Second Honeymoon

Chapter 21

ACTUALLY, NO, I hadn’t read his FBI file. Not yet.

But I’d read the newspapers, especially those from some months earlier, when his firm purchased the Italian drug company Allemezia Farmaceutici, under a cloud of suspicion more bizarre and mysterious than anything in a David Lynch film.

It started with a video that appeared on the website of the leading Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera. In vivid color, a Chinese man wearing nothing but bunny ears and a baby’s diaper could be seen hopping around a hotel suite with a couple of naked Italian prostitutes. Later in the video, after a three-way that would make Ron Jeremy blush, the guy was snorting a Great-Wall-of-China-size line of coke off the stomach of one of the girls.

Okay, just your average night in Milan, perhaps—only the man happened to be Li Yichi, the deputy general manager of Cheng Mie Pharmaceutical, the largest drug company in the world. Li was in Milan finalizing the purchase of Allemezia Farmaceutici for thirteen billion euros. It was all but a done deal.

But twenty million hits on YouTube later, it was all undone. The board of Allemezia rejected the Cheng Mie offer, citing fallout from the video.

Of course, there were many unanswered questions, not the least of which was how Li could be so careless. And what the hell was up with the bunny ears and diaper and those Italian prostitutes? Molto kinky, no?

The biggest question of all, though, had to do with who was behind the camera—both literally and figuratively. Had the married Chinese executive been set up? And by whom? Who stood to gain?

Warner Breslow sure did.

With Cheng Mie Pharmaceutical out of the picture, Allemezia’s stock took a major nosedive, leaving the company desperate for a new suitor. That’s when Breslow swooped in and bought them for a billion euros less than what Cheng Mie had offered. Talk about a discount.

But that’s not why I’d remembered all this, why I went online to reread all the articles.

It was the aftermath.

One day after the news broke that Breslow had bought Allemezia, Li, star of the video, hanged himself in his office. He was discovered by his father, Li Kunlun—the chairman of Cheng Mie Pharmaceutical.

“I want you to take a look at something,” I said to Breslow, opening the envelope.

It was the report from Ethan and Abigail’s autopsy.