The Prince of Risk

49

“Where we headed?” asked John Sullivan.

“Cherry Hill.” Settling into the backseat, Astor caught Sullivan’s look of surprise. “You heard me. And step on it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sullivan navigated north to Delancey Street and crossed the East River on the Williamsburg Bridge before merging onto the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. At 10:15, traffic was light, and the vehicle made good time driving north, reaching I-495 in just fifteen minutes.

“Got your wheatgrass if you’re interested,” said Sullivan when the ride had smoothed.

“Screw my wheatgrass.”

Astor stared out the window glumly. How quickly they deserted the cause. At the first signs of adversity, they all fled like rats from a sinking ship. Marv had likened the firm to the Titanic. If he was right, the rats were the smart ones, and Astor was the fool rushing around the deck mustering the band to play one last waltz. He felt a blackness nipping at his heels. It wasn’t fear. It was doubt, which was more ill-defined and thus more dangerous.

On an early trip to Paris with Alex, he had visited the sculpture garden decorated with many larger-than-life artworks by Rodin. One black marble piece showed a powerful, confident man poised in reflection, his countenance gripped by a terrible uncertainty. Gripped by doubt. It wasn’t audacity that killed a trader. It was doubt. Doubt led to indecision, and only the decisive survived on the Street.

Astor played back the conversation with Longfellow and Goodchild. Their reasoning was sound. China was posturing. Some sort of political gamesmanship was occurring, but in the end Astor was right. And Magnus Lee had confirmed it.

Screw doubt.

“I know it,” said Astor aloud, banging his fist on the armrest.

“Everything okay, boss?”

“What?” Astor shook himself back to the real world. Leaning forward, he clutched his driver’s shoulder and gave it a friendly squeeze. “Yeah, Sully. Never better.”

Cherry Hill sat on top of a broad grassy knoll overlooking the expanse of Oyster Bay. It was an old Victorian pile built in the 1880s, when the Roosevelt family had lived nearby on Sagamore Hill. Over the years each owner had added on a room or a terrace or a porch until it resembled a sprawling hotel more than a home. The Astors had purchased it in 1950 for the then astounding sum of $175,000. Following in the tradition of their predecessors, they’d expanded the kitchen, built a sauna on the second floor, and added a gymnasium on the third for Edward, then a boy.

A paved road wound up the slope and emerged from an orchard onto an immense lawn that collared the estate and made Cherry Hill look like a frosted white decoration atop a wedding cake.

Sullivan spotted the striped tape stretched across the front door first. “We’re late,” he said. “The feds have already been by to have a look.”

Astor opened the car door before the Audi came to a halt. He was out and striding across the gravel forecourt as Sullivan hurried to join him.

“Tampering with evidence is a felony. Be careful what you touch.”

Astor stopped at the top of the front stairs. “It’s my house. I have every right to go in. Besides, who you going to tell?”

Sullivan reached his side. “Have it your way. But let me take a look first. We don’t want any surprises.”

Astor noted that the alarm system was disarmed and the door locked. He fished in his pocket for his old key. It worked like a charm. “You’re the only one who knows I’m here,” he said, ducking under the tape as he pushed the door open. “Be my guest.”

Sullivan passed beneath the tape and entered the foyer, his pistol held in front of him. “Wait here. I’m going to do a quick walk-through.”

“Knock yourself out,” said Astor.

Sullivan padded down the stairs five minutes later. “All yours. Looks like the feds took a look around and left everything here. I’d count on them being back anytime. They’ll be taking another look now that Penelope Evans is dead, too.”

From his vantage point in the orchard, the warrior monk fashioned his plan.

A car was parked in the gravel drive, a large silver SUV. The front door of the house stood open, a band of yellow-and-black tape strung across the entry. The stocky white-haired man with the florid cheeks paced back and forth on the porch. Astor must be inside.

Kill him, his brother had said.

The warrior monk revered family above all. He would not disappoint him.

Bobby Astor walked into the house and time stood still. Ten years had passed since he’d last set foot inside. The occasion had been Thanksgiving or Christmas. It had been a happy time. Katie was five or six. Alex’s career with the Bureau was starting to hum. Comstock was doing well, and his father had just sold his own firm to one of the big boys for an ungodly sum.

It was a time before their falling-out.

A time before Astor had confronted his father about the events of his childhood.

The black belt.

Three words, and they conjured up an immediate and unsettling terror that after thirty years had lost none of its ability to paralyze him.

Astor pushed away the words, pretending he did not hear them. Pretending that nothing had happened. He turned a circle on the parquet floor, studying the vaulted two-story entryway. It was more a minstrel’s gallery than a family foyer. His eye ran up the staircase, past the stodgy oil portraits of his father and his grandfather, Edward and Frederick Astor, respectively. Why was it ever the dream of first-generation immigrants to emulate the immigrants who had come before them?

Of course Astor wasn’t his family’s real name. He had discovered his true lineage when he was thirteen and home on break from prep school. Having pilfered two of his father’s Cohibas, he and a buddy were searching for matches to light them. The first place to look was his father’s desk. There, stashed away in his top drawer, was a stiff, yellowing envelope marked Private in archaic, curling script. Astor was a born snoop. He could have asked for no better invitation. He opened the envelope at once. It contained his grandfather’s immigration papers, naming him not Frederick Emile Astor but Feodor Itzhak Yastrovic of Lvov, Poland. Stunned, Astor replaced the document and fled from the room. Bobby Astor was not an itinerant Polish Jew. He was an American blueblood born on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, educated at the Horace Mann School, and confirmed at All Saints Episcopal Church in Oyster Bay, New York. He never looked at the envelope again.

Astor tucked away the memory. There were other secrets within these walls, other lies that best remained concealed.

The black belt.

Astor climbed the stairs slowly. He held the piece of blue stationery with the word Cassandra99 in his hand. The stationery came from one place and one place only. The top right drawer of his father’s desk. He did not stop to admire his father’s portrait. Nor did he marvel at the Swarovski crystal chandelier made a century earlier for his Imperial Majesty, Charles I, the last Emperor of Austria. His pace quickened with each step, so that when he reached the first-floor landing and started down the hall, he was moving briskly and passed his father’s bedroom without peeking in.

Later, he told himself. There would be time after he searched the office.

Astor stopped in his tracks.

There was no later.

Edward Astor was dead. He would never have the chance to explain. He would never have an opportunity to reconcile with his only son. The time for that was gone. Astor would have to reconcile for both of them. He was done running.

He retraced his steps until he stood at the doorway to the bedroom and peered inside. The room was as he remembered it: the vast bed with the white bedspread, the maple furniture that might have served a founding father, the windows looking over the orchard and the expanse of Oyster Bay.

He stepped inside the room like a man mounting the gallows.

The black belt.

The punishments always took place here in his parents’ bedroom, and in the early evening. There was a strict protocol about them, a procedure that never varied. It began with a summons, his father’s operatic baritone trumpeting his name from upstairs.

Master Robert Frederick Astor.

Always the full name. Always uttered without a trace of malice or anger.

Come.

Astor had only vague memories of the actual crimes. Once he had played with his father’s double-edged razor blades and cut himself. When asked about the gash on his finger, he had lied and said he caught his hand in the medicine cabinet. The evidence was discovered lurking at the bottom of his parents’ toilet, where he’d tried valiantly to flush it away. Astor was mischievous by nature. Fibbing came easily. Even then he had courted trouble. At some point, boyish dares hardened into adolescent transgressions. The sentences were never unjust.

With dread he would climb the stairs. (It was years before he’d learned to camouflage fear with arrogance, bravado, or confrontation.) Trembling, he waited at the bedroom door, palms sweating, stomach sick with anxiety.

Enter.

There stood his father, Edward Everett Astor, Wall Street supremo, chairman of the school board, pillar of society, a man of untarnished rectitude. He was not a tall man, but broad across the shoulders and barrel-chested. He wore his hair slicked back with pomade. At day’s end, a few strands hung loose and he had the rough, capable air of an accomplished seaman. He had removed his jacket and tie and stood with his white shirt unbuttoned. In his hand he gripped his black crocodile belt, folded double, and in the manner of Bligh on the Bounty, he tapped it threateningly on his thigh.

How do you plead, Master Astor?

Guilty, sir.

Astor had learned early on never to proffer excuses. Excuses were an extension of the crime and merited further beating.

The punishment is ten lashes.

Astor advanced to the bed. He lowered his trousers, then his underwear, and bent over, hands scrubbed, trimmed fingernails clutching the bedspread. A final indignity demanded that he himself signal the punishment.

Please begin, sir.

The strokes were administered crisply and with brute force. The punishment was meted out in full.

One.

Astor heard the snap of leather against flesh and jolted in his shoes. He was breathing hard, the paper in his hand crumpled into a ball. He looked around the room, half expecting to find his father still there, belt in hand. He met only his reflection in the mirror. He stared at himself, remarking on how much son resembled father.

Astor sat down on the bed. Carefully he flattened out the stationery. He felt lighter, somehow freed of a burden. The past had no claim on him. From here on out, his actions were his own. He was not assisting his father out of guilt or fear or some long-repressed need to repent for sins either real or imagined. He was helping him for another reason.

Because it was the right thing to do.

The monk circled the home to the rear. When he was sure the older man could not see him, he dashed across the lawn and mounted a short flight of stairs to the raised back porch. He peered in a window. The kitchen was as large as his childhood home. The door was locked. So were the three windows nearest him. He needed only three seconds to climb the drainpipe and hop onto the roof that skirted half the second floor. He ran to the wall and pushed his body against it. He paused, finding his center, then peeked into the window to his right. The room inside held two single beds. The door to the interior hall was closed. He tried the window and found it locked, too. The next window was locked as well. A wraparound terrace met the corner of the roof. He hopped the railing and landed on the decking. He waited again, allowing his heart to slow, his senses to come to life. He had no idea where in the house Astor might be, or if he was alone. The Audi had already been parked in front when he had arrived. It had become necessary to use other means to ascertain Astor’s whereabouts and intentions since he had destroyed his phone.

The monk peered inside the window. Astor was seated on the bed inside, his back facing him. The monk continued to watch, hoping to catch a glimpse of a second person if there was one. He placed a hand against the wall, feeling for vibrations within the home. All was quiet. This close he could sense Astor’s energy. The man was strong, aggressive. A fighter, but too arrogant and headstrong for his own good. Still, it was a powerful energy, and the monk would find pleasure in defeating a formidable adversary. He looked more closely into the room, drawn by Astor’s spirit. It was then that he observed the mirror and noted the dark triangle in the lower quadrant that was his face and hair.

A moment later Astor saw it, too, and jumped to his feet.