I sit down on a low wall, my hand on my bat.
A minute later I sense someone sit opposite from me. They came out of nowhere. I look around out of the corner of my eye.
‘Keep looking the other way,’ he says. ‘Take out your phone and start talking into it.’
I consider running away.
Because it’s not him.
But I take out my phone. There are more people around us and right now that’s a good thing. If I scream they will take him down – they will come to my assistance and not to his.
I say, ‘What the hell is this?’ into my phone.
He makes his own phone ring and answers it in a jovial tone. ‘My name is Peter. How are you?’
‘That’s not your name,’ I say.
‘Peter Hill,’ he says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Your name is Bogart DeLuca.’
Chapter 28
‘How did you know I’d be here?’ I ask.
‘Does it matter, Molly?’
‘He sent you? What do you want?’
‘Keep talking into your phone.’
‘I am talking into my damn phone.’
‘You raise your voice like that again and I will walk away.’
I don’t say anything.
‘My name is Peter Hill.’
‘Whatever.’
His accent is different from before.
‘I work with The Man. I work for him.’ His accent has shifted from Brooklyn to LA.
‘OK.’
‘He couldn’t make it today in person and he sends his apologies for that.’
More like he never planned to be here in the first place. Sent his henchman.
‘OK.’
‘What can we do for you, Molly?’
I take a deep breath. ‘I need one more favour.’
‘The deal,’ says Bogart DeLuca, Peter Hill, whoever he is, ‘was one favour. One significant favour.’
I take another breath. A teenager glides by on roller-skates.
‘New deal,’ I say.
I can’t see him smile because I have my back to him, looking out at the lake, but I sense it.
‘Go on.’
‘I’m here for another week or so but I have no funds. I need ten thousand dollars in cash – that should be pocket change to your boss – and I need a safe room, a room you guarantee is secure.’
‘OK, Molly.’
‘Understand?’
‘Loud and clear.’
Neither of us says anything for a while. I hold my phone closer to my mouth and start speaking, but then it rings and I almost jump out of my skin.
‘You gonna answer that call?’ he says.
I silence the call and look at the screen. It’s Mum. I let it go to voicemail.
‘Real smooth,’ he says. ‘I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. You’ll get, in full and final settlement of this arrangement, fifty thousand dollars in small used bills, and a hotel room I’ll guarantee is clear and secure. I’ll select it personally and I’ll sweep it for bugs and cameras. I’ll inspect it. Is that acceptable to you?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Full and final, Molly. You understand what that means, right?’
‘I do.’
‘Make sure you do. Because if this goes any further, or any of the project details are ever disclosed, it won’t be me dealing with you, you know that, right?’
‘Sure.’
‘This will go over my head, Molly. Outsourced to someone specifically trained to erase problems. Got it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll meet you outside the Pierre hotel at eleven tomorrow morning. Come alone and ensure you’re not followed. I’m going to stand up now and walk. You head in the opposite direction in no less than five minutes. You got that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘See you tomorrow.’
He walks away and I watch him. No moustache. A different style of clothes and a different gait, but it’s him. Bogart or Peter, it’s him.
This is a fair deal, all in all. I stay seated on the bench for a full eight minutes trying to square off all the angles in my head, all the risk factors. I haven’t written these details down, or typed them into an email, or saved them in a supposedly unhackable app. They’re in my head. I can access them whenever I like and I know it’s all cast-iron secure.
James Kandee was nothing to me.
And then, for a while, he was everything.
When KT was awarded her sponsorship, which she called a scholarship because that sounds so much more worthy and academic and above-board, it took me a good while to figure out who was behind it. Took me six weeks, in fact. She wouldn’t tell me. She wouldn’t even hint at his identity. Said that the offer and the paperwork all came via a third party. But by cross-referencing Instagram stories with Snapchat posts, diligently photographed by me before they auto-deleted, and making myself aware of his public schedule, meetings with NGOs and UN ambassadors, video footage of him bidding at Patek Philippe auctions in Geneva and Hong Kong, details gleaned from KT’s social media and our conversations, I could tell they were in the same place from time to time. By the end of last year I had calculated it was approximately eighty per cent likely that James Kandee, and his foundation, was indeed the sponsor of KT’s lavish New York student experience. It’s not like me to confront someone, so I had to make sure of my facts. It wasn’t until I had reached ninety-five-per-cent probability that I ambushed James Kandee, gently, subtly, professionally, outside his townhouse in Onslow Gardens, South Kensington. I dressed in the exact outfit KT had worn the month before, with him, to Aspen. I worked on my make-up techniques to look more like her, even plucking a line of eyebrow hairs with tweezers to mimic her scar. And it worked. He thought I was KT. By the time I was inside his house and he’d worked out I was not actually KT, it was too late. I had access. I had his ear. I told him everything I had worked out and I told him I’d communicate my evidence to the Guardian, the New York Times and the South China Morning Post. Details of the young women he’d sponsored over the years, and the trips he expected them to accompany him on. He pleaded his innocence, maintaining the trips were optional, and that he’d never crossed the line, he’d never slept with any of the students he sponsored. He was actually very open about the arrangement. He also claimed he was asexual. A virgin by choice. He flew beautiful young students with him, all for his public image. For his Instagram profile and to ensure he never lacked company when dining at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes or at the French Laundry outside Napa. He wanted their faces next to his and he wanted their conversation. I didn’t believe a word of it at first, but later, after finding some of his boarding school friends from Rolle, Switzerland, and talking to them through a proxy, I worked out he was most likely telling the truth. Or part of the truth. I still suspected dark forces were at play somehow but even my research couldn’t uncover exactly what they were. He asked me what I needed to guarantee my silence. He knew the public would never believe the sponsorship deals were a hundred per cent platonic. He said he realised the ‘optics were dreadful’。 He asked what I wanted.