Too Damn Rich (5 page)

One, swooping a flute of champagne out of a
tourist's hand, drained it in one swallow, then flung it into the
fireplace, the Waterford crystal shattering.

Another, plopping himself sideways down on a
sofa, rudely propped his shoes up on an incensed matron's lap.

The third, lit cigar in his mouth and hands
clasped behind his back, walked slowly around, as though taking
inventory. Finally, he took the cigar and deliberately tapped a
length of ash onto the Wilton carpet, grinding it in with his heel.
"You the countess?" he asked Zandra, an ugly smirk on his
pockmarked face.

"I am Zandra von Hohenburg-Willemlohe,
Countess of Grafburg, yes." Her voice was calm but her eyes flashed
angrily. "If you'll wait out in the foyer, I'll be with you in a
moment—whoever you are."

He didn't move. "You know good an' well who
we are. We've come to find yer bleedin' brother." Crossing over to
her, he lifted the cigar, puffed on it, and regarded her with stony
gray eyes. "We think you might know where 'e is." He blew a cloud
of smoke directly in her face.

Crimson spots burned on Zandra's cheeks, but
she refused to be cowered. Turning to the tourists with born and
bred dignity, she said, "I apologize for this rude intrusion. It
really was lovely meeting all of you."

Avoiding her eyes, they quietly set down
their drinks, gathered up coats and purses, and exodused
en
masse
.

"Right cozy, this place is," said the
cigar-smoking tough once the tourists and butler were gone. His
grin was a rictus. "Wouldn't mind stayin' 'ere meself fer a while.
Now ... whyn't you make it easy on yerself? Just tell us w'ere the
bloke calls 'imself yer brother's 'idin'."

Zandra stared at him. "How can I, if I don't
know?"

"Pity."

He seemed suddenly absorbed in his cigar,
rolling it back and forth between his thumb and forefinger while
blowing gently on the glowing tip. Finally he glanced up at
her.

"But you 'eard from 'im, din't ya?" His voice
was softly menacing.

"Yes, he called me this morning," Zandra
admitted. She couldn't take her eyes off the cigar. Fear, like a
suffocating wall, was closing in on her from all sides. "But he
wouldn't tell me his whereabouts. I really don't know where he
is!"

"Yeah? Hope you ain't expectin' us to swallow
that."

"Believe what you will." Her eyes rose to
meet his. "To tell you the truth," she added with contempt, "I
wouldn't help you even if I could."

Swift as a cobra, he clamped one steely hand
around her left wrist and jerked her toward him. "We'll see about
that," he said into her upturned face, "won't we?"

Slowly, deliberately, he brought the glowing
cigar end to within an inch of her bare forearm. Heat radiated from
its ashy tip, causing her arm muscles to twitch involuntarily.

"Now, why make it so 'ard on yerself?" he
asked, looking at her with eyes as cold as ball bearings. "All you
hav'ta' do is tell us where 'e is."

"But I already have!"

Clucking his tongue chidingly, he moved the
cigar half an inch closer to her flesh. Her pupils dilated wildly
as the radiating heat intensified, and she stared down at herself
in horrified fascination.

"Goddammit!" she whispered. "What will it
take to convince you I'm telling the truth?"

"How about this?"

And grinning, he ground the cigar out on her
forearm.

Excruciating pain seared her flesh, bolted
through her like white- hot lightning. Tears sprang to her eyes,
and it was all she could do not to scream.

He did it twice more, relighting the cigar
each time, and burning her in that exact same spot so that a huge,
blistering wound immediately swelled up. Yet somehow, she found the
strength to refuse him the satisfaction of crying out.

When it became obvious that she really had
nothing to tell, one of the men went around the apartment,
methodically tearing out all the telephone wires except for the
extension in the drawing room. Then Zandra's torturer took her
upstairs to her bedroom.

"If yer brother 'ad 'alf the balls you've
got," he said, "we wouldn't 'ave 'ad to 'urt you."

She shot him a withering look. "If you had
half the balls I've got," she retorted, "you wouldn't get your
kicks torturing women!"

That said, she stepped voluntarily into the
bedroom—and slammed the door on him.

She heard him lock it from the outside. Then,
pressing her ear against it, she listened to his receding
footsteps.

Not wasting a moment, she sprang into action.
First, she stripped off her "countess" gown, applied rudimentary
first aid to her arm, and pulled on jeans, cable-knit sweater, and
scuffed leather motorcycle jacket.

Second, she rummaged in her dresser, where
she kept her passport and a stash of nearly three hundred pounds
hidden beneath her underwear.

Third, she stuffed the barest essentials in
her giant shoulder bag.

And fourth, she quietly raised the window,
where a thick branch of the ancient elm in the backyard was
obligingly within reach.

Heaving out her bag and boots, she waited a
few minutes to see if the men had heard them drop. When she was
convinced they hadn't, she climbed over the sill, took a deep
breath, and leapt to the branch.

The climb down was swift; her disappearance
stealthy.

By the time they discovered she'd escaped,
she was already at Heathrow, boarding pass in hand.

Still, it wasn't until the British Airways
jet was well over the Atlantic that she finally began to relax.

Now, taking a seat on the Manhattan-bound
bus, she silently cursed the cause of her predicament.

Rudolph von Hohenburg-Willemlohe. Her brother
the count.

Some count.

First-class shit was more like it!

MacKenzie Turner, fleet of foot in her pink,
white, and blue leather Reeboks (she kept a pair of low-heeled
black dress pumps in the bottom drawer of her desk), tried to make
up for lost time by speed-walking to work. A stickler for
punctuality, she would have double-timed it, but running would have
meant working up an unpardonable and most unladylike sweat—hardly
appropriate for the hushed old- world atmosphere of Burghley's.

"Damn and blast Charley Ferraro all to hell!"
she growled furiously under her breath as her cassis-colored
leather shoulder bag bounced against her lats with every hurried
stride. She was never late for anything—
never!

Catching the DON'T WALK light at Madison and
Seventy-fifth, Kenzie saw, a block away, her place of employment.
Burghley's, the self- proclaimed museum where the art was for sale.
Eyeing the regal edifice, a sudden feeling of apprehension
fluttered inside her, like a trapped bird desperately seeking
escape. For the first time she wondered what the workday would
bring.

A change in ownership.

What did that mean? Were cutbacks to be
effected? Pink slips being readied? A tighter ship to be run?

Squaring her shoulders, she reminded herself
that nothing could be gained through speculation.

She would find out soon enough.

Burghley's occupied the length and breadth of
an entire city block, and was located at the sumptuous heart of one
of the western world's prime luxury shopping districts, the eastern
side of Madison Avenue between Seventy-third and Seventy-fourth
Streets. The building was a six-story, neo-Renaissance palazzo of
white marble, and worthy of Commodore Vanderbilt himself.

But with one major difference.

At Burghley's, even the air rights brought in
big moolah. Rising from the steeply angled verdigris roofs were
twin campaniles—two thirty-four story residential high-rises named,
appropriately enough, Auction Towers—built and managed by
Burghley's International Luxury Realty Division, and advertised as
the address, "Where Life Imitates Art."

The Towers had its own separate entrance on
Seventy-third Street, and boasted a private security staff,
attended underground garage, and around-the-clock white-glove
service.

The entrance to the auction galleries proper,
however, was appropriately located directly on Madison Avenue,
where a pair of baronially scaled, etched-glass doors almost, but
not quite, reached the second floor, which sported a continuous
carved fretwork frieze—a blatant copy from the Doge's Palace in
Venice.

BURGHLEY'S

FOUNDED
1719

The plaque was brass, discreet, and polished;
no giant letters were needed to trumpet
this
institution of
the art world. But along the sidewalk, recessed eye-level windows
held back-lit, blown-up slides of items in upcoming auctions—a
Beykoz rosewater sprinkler, a Renoir, a gilt samovar, a Tiffany
dragonfly lamp.

Today, since time was of the essence, Kenzie
didn't so much as glance at the photographs. Even the uniformed
doorman, all spit and polish, whom she normally engaged in a few
pleasantries, was taken aback by the speed with which she tore past
him, yanking open the heavy glass door herself before he could jump
to.

Once inside, she sketched a wave at the armed
security guards manning the vast lobby and strode rapidly toward
the sweeping staircase, virtually flying up it to the second-floor
galleries, where she made a shortcut through the carefully lit
collection of Highly Important French and Continental Furniture,
Decorations, and Clocks, which was slated to go on the auction
block the following day.

It was an eye-popping, mind-boggling
assortment of opulent treasures, including marble cassolettes,
ormolu chenets, mahogany gueridons, gilded console tables, regal
bureaus, desks, and commodes, and more chairs than you could shake
a leg at—all the more amazing, since auctions of one kind or
another at this, the world's ultimate recycling center, were a
bi-weekly event, which proved that, with enough money to blow, a
palace could indeed be furnished with one-stop shopping.

Pushing open a metal door marked FOR
EMPLOYEES ONLY, Kenzie plunged "backstage"—the staff's euphemism
for the whole of Burghley's to which the general public was not
admitted. She took the flight of concrete fire stairs two at a time
and rushed down a narrow carpeted corridor to her tiny office,
located in the rear of the building.

Glancing at her watch as she ran, she
whispered, "Eek! Gadzooks!"

She was late! To be exact, forty-two
hair-raising minutes late on this, of all days, when Burghley's new
majority shareholder was likely to drop by!

She burst breathlessly into her office, a
windowless, fourteen-by- fourteen-foot cube of a cell which she
shared with two other members of the Old Masters Paintings and
Drawings staff. There was just room enough for the three gunmetal
gray desks, all groaning under piles of reference tomes and
catalogues, and each facing the kind of wall-mounted lightboard
doctors used for viewing X rays—used, in this case, to peruse
oversized slides of items whose provenances or values needed to be
established.

The first thing Kenzie noted was that while
her friend, Arnold Li, was at his desk, her nemesis, Bambi Parker,
was absent from hers.

"Ah so!" greeted Arnold in his best Chinese
takeout voice. Grinning up at her, he spun around on his swivel
chair. "The prodigal daughter arrive at wrong rast."

"And late, too, dammit!" Kenzie cried,
lunging for the bottom drawer of her desk to fish out the leather
pumps she kept there. "Late!"

"Rate?" Arnold was slim, handsome, and
Eurasian: Chinese father, Caucasian mother. Gay, too, and very
sharp. He grinned slyly, one eyebrow arched. "Too much ruvemaking,
eh?"

"Oh, do stop with that incessant routine!"
she snapped in annoyance. "Oh, shit!" she moaned, plopping into her
chair and gazing at one of her pumps in dismay. She repeated a
string of curses, slamming the shoe on her desk to emphasize each
word. "Shit." Bang. "Shit." Bang.

"Whoa!" said Arnold, reverting to perfect
English. "What's the crisis?"

"This." She brandished one shoe malevolently.
"I forgot that the heel of this damn thing broke off yesterday! Now
what do I do?" she wailed.

"Tear off the other one," Arnold said calmly.
"Then they'll match. Flats are all the rage, or haven't you
heard?"

"D-do you have any idea what these ... these
things cost?" she sputtered in outrage.

He eyed her feet. "Well, then wear your
ghetto flyers."

"You know I can't. 'Ms. Turner, have you
forgotten?' " She mimicked Sheldon D. Fairey's secretary, Miss
Botkin, to perfection. " 'Sneakers may be appropriate attire out on
the playing field, but here at Burghley's, they are highly
inappropriate—not to mention offensive!' "

That cracked Arnold up, but Kenzie just
stared mournfully at her one good pump. After a moment's
hesitation, and purposely averting her head, she held out the shoe.
"Here," she said, looking away. "You break it off. I can't bring
myself to do it."

Arnold took it and she busied herself
attacking the laces of her Reeboks, cringing painfully when she
heard the sharp snap of the heel.

"All done." Arnold cheerfully got up and with
a flourish placed the pump on her desk. "If the shoe fits, wear
it."

"Veeeeery funny." Scowling, she wriggled her
feet into what, until now, had been her best pair of shoes, and
upon which she had recklessly splurged a full week's salary. "And
what have you got to be so cheerful about, anyway?" she
growled.

"Why shouldn't I be cheerful?" Arnold
asked.

"Well, because ... aren't we supposed to line
up outside and greet the new owner, or something?"

"Not that I heard." He sat back down and
calmly unwrapped his breakfast bagel. "Relax." He took a bite and
chewed. "The only person I know of who's coming to visit is Her
Royal Highness."