Trump Tower Page 7

  Although he wasn’t sure he’d figured it out enough by 2008, when the world’s financial markets went into meltdown, other people believed that Carson knew what he was doing because he was asked to join Goldman’s “Internal Team,” the secret collective of traders, managers, gurus and strategists whose job it was to save the company from going broke.

  After eight months of nonstop planning, convincing, conniving, buying, selling and restructuring—without any time off and hardly ever more than a couple of hours sleep a night—the sinking ship had been righted and was no longer taking on water.

  That’s when Warring told him, “Remember my plans for us? Now’s as good a time as any. You and I are going out on our own.”

  “I am? We are?”

  “Set up shop. I’ll back us. Everybody’s selling, so we’re buying. Let’s have some fun.”

  Carson went to see Warring in Puerto Vallarta where he was on his honeymoon with wife number four, Ellen Corley DeSoto, a blonde from Toronto who was a foot taller than him and at least thirty years younger.

  She told Carson that she’d met Ken in Brazil, where she was living with her second husband, a racecar driver. According to Ellen, Warring had walked up to her at a party, said let’s go, took her to his plane and flew her to Paris for a dirty weekend that turned into marriage.

  But Warring said that he’d met Ellen in Monte Carlo on the arm of some British corporate raider and that he’d won her from the Brit after a long night in the private casino playing chemin de fer.

  The truth, Carson decided, was probably somewhere between neither story and both.

  Over the two days Carson was on their honeymoon with them, Warring drew up a business plan for a boutique operation that he decided should be called First Ace.

  Carson’s contribution was to add the word Capital.

  Back in New York, Carson found office space downstairs in the Tower, called his old tennis pal Tommy Arcarro—who’d been on Wall Street much longer than him—and within two years they were flying higher than Carson ever imagined he would.

  ALL OF A SUDDEN an e-mail arrived from Tokyo. “Friday, breakfast.”

  “You are not going to win,” Carson said out loud to his screen, and e-mailed back, “Friday lunch. Omaha time. Or there is nothing more to discuss.”

  “You’re correct,” Shigetada wrote, “there is nothing more to discuss.”

  Now Carson took a deep breath, pumped himself up by saying, “Time to play for keeps,” and e-mailed, “We’re calling in your paper.”

  Half an hour later Shigetada answered, “Friday lunch, Omaha time.”

  8

  The office of the director of operations was not in Trump Tower; it was at One Central Park West, on Columbus Circle, in the Trump International Hotel and Tower, which is the old Gulf and Western Building that Trump converted in 1997 into 176 hotel rooms and 158 condominium apartments.

  Usually, whenever Antonia had to go between her second-floor office on the hotel side to any other Trump property, she took taxis.

  Antonia has an expense account, she would remind herself. Antonia is entitled.

  But she didn’t use her entitlement this time.

  She rode the elevator down from the staff meeting, all the time mumbling to herself, oblivious to the other people in there with her.

  When it stopped on the ground floor, she pushed her way out first, hurried out of the atrium onto Fifth Avenue, turned right, rushed past Tiffany’s to Fifty-Seventh Street, crossed there and headed west.

  He embarrassed Antonia, she told herself.

  She was walking faster than anyone else on the street.

  That’s what he did. He embarrassed Antonia.

  People approaching in the opposite direction spotted her and stepped aside to get out of her way.

  He embarrassed Antonia . . .

  Now she started saying it loud enough for people on the street to hear.

  “. . . and Antonia doesn’t like to be embarrassed. Antonia doesn’t like that. Antonia doesn’t like Pierre.”

  9

  He rang the bell, and one of Katarina Essenbach’s two maids let him in. “Madame is in the library,” she said, and walked him through the ornate, gold Louis XVI living room into the wood-paneled, book-filled study where Mrs. Essenbach was sitting on a leather couch, wearing a flowing gold lamé dressing gown.

  “Cher Monsieur Belasco,” she extended her hand but did not get up.

  He went to her, took her hand, bowed and almost kissed it but not quite, which is the proper way to kiss a lady’s hand.

  “Madame,” he said, “how nice to see you.”

  She opened her eyes very wide, licked her upper lip and smiled at him. “I assure you, it is my pleasure.” She motioned, “Please, come sit by me.”

  He did.

  “Coffee? Tea? Champagne? It is never too early for champagne, as I’m sure you know. Or perhaps something . . .” she paused and then said, smiling . . . “hard?”

  “Nothing, thank you.”

  With a wave of her hand she dismissed the maid, who left and shut the door.

  Said to have been one of the all-time great Hungarian beauties, rumor had it that in 1968, at the age of eighteen, Katarina Laszlo—as she was then known—so dazzled the conductor Herbert von Karajan, who was sixty at the time, that he brought her to Berlin as his mistress and maintained her for two years in a huge suite on the top floor of the Hotel Kempinsky on the Kurfürstendamn. She supposedly left him for the sixty-five-year-old Italian tenor Gian Carlo di Pasquale, with whom she lived in one of the last private villas off the Spanish Steps in Rome for three years.

  She came to America, thanks to a remote family connection to Vilmos Gabor—father of Zsa Zsa, Eva and Magda—where she was introduced to the seventy-year-old exiled Hungarian film director Gergely Bartok, with whom she lived for five years. The couple divided their time between a home on Bellagio Road in Bel Air that had once been owned by Alfred Hitchcock, and a home in the south of France, on Cap Ferrat, right next door to the Grand Hotel. Because neither of them cooked, she arranged to have the hotel cater all their meals, including room-service breakfast, delivered to her bedroom—they had separate rooms—by white-gloved hotel waiters.

  As none of her live-in lovers left her anything in their wills, after Bartok’s death, the then-twenty-eight-year-old Katarina had to fend for herself.

  So she embarked on a series of marriages, going from rich to richer, ending with Kurt Essenbach, an Austrian industrialist whom she married when he was eighty-one. Much to her often-admitted great relief, he died on their honeymoon, leaving her the entirety of his $200 million fortune.

  Not surprisingly, Kurt’s seven children from four previous marriages contested the will, but only managed to claw back half of his estate. And even though they tried to get the Trump Tower apartment too, when he bought it for her as an engagement love nest, she insisted that he put it in her name.

  These days, money was the least of her problems. Top of the list was her rotten luck with plastic surgeons. A tummy tuck had gone wrong and, according to the press reports that Belasco had seen, her navel ended up two inches off-center. She successfully sued for $5 million, but never managed to get her belly button back to where it should be.

  Then a facelift went wrong, distorting her mouth.

  After another successful lawsuit—this time she won $8 million—a second facelift, to correct the first one, stretched her skin so tight that it seemed amazing she could smile.

  More than a few people in the Tower commented—of course, behind her back—that the once-great beauty now had a mouth worthy of a Halloween mask.

  “I should be hearing any day now on my construction permission,” she said, crossing her legs and letting the gown slip just a bit, revealing some thigh.

  Belasco smiled politely and averted his eyes, spotting an odd snapshot sitting on the coffee table. It showed Katarina Essenbach in a black leotard with her arms cozily around a bare-chested Alejandro, the tra
iner from the gym.

  “A mere child,” she said, reaching for the photo and turning it over. “Hardly the man you are.”

  “Yes,” he said, then realized that she might think he was referring to her comparison with Alejandro. He quickly added, “Yes, I heard that your planning permission was coming up for consideration.”

  “I purchased the necessary space on the floor below more than a year ago. Why should this take so long? I presume you’ve seen the plans.”

  “I have,” he said, and remembered thinking when he first saw them that these were the most extravagant use of indoor space he’d ever heard of.

  Essenbach intended to turn her half of the forty-first floor into a tropical rain forest.

  The Brazilian designer Yarah—she only used one name—had already created five of these private rain forests. The first was for the Italian industrialist Giacomo Amaducci. She built a glass-enclosed conservatory measuring seventy thousand square feet—about the size of a New York City block—on the oceanfront grounds of his estate on the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia. She stocked it with an elaborate irrigation system and machinery to keep the temperature range from 80 to 91 degrees Fahrenheit and to provide 140 to 150 inches of artificial rain annually.

  Inside were more than fifteen hundred different plants, trees, and flora, plus four hundred different species of insects and animals from Brazil’s own rain forest, including three types of monkeys—Spider, Squirrel, and Golden Lion Tamarins—baby sloths, baby anteaters, toucans, macaws, Anaconda snakes, Amazon turtles, Poison Arrow frogs, Piranha and Capybara, which are the biggest rodents on earth.

  The “Amaducci Yarah,” as this first installation came to be known, cost $19 million.

  No sooner had she completed that when Tatyana Batukhtina, whose murdered husband, Taras, was one of the original Russian Oligarchs, installed a freestanding ninety thousand–square foot “Yarah” next to her Black Sea home. This one held more than two thousand trees, plants and flora varieties, in addition to six hundred different species of animals and insects.

  Since then, Yarah had “installed” three more—for the Shanghai billionaire Yu Kwong Ni, who spent $13 million; for an oil baron in Brunei named Laclaclac Badawi, who paid $14 million; and for the wife of an Indian shipping magnate Vajra Chopra, whose was the biggest to date, and cost a whopping $21 million.

  The “Essenbach Yarah” would be the first non-free-standing private rain forest, as it was going to be installed inside an apartment. It would also be the smallest. Although it would be the only Yarah that did not come stocked with any wildlife, as Trump Tower had a no-pets policy, it was still going to cost Mrs. Essenbach $15.4 million because temperature, humidity and ventilation were a nightmare. On top of that, Yarah was going to charge her $65,000 a month to maintain the installation.

  “You know that we’ll have to rip out the fourth bedroom and the Regency sitting room,” she went on. “But I won’t miss either. When it is installed, you will come to the party, won’t you?”

  He responded politely, “I look forward to your vernissage.”

  “And what an opening night it shall be, considering that there are no other tropical rain forests in the building, in the city, in the state, in the entire country.” She opened her eyes wide again. “Or, perhaps, you might prefer it if the party was particularly small? Perhaps just the two of us?”

  He disliked the way she made him feel uncomfortable. “I would have thought you’d prefer to celebrate with grandeur.”

  “Does that mean I must invite my neighbors? They’re all so pitifully jealous.” She pointed to the floor below. “Them?” Referring to the Advanis. “Don’t get me started. They’re returning just to oppose my request. He sits on the Residents’ Board, hasn’t been to a meeting in years, but he’s coming all the way back from . . . wherever it is those people spend their time . . . just to annoy me.”

  “Yes, they’re due back at the weekend, but I can’t imagine . . .”

  “You don’t know how . . . those people . . . think,” she said. “Not like us.”

  This was not a discussion he wanted to have, so he changed the subject. “Madame, I need to speak to you about Carlos Vela . . .”

  She continued, “Can you imagine how they leave their chaste little daughter all alone for so many months at a time?”

  “Amvi?” He said. “I assure you, she is well looked after.”

  Prakash Advani provided for round-the-clock bodyguards—after all, Amvi was the teenage daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the subcontinent, and there had been kidnap threats—plus a very strict Austrian governess, not to mention a full live-in household staff.

  “I’m sure she misses her parents, but . . .”

  She scowled, “If only they knew.”

  “If only they knew what?”

  “You of all people . . . you don’t know?”

  He looked at her to show her he didn’t. “About . . . what?”

  “Chaste and proper little Amvi,” she said. “Are her parents ever in for a surprise.”

  “I’m sorry . . . I don’t.”

  “That English musician’s son . . . the Jewish one who changed his name . . .”

  “Mr. Lips?”

  “Lips? You mean, Lipschitz.”

  “What about him?”

  “Not him, his idiot son. And Amvi.”

  “I’m sorry,” Belasco said, hiding his surprise. “I don’t know anything about . . .”

  “Have you fired him yet?”

  “Fired him? Who?”

  “Vela. Donald said to me that . . .”

  “Oh, yes,” he realized she’d changed subjects. “I know that you and Mr. Trump discussed it, but I must tell you . . .”

  “Pierre, darling . . .” she reached for his hand and put hers on top of his, “you’re not going to make excuses for this pathetic little thief . . .”

  “I’m certainly not going to make excuses for anyone,” he said smiling, then carefully moved his hand from under hers. “But there seems to be some doubt as to whether or not he’s the one who actually stole . . .”

  “Oh please,” she snapped. “What doubt?”

  “The police are not charging him.”

  She reached for his hand again, and this time took it in both of hers. “You know, dear Pierre, that I am very close to Donald.”

  Forcing a smile, he simply said, “It is always nice to see you, Madame. Let me discuss the situation concerning Mr. Vela again with Mr. Trump . . .”

  “And with that Advani fellow,” she said, not moving. “About my rain forest. I know that you don’t have a formal vote on the Residents’ Board, but you certainly have influence and . . .” She leaned back on the couch in what she obviously thought was a seductive pose. “I would be very grateful for your help. You know, of course, that I think about you often, Pierre.”

  “Thank you, Madame. I will indeed speak with Mr. Advani.”

  “I know I can count on you,” she smiled. “And, Pierre . . . my husband need not know anything about this.”

  He looked at her, hoping not to give away his surprise. “Your husband, Madame?”

  “There is no reason for him to know anything at all about . . . us.”

  “No,” he assured her. “Of course not.” He bowed. “Madame, I will let you know about both of these matters as soon as possible.”

  She nodded. “I will look forward to that.”

  He let himself out of the library and one of the maids let him out of the apartment.

  Now, in the hallway, he took a deep breath. “Her husband?” He said to himself, “What husband?”

  DOWNSTAIRS on the nineteenth floor, next to the hand-painted logo that said “Scarpe Pietrasanta,” there was a small sign that read, “Please ring the bell.” But the door was already open. So Belasco poked his head in and said, “Good morning?”

  No one answered.

  Stepping inside the small suite of offices on the east side of the Tower, he tried again, “Good morning?
Anyone home?”

  Still no one.

  There was a reception area and behind that a showroom filled with displays of designer shoes. Off to one side was a large conference room with a built-in stainless steel kitchen and a very long table surrounded by a dozen chairs. On the other side, there were three small offices.

  The doors to the first two were open, and Belasco could see they were empty.

  But the door to the third office was shut. “Hello? Anyone home?” He knocked softly on it. “Hello?”

  “Oh,” a woman said inside and opened the door, surprised to find someone there. “I’m sorry . . . excuse me . . . may I help you?”

  He guessed she was in her early- to mid-forties. She had a pleasant face and short auburn hair that had been lightened just a bit. He thought that she looked a little like the British actress Emma Thompson.

  But her eyes were red.

  “I’m Pierre Belasco,” he held out his hand and smiled, “general manager of Trump Tower.”

  That’s when he realized she’d been crying.

  “Are you all right?”

  She shook his hand quickly. “Rebecca Battelli.”

  It took him a few seconds. “Mr. Battelli’s wife. My deepest condolences. I was shocked when I heard that your husband . . .”

  “Me too,” she said, and walked back into the small office.

  He followed her in. “Of course, if there is anything I can do for you . . .”

  She fell into the high-backed chair behind a desk covered in folders and papers piled high. “Can you give my husband back to me?”

  He stood there. “If only I could, Madame . . .”

  “Rebecca,” she said. “I guess . . . I mean, as of two weeks ago . . . I’m no longer Madame anybody.” Tears now poured out of her eyes.

  He stood there, feeling helpless. “Perhaps this is not the best time . . .”

  “Please,” she motioned that he should sit down in one of the two chairs facing the desk, and took a tissue to dry her face. “I’m sorry, it’s just . . . this is very new to me.”

  “I understand.” He did not sit down. “Perhaps if I could get you some water or coffee or tea . . . anything?”