she took, every movement of her body was luscious and sensuous, and when he caught a glimpse of her face, its beautiful features were bathed in a light of mingled liveliness and serenity. Or was it that contentment which comes from the depths of the soul? Yes, that was what made her stand out from the other women: she wore her rich soul like a second skin for the world’s eyes. She was fearless.

A mulatto youth was roller-skating past the bench, arms flailing about for balance and speed. Adam reach out and grabbed his arm.

“Hey, mister, watcha do that for? I ain’t bothering no one. I got as much right here as you do. Let go!”

“I didn’t mean to frighten you, fella. Do you want to make ten dollars?”

“You ain’t gettin’ dirty, are ya, mister? Lemme go.”

“No, I’m not getting dirty. I’ll pay you ten dollars to catch
up with a woman across the street and give her this note.” Adam let go of the boy’s arm and reached for the small Cartier notepad and his pen in the breast pocket of his jacket.

“Which woman?”

Adam pointed her out and was not surprised when the boy spotted her immediately. He quickly scribbled out a note.

“Tha’s all I gotta do for the tenner?”

“That’s all for the tenner. But, for another twenty, after you give her the note, you skate like hell over to that flower shop” — he pointed to the florist’s window — “and give them this note. They’ll give you a bunch of flowers. She’ll be coming your way, so skate back and place them in her arms.”

“Listen, mister, that’s a lotta fast’n fancy footwork for thirty bucks. Forty.”

Adam handed the boy two twenty-dollar bills. The boy snapped them out of his hands with the notes and was off at high speed, now both legs and arms flailing, his bulging, satiny lime shorts and shocking-pink tank top iridescent in the sun. Over his shoulder he shouted, “My old man says there’s a sucker born every minute. And my old man sure is right. I hope I never fall in love like you, mister. It makes a real sucker of ya!”

Watching the encounter while walking toward his father, Josh took it all in with a grin. “Do you think it’s true Papa, that love turns you into a sucker?” Then he sat down next to his father, laughing.

The pair of them avidly watched the young man’s progress out of Central Park. With scant regard for the afternoon traffic and the screaming horns, he weaved across Fifth Avenue, answering the abusive drivers with a bang on their fenders or an elaborate hand, arm, and elbow movement which read, “Fuck you.”

“An afternoon idyll, Papa?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you mind if I ask what you said in the note? You know how I pride myself on ‘like father, like son,’ and for that I need all the tips I can get.”

Adam took his eyes off the roller-skating messenger to look at his son with a smile. “Is a father’s work never done? From what I saw pass between you and Carmel over luncheon, I would say you need no tips from your dad. You seem to be doing quite well on your own. And anyway, let’s just see if I
score with the lady. If I do, then I promise you an introduction, and you can ask her to show you the note.”

They watched the boy approach his quarry. She was distracted by something in a window. He tapped her on the shoulder and spoke to her. With a courtly bow he handed her Adam’s note, then took off as fast as he could across the crowded pavement toward the florist’s shop.

The woman scanned the faces in the crowd, seeking the author before she opened the small folded piece of paper. Then she eyed the crowd once more, read it again, and slipped it into her shoulder bag.

“He did that rather well, don’t you think?” Adam asked his son.

“ ‘Rather well’ is an understatement. Sure as hell I thought he’d skate off with your money. How the heck did you know he would follow through, Papa?”

Adam laughed. “Because everyone loves a lover, sucker or not. Because everyone goes for romance. In romance there is hope and escape. Because the romantic at work is a high-jumper, with his heart on his sleeve. And any half-black, half-white kid who dresses like that boy, doing New York City on roller skates, is a romantic, full of spirit, who will try almost anything for fun and a bit of escape. No great gamble that.”

They continued to watch the woman and waited for further reactions from her. She resumed her walk up the Avenue. It brought her past the Grand Army Plaza fountain and closer to Adam and his son. Suddenly all heads were turning around to catch a glance of the mulatto Mercury on skates, arms filled with dozens of long-stemmed white roses, zig-zagging his way around the pedestrians. He left a comet’s tail of smiles lighting a path behind him.

Mirella, her arms filled with the flowers, threw her head back and laughed. She buried her face in the roses and took in their exquisite sweet scent. She looked and felt radiant, and her joy spilled over to the waiting Mercury, and the passersby who smiled at her. A few clapped their hands for the romantic gesture.

Mercury appeared to have shed the wings from his heels. He stood next to Mirella as if mesmerized. She chose one of the roses and handed it to the boy.

“A small gesture. My token of thanks to you, Mercury.” Mirella walked to the curb, anxious to cross the street and
meet her capricious lover at the fountain. The boy skated next to her and asked, “Whyd’ ja call me that funny name?”

“Because he’s the one who drops from the sky.”

Mirella stepped off the curb, and a taxi which had jumped the light whizzed close by her. The boy took her by the elbow and together they hurried across the street. He insisted on accompanying her to the fountain and fussed sensuously around her.

Adam and Josh rose from the bench and started walking toward the fountain too. Josh was completely admiring of his father.

“Lesson-One-million-and-I-don’t-know-what,” Josh said. “How to keep a wife happy and a marriage new and fresh every day is the question. The answer? Be as much an imaginative lover as a husband.”

“And have a wife like Mirella,” Adam added.

Josh followed Mirella with his eyes, and thought her glorious, as he did whenever he saw her. Memories of when he whisked her away from Rashid and held her in his arms and they danced together returned to him much too often. There was little he could do about that. He had fallen in love with her just as his father had, and he had come to terms with that, and the fact that he would love her the best way he could under the circumstances. He felt the same joy as his father, watching her hurry toward an afternoon assignation, and loved his father even more for having brought Mirella into the family. He would share her with Adam and the rest of the clan, because that was as it had to be. But he was secretly determined never to share her with another man, and most certainly not Rashid, who suddenly had become a constant presence in the lives of Adam and Mirella, something he could not understand.

They waited on the corner for the traffic lights to change, and Adam diverted his attention from Mirella and their Mercury to Josh.

“Josh, were you looking for me for any particular reason?”

“Yes, there’s been a telex from Geneva. Your mysterious white knight has saved us. The money has been made available to the trust, and our offices are picking up all the junk bonds as fast as they can, as per your instructions. Adam, who is this white knight, and why have they come to the Corey Trust’s rescue?”

Josh was astonished at the look that passed across his father’s face. One of such relief that only then did Josh realize how much pressure his father had been under. Adam was so controlled, so well equipped to handle catastrophe, that it never occurred to Josh that the danger the Corey Trust had been through could affect his father as much as it apparently had. It puzzled Josh.

One of the Corey Trust’s pet companies was a crisis-management group called Corey and Corey International Industrial Consultants. Josh had taken over the company from Adam only a year before, when Josh had decided to work for the Corey Trust. CCIIC was a pioneer in the field of coping with catastrophe. They had been responsible for crisis management becoming the new corporate discipline. They were the developers of detailed planning to cope with crises from industrial accidents, product, recalls, terrorist attacks, to any natural disaster on any scale. And the creator, the compelling ideas-man behind CCIIC, had been Adam Corey.

Josh never worried about Adam when the raid on the Corey Trust came to light because he knew his father would practice what he had always preached: for an executive confronted by a sudden catastrophe, it is the element of surprise that is the most unsettling aspect; the wisest of executives is susceptible to paralysis when a crisis strikes. Adam would avoid those pitfalls.

Being unprepared was the worst part of a crisis: remove the unexpected, and the unnerving element is expelled with it. Josh had watched his father put that into effect, and learned much from the way Adam had communicated with all parties concerned, planning everything to the last detail in order to quash the attempted takeover. Adam, though emotionally involved, had the much-needed objectivity to win through. There had been no sitting on his hands waiting for the problems in the trust to sort themselves out. He had taken charge. No evasion by Adam, no hiding from disaster. He had gone into action immediately and investigated in minute detail the causes. That and his white knight had saved their huge conglomerate.

Whatever had passed across Adam’s face that astonished Josh was now gone. Adam smiled, ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair, a gesture familiar to his son, who in fact had picked up the habit, and answered at last. “The white
knight is a Geneva-based holding company dealing mostly in agribusiness all over the African continent. It’s a multinational conglomerate, a private company not unlike ours. Why did they rescue us? What you should have asked is why and how were they able to warn us about an impending disaster before we ourselves were able to get wind of it,
and
rescue us. And, on our terms — which were fair, but hardly as advantageous to them as they might have been. I’m not quite certain I have the answer to those questions, but I’m sure as hell going to find them out.”