Cold War - Jerome Preisler [23]
Different forebears placed different emphasis on the parts of the empire, which itself waxed and waned, metamorphosing with the times. Morgan’s great-grandfather had taken the boldest leap when a packet of small Renoirs had come his way via South America; obviously authentic and obviously pilfered by the Nazis, the paintings had been placed at considerable profit with a client known to be outstandingly discreet and willing to pay in gold bars. From there, as his father liked to say, it was but a matter of addition, though a more objective viewer might have likened it to multiplication. Money from the art side of the family empire helped fund the purchase, and in one or two cases the establishment, of concerns that diversified the family holdings even further. Such business were, by necessity, prejudiced toward the future, balancing the necessary prejudice toward the past that the art dealings betrayed. Those prejudices were among the key principles the family had adhered to since they were Molerrageneaus, principles that included direct personal involvement by one and only one Morgan at the helm, discretion, and above all, boldness.
Which led the family’s present overseer to throw caution and the prospect of diarrhea to the winds when the waiter appeared—choosing the rabbit and ostrich ragout in a morel mustard sauce, along with the Potatoes Daphne and the vegetable of the night, which happened to be Peruvian asparagus in a caviar coulis.
Morgan ordered for the twins, who nodded gratefully. He felt his stomach rumble, and had regrets as he handed the menu back to the waiter. But he was a Morgan; he would not turn back. As a final stubbornness—and a gesture at least as provocative to discerning neighbors as hosting the twins—he asked for a bottle of 1985 Latour, a Bourdeaux wine that though still comparatively young, would decidedly not go with any of the dishes.
“Ladies, I’ve got to take care of some business, but go right ahead and enjoy,” he said, leaning to accept light pecks and a squeeze of the thigh from Minz before heading toward the room beyond the bar where the lavatory was. En route he stopped to greet Frau Leber, who was looking particularly potted tonight. He did not know her dinner mate, introduced as a retired French general; Morgan nodded attentively and memorized the name—Ambrose Xavier—in case it might become of use.
In the men’s room, he locked the door, then leaned against it before removing the small alpha pager from his pocket. Morgan thumbed a hot-button combination on the miniature keyboard, activating the modem; within thirty seconds he had signed onto a wireless message network and initiated a transmission that launched him as an anonymous, encrypted user on the system—not an easy feat actually, and one that required a rather large program on not one but two different servers. Fortunately, placing the programs on the servers had been assisted greatly by Morgan’s ownership of the company. Morgan cared little for the exact mechanics of the program, though he had a rudimentary notion of how it worked. In every area but art he tended to focus exclusively on results. Even in art, it took a great deal to interest him.
The matter he had come to the rest room to check on, for example, interested him a great deal.
A line of messages to a Yahoo e-mail account appeared on his screen. Most were products of list-serves, purposely cluttering the account. Several were dummies posted at random to make things difficult for anyone who might be trying to pry into his business. (There were several candidates who might undertake such despicable activities, including three different agencies of the United States government and one international firm that was a continual source of difficulty.) He opened each message, lingering as