James nodded. “Yes, we have very good history together. And it is also a very funny story how we met.”
“Oh, really?” I said. “I'd like to hear it.”
“Well,” he said proudly, “I was what you call ‘emergency CEO’ in one of Bob's underwritings.”
“Yeah—get a load of this,” snapped the Chef. “Bob does a deal, makes ten million, but then the CEO kicks the bucket the day the thing goes public. So now we needed someone—or, should I say, anyone—to step in.” The Chef looked at his Chinese friend. “No offense, James.”
“None taken,” he replied.
“Anyway,” continued the Chef, “James was on the board of the company at the time, so he agreed to step in as CEO. Then, of course, he did the right thing afterward, which is why we're all sitting here today.”
I nodded slowly, searching for a way to delve deeper into how James had “done the right thing afterward,” which in Chef terms (and in Wolf terms) meant that James had continued to issue cheap shares of stock to the Blue-eyed Devil after he went public. “So how did the company end up doing?” I asked casually. “Did it go anywhere?”
“It struggled for a while,” said James, “but we all did okay.”
The Chef said, “The most important thing is that James can be trusted. The company had its ups and downs, but James was always solid as a rock. And that's how he'll be with you on this: solid as a rock.”
Sensing an opening, I asked, “So you've helped Bob the same way you're gonna help me? You know, like”—I winked—”over there, in the Orient?”
James shrugged. “I do many things for Bob, but I do not like to discuss them. It will be the same way with you. What we do is only between us, and, of course, Dennis.”
I needed to get off this topic quickly, so I smiled at James, as if I'd only been testing him to see if he were a blabbermouth. “That's exactly what I wanted to hear, James. Exactly! See, the most important thing to me is that no one outside this room ever finds out about this. That's crucial.”
“They won't,” James said confidently. “Remember, it will be just as bad for me if that happens.”
“And that is indeed true,” added the Chef, with a single nod. “So all that's gotta happen now is you and James gotta come to your agreement; then I'll do what I gotta do, and you'll do what you gotta do, and then James will do whatever he's gotta do, and badabeep, badabop, badaboop—schwiiiitttt!—the money'll be over there, and we'll still be over here, and we can all sleep at night like babies.”
“We're all on the same page here,” I said confidently, “and if it's okay with you, James, I'd like to move very quickly. I have two million in cash that I want to get out of the States ASAP, because I, uh”—I looked around the room suspiciously, then lowered my voice—”got the money from new-issue kickbacks. You know, from clients I gave units to, who then did the right thing afterward and gave me back cash.” I slowly raised my voice to normal. “Anyway, then I got another ten million dollars already in Switzerland, which I'd like to wire to your sister as soon as we get all the accounts set up.”
“It is no problem,” said James. “She is very organized and very reliable.”
The Chef said, “I can take care of all the paperwork over there or anything else you need to get done. And when it comes to making investments, I'll work as an adviser to keep you one step removed until your problems blow over.”
I nodded in understanding, wondering if there was any point to sitting in this room one second longer. Both the Chef and James Loo had already buried themselves a thousand times over, plus I had the Chef on audiotape from the other day, with his diagram of the nuclear submarine.
Still, according to OCD, there was nothing more powerful with a jury than videotape, so, if possible, I should try to get the Chef to explain the entire money-laundering scheme yet again. Obviously, with the way things were going, I knew he would; it was just that I was so bored with the whole thing by this point that I couldn't bear to hear it myself again. I had already been an expert on money laundering before all this started, and I was sick and tired of playing dumb.
Nevertheless, I had a job to do; so I took a deep breath and said, “Everything sounds great, but I'm still a little bit confused. Just so there's no crossed wires in the future, can we go through the whole thing one more time?”
The Chef shook his head quickly, as if I were a bit on the dense side. Then he said, “Yeah, of course. Grab that pen and paper over there, will you…” and that was it. Ten minutes later I had another nuclear submarine, this one even more detailed. After all, the first one had only been a prototype; this one was the second generation. All I had to do now was to pass James the envelope. Then I was done.
I patted the outside of my sport jacket, just over the left breast pocket. “I assume Dennis mentioned that I was gonna give you a little cash today to get things going.”
James nodded. “Yes; that would be excellent.”
“Okay,” said the Chef, “well, I don't think you guys need me around for this, so I'm gonna get going.” And just like that he rose from the couch. “Is that okay with you, James?”
James shrugged. “Yes, no problem.”
The Chef looked at me. “Is it okay with you?”
No, I thought, I gotta check with the guys in the bedroom first. “Sure,” I said quickly, “it's fine.”
With that the Chef shook James Loo's hand and headed for the door.
And that was when it hit me: I would never see the Chef again. I had no doubt that once the Bastard saw this videotape, he would indict the Chef quickly and then announce my cooperation shortly thereafter. The end was fast approaching, and it was time to say my last good-byes to a man whom I had once trusted with my dirtiest secrets, a man whom I had once called my friend.
The Chef was a man's man, and there was no one else like him. He was the sort of Chef who could stand the heat in the kitchen, the sort of man I would want to go into battle with. How many times had I said that to myself over the years? How many times had I looked to the Chef for strength, and for answers, wisdom, and courage? And this was how it ended up.
As the Chef opened the hotel-room door, I said, “Hey, Chef!”
“Yo!” he said, smiling. “What's up?”
I smiled back sadly. “I just wanted to thank you for everything you've done for me. It's a f**ked-up business we're in, and you've always been a friend to me. Don't think I don't know that.”
“Yeah,” he said, “well, it's times like these when you find out who your true friends are. And now you know.” Those were his last words to me before he flashed me a wink and a smile and walked out the door.
James Loo would never make it out the door.
Per OCD's instructions, I would pass him the envelope and then tell him that I needed to go downstairs for a minute to get something from the doorman. Then they would arrest him. Of course, the Chef would never find out, because James Loo would also join Team USA, as would the Chef, I prayed, when his time came. After all, it wasn't him that they were really after; it was the Blue-eyed Devil.
The Chef was just a stepping-stone.
On my way back out to Southampton, I held on to that thought for all it was worth: that the Chef would roll over on the Devil, and I would be spared the guilt of having ratted out my old friend. And when I wasn't thinking that, I kept reminding myself over and over again that all men betray… all men betray… all men betray.
I would be wrong about that.
Some don't.
*Name has been changed
CHAPTER 23
TWISTS OF FATE
he only newspaper KGB ever read was Pravda, which was the former Soviet Union's most well-respected newspaper. In Russian, the word pravda meant truth, which was somewhat ironic, I thought, considering that when the Soviet Union was around, Pravda never published anything even remotely truthful. And while today's Pravda was substantially more accurate than the Pravda of old, all I cared about on September 21, the day my cooperation was announced, was that Pravda hadn't dedicated so much as one Cyrillic letter to the day's hot topic in America, which was: The Wolf of Wall Street had secretly pleaded guilty months ago and had been cooperating with the feds for over a year.
So, while ninety-nine percent of Americans were reading their morning papers and saying, “This is great! They finally brought that bastard to heel!” and the other one percent were reading their morning papers and saying, “This is bad! That bastard is going to rat us out now!” KGB was reading Pravda and cursing out the Chechen rebels, who, in her mind, were worthless Muslim dogs that deserved to be nuked.
And that was what I loved most about KGB: not her burning desire to turn the Chechens into radioactive dust (I was opposed to that) but the fact that she was completely oblivious to what was going on in my life. Better she focused on those Chechen dogs, I figured, than on the fact that she was living with a rat.
At this particular moment, she was sitting with Carter on the TV room's couch, staring at a forty-inch high-definition TV screen. Every last drop of her mental energy was focused on an ultrabrave, genetically enhanced marsupial named Crash Bandicoot, who was in the process of doing what he was always doing: running for his f**king life.
“What are you guys doing?” I asked the two videoholics.
KGB ignored me; she was too busy at the PlayStation controls, her thumbs moving up and down at a frenetic pace. Carter, however, was just observing, although he was so entranced that he ignored me too. His eyes were as wide as an owl's, his elbows resting on his thighs with his tiny chin cupped in his palms.
I walked over to Carter and said, “Whaddaya doing, buddy?”
He looked up and shook his head in awe. “Yuya's anazin ‘, Daddy. She… she… she”—he couldn't seem to get the words out—”she's on the top level. She's fighting brand-new monsters I never see before. No one has.”
“Look here,” KGB muttered to Carter, as she assisted Crash in his escape. “If I capture golden mask I become invincible!”
Carter looked back at the TV screen, awestruck. After a few seconds he whispered, “Invincible!”
I sat down beside my son and put my arm around him. “She's pretty good, buddy, huh?”
“Use a jump attack!” he screamed to KGB.
“No!” she shot back. “To defeat this monster I must use spin attack!”
“Ohhhh…” he said softly.
A spin attack, I thought. Just say the word a, for Chrissake! Still, there was no denying that KGB was the most proficient videogamestress on the entire f**king planet—Ms. Pac-Man, Super Mario, Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Hercules, and, of course, her latest obsession, Crash Bandicoot, the genetically enhanced marsupial from Wumpa Island off western Australia. She'd beaten them all, rising to levels that mere mortals, like Carter, never dared dream about.
As KGB jerked her glorious body this way and Carter jerked his thirty-one-pound body that way, I found myself wondering what the hell made Yulia Sukhanova tick. She played videogames no less than eight hours a day, spending the rest of her time either reading Russian books, babbling on the phone in Russian, or whispering sweet Russian nothings in my ear as we made love. She resided in America, yes, but only in the physical sense. Her heart and soul were still in Russia, stuck in a geopolitical time warp in the year 1989, the very year she'd been crowned Miss Soviet Union.
Intellectually, she was brilliant. She excelled at chess, checkers, backgammon, gin rummy, and, for that matter, all games of chance, which she played with a hustler's edge, and she hated to lose more than anything. Her parents were both dead, her father succumbing to a heart attack when she was only nine. They had been close, she said, and his death traumatized her. He had been an important man in the Soviet Union, a rocket scientist with the highest security clearance, so even after his death the family had always been taken care of. She had never wanted for anything. Bread lines, empty store shelves, drab clothing—things like these were as far removed from Yulia's childhood as they were from mine. Her life had been a charmed one and, by Soviet standards, one of affluence.
Her grace and beauty had come from her mother. I had seen the pictures; she was breathtaking—blond, blue-eyed, and possessing the warmest of smiles. In her day, according to Yulia, her mother was even prettier than she and held a very important position in the arts. In consequence, Yulia had grown up in a chic Moscow apartment, where a never-ending parade of famous Soviet artists-actors, actresses, painters, sculptors, singers, and ballet dancers— partied into the wee hours of the night, drinking Stolichnaya vodka and singing Russian songs.
Her mother hadn't died of natural causes: She was murdered, stabbed to death in her apartment, and that was where the story became murky. Her death had come shortly after Yulia was crowned Miss Soviet Union—and literally coincided with a dispute over who had “rights” to the gravy train that Yulia Sukhanova had become. Many were suspected in the murder, but no one was ever charged. So who murdered her? Was it the KGB? The Russian mob? A disgruntled businessman trying to extort Yulia for her modeling earnings? Or was it simply a random act of violence?
Whichever it was, this was the girl I had fallen in love with, a girl who loved her country but was reluctant to return there even as a visitor. In fact, she hadn't even flown back for her mother's funeral, and while she didn't say it, I knew it was out of fear. Igor— who she still maintained was her brother-in-law, married to her older sister, Larissa—hadn't flown back either, although in his case, she admitted, he couldn't have gone even if he wanted to. He was a wanted man in his country, but not by the law. There were “others,” she said, whose toes Igor had stepped on, and it had something to do with her. And that was it. Try as I might, she refused to go any further with the story.
Insofar as my circumstances were concerned, I was certain that she knew more than she led on. On the day my cooperation was announced, I offered her a brief explanation of what was going on—stressing the Dave Beall incident and how, in spite of it coming back to haunt me, I still felt like I had done the right thing. I had maintained my self-respect, I told her, to which she grabbed my hand and squeezed it reassuringly. And when the Chef was indicted two weeks later, I told her about that too—how he had been my accountant, a loyal friend who seemed to get an irrational joy out of “scheming,” which, ultimately, had led to his undoing—to which she said that there are no friends in business and that, if I hadn't learned my lesson with Dave Beall, then I never would.
She spent a great deal of time telling me about the great Russian soul—the velikaya russkaya dusha, she called it—and how no American could truly understand it. Honesty, integrity, sensitivity, imagination, compassion, guilt, the need to suffer in silence. Those were just a few of the words she used to describe it, thumbing through her Russian-English dictionary.
Yet, from my perspective, it wasn't her great Russian soul that was impressive, but her loyalty. We had known each other for less than two months, and it had to be plainly obvious to her that I wasn't the man she had thought I was. I was burdened with problems, my future uncertain. I was a man whose financial star was on the fall, not on the rise. Still, none of this seemed to bother her.
When I told her that I had to get rid of the beach house, she shrugged her shoulders and said that she couldn't care less about Meadow Lane. Better we should live in Manhattan, she added, and who needed such a big house anyway? And when I told her that money might get tight for a while, she assured me that any man who could make as much as I had so young could figure out a way to do it again.
Emboldened by her words, I nodded in agreement and then made a decision to start trading stocks again, albeit legitimately. The NASDAQ was flying—dot-com mania, they called it—and with the money the government had left me, I could make a few million a year in my sleep. Just why I hadn't thought of this before I wasn't so sure, although I knew it had something to do with KGB believing in me.
In that sense, she was everything the Duchess wasn't. She was willing to bet on me, not on what I had come to surround myself with. Yet, in the Duchess's defense, Yulia didn't have two children to worry about, nor did she have “history” with me.
Whatever the case, the Duchess was my past and KGB was my future, and here she was, about to reach the twenty-fifth level of Crash Bandicoot. All she needed to do was defeat Dr. Neo Cortex, Crash's nemesis, and then Crash would be reunited with his girlfriend, Tawna, another genetically enhanced bandicoot, who, in the world of bandicoots, was as sexy as Jessica Rabbit.
Suddenly, KGB started screaming: “Blyad! Blyad! Nyet! Nyet!”
“Back up!” screamed Carter. “He's throwing fireballs!”
“I can't!” screamed KGB. “I have lost power!”
“No!” screamed Carter. “Use a power crystal…” and I watched the screen with total fascination as a muscle-bound ape named Koala Kong picked up a fireball and winged it at Crash's head, causing him to burst into flames. At this point Crash screamed in agony, jumped into the air, did a three-sixty, and then landed on his tiny bandicoot butt and burned to death. Then the TV made a sound like: “Wa, wa, wa, wa, wa… boom!” And that was it: The screen went black.
At first, KGB and Carter just looked at each other, frozen. Then KGB shook her head and said, “Chto ty nashu stranu obsirayesh!”
Carter compressed his lips and nodded his little head in agreement, having no idea that KGB had said, “I just shit all over this stupid game!” Then Carter said, “Again, Yuya,” to which KGB nodded in resignation, took a deep breath, and hit a button on the controller, bringing Crash back to life, albeit at the bottom of Neo Cortex's castle.
And as they lost themselves in the game, I found myself wondering what kind of mother KGB would be to my children if disaster struck. Unlikely as it seemed, it was still something I had to consider—that the Duchess could die and the kids would become solely my responsibility.
KGB and Carter had a close connection based on their love of video games, but, outside that, I wasn't so sure. There was a certain disconnect between them, inasmuch as when they weren't sitting in front of the TV screen they said very little to each other. Of course, she was never anything but nice to him, no two ways about that, but there was a lack of warmth, I thought, a certain apathy that one wouldn't expect to find given the storied nature of the great Russian soul.