I pay. I smile a little nervously at Ingrid, the checkout girl, who knows me. I have this eerie premonition. What if she’s the last person to see me alive?
Back outside, I feel relief for a second. The guy must be gone. No sign. But then I freeze. He’s still there. Leaning aimlessly against a parked car on the other side of the street, talking into a phone. His eyes slowly drift to mine.…
Shit, Kate, what the hell do you do now?
Now I run. An indistinguishable pace at first, then faster. I hear the frantic rhythm of quickening footsteps on the pavement—but this time they’re mine.
I grope in my bag for my phone. Maybe I should call Greg. I want to tell him I love him. But I know the time—it’s the middle of his shift. All I’d get is his voice mail. He’s on rounds.
Maybe I should call 911 or stop and scream. Kate, do something—now!
My building’s just a half a block away. I can see it now. The green canopy. 445 East Seventh. I fumble for my keys. My hands are shaking. Please, just a few yards more …
The last few feet I take at a full-out run. I jam my key into the outer lock, praying it turns—and it does! I hurl open the heavy glass doors. I take one last glance behind. The man who was following me has pulled up a few doorways down. I hear the door to the building close behind me, the lock mercifully engaging.
I’m safe now. I feel my chest virtually implode with relief. It’s over now, Kate. Thank God.
For the first time, I feel my sweater clinging to me, drenched in a clammy sweat. This has got to end. You’ve got to go to someone, Kate. I’m so relieved I actually start to cry.
But go to whom?
The police? They’ve been lying to me from the beginning. My closest friend? She’s fighting for her life in Bellevue Hospital. That’s surely no dream.
My family? Your family is gone, Kate. Forever.
It was too late for any of that now.
I step into the elevator and press the button for my floor. Seven. It’s one of those heavy industrial types, clattering like a train as it passes every floor. All I want is just to get into my apartment and shut the door.
On seven the elevator rattles to a stop. It’s over now. I’m safe. I fling open the metal grating, grasp my keys, push open the heavy outer door.
There are two men standing in my way.
I try to scream, but for what? No one will hear me. I step back. My blood goes cold. All I can do is look silently into their eyes.
I know they’re here to kill me.
What I don’t know is if they’re from my father, the Colombians, or the FBI.
Gold was up 2 percent the morning Benjamin Raab’s life began to fall apart.
He was leaning back at his desk, looking down on Forty-seventh Street, in the lavish comfort of his office high above the Avenue of the Americas, the phone crooked in his neck.
“I’m waiting, Raj.…”
Raab had a spot gold contract he was holding for two thousand pounds. Over a million dollars. The Indians were his biggest customers, one of the largest exporters of jewelry in the world. Two percent. Raab checked the Quotron screen. That was thirty thousand dollars. Before lunch.
“Raj, c’mon,” Raab prodded. “My daughter’s getting married this afternoon. I’d like to make it if I can.…”
“Katie’s getting married?” The Indian seemed to be hurt. “Ben, you never said—”
“It’s just an expression, Raj. If Kate was getting married, you’d be there. But, Raj, c’mon … we’re talking gold here—not pastrami. It doesn’t go bad.”
This was what Raab did. He moved gold. He’d owned his own trading company near New York’s diamond district for twenty years. Years ago he had started out buying inventory from the mom-and-pop jewelers who were going out of business. Now he supplied gold to half the dealers on the Street. As well as to some of the largest exporters of jewelry across the globe.
Everyone in the trade knew him. He could hardly grab a turkey club at the Gotham Deli down the street without one of the pushy, heavyset Hasids squeezing next to him in the booth with the news of some dazzling new stone they were peddling. (Though they always chided that as a Sephardi he wasn’t even one of their own.) Or one of the young Puerto Rican runners who delivered the contracts, thanking him for the flowers he’d sent to their wedding. Or the Chinese, looking to hedge some dollars against a currency play. Or the Australians, tantalizing him with uncut blocks of industrial-quality stones.
I’ve been lucky, Raab always said. He had a wife who adored him, three beautiful children who made him proud. His house in Larchmont (a whole lot more than just a house) that overlooked the Long Island Sound, and the Ferrari 585, which Raab once raced at Lime Rock and had its own special place in the five-car garage. Not to mention the box at Yankee Stadium and the Knicks tickets, on the floor of the Garden, just behind the bench.
Betsy, his assistant for over twenty years, stepped in carrying a chef’s salad on a plate along with a cloth napkin, Raab’s best defense against his proclivity for leaving grease stains on his Hermès ties. She rolled her eyes. “Raji, still …?”
Benjamin shrugged, drawing her eye to his notepad where he had already written down the outcome: $648.50. He knew that his buyer was going to take it. Raj always did. They’d been doing this little dance for years. But did he always have to play out the drama so long?
“Okay, my friend.” The Indian buyer sighed at last in surrender. “We consider it a deal.”
“Whew, Raj.” Raab exhaled in mock relief. “The Financial Times is outside waiting on the exclusive.”
The Indian laughed, too, and they closed out the deal: $648.50, just as he’d written down.
Betsy smiled—“He says that every time, doesn’t he?”—trading the handwritten contract for two glossy travel brochures that she placed next to his plate.
Raab tucked the napkin into the collar of his Thomas Pink striped shirt. “Fifteen years.”
All one had to do was step into Raab’s crowded office and it was impossible not to notice the walls and credenzas crammed with pictures of Sharon, his wife, and his children—Kate, the oldest, who had graduated from Brown; Emily, who was sixteen, and nationally ranked at squash; and Justin, two years younger—and all the fabulous family trips they’d taken over the years.
The villa in
