Tom Hyman (23 page)

But he knew it was there, lurking somewhere in the dark, waiting to destroy him.

He had never faced such a crisis before. His entire multibilliondollar empire was now in a financial shambles. He had succeeded in maintaining an optimistic front in public and before his employees; but the word was out, and the situation was deteriorating hourly. Wall Street was awash with rumors, greatly compounding Biotech’s already crippling money problems. The company’s stock was in a free fall. It had lost eighteen points on the New York Exchange yesterday—ten percent of its value—and he expected worse today.

In the current climate he knew the banks would not give him another extension to keep Biotech afloat. In the five months since he had negotiated the last extension, the situation had not improved. In fact it had gotten measurably worse. He had lost the psychological edge in his dealings with them. They simply no longer believed in him.

He wondered why he was begging them so hard, anyway. Even if the consortium of banks agreed to a complete rescheduling of 1 84 his debt, it was clear they would do it only on their own terms.

They’d demand a seat on the board and complete financial oversight.

They’d be looking over his shoulder at every business decision. He doubted he could tolerate it.

Chapter 11 bankruptcy would be even worse. It might offer him some breathing room—hold off his creditors and give him a chance to reorganize the company. But at bottom it was too extreme a remedy. He would lose financial and operating control.

He would no longer be free to call the shots. His every move would need the approval of outsiders—a bunch of bankers, CPAs, and lawyers whose interests would not be his interests.

Stewart opened his eyes and stared out the window. A cold spring drizzle made the dirty streets and ugly houses beneath the expressway look even more desolate than usual. The ghost of his father was never very far from his mind—especially when he thought of Anne and Genny.

They were his only consolation in the rising tide of financial misery around him. For the first time in his life, he understood the joys of being a husband and father.

And now he was being forced to visit this calamity on them.

They would survive, just as he had survived his father’s downfall. But the family’s social position, buttressed entirely by money, would collapse along with his business. All the old-line families on whom he had expended so much effort to ingratiate himself would freeze him and his family out completely. He could already imagine their smug condescension at the news of his ruin. God, Anne was right, he thought. They were never worth the trouble in the first place.

He had to do something.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. His father used to quote that old saw to him all the time, and it used to make him snicker in derision. But this time the memory brought tears to his eyes. All these years he had missed the truth hidden beneath the disgrace. His father, in his desperation to preserve the privileges and position of his demanding, selfish family—and to preserve what he assumed was the reason for their love and respect —had risked everything, absolutely everything, in one terrible, misguided gamble. He broke the law, he got caught, and he suffered the consequences.

Suffered them with no small degree of stoicism, Stewart recalled.

And all these years he had despised his father. Because he had ruined the good times, because he had made Dalton ashamed of him. Dalton had seen only the failure. He had never considered the tragic bravery.

Now had come his turn to stare ruin in the face—and be brave enough to risk everything for it.

Hank Ajemian was waiting for him in his office when he arrived. His assistant looked more depressed than Stewart had ever seen him. He was sitting hunched forward on the sofa by the windows. The normal dark circles under his eyes now looked purple and puffy. His white shirt collar was wilted and grayish, and his suit was badly in need of pressing.

“What’s the situation?” Stewart asked.

“We need twenty-four million by the end of the business day tomorrow.”

“I know that. What about the bankers’ meeting tomorrow?”

Ajemian sniffled. “All they’re going to do is give us an ultimatum—no more extensions, no rescheduling, no new deals, no exceptions, no nothing.”

“They’ve said all that before.”

“This time they mean it. And we don’t have anything left to offer them to make them change their minds, anyway.”

“You’ve got to buy us some more time at that meeting, Hank —even if it’s only twenty-four hours.”

“You’re not coming?”

“No.”

“What do you expect me to tell them?”

“That I’m raising the money. Get us an extension until Wednesday.

Tell them we’ll have it for them by then. Absolutely without fail.”

A long pause. Ajemian looked at his boss incredulously.

“Will we?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got an idea. If it doesn’t work, then I really don’t give a shit what the bankers do. I’ll give them the keys and take a walk.”

Ajemian started to protest, then sensed there was no point.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll stall them. They can’t say no to twenty-four hours. When will I know whether or not you’ve got the money?”

Dalton considered for a moment. “Tomorrow afternoon,” he replied.

“Two o’clock.”

“You’re not going to tell me what you’re doing?”

Stewart didn’t like shutting his assistant out on such an important matter, but he didn’t want to have to listen to arguments against his plan; he might be persuaded by them. “Not yet. No.”

Ajemian stared at his boss for a few moments, as if trying to divine his intentions. “Okay,” he said.

By seven-thirty the following morning Stewart was through French customs at Charles de Gaulle Airport. He went to a telephone, pulled a slip of paper from his pocket, and dialed a Paris number. He prayed.

If Kirsten Amster wasn’t there, he wasn’t sure what he’d do. The number rang eight times. He hung up, then dialed again. Ten rings.

He dialed directory assistance. He made the operator repeat her information three times, to make sure he had understood the French.

There was no mistaking the message: the city of Paris had no listing for a Kirsten Amster.

Stewart found a taxi and handed the driver a slip of paper with Amster’s address written on it.

Rue Montgallet was a short and narrow street that connected avenue Daumesnil with the rue de Reuilly several blocks east of the Gare de Lyon. It was in an old working-class neighborhood of the city, and entirely unfamiliar to the cab driver, who managed two wrong turns before finally zeroing in on it.

Stewart pulled up his collar and walked down the block to number 15.

It was a cold day. The same clammy drizzle he had left behind in New York seemed to have followed him to Paris.

The front door of number 15 was ajar. He pushed it in and peered around the small brown-painted vestibule. He brushed his wet hair out of his eyes and looked for the buzzer for apartment 3. He found it, third from the end, over its mailbox. Garibaldi, the nameplate said.

He checked the names over the other boxes: Abadji, Jusson, Cameon, Bagoy, Sapon. No Amster. He stepped back outside to check the building number. It was 15.

A squat, muscular man in a corduroy coat and woolen hat came through the lobby’s inner door, carrying a broom. The pungent odor of sardines wafted out behind him into the vestibule.

“Excuse me. Do you speak English?”

The man shook his head.

“Vous etes le concierge?”

He nodded.

Kirsten Amster, it turned out, no longer lived at that address.

Getting her new address took twenty minutes of hard bargaining and cost Stewart two hundred francs, but he walked away with a strip of brown paper torn from a shopping bag with the words “Apt. 6, 32 boulevard Raspail” scrawled on it in leaky blue ballpoint.

Stewart ducked into the Metro station at the end of the block and rode across the city to the rue du Bac, a short block from where the boulevard Raspail branched off from the boulevard Saint-Germain. The neighborhood was Left Bank chic, and many rungs up the economic ladder from the rue Montgallet. Stewart was seized by the sudden fear that Amster had sold the Jupiter program to someone else. That would certainly explain her move to a better part of town.

Stewart found number 32 a block and a half up. It was a large, immaculately maintained four-story apartment building. The name under the bell for apartment 6, on the top floor, was Steiner, not Amster.

Stewart pressed it anyway. No answer. He looked at his watch: 8:30

A.M. He pressed the buzzer again and held it.

Eventually a sleepy, blurred female voice boomed over the lobby’s static-filled intercom: “Qui est-ce?”

“Kirsten Amster? Est-elle la?”

“No.” The accent sounded American.

“Does she live here?” Stewart asked.

“Who are you?”

“Dalton Stewart…. I need to find her.”

“Why? ” “An urgent business matter.”

“She’s not here anymore.”

“Do you know where she is?”

There was a long pause. Dalton repeated the question. Still no answer. “Please,” he said, looking pleadingly at the shiny metal intercom grille. “If you know her address . . .”

“Try 9 rue Blondel.”

“Where is that, exactly . . . ?”

“Off the rue Saint-Denis.”

“Thank you. Do you have a phone number . . . ?”

There was no answer. The woman had shut off the intercom.

The rue Blondel was in the heart of the red light district. At this hour of the morning, with a cold, misty rain falling, the only prostitutes out were the hardy and the desperate, hunched against the elements in dark vestibules and doorways, calling out in stage whispers to the males passing by.

The entrance to number 9 was barricaded by a fat fortyish woman in a cheap cloth wrap. She was leaning against the door frame, smoking a cigarette.

Dalton cleared his throat. “I’m looking for Kirsten Amster.

Does she live here?”

The woman glanced across the street, then shrugged. Stewart followed her gaze. Two men were watching him from a doorway.

He extracted a hundred-franc note from his wallet and held it out toward her. “Kirsten Amster?” he repeated.

The woman snatched the bill smoothly out his hands and swept it into a pocket somewhere. She nodded quickly in the direction of the stairs at the end of the narrow, shabby hallway behind her.

“Deuxieme etage. Au fond.”

Stewart moved up the stairs slowly, giving his eyes time to adjust to the dim light. The place stank of rotting food and urine.

He paused at the second landing and then remembered that deuxieme etage meant the third floor in France, not the second. He climbed another flight. At the back end of the hallway there was a single scarred brown door with several locks on it.

He knocked.

After a few minutes of persistent pounding, he heard a voice growl something in French from the other side.

“I’m looking for Kirsten Amster,” he said.

“What do you want?”

“I need to talk to her. We had a business arrangement.”

“Who are you?”

“Dalton Stewart.”

A long silence.

“Please. I must talk with her.”

He heard the snap of a lock and the rattle of a chain. The door opened an inch. Stewart saw a dark eye peering at him. The safety chain was lifted out of its catch, and the door opened wider. A puffy, bald, bearded, middle-aged figure in a gray undershirt looked him over.

Stewart glanced over his shoulder. The dim corridor behind him felt vaguely threatening. “May I come in?”

“You alone?”

“Yes.”

The man let him into a small studio apartment—a galley kitchen and minuscule bath attached to a narrow, airless room with one window, shut tight and covered by ratty red velvet drapes. The walls were painted red, the ceiling light blue. Both colors were peeling.

A mattress lay on the floor in one corner. There was little else in the room—a table, a chest of drawers, a couple of beat-up chairs, an improvised bookshelf of stacked wooden crates. There appeared to be no closet. Clothes hung from hooks on the wall.

The stale smell of cigarette smoke and human funk was strong.

Despite the desperate tawdriness of the place, it was surprisingly neat. The floor looked clean, and a stained quilt was tucked neatly over the mattress. There was a single lamp on the floor beside the mattress, and a stack of books on the quilt. A pile of pillows propped against the wall indicated that the man had been reading.

“My name is Joe Slater,” he said. He sat at the table and gestured toward the other chair. Stewart walked over and sat down.

Slater waved a hand around, inviting his guest to take in the surroundings. “Not exactly avenue Foch, is it?” he joked.

“Are there some people watching you?” Stewart asked.

Slater laughed. “You mean those guys across the street?”

“Who are they?”

“Fucked if I know. I don’t pay any attention to them.” Slater looked toward the kitchen. “I got a couple of beers in the fridge.

Alsatian, not too bad….”

“No thanks.”

“A man never thinks his life’ll come to this,” Slater said.

“Christ knows I didn’t. I would have thought this romantic as all hell when I was in my twenties. But now . . . now it’s just pathetic.

I’m pathetic. I’ll be fifty-three next birthday. I really didn’t expect to live this long, you know that? I guess that’s part of my problem. I’ve outlived myself. Hey, but you didn’t come here to listen to my problems.”

“I’m looking for Kirsten Amster.”

“Yeah, you told me.”

“Does she live here?”

“Not anymore.”

“Where does she live?”

Slater’s eyes narrowed. “She doesn’t live anywhere. She’s dead.”

The news jolted Stewart powerfully. When he had recovered, he asked what had happened to her.

“She drowned. In the Seine. Last October.”