Exact Revenge Read online

  “What is it?” Dan asks.

  The manager is shaking his head. He looks up with a wide grin.

  “Mr. Parsons,” he says. “Goldman Sachs just put thirteen million dollars in your account.”

  “Can they take it back?” he asks, shooting a glance at me.

  “No sir,” the manager says. “It’s there. No one can take it but you.”

  Dan Parsons utters a cry. He grabs my hand and gives it a quick strong shake, then he races out of the building. Bert and I walk outside. I stand on the sidewalk and watch Dan make his way up the street in a ragged jog while Bert gets the truck. When Bert picks me up, I have him drive to Elizabeth Street.

  There is a big bay window in the front of the small saltbox house where Dan lives. We stop out front and I roll down my window. Through the bay window, I can see him hugging his wife and swinging her around. I can see the sparkle of tears running down his face. His mouth is open in wild laughter that I don’t have to hear.

  I roll up the window and stare straight ahead at the snow-covered street that is lined with four-foot banks.

  “Back to New York, Bert,” I say.

  “What about Mickey Mouse and Space Mountain and all that?”

  “No,” I say. “You liked when I played God, right? Reward a loyal friend? A kind old man? Make his dreams come true? That’s like Disney World. You take the ride, get a little scared, then you get off and have some cotton candy or a turkey drumstick. Take your picture with Snow White. But God’s got a night job too. God is a judge. Yeah, he rewards the good guy, right? Supposedly… But what about the bad?

  “God makes a call. Good, you get Disney World. Bad?”

  I look Bert in the eye and say, “You go to hell.”

  BOOK THREE. ASCENSION

  It was time for him to go back among men and take up the rank, influence and power which great wealth gives in this world.

  THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO

  34

  I KNOW THAT SOMEONE like Frank Steffano doesn’t get to where he is by destroying just one man. People like Frank are tumors. They feed off everything decent within their reach. They are worse than parasites who fatten only themselves. Tumors like Frank grow stronger and stronger until they can metastasize. They create other tumors that also grow and thrive. Villay. Rangle. Russo. I’m sure there are others.

  I hire Vance International, a private investigative and protective agency made from the cream of the Secret Service, the FBI, and all four branches of the military. I put up a five-million-dollar retainer, which gets their attention. They are my diagnostic team.

  You would be shocked at how easy it is to invade someone’s privacy. I’m not talking about getting someone’s phone records or financial statements, or hacking into their e-mails. I’m talking about seeing and hearing what goes on in their bedroom and the table where they eat breakfast.

  Vance International isn’t bound by any laws. They have employees who are welcomed into Frank and Lexis’s home, into the Rangles’, into the Villays’. It happens to every American on a weekly basis. We open our doors to complete strangers, giving them access to our secret places. Cable TV workers. Appliance repairmen. The guy who delivers the dry cleaning. The more money people have, the more intruders enter their homes.

  If that fails, Vance has other ways of getting in. Skeleton keys. Lock picks. Drills and glasscutters. Cameras and microphones the size of a pencil lead are easily inserted into ceilings and walls. Tiny transmitters send microwave digital data to receivers that are connected into fiber lines and fed to monitoring stations that gather everything. Then Vance boils it down to the good stuff.

  For six months they chronicle for me not only every symptom of the disease, but its complete pathology.

  Am I collecting information because I want to destroy the tumors perfectly, or because I want justification for what I’m going to do? Maybe I’m really not as comfortable filling in for God as I make myself out to be. It makes me sick to be this weak, but I think that’s the truth. Even after everything that’s happened to me, I need something more. A justification to make my judgment. A rationale to dole out my punishment. As if I didn’t already have enough of both.

  And, just like I figured, Vance International digs up other ruined lives besides mine. None of them are as bad as what happened to me, though. None of them except one. A girl named Helena. At first, I decide to look for her because she could serve an important role in my plan. But the more I learn, the more I feel as if we are somehow connected through our losses and our pain and I wonder if she might also be able to take the edge off my loneliness.

  It’s late summer when I track her down in a men’s club in Fairbanks, Alaska. She’s emotionally battered and bruised and so bitter that she’s almost wicked. I don’t blame her. She was sold off as a prostitute when she was a child. They used her in some movies and then they just used her. She was fifteen when she escaped a flophouse in West Hollywood. It took her a year to steal her way up to Alaska. Someplace she must have fantasized as being safe.

  She dances for the oil workers and fishermen during the week, and in exchange, the owner lets her sing with her clothes on over the weekend. She lives in a small one-room cabin that she built herself. She has electricity, but uses an outhouse. The first time I approach her in the club parking lot, she pulls a little 9mm Chief’s Special out of her bag and stabs it into my ribs.

  “You ever use that?” I ask.

  “You’re goddamn right,” she tells me.

  I buy the men’s club and shut it down. It still takes me two weeks to convince her I am for real.

  Finally I pack her into my G-V and take her to a flat I have in Knightsbridge in London. It takes four weeks before she realizes that she’s really safe.

  She starts to take walks with me and look me in the eye, and when I take her to a Nathan Lane show near Piccadilly Circus, I catch her smiling halfway through the first act. After the show, when she gets out of the limousine and we walk through the alley into Shepherd’s Market, she holds my hand. We have a drink at Ye Grapes, then go around the corner to a Turkish restaurant called Sofra. We sit in a table by the window and eat hummus and skewers of grilled lamb and vegetables.

  Her eyes are dark and liquid and deep, framed by long thick lashes that shadow her cheeks when she looks away. Her nose is narrow and straight, long without being big. Her lips are full. She isn’t a tall girl, but her figure is curved and her stomach flat. I lean across the table and let my lips brush gently against hers. She looks down and brushes her dark silky hair back out of her face. A tear falls, spattering the rim of her plate.

  “If you could have anything in the world,” I say, “what would it be?”

  “Like, really anything?”

  “Really.”

  Her eyelids flutter as she looks away and out the window at a passing punk with tall spiked hair, leather, and chains.

  She sighs and looks down and says, “A singer. A diva.”

  “Like Jennifer Lopez?” I ask.

  “Like that,” she says, looking back at me.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Her eyes stare into mine. One corner of her mouth curls up and in a quiet voice she says, “I think you mean that. I can sing, you know.”

  I nod that I know and say, “I wasn’t just watching your body.”

  “But it takes more than that,” she says, staring at the small candle that burns in its glass by the salt.

  “Just money,” I say.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I love the way you say that.”

  “I mean it,” I say.

  “I know you do,” she says.

  “No one will hurt you again,” I tell her, reaching out and holding her hand in mine. “No one will touch you. I swear to God they won’t.”

  That night I am awaked to find her standing beside my bed. She is touching my cheek with the back of her fingers. I draw back the sheets and she slips inside and clings to me tight. I hold her and stroke the
back of her head, drifting back into sleep.

  In the morning, I lock myself up alone in my wood-paneled study to make some serious phone calls. I raise my voice and the price often enough to get my point across for some immediate results regarding Helena’s career. Then we go for a walk.

  The sky is bright blue between the tall white clouds. We pass Buckingham Palace with its sea of red and yellow tulips, gold gilt statues, cascading fountains, and high wrought iron fence. We walk under the towering London plane trees along the lake in St. James’s Park. Ducks dip and splash in the green grasses poking up out of the dark water. The breeze is warm and cinders crunch under our feet. We cross the gritty Horse Guards Parade, and Helena clings to my arm while we stop to watch the Royal Horse Guards change posts in their blue tunics and red plumed helmets.

  Soon we’re passing by the bronze lions beneath Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. I reach out and run my fingers along a cold metal mane. The big black cabs swirl around us like miniature bread trucks. When we mount the steps of the National Gallery, I hurry through the columns and go right to the room where van Gogh’s A Wheatfield, with Cypresses takes center stage. I stand in the doorway and freeze. The trees burning like green flames and the brilliant yellow of the wheatfield fill my mind with thoughts of Lester. He would want me to be here, enjoying this painting, helping this girl. I see his smile and the glint in those magnified eyes.

  “Are you okay?” Helena asks.

  She reaches up and touches the corner of my eye, and I feel the dampness on my skin.

  “Just thinking,” I say.

  “Can I tell you what happened?” she asks.

  “With you?”

  “How he got me.”

  “Of course,” I say. I take her hand and start to move through the rooms of paintings.

  “I was supposed to be with my mother,” she says. “She was an actress from Montreal. She left my father when I was eight and we went back to Canada. I didn’t see him much, but she got a part in an off-Broadway show, so I was staying with him. I didn’t find out until a lot later, after I ran away, but she died in a car accident on that same tour in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I was ten.

  “My father was a bookie. I didn’t know that when I was a kid, just that he was on the phone all the time talking about games and he always had money around the house and a gun. Actually, when I went to look for my grandmother and found out that she was dead, I also found out about her brother-my dad’s uncle. He had something to do with the casinos down in New Jersey.”

  She looks up at me, and I give her hand a squeeze. We stop in front of Monet’s Houses of Parliament, Sunset, dark and forbidding.

  “Anyway, I was walking home one night from a friend’s,” she says. “It was winter and raining little pieces of ice. I heard a gunshot half a block from my house and saw people running. By the time I got there, a police car came around the corner and ran into the snowbank. A cop got out and ran into the house.

  “At first I couldn’t move,” she says. “I actually wet myself. The cop, he went in with his gun. He was big and he had on a black leather coat with his badge on his hip. It all happened fast.”

  We move from the Monet into a room with a special exhibit on Joseph Turner. I see The Slave Ship on loan from Boston and move toward it. It’s the original of the print Lester had hung over my bunk in A block. Carnage and horror in an angry sea. The sun going out on the horizon like the last tail of a gas flame.

  “I think I know who he was,” I say.

  “I’ll never forget his face,” she says. “My father was on the floor. He was bleeding and there was a gun. That cop, he picked it up and he and my father started to argue. They knew each other. I knew that because they were talking about being partners. And then they started shouting and he shot him. He just put the gun right up to my father’s head. I tried to scream.”

  I look from the painting to Helena. Her eyes are shiny and brimming. She wipes them with the back of her hand and her voice breaks.

  “Then he took me,” she says. “I didn’t move. I couldn’t. He just picked me up under his arm like some ogre. He dumped me into the trunk of that police car. He said, ‘Pretty little thing.’ Smiling like I was a doll or something, and do you know what I said?”

  She laughs. A harsh grating sound like the cries of the ravens at the Tower of London.

  She looks at the painting, nods, and says, “‘Policemen are my friends.’ That’s what I said.

  “I learned it in school.”

  35

  I’VE SEEN AN OCCASIONAL TEAR from Helena before, but nothing like this. She starts sobbing loud and hard. People move away from us in ripples. I hug her tight and sit her down on a bench, stroking her hair until she stops shuddering. During it all, a white-haired guard clears his throat and starts toward us, but I back him down with a glare.

  She grows quiet and I say, “Better?”

  She nods her head and says she’s fine.

  “Come on,” I say, taking her by the hand. “I’ve got a surprise.”

  We catch one of those big black London cabs back to my flat.

  On our way up the elevator, Helena sniffs and looks up at me without raising her chin. I smile and wink. She smiles back and slaps my thigh.

  The flat is decorated in antiques, velvet, rich-grained wood in dark hues, marble tops, and swirling gold gilt. The ceiling is a rococo sky with puffy white clouds and feathery angels. A strange collection of men and women are clustered about the furniture near the white marble fireplace. When we go in, they stop talking and turn to stare.

  Several teacups clink as they’re put back onto their saucers. A tall thin man with a mustache clears his throat and fiddles with his ascot tie. A round little man in a dark suit with wispy hair and liver lips steps forward with a scowl and in a thick Manchester accent says, “What’s this all about?”

  “Helena,” I say, turning to her, “meet Peter Darwin. He’s your manager.”

  “Is this really serious?” Darwin says, snorting and choking at the same time.

  “No,” I say. “When I said a million up front, I meant two.”

  Darwin’s face relaxes and then blooms into a smile.

  “Well, well,” he says, opening his arms. “You should have said so. Let me shake your hand.”

  We both shake his hand and then I lead Helena into the midst of the others. The tall ascot tie is her lawyer. The chunky pink-haired woman with cat glasses is her clothes coordinator. The effeminate wisp of a man in black with the shaved head and tortoiseshell glasses is her hairstylist. The pretty green-eyed woman in the sweatsuit is her choreographer and trainer. The white-haired black man is her voice coach. And the little old lady with the straight back and the napkin laid out on her lap is for etiquette.

  Helena shakes their hands and nods her head. The little old lady tells her to look people in the eye, dear, and Helena sticks out her tongue, then grins at me.

  “Just money,” I say to her, then I turn to them. “Thank you all very much for coming. You’re here because you’re the best. Everyone’s getting the same thing. A three-year contract at ten times your normal fees. From what I know about your talents and hers, Helena will be the biggest star the music industry has seen since, who? J-Lo?”

  “Honey,” says the hairstylist, “with those cheeks and a few highlights she’ll make J-Lo look like the tramp she is.”

  The old lady sniffs.

  “You’ve got three months,” I say. “We need an album and an act. I’ve already booked a studio at Warner Bros. to shoot the videos with Joe Pytka. I’ll make my G-V available, so going back and forth will be easier than getting to Scotland. We’ll release the first single in late December.”

  Someone whistles and I hear the words “fast track.”

  “That’s why you’re getting the big money. So, I had lunch brought in for everyone and then you can get right to work,” I say, leading them to the dining room, where a buffet in shiny silver service waits for us.

  Helena lea
ns into me as we fall into the back of the line and says, “This is a joke, right?”

  “If you think working your ass off is funny,” I say, kissing her forehead.

  “Is that supposed to scare me?”

  “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “You’re right.”

  She looks up into my eyes. Hers are burning.

  “You’ll be on your own, you know,” I say. “I have work to do in New York.”

  “Why not here?” she asks.

  I don’t think she realizes it, but she’s gripping my forearm. I pat her hand and say, “I have a job to do. Besides, I don’t want to crowd you.”

  “You couldn’t.”

  “Maybe not,” I say, “but I won’t.”

  “What if I need… or want you?”

  “Tell you what,” I say, giving her hand a squeeze before taking it off my arm. “I’ll check in.”

  “What are you?” she says. “My fairy fucking godmother?”

  “A lot of things are going to change, you know,” I say, lowering my voice.

  “That’s bullshit,” she says.

  I touch the smooth skin on my face and turn to go.

  “What the hell is all this? What about lunch?” she says.

  “You need to do this,” I tell her. “Without me here every minute. Then you’ll decide what you want to do.

  “No one owns you, Helena. Remember that.”

  “You’re goddamned right,” she says, raising her voice and her chin at the same time. “I can do whatever the hell I want. And if I want to give it away I can do that too.”

  I nod and step backward and say, “I’d like that very much, but we’ll see.”

  36

  I REALLY DON’T WANT to interfere with Helena’s progress. And I really am busy with my own plans. Still, we speak almost every day and she keeps me up to date. While her version of things and Darwin’s aren’t quite the same, in a little over two months her first single starts right off at number seven.