Trump Tower (69 page)

She took a deep breath suddenly ripped off her shirt and stood there very nervously in a small, pink bra. “Joey . . .” she said breathlessly . . . “where's Joey?”

“I'll page him.” Mikey turned and screamed, “Joey . . . Joey . . . where are you?”

Joey was still making out with that woman when he glanced up, then jumped up, and screamed, “Pocahontas . . .” He raced to the door. “What are
you doing . . . get dressed . . .” He pulled her shirt back over her head, then screamed at Mikey, “Are you fucking out of your skull?”

“Nice to meet you,” Mikey said.

Joey was frantic. “Pocahontas . . . you can't stay here . . .”

Amvi threw her arms around Joey and started kissing him. “I love you . . .”

“No,” Joey said. “You've got to go home . . . go on . . .” With his arms around her back, Joey picked her up and carried her to the elevators. “You've got to go home . . .” He pushed the elevator button. “Come on, I'm taking you home . . . you've got to go home.”

When the elevator arrived, Joey carried Amvi inside.

Mikey watched as the elevator doors closed and waited there.

But they didn't come back.

Walking inside, he tried to find the woman he'd just been with, had trouble remembering exactly which one she was, then recalled that they'd been together in Ricky's bedroom. That's where he found her, still naked, but snoring and fast asleep.

“I remember you,” he said.

Back in the living room, he noticed that some people were leaving.

“Isn't anybody going to get naked?” He asked two women on their way out, “Come on girls . . .”

They left.

“Aw come on . . . anyone? Someone? You? You?” He pointed to one woman, then another, turned around and then another. And soon he found himself turning round and round. “You? . . . you? . . . going . . . going . . . gone.”

Dizzy, he fell to the floor.

“What kind of a party is this when the world won't stop spinning.”

Getting onto his hands and knees, he crawled over to a woman who was standing at the door. When she saw him there, she opened the door and asked, “Where are you off to, then?”

“I was thinking of . . . I don't know . . .” He looked up at her. “Where can we crawl to together?”

“My place?”

“Sure. Where's that?”

“New Jersey.”

“Can't get there from here.”

“How about your place?”

“No, no, no. Not if we both want to live to tell the tale.”

“Then where?”

“Where are we now?”

“Trump Tower.”

“Been there, done that,” he said. “Speaking of which, we're right around the corner from the Plaza. Ever been there?”

“Not with you.”

He crawled into the hallway, over to the elevators, and pushed the call button. When Ricardo arrived, Mikey—still wearing Ricky's ankle bracelet—crawled in with the woman walking beside him and announced, “The Plaza Hotel please, and step on it.”

MONDAY

C
arson walked into the office two hours later than usual.

“Where the hell have you been?” Tony Arcarro wanted to know.

“When? Last Week? Yesterday? Last night?”

“This morning.”

“Why? You taking attendance?”

“No. Raising the alarm.”

“What alarm?”

“Better get onto voice mail. You got yourself a real problem.”

T
WENTY-FOUR HOURS
before, Carson and Alicia had ordered a leisurely breakfast—two big café lattes with fresh
croissants—
gotten back into the tub and had spent nearly an hour making love there until Alicia announced, “I have to pack . . . for Cyndi, too.”

They'd put all their luggage together, then gotten Roland to drive them to
Fouquet's
to meet up with Cyndi.

There, they had lunch on the private club terrace off the
Champs Élysées
, along the
Avenue George V—
Carson couldn't get over the fact that just about everybody on the terrace came up to kiss Cyndi hello—before going to the airport and flying back to New York together.

No sooner had the three of them arrived home at Trump Tower when Alicia remembered that she and Carson had, weeks ago, accepted a dinner invitation at the Park Avenue penthouse home of Fleming and Elizabeth Scranton.

A couple they'd only recently met, the Scrantons privately owned Decorators' Depot, a chain of 180 big-box stores around the country.

So Alicia and Carson rushed out of their traveling clothes—“Lucky for us that we spent so much time taking baths in Paris,” she said—got into dinner-party clothes and managed to get to the Scranton's place almost on time.

Not surprisingly, between his jetlag from having come full circle around the world in only five days plus the late night, Carson had overslept.

It was the wrong morning to have done that.

“Y
OU GOT
yourself a real problem.”

Carson wanted to know, “Who or what or why?”

Arcarro told him, “Omaha.”

That woke him up.

Instead of ordering his usual juice and bialy, Carson punched up his voice mail and listened to the message from Warring, which simply said, “He fucked us.”

He returned the call immediately. “It's Carson.”

Warring demanded to know, “Where the fuck have you been?”

“I just got back . . . last night.”

“Yeah, well, I needed you on the phone with Japan this morning while Japan was still open. Now they're closed.”

Carson asked, “What's the problem?”

“The problem is,” Warring said angrily, “he fucked us . . . And you're asleep at the switch.”

“Hold on . . . Ken . . . calm down . . .”

“Don't ever tell me to calm down.”

“Sorry,” he said, taking a deep breath. “I'm sorry. Please tell me what happened.”

“He reneged. Fucking flat-out refused to sign. Said he changed his mind. Said if we didn't like it, we could take him to court or fuck ourselves, or both.”

Carson pulled his keyboard closer and checked the Shigetada share price on the Tokyo Exchange. “Closed down two-thirds. Who else knows?”

“Who knows what?”

“That he wants us out?”

“How do I know? Lawyers had everything set to sign the initial intent, and the fucker sends a message that the deal's off. I try to get in touch with you because we need to do something fast . . . and I can't find you . . .”

“What did the lawyers say?”

“What do you want them to say?”

“Okay.” Carson understood that Warring was in no mood to have a conversation. “Let me find out what's going on and where we stand and figure out what we can do.”

“You don't need to figure out what we can do. We need to ruin the fucker. That's what you have to do when somebody tries to screw you. Screw them back fifteen times so they never do it again. Screw them back fifteen times worse and your reputation gets out there and the next guy thinking about it says to himself,
I better leave this prick alone
.”

“I understand,” Carson said.

“You can never let some son of a bitch get away with anything because if you do, you only invite others to try.”

“I'm on the case,” Carson said. “I'll call you in an hour.”

“Yeah, and when you call . . . you better have something to say.”

Carson hung up and screamed loud enough for everyone in the office to hear, “Shit!”

“What?” Arcarro was standing in his doorway.

“Shigetada went away. Refused to sign.”

“I thought the fat lady already sang.”

“Wrong song. And Warring is seriously pissed off.”

“At us?”

“At me. At Shigetada. At everybody.”

Arcarro fell onto Carson's couch and took up all of it. “What now?”

“I don't have a clue.” He checked the time. “It's too late to get the lawyers on the phone in Tokyo. And, I don't have any home numbers for them. I could phone Shigetada . . . I don't know. Ken is furious. What do you think?”

“Don't ask me. Ask J. R. Ewing what he would do.”

Carson smiled at the
Dallas
reference. “Yeah . . . J. R. Ewing's art of the deal. Besides blackmailing somebody's ass, J. R. would probably say that we've got three choices. We buy . . . we sell . . . we do nothing.”

“Right. J. R. would look for a girlfriend, a boyfriend, a donkey, whatever. So get something on Shigetada and blackmail the shit out of him.”

“Knowing Warring,” Carson suggested, “he wouldn't automatically say no. But short of blackmail . . . what else you got?”

Arcarro thought for a while. “Shift your defense. This is an away game. Go zone.”

“You don't score playing defense.”

“Tie goes to the base runner. If he doesn't score, he loses.”

“Too many mixed sports metaphors . . . makes no sense at all. If we don't score, either . . .”

“You're not following me. He can buy, he can sell, he can do nothing. So, prepare the ground for all three eventualities. If he's buying, you've got to be selling high. If he's selling, you've got to be buying low. If he's doing nothing, you've got to kick him in the ass and make him do something.”

“He's suddenly not selling,” Carson said, “but that doesn't mean he's necessarily buying. Easy enough to find out, I guess. But what happens to us if Shigetada's doing nothing?”

“If he's doing nothing, maybe he's waiting for the market to tell him what to do.”

He looked at Arcarro. “You're saying I should force the market?”

“That's step number two.”

“And, step number one is?”

“After all the time you've spent putting this deal together, you've got to know him and his company inside out.”

“I do.”

“So step number one is . . . find out what you don't know.”

A
T EIGHT O'CLOCK
New York time, Carson phoned Warring to say the only thing that seemed to make any sense. “I'm working on it.”

Warring's mood hadn't changed. “Don't bullshit me.”

Carson promised, “I'm not going to let you down.”

Warring warned him, “I'm not going to sit around listening to bullshit for very long,” and slammed down the phone.

C
ARSON CORRALLED
Mesumi and one of Arcarro's traders, a fellow named Matthew who'd been with them for four months, sat them down in the conference room with their laptops and said, “Shigetada Industries. Find me a way in.”

“Like what?” Matthew wanted to know.

“Like anything and everything. Go to analysts' reports, pink sheets, Internet rumors, intel, out-tel, under-tel.” He sat down with them. “Whatever there is.” He pointed to Mesumi, “You get the Japanese pages.”

At ten Arcarro stopped in to ask, “How goes it?”

Carson answered, “Nothing yet.”

At 10:30, Matthew stepped out to do a conference call that he'd set up days ago and didn't come back for over an hour.

By noon, they still hadn't found anything on Shigetada Industries that Carson could use.

“I wish we knew what we were supposed to be looking for,” Matthew said, motioning toward the printouts that were now cluttering up the conference table.

Carson thought about calling Warring but didn't. He was afraid of what Warring might say.

At two, Matthew stood up and announced, “I'm getting cross-eyed. I need to take a walk.”