Too Damn Rich (12 page)

But the lobster went uneaten; the coffee was
half drunk.

His Serene Highness, Prince Karl-Heinz von
und zu Engelwiesen had lost his appetite. How, how on God's earth,
he asked himself, could he of all people have been so cretinously
stupid, so unforgivably asinine as to wait until today, his
fortieth birthday, to see the light? Truly, such imbecility is
unworthy of me! he thought with the bitter recriminations of
someone who has won the lottery, but has forgotten to cash in the
ticket.

He needed to make up for lost time—and lose
no time doing it.

Yes, Karl-Heinz thought, uneasy rests the
head, even if it wears no crown ...

The man climbed the shallow marble steps to
the head of the grand staircase. To the left was the entrance to
the auction auditorium proper; to the right, Burghley's carpeted
showroom galleries, a succession of wide open spaces which could be
divided or opened up, whichever the occasion required, via
instantly movable walls on tracks.

"May I heeeeelp you?" drawled the bored
Locust Valley lockjaw behind the sales counter.

He looked at her. She was one of three
exceptionally thin, uniquely chic, and peculiarly interchangeable
ex-debutantes who sold Burghley's books, catalogues, magazines, and
pricey, specially printed books.

"Yes," he told her. "I would like a copy of
Attractions."

"The November-December issue?" She raised
perfectly plucked eyebrows. "Or the current one covering
September-October?"

"The November-December. Also, if you have it,
the January- February."

"I'm teeeeeribly sorry, but those won't be in
for another month and a half yet."

"Then the November-December issue will be
fine."

She turned to the magazine rack behind her,
and reached for a copy of Attractions, the oversize glossy magazine
which was Burghley's preview of upcoming worldwide events.

"Would you like any catalogues while you're
at it?" she asked. "We've just unpacked a new shipment, and they
cover the whooooole rest of the year."

"No, thank you," he said.

"That'll be twenty dollars, then."

He pulled out his wallet, fished out a crisp
twenty, and handed it over. She rang up the sale, stuffed two
sheets of oxblood tissue paper into a small silver-gray buff
shopping bag with string handles and BURGHLEY'S FOUNDED 1719
printed in oxblood on both sides of the heavy buff paper, and slid
the magazine inside it.

"There you are." Handing it across the
counter, she smiled automatically, already tuning him out.

Back outside on Madison Avenue, the man took
the magazine out of the bag, rolled it up tightly, and stuck it in
his coat pocket. As for the shopping bag, he crumpled that and the
tissue paper into a ball and tossed it into the trash can on the
corner. He didn't even want to be seen carrying around a Burghley's
bag—it was too noticeably chic and memorable, and in his line of
work drawing attention to himself was not only bad for business, it
was a risk he could not afford to take.

He was the most successful career criminal in
the world, only nobody knew it.

Which was exactly the way he intended it to
remain.

A grand strategist at heart, he hadn't gotten
to where he was by sticking out in a crowd. Or trusting anything to
luck.

On the contrary. Caution was his middle name,
and keeping a low profile his tried-and-true game. Too smart to
openly consort with others of his kind, he was not, however, above
using highly skilled criminal personnel when needed.

In those cases, he did as he'd done in
Macao—delegating the details to an associate who would see to
everything while he himself wisely kept his distance and stayed
safely, invisibly, far in the background. The melodramatic black
disguises he donned on the rare occasions he met with his
go-between were no affectation; they were a necessity.

The secret to his success had always been
that no one—not even his own second-in-command—could identify him
as the mastermind should a job ever go wrong.

To date, this recipe of one part anonymity to
one part caution had served him well. Neither Interpol, the FBI,
the Surete, Scotland Yard, nor a single police department on earth
had him in their criminal files, not even for so minor an
infraction as a parking violation.

Blessed with a photographic memory, he never
left a paper trail, was a virtuoso at laundering money, and was
worth a hundred million dollars of cunningly concealed assets in
gold, diamonds, and cash stashed safely in—and invested cleverly
from—an untraceable maze of dummy corporations and numbered bank
accounts in Liechtenstein, Grand Cayman, and the Isle of
Jersey.

Needless to say, he could long ago have
retired in supreme luxury. The only reason he still worked was
because he truly liked crime.

Now in the midst of planning his curtain
call—his biggest and most daring caper ever—his foremost concern
was to ensure that it would not go down in the annals of history as
merely the crime of the year. Nor the crime of the decade.

No, nothing short of the crime of the century
would do.

This was to be the crowning achievement of
his criminal career; his glorious swan song before retiring to join
the world's law-abiding citizens.

But best of all, he would be able to sit
back, far above suspicion, and watch as the authorities ran around
in useless circles, trying to hunt down the elusive mastermind.

Because it went without saying that they
would never find him, for the simple reason that as far as they, or
anyone else was concerned, he did not exist, at least not as a
criminal.

And that, he thought with the satisfaction of
someone whose life is devoted to matching wits with the guys in the
white hats, is nothing if not truly elegant.

For Kenzie, home was a walk-up on East
Eighty-first Street, where she had the third floor rear of a
five-story, one-family brownstone which had long since been carved
up into ten rental units.

The circa-1920s kitchen was tiny, and had a
minuscule gas range, a countertop oven barely big enough for
roasting two tiny game hens, plus an ancient refrigerator/freezer
of roughly the same vintage, which required weekly defrosting. But
never mind.

The living room had a working fireplace from
whose mantel she'd painstakingly stripped and sanded a century's
worth of paint, two windows overlooking the garden out back, and
relatively high ceilings. Better yet, the walls were thick, the
neighbors quiet, and there were two smallish bedrooms, a steal in
Manhattan for a mere rent-stabilized $823.28 a month.

It was also the perfect apartment to share,
one reason why she had been attracted to it in the first place.
Alas, three months earlier her roommate had discarded a series of
boy toys for a dentist with a thriving practice, and had moved on
to the greener pastures of matrimony and Westchester County.
Without someone trustworthy with whom to share the rent, gas,
electric, and cable TV bills, Kenzie had had to apply the brakes on
her greatest passion—buying at auction.

She possessed an uncanny knack for ferreting
out "sleepers"—those lots at auction which were either
misattributed or completely overlooked by other buyers. Thus she
managed to purchase treasures for a proverbial song before
attributing them correctly, and turning around and either reselling
them for a hefty profit or keeping them to enjoy.

In this way, she had made ends meet while
furnishing her apartment with a collection of surpassingly fine if
eclectic art and antiques, a luxury which would have been
dauntingly prohibitive to anyone but the rich, let alone a young
Manhattanite restricted by Burghley's bare-bones subsistence
wages—the consensus of management being, the honor of working at
Burghley's more than made up for in cachet what was lacking in
salaries.

As if cachet put food on the table, Kenzie
mused with grim humor, the carefully rewrapped Zuccaro propped
between her legs as she struggled with the five heavy-duty Fichet
locks on her front door—the wisest investment of any lone female
city dweller.

Once inside her apartment, she snapped the
door shut with a well- practiced bump of her buttocks and had
barely finished latching the fifth and last lock when the back of
her neck began prickling.

I'm not alone! a keen sixth sense informed
her.

Suddenly she could feel her stomach crawl;
rancid bile rose swiftly in her throat. Slowly and cautiously, she
turned around, a bass drum pounding in her ears.

"Hel-looooo, beautiful!"

Flashing his blinding whites, Charley Ferraro
blew her a kiss from across the room.

"Charley!" she gasped reproachfully. "God!
You sure know how to give a girl a scare!" Now that she was in no
danger, she didn't know whether to be relieved or angry.

Anger won out, especially since he'd made
himself right at home.

With his muscular arms crossed casually
behind his head, he was comfortably, if incongruently, sprawled on
the voluptuous, cut-velvet Napoleon III sofa with its exuberance of
fringes and tassels—an item of furnishing more suitable for an
odalisque than a man whose firm, NYPD-trained body was clad in
nothing more than skimpy snow white briefs.

"And just what the hell do you think you're
doing here?" she demanded in outrage. "Other than trying to scare
me to death, that is?"

"As a matter of fact," he said jovially,
wiggling his toes, "I never left. I told you I had the day off.
Remember?"

Seeing her infuriated expression, he sat
abruptly forward, his face registering solicitude. "Hey, what's the
matter, babe? You don't seem exactly overjoyed to see me. Have a
rough day, or something?"

Letting her shoulder bag drop to the floor,
Kenzie slumped against the door in weary resignation. Drawing a
deep, ragged breath, she held it in for a full ten seconds before
expelling it, the force of her breath lifting the sable bangs from
her forehead.

Dammit! Tonight she neither wanted nor needed
Charley's company. She'd been looking forward to spending a
visually gluttonous hour feasting her eyes on her Zuccaro—not
Charley Ferraro's otherwise delicious and wiry free
weights-sculpted body—before getting ready for her first-ever,
high-society shindig at the Met.

Placing the Zuccaro on the demi-lune table by
the door, she put her keys into the glazed green ceramic Han
dynasty bowl and then turned to face him, her hands on her hips,
her feet planted in a wide, aggressive stance.

"Get out, Charley," she said quietly.

"Excuse me?" He made a production of using an
index finger to clear nonexistent wax from his ear. "Babe, did I
hear—"

"Charley," she interrupted, unruffled, "are
you deaf? I said out! Out!" She clapped her hands sharply twice.
"Vamanos!"

He looked appropriately taken aback as he
tried to gauge the seriousness of her tone. "Aw, come on, babe," he
cajoled.

Propping himself up on one elbow, he looked
at her with a trace of perturbation, but seemed otherwise
unconcerned, counting on his cocky charm and far from unattractive
looks to win her over. "You don't really mean that," he added,
mildly aggrieved.

"Oh yeah?" she retorted. "Try me."

Picking up the Zuccaro, she tore off the
wrapping, stalked over to the fireplace, and propped the picture
atop the mantel, adjusting it until it was just so. When she
finally turned back around, she caught Charley eyeing her buns with
unabashed connoisseurship.

"Guess what Super Dick's been thinking about
all day?" he asked, waggling his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

"Super Dick!" Kenzie rolled her eyes. "You've
got to be kidding!"

Plopping herself down on a Louis Philippe
chair, she untied her laces; by the time she'd kicked off her
Reeboks and was standing up, Charley was on his feet too, engulfing
her in his strong, bulging arms.

She pushed him away. "Get your paws off me,
Charley," she said wearily. "And while you're at it, why don't you
collect your clothes, get dressed, and go on home? Hmm?"

Worry lines creased his handsome features;
Charley Ferraro was unused to rejection from members of the
opposite sex.

"Well?" She stared mercilessly at him.

His frown deepened. "That the thanks I get
for saving you from KP?" he asked.

"KP?" She blinked her eyes rapidly. "What is
this? Are we suddenly in the armed services?"

"Well, you are an army brat, right? And you
don't want to cook, do you?" When she didn't reply, he added
smugly, "Didn't think so, which is why yours truly called out for
grub. It should be here any minute now. Your favorite—Burmese." He
took the opportunity to flash her a thousand-watt smile. "Still
find me resistible?"

"As a matter of fact," she said inexorably,
"yes. Eminently so."

That wiped the grin off his face. "You
aren't," he said slowly, "by any chance telling me to get lost ...
are you?"

"Why, that's exactly what I'm doing," she
said, pouring on the molasses.

What the hell! Now this was a first! She'd
never treated him like this before! "Don't you think you owe me an
explanation?" he demanded huffily.

She placed both hands on her hips. "Charley,"
she sighed, "has it ever occurred to you that I might have made
other plans?"

He blinked, clearly taken aback. "In that
case, may I inquire as to what those plans are? Or is that asking
for too much?"

"Not at all," she said magnanimously. "I've
been invited to a society party at the Met. The museum, not the
opera."

"Well, ex-cuuuuuse me! And here I was,
harboring the distinct impression that you weren't into all that
society shit."