“Sir, madam? Your beggar’s purses. Osetra instead of beluga, just as you requested!”
“Thank you,” Rick said weakly.
Andrea glanced from her plate to Rick’s eyes. Her smile now seemed chilly. “Beggar’s purse, huh?” she said.
11
When he got back to his king-size bed at the Charles, he was unable to sleep. He was drunk. The hotel room tilted on its axis, wobbled, and capsized. He thrashed around the bed as he replayed the evening over and over, agonized. How could he have been such a buffoon? Jesus! What the hell was he thinking, throwing money around like that? He saw himself through Andrea’s eyes, and it was painful. He might as well be one of those Goldman Sachs dicks she despised. The ridiculous beggar’s purses. Beggar’s purses-could there possibly be a more offensive name? And that… four-thousand-dollar bottle of La Tâche, wasted on both of them.
He could almost hear her words playing in an echo chamber. They’ll go to Per Se and dump thousands of bucks for a single bottle of… of freaking fermented grape juice, you know? It’s stupid. It’s obscene. It’s gross.
He was no better than one of those swaggering, splurging, callow investment bankers whose life was hollow and meaningless. He was just the kind of asshole she was railing about. Exactly the sort of guy Back Bay magazine used to publish worshipful profiles about. With only one difference: He had less money.
He’d been trying to impress a girlfriend he’d once dumped, to win her over with a fraudulent optical illusion of his “success.” When that was the fastest way to repel her. And he’d repelled her for sure. He could see it in her face, now that he reviewed the tapes of the evening, the way her smile had gone from sweet and nervous and hopeful to amused and then cloyed and finally outright disgusted. She saw him for what he was: a tool. A pompous, pretentious, affected jerk.
Yesterday, that three and a half million dollars had been a vast, almost incalculable fortune. And then? Between his fancy duds from Marco (ten thousand dollars), paying Jeff, and the seven thousand bucks he’d dumped at Madrigal, his fortune-which was how he thought of it now, his-had been depleted by twenty-five thousand dollars. If he kept up spending at this rate, after a month and a half he’d have nothing left.
He awoke late the next morning, head thick and pounding and mouth tasting like asphalt, as though a truck had driven through it, farting its foul exhaust. He got up carefully, balancing his throbbing head as if it were a fragile globe made of gossamer-spun glass, and made it to the toilet just in time to throw up.
That made him feel a little better.
He went down to the small lobby gift shop in T-shirt and gym shorts and bought a little bottle of Advil and a couple of bottles of water and gulped down four pills right there in the shop. He went back upstairs, changed into jeans and a button-down shirt, and went to the restaurant attached to the hotel and had some black coffee. He was still too queasy to eat anything. A sip of fresh-squeezed orange juice was a mistake; it hit his stomach like battery acid. Eventually he was able to eat a croissant, dry.
Moving slowly and gingerly, he took the elevator down to the parking garage beneath the hotel and looked for his car.
It was on the second underground level, parked a little crooked. And he’d been mostly sober at the time, except for a couple of flutes of Champagne at Marco. When he thought about how roaring drunk he’d gotten last night, he was glad he’d hired a limo.
Then he remembered: Hadn’t his father indicated that the money wasn’t his?
Then whose was it?
He knew what he had to do today. He had to find out where this money came from, how it had ended up sealed in the walls of his father’s house.
Where to start? His sister, Wendy? She’d have said something after all these years. And she’d have been looking for it: If she knew there was money hidden there, she wouldn’t be insisting on selling the house. No way did she know about the money.
But someone did. Whoever had broken into the house and attacked him was looking for something, that much was clear. It couldn’t have been a coincidence. Once again he ran through the list of possibles. Someone at one of the banks where he’d made deposits? The guy from the storage place? A neighbor?
Jeff? One of his guys?
Rick had been so careful, up until last night, anyway. Because he knew having too much cash always makes you a target.
He’d seen enough movies to know what happens to people who find large quantities of loot. Rarely did it end well. Brother turns against brother, Humphrey Bogart goes stark raving mad. A psychopathic killer with LOVE and HATE tattooed on his fingers comes to town. A lunatic with a nail gun pays a visit. But he didn’t want to be in a noir film. He wanted a happy ending. He wanted Brewster’s Millions, not The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
He took out the BMW’s keyless remote and thumbed the button to unlock the car.
Maybe Len’s old secretary could help figure it out. He’d have to be cagey about the amount of cash-she might well try to insist that some of it rightfully belonged to her. She’d worked for Len for more than thirty years, after all. And even if she knew nothing about the three million-plus, she could still be invaluable. She’d have appointment books and calendars and ledgers. Somewhere in there would be the name of a client or a friend or-
He heard a quick scuffle, and something moved behind him and then everything suddenly went dark.
Some kind of rough cloth was smothering his face. His throat was vised in a strong grip: Someone had come at him from behind, thrown something over his face, and grabbed him round the neck. He tried to swing his fists, dropping the car’s remote in the process, but didn’t connect. He tried to free his neck from the crook of his assailant’s arm, someone much bigger than he, someone who stank of sweat and mildewed clothing and something that reminded Rick of a barbershop. He struggled, but it was useless. Something was binding his wrists together, some kind of plastic restraint, pulled tight. A hand was clapped over his mouth, atop the cloth.
His legs were free, though, so he kicked out in front of him, hit the steel of the BMW, painfully. Then something slammed into the backs of his knees, and he crumpled to the ground in excruciating pain, but his screams were muffled.
On either side there were voices, male voices, talking fast. In English but with an accent-Irish, maybe. The hand was still flat against his mouth. He tasted something bitter and dirty and organic, maybe burlap. He jammed his heel into something that wasn’t steel, something probably human. He heard an ooof, a man’s low cry. He managed to grab some of the burlap in his fingers and move the hood up far enough for him to see his attacker’s hand, a green blob of a tattoo on the inside of his wrist. He heard a car trunk popping open, and then he was slammed against the concrete floor of the parking garage and he could taste blood, his own blood, dark and metallic.
He kept struggling, but with his wrists bound, and being unable to see anything, it was useless. He was hoisted and pushed and gripped and then dropped like a sack of rice into the trunk of a car. He could feel the steel lip of the trunk as his ankles crashed against it. He swung his bound hands upward and hit something hard, unyielding: steel. Frantically now he kicked, hit more steel, felt the lid of the trunk.
Then he heard the guttural growl of a car’s engine roaring to life, the dull vibration against his face, and he knew the car was taking him someplace.