Trump Tower Read online

  TRUMP

  TOWER

  Also By Jeffrey Robinson

  FICTION

  A True and Perfect Knight

  The Monk’s Disciples

  The Margin of the Bulls

  The Ginger Jar

  Pietrov and Other Games

  NONFICTION

  The Takedown

  There’s A Sucker Born Every Minute

  The Sink

  Prescription Games

  The Merger

  The Manipulators

  The Hotel

  The Laundrymen

  Bardot: Two Lives

  The End of the American Century

  The Risk Takers: Five Years On

  Rainier and Grace

  Yamani: The Inside Story

  Minus Millionaires

  The Risk Takers

  Teamwork

  Bette Davis

  AS CO-AUTHOR

  With Gerald Ronson

  Leading from the Front

  With Ronnie Wood

  Ronnie: My Life as a Rolling Stone

  With Joseph Petro

  Standing Next to History:

  An Agent’s Life Inside the Secret Service

  Official Website: http:/www.jeffreyrobinson.com

  Follow Jeffrey Robinson on Twitter @writingfactory

  A NOVEL

  JEFFREY

  ROBINSON

  For Barbara and Mel

  Copyright © 2012 by Jeffrey Robinson

  Published by Vanguard Press,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information and inquiries, address Vanguard Press, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.

  Books published by Vanguard Press are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, extension 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  Trump Tower is a work of fiction. The novel’s characters are purely products of the author’s imagination. All incidents and dialogue are completely fiction. Where real-life historical figures, organizations, businesses or public figures appear, the situations, incidents and dialogue concerning those persons, organizations or businesses are entirely fictional and not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of this work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. The real-life organizations, businesses and public figures who appear in the work have not endorsed and have not approved any aspect or part of this fictional work, and no such endorsement or approval should be inferred.

  Designed by Jeff Williams

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Robinson, Jeffrey, 1945–

  Trump Tower : a novel / Jeffrey Robinson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59315-736-4 (e-Book) 1. Trump Tower (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 2. Rich people—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3620.R859T78 2012

  813'.6—dc23

  2012010191

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  List of Characters

  Residents

  Mr. and Mrs. Prakash Advani and daughter, Amvi (40th and 41st floors)

  Rebecca Battelli (19th floor), owner of Scarpe Pietrasanta shoe company

  Cyndi Benson (59th floor), model and former face of Chanel and Dior

  Mme. Odette de La Chabrillan (58th floor), French cinema star from the 1940s

  Tina Lee Cove and David Cove (45th and 46th floors), traders in distressed cargoes

  Katarina Essenbach (41st and 42nd floors), longtime, wealthy resident

  Zeke Gimbel (39th floor), Hollywood agent

  Mikey Glass (31st floor), television sitcom star

  Dr. Robert Gildenstein and Dr. Susan O’Malley (37th floor), married, orthopedic surgeons

  Alicia Melendez (Haynes) and Carson Haynes (52nd floor), she’s the anchor of News Four New York; he’s a former tennis player, now cochairman of First Ace Capital

  Ricky Lips and his son, Joey (32nd floor), rock star/bass player with the British group “Still Fools”

  Roberto “Espiritú” Santos and his mother (61st floor), center fielder, New York Yankees

  Trump Tower Staff

  Pierre Belasco, vice president and general manager

  Brenda, resident services

  Harriet, commercial services

  Little Sam, human resources

  Big Sam, building engineer, maintenance

  Bill Riordan, head of security

  Anthony Gallicano, director of operations at Trump Organization

  Antonia Lawrence, assistant to the director of operations

  CONTENTS

  FRIDAY

  SATURDAY

  SUNDAY

  MONDAY

  TUESDAY

  WEDNESDAY

  THURSDAY

  FRIDAY

  SATURDAY

  SUNDAY

  MONDAY

  TUESDAY

  FRIDAY

  1

  Donald Trump only thinks he rules Trump Tower.

  Pierre Belasco reminded himself of that every morning as he stepped into his antique-filled office.

  But he doesn’t.

  He was always tempted to say that out loud.

  Because I do.

  But he couldn’t say it, and he wouldn’t say it—even though he knew it was true—not to anyone, not even as a joke. After all, he’d been raised in a business where the first rule in the list of The Ruler’s Rules is . . .

  “Sir.”

  . . . ultimate discretion.

  “Sir?”

  He’d just come in and hadn’t even had his coffee yet. “Tanya?”

  An attractive redhead in a black Trump Tower concierge uniform was standing in the doorway. “I’m afraid there is a very irate young gentleman . . .”

  Belasco pushed the large, high-backed, ornate chair away from the eighteenth-century Louis XV table that he used as a desk, straightened his dark blue suit, and was about to follow her out to the small reception area when Tommy Seasons—currently the toast of Broadway in the smash revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf—barged in wearing faded jeans, a tight black T-shirt, and a very weary up-all-night expression.

  “Get your thrills dude,” he said, “then tell the slut she can’t do that to Tommy.”

  “And what is it exactly,” Belasco asked quietly, “that Madame has done to Mr. Seasons?”

  “What is it exactly,” he mimicked Belasco’s slight accent. “You mean, what did Mr. Seasons do to Madame? Well, exactly, he said, bon appétit. You know what that means? Ask Madame. And fuck you, too, dude.”

  With that, the actor, widely acclaimed as the next Richard Burton, stormed out of the residents’ foyer and disappeared down Fifty-Sixth Street.

  Tanya seemed shocked. “Did you understand . . .”

  Belasco told her, “Make certain that he does not go back upstairs.”

  She asked again, “But did you . . .”

  “Yes,” he said, waited for her to leave, then went to the French sideboard behind his desk—where he kept his three favorite Ming ginger jars—opened the drawer on the left, took out a small, brown leather pouch and put it in his pocket.

  Turning to the large French cherry-wood Louis XV armoire along the far wall, he unlocked the doors with a small metal key. Built inside was a huge safe wit
h a digital combination lock and a card reader. He took his card-key out of his pocket, inserted it in the slot, then punched in his eight-digit code.

  The door clicked open, electronically registering that he now had access to the contents.

  On the left there was a bank of computer hard drives, which served as the secondary backup for all the security cameras in the Tower, plus the office phone logs. On the right there was a grid with several hundred keys, each lying in their own little slot, each electronically tagged so that as soon as one was removed, a digital time and date stamp would show that the key had been taken out. Another digital time and date stamp also noted when the key was returned.

  He took two keys from the slot labeled “Benson-59,” put them in his pocket, shut the safe, relocked the armoire, and left his office.

  One of the three elevators was waiting. He told Tomas, the uniformed operator, “Fifty-nine, please.”

  Tomas nodded, “Good morning, sir,” but that was all either man said until they arrived on the floor.

  Belasco stepped out, waited for the doors to close again, then went down the dark, carpeted hallway to his left. Now there were two large, darkly painted doors. Neither of them had a number. In fact, none of the apartments in the Tower was numbered.

  He knocked on the door to his right.

  No one answered.

  He knocked again, waited a few seconds, then took the two keys out of his pocket and let himself in. “Miss Benson? It’s Pierre Belasco.”

  There was no answer.

  “Miss Benson?” Still nothing.

  From the marble-floored vestibule he walked into the large living room that looked west over Fifth Avenue and south to the Empire State Building, where a fabulous palace-sized silk Kasan rug, circa 1900, covered the floor and where designer, modern furniture covered the rug. On the far wall there was an enormous painting that looked exactly like Manet’s Olympia, except the nude woman lying on the couch was Cyndi Benson.

  “Miss Benson?”

  He peered into the dining room, which lined the Fifty-Sixth Street side of the building, where a beautiful Tabriz rug lay on the floor. There was a huge Italian refectory table, that he liked very much, and on the wall six large Warhol prints—two soup cans, one Elvis, one Jackie, one Marilyn, and one Mao—which he could have done without.

  “Miss Benson?”

  He moved back toward the vestibule, then along the marbled hallway.

  “Miss Benson . . . it’s Pierre Belasco.”

  That’s when he thought he heard a whimper.

  The door to the second bedroom was open—the room was so filled with clothes that you couldn’t see any furniture—but the door at the end of the hallway, leading to the master bedroom, was shut. He went to the door and knocked on it twice. “Miss Benson?”

  Now he heard her very clearly—whimpering.

  Slowly opening the door—“Miss Benson?”—there she was, completely naked and gagged, her arms above her head, handcuffed to the top of the brass bedstead, with her legs tied to the bottom of the bedstead, stretched wide apart . . .

  “Miss Benson . . .”

  She began cursing, with the gag in her mouth, struggling helplessly to get free.

  He picked up the black silk sheet that had spilled on the floor and covered her, but not before noticing she had a new, tiny tattoo near her bikini line on the left side—it looked to him like a ripe tomato on a vine—to go with the small double-C Chanel symbol that she had on the other side from her Paris days.

  Removing the gag from her mouth, he said, “Miss Benson.”

  “That fucking bastard,” she screamed. “Fucking bastard Tommy fucking Seasons . . .”

  “Miss Benson . . .” He sat down on the side of the custom-made, extra-large king-sized bed, deliberately leaving her still handcuffed.

  “I’ll kill that fucking Tommy . . .”

  Hanging on the wall behind the bed was a giant Lucien Freud nude portrait of Cyndi. Above the bed was a soft, gold-tinted, smoked-glass-mirrored ceiling.

  “. . . fucking bastard Seasons . . .”

  At seventeen, standing five-foot-eleven and weighing 116 pounds, she’d been the hottest fresh-faced American model on the Parisian catwalks. At nineteen she was the face of Chanel. By the time she was twenty-one she had her own clothing line and perfume, “À Poil,” which means “naked.” At twenty-three she left Chanel to become the five-million-dollar face of Dior. Two years later she was lured back to Chanel with a $10 million bonus.

  When she was twenty-seven, Hugh Hefner offered her a meager $1 million to do a centerfold. She refused. Instead, she posed nude for free for PETA, the animal rights group, as part of its “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” campaign. But when His Excellency Sheikh Ali Mohammed Khalifa Bin Salman al Khalifa—a minor but extremely rich member of Kuwait’s ruling family—offered to buy her a two-bedroom apartment in Trump Tower if he could visit six weekends a year, she bargained him down to four and accepted.

  A month after that, Count Giacomo Albarco di Livenza, patriarch of a Venetian fortune and the future finance minister of Italy, paid for the same apartment in Trump Tower so that she would become his American mistress. She accepted him, too. But he never bothered showing up.

  Later, His Excellency bought her a fabulous A-frame at Breckenridge, in Colorado. He went there once, decided he hated snow and never went back. But she always spent Christmas and New Year’s there with friends.

  When the Count realized he couldn’t see her over the holidays, he bought her a beach house in Jamaica, where she stayed with friends every February. She never told His Excellency about the beach house, and the Count never visited there, either.

  Now at thirty, she had one Trump Tower apartment in her name, the money for the same apartment in her Cayman Islands bank account, two other homes, and checks from each man averaging fifteen grand a month to cover apartment maintenance and charges.

  She also still had her career, commanding $150,000 for a catwalk show, more if she did underwear, and up to a quarter of a million for a standard photo shoot.

  Although she’d lately added blonde mesh highlights to her dark hair, her big, hazel eyes were the same as when they helped to make her famous, and her high cheekbones were the same, and her legs were the same but, as Belasco had already discovered—being two or three pounds heavier than she’d been as a teenager—she now had absolutely gorgeous breasts.

  “I’ll murder that fucking bastard son of a bitch prick . . .”

  “Miss Benson.”

  “. . . cut off his balls and stuff them in his mouth . . .”

  “Miss Benson.”

  It was several minutes before she finally calmed down.

  “Miss Benson,” he said to her once she stopped screaming and looked at him with those eyes. “This really must stop.”

  “I don’t . . . it wasn’t . . . he . . . oh Belasco . . .” She sighed and shook her head sadly. “Thank you, yet again.”

  He nodded, got up, went to the foot of the bed, and untied her legs.

  “I hope you didn’t mind the view.” She pretended to blush.

  “Miss Benson . . .” He gave her his best disapproving look, then pointed to the handcuffs. “Do you have the key this time?”

  “No.”

  “We discussed this last time.”

  “This time he swallowed it.”

  “What?” Belasco wasn’t easily shocked, but that stopped him. “Last time he simply . . .” Shaking his head, he mumbled “bon appétit, indeed,” and said softly, “This must stop.”

  Her eyes opened wide like a child who’s thought of a good idea. “We could ban him from the Tower, the way we banned Babaloo Facinelli.”

  “Who’s Babaloo Facinelli?”

  “The reggae singer.”

  “Miss Benson . . .” He took the small, brown leather pouch from his pocket, found an oddly shaped, very thin, cold steel instrument inside—like something a dentist might use—and went to the head of her bed. Taki
ng the handcuffs, he fiddled with them, using the instrument to pick the lock. “. . . the Tower has never banned anybody named Babaloo.”

  “It wasn’t him? You sure? Then it must have been George because he and I . . .”

  “George who?”

  “George Timothy Daniels.”

  “And who is George Timothy Daniels?”

  “The astronaut,” she said, as if it was obvious.

  “No, not Mr. Daniels, either.”

  The handcuffs snapped open.

  “Damn things . . .” she grabbed her wrists and rubbed them . . . “they hurt.” She showed him the marks they left. “Someone stole my mink-lined handcuffs . . . the blue mink . . . I loved those . . . remember them? And Tommy . . . that fucking bastard, I will kill him . . . he said he got these from a cop . . .” She looked at Belasco. “Maybe it was Tony Curtis . . . poor Tony is dead . . . maybe he was the one who stole my blue mink . . . are you sure we didn’t ban George?”

  “I’m absolutely positive,” he said, “that we have never banned any astronaut.”

  Pulling the sheet around herself, she sat up, crossed her legs Indian style, clasped her hands and said to him tenderly, “Poor Belasco, I am afraid that you have become my faithful knight in shining armor.”

  “You will need more than a knight in shining armor if His Excellency finds out about this.”

  “Hah.” She agreed, “I’ll need twenty-four-hour bodyguards.”

  He asked delicately, “And . . . Il Conte?”

  “Pussycat,” she assured him. “I never see him. Sometimes he phones late at night and we have . . . well, you know . . . and I keep telling him that if he put a camera on his computer then we could have Skype sex . . . but he can’t figure out his computer.” She shrugged, “Anyway, Italian men are cool about these things. He has his wife, and he has at least one mistress that I know of . . . she’s in Venice . . . and come to think of it there might be another somewhere else. I suppose she’s in Rome. After all, he’s a very good-looking man.” She thought for a moment, then decided, “But you’re right, if His Excellency ever finds out . . . Arabs, you know, are born possessive. Especially Kuwaitis. It must have something to do with the water they drink. All that seawater after they take out the salt. He told me once that when he had this mistress in Brazil . . . she was a stewardess he picked up on a flight to somewhere, or from somewhere, I don’t know . . . but he started showing up there regularly, which is how he found out that she was also sleeping with some soccer player. Let’s face it, Belasco, every Brazilian girl I know is always sleeping with soccer players. Anyway, he found out and had the poor guy beat up by his bodyguards.” She made a face. “Kuwaiti princes aren’t as cool as Italian counts. In Kuwait they don’t do non c’è problema . . . that’s what the Duke says all the time, non c’è problema . . . no problem. In Kuwait they do, Imma gonna breaka you legs.” She giggled, “Did that sound more Italian than Kuwaiti?”