Trump Tower (25 page)

“Drug money?” David blurted out.

“Tax evasion,” Forero claimed. “There is a large market in brokering dollars and Colombian pesos . . . and although Juan Felipe is a travel agent by profession, and Javier is a jeweler and I am an industrialist . . . all of us from Bogota . . . we make substantial amounts of money brokering dollars and pesos.”

David wanted to know, “How does tax evasion . . .”

Forero smiled. “There are people who believe that football . . . soccer to you . . . is the national sport of Colombia. Those are people who don't know my country. The national sport is tax evasion. No one looks down on anyone who cheats the government in Colombia because everybody cheats . . . especially people in the government. But the problem with tax evasion is that if you have money that should have gone to the tax department, you cannot spend it in Colombia. If you do, they will know. So the entire country wants dollars in America. They have pesos, we have dollars, and we move money back and forth. You understand?”

David confessed, “Not exactly.”

“If you have five million dollars in pesos,” Forero went on, “and you buy yourself a nice
hacienda
, the government will ask where you got the money. But if that money is not in Colombia, if it is in America, then there are all sorts of ways that you can spend it there, or enjoy it outside Colombia, or even buy things and send them back to Colombia.”

“And you want to put that money into my business.”

“No,” Forero said. “We want to make that money available to you to guarantee your line of credit against your trading. You never see the money. You never see us. It is bedded down in several business accounts.”

Zhadanov piped up for the first time, “All of which comes through my attorney-client account.”

Forero continued, “Security for your line of credit. You deal with your bankers, not us. We put up the money so that your bankers can deal with you.”

On the surface, it sounded to David like a foolproof scheme. “What kind of money are we talking about?”

“Twenty? Fifty? A hundred? What kind of money do you need?”

A hundred million dollars, David thought, in addition to the line of credit he was already working, that would make him and Tina major players. There wouldn't be a cargo anywhere in the world they couldn't buy. They could even afford to sit on a cargo for a few days if they had to before unloading it. Airplane parts. Metals. Oil. Nothing would be out of their reach.

But then David had seen foolproof schemes before. “So what's in it for you?”

“Twenty-five points on your profit . . .”

“A quarter's a big cut.”

“And paperwork.”

“What kind of paperwork?”

“To justify the twenty-five points.”

David thought about that. “You want me to doctor up paperwork . . .”

“No,” Forero said. “We need the paperwork from your bank to show the trading profit and our share. The principal stays in Vasyl's client account, always in the name of a business. That secures your line of credit, while the profits that come back to us get used to buy something like farm equipment. That then is shipped back to Colombia as part of a business plan. The farm equipment or television sets or cars, whatever, gets sold in Colombia. We get our pesos back to spend, and after a lot of transactional deductions, the tax gets paid at a much, much lower rate.”

David tried to take it all in. “So what I'm really doing is . . . facilitating income tax fraud.”

“Please understand that you are not committing any crime, whatsoever,” Forero insisted. “To begin with, if we don't pay our taxes in Colombia, that's not a crime in the United States, and that has nothing to do with you. In any case, you never touch any of our money.”

“I'm trading with it.”

“No, you're trading with your money and your bank's money. Our money is never anything more than a guarantee to your bank. Not to you. Only to your bank. Please . . .” he motioned toward the table . . . “help yourself to another plate.”

David wasn't yet totally convinced, but the more they ate, and the more they drank, the more he realized this could make him the biggest player in the game.

By the time the sun came up—lighting the white sand beach and the gorgeous turquoise sea and turning the sky from bright red and orange into deep blue—the deal was sounding very sweet.

MONDAY

T
he first thing Antonia did when she got up on Monday morning was walk into her living room and look out the window for baseball caps.

From her bedroom, all she could see was another apartment building, but from the living room she had a view of West Eighty-Eighth Street and, by leaning forward a bit, then craning her neck to the left, she could see the northwest corner at Broadway.

If she saw people bundled up or carrying umbrellas, she'd have to make a six-minute dash to Eighty-Sixth Street for the six-minute subway ride to Columbus Circle. But if she spotted men in suits and women wearing dresses with running shoes wearing baseball caps, that meant it was walking weather.

And this morning, there were plenty of baseball caps.

She showered and dressed, put on her running shoes, stuffed her heels into a shopping bag, looked around the apartment one last time—decided no, after spending the entire weekend moving furniture around, she still didn't like the arrangement in the living room—and headed out the door.

Walking fast down Broadway, the way New Yorkers do, she peeled off after four blocks into Le Macaron D'Or, a tiny French pastry shop, where she bought two
croissants
and a cup of French roast chicory coffee to go.

This was what she liked best about walking to work, and what she liked best about work was being in New York.

She'd grown up in New Jersey, staring at a city that was calling to her from across the river. It was where everyone she knew aspired to be. It was where she knew she had to wind up.

There are two types of people in New Jersey—she and her friends had convinced themselves ever since they were old enough to know where New York was—those who stay and those who leave. But her road to New York had taken her around the world. All the hotels she'd worked in, all the exotic locations she'd come to know, as far as she was concerned, it was those roads that led here.

“It doesn't get better than New York,” she said out loud, arriving at Columbus Circle at the same time that she finished her first
croissant
, “Someday . . . Antonia is going to have the Big Apple by the balls.”

Upstairs, in her tiny second-floor office just before eight o'clock—her boss usually never wandered in until 8:30—she ran through the reports she needed to see, but stopped when she came to Pierre Belasco's report on Carlos Vela.

It amazed her how careful he was to avoid saying that Vela was guilty of anything.

She checked her watch—by now it was 8:16—and knew she was cutting it close but decided there was enough time. So she left her coffee and second
croissant
on her desk, stepped out of her office, looked around to see that no one else was in yet, and went into Anthony Gallicano's office.

The man responsible for all the Trump Organization properties in the greater New York area had a big corner room with views south past Columbus Circle, and east along Central Park South.

Antonia had long ago cracked his code—his wife's initials and her birthday—so now she turned on his computer and, when it was ready, typed in “MAG616.”

It brought her straight into his inbox.

Running down his list of unread e-mails, she saw nothing of any consequence. But there were several e-mails in the draft box. And one of them was a memo to Trump himself. The subject was “Carlos Vela.”

The memo was very brief. “Concerning the employee in question, Carlos Vela, Belasco reports there is insufficient evidence for dismissal. The resident is adamant. Your call.”

She didn't know why it hadn't been sent. Maybe Gallicano was waiting to attach something. In any case, she erased the first two letters of the word “insufficient,” then she pushed send.

A copy appeared in the sent file, which she immediately erased. She then searched through the other e-mails in the sent file and noticed one from Gallicano to all department heads. It said that the Broadway actor, Tommy Seasons—and there were several photos attached, including some taken of him by the CCTV cameras in Trump Tower—was to be considered
persona non grata
throughout the group properties. Gallicano wrote, “Sightings of him should be reported immediately.”

Also attached was a one-page Word document, written by the Tower security guy, Bill Riordan, explaining the nature of the complaint against Tommy, along with some background.

Antonia read it and saw that Tommy Seasons had been involved with Cyndi Benson.

“Hah!” She said out loud, forwarded the report to herself—not to her office
e-mail address, but to her secret
[email protected]
account—then erased that sent copy, so that Gallicano could never see she'd done it.

Logging out of her boss' computer, she hurried back to her office.

A few minutes later, Gallicano walked past her open door and waved, “How come you always beat me to work?”

Finishing her second
croissant
, she waved back. “Worms.”

He stopped short. “Did you say . . . worms?”

“As in, what the early bird gets.”

“Oh . . . yeah, of course. Any good worms this morning?”

She raised her paper cup and toasted him with the rest of her coffee. “A couple.”

C
arson was up at his usual hour, but when he came out of the bathroom and started looking for his gym clothes, he noticed that Alicia was also awake.

“Go back to sleep.”

“I can't.”

“Why not?”

“I'm thinking.”

“You can think later,” he said pulling on his shorts. “You have all day to think. Right now, you should sleep.”

“Do I really want a coffee table book to be my first book?”

“What?”

She said it again. “Do I really want a coffee table book to be my first book?”

“That's what you're losing sleep about?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it's a coffee table book.”

“Think of it as something to do while you're working on
War and Peace
.”

She swung her feet onto the floor and sat up. “Somewhere in my mind I saw myself one day writing a book about . . . I don't know . . . women in broadcasting. Or glass ceilings in the media. Something more substantial than a coffee table book.”

He stared at her sitting there, wearing nothing, with the sheet half covering her, and the other half falling onto the floor. “I'm thinking of writing a book, too.”

“What about?”

“The substantial adventures of Cuban-American-girl-journalist-turned-TV-anchor and black-boy-tennis-player-turned-whiz-kid, on a balcony at the Hermitage Hotel in Monte Carlo during the Grand Prix?”

She raised her eyebrows, “Whiz kid?”

He made a sound like racecars speeding by. “We should return to that balcony every year. Make it our annual pilgrimage. Like Lourdes.”

“Lourdes?”

“Sure healed what ailed me.”

“Don't push your luck, whiz kid.”

“Luck? What luck? That was skill. That's why it was . . . so very amusing.”

“I beg your pardon? So very amusing?”

“If I remember correctly, you were so very amused . . . several times.”

“Well . . .” She smiled as if she was remembering it. “Maybe you did . . . amuse me.”

“Only maybe?”

“If life was like television news, you know, where you can go back to the tape, I'd be willing to run it again to check the facts.”