The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [17]
Rashid called as my car entered Central Park. We worked our way through the usual preliminaries and then spent a few fruitless minutes probing each other on Nord Stream. Neither of us had anything more to tell the other.
“What’s your interest here, anyway?” I asked. OPEC dealt with oil, not natural gas. And to the extent its members also exported gas, their customer was Asia rather than Europe.
“Nothing specific. A couple of Middle Eastern banks are in the Nord Stream financing syndicate. One lost its European head today. And the senior people in the Kingdom get edgy whenever there’s a terrorist event. They like to be kept informed.”
The Kingdom was Saudi Arabia, and their concern was easy to understand. Fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers had been Saudis, a fact that made the royal family nervous as hell about political repercussions. The Saudis lived in a bad neighborhood, and they needed America for security.
“Is there any reason to think Saudi nationals were involved?”
“Not that I know of,” he said. “I have to answer a call on my other line. Stay in touch.”
I slipped my phone back into my jacket pocket, inclined to accept his explanation at face value. Rashid’s position with OPEC made him dependent on the goodwill of the more influential member states, which was the primary reason he swapped information with me. It helped him to be in the know about matters of interest to his constituents.
I tipped the driver a five when we finally got to my building, spent a couple of minutes bemoaning the Knicks with the doorman, and then rode the elevator up to my floor. The elevator car is antique mahogany banded by brass, the lower panels scuffed and scratched by generations of strollers and scooters and teenage roughhousing. As always, my eyes were drawn to a ding beneath the operating panel that an excited Kyle had left with a carelessly handled baseball bat when he was eleven. I touched the ding sometimes, when I was alone. The junk mail the super intercepted made me sad, because it reminded me of all the things I’d never get to do with my son—to teach him to shave, or to visit colleges with him, or to slip him a little extra money so he could take a girl to a concert and a nice dinner. But the ding in the elevator made me happy. He’d gotten three hits the morning he made it, and his coach had awarded him the game ball. It had been a great day, one that I liked to remember.
I could hear Claire on the piano as the elevator approached our floor. A violin began playing with the piano as the elevator doors opened, and then a second violin joined, contrapuntal to the first. The performers were likely Claire, Kate—and who? Opening my apartment door, I saw an NYU backpack on the floor and abruptly recalled something Claire had told me a few days ago—that she, Kate, and a college kid from NYU were scheduled to perform together in a holiday recital at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the hospital where Claire was the volunteer director of the arts program. Hanging up my coat, I headed for the living room.
The black Yamaha baby grand I’d given Claire as a wedding gift had been rolled out of the corner where it usually sat. Claire was on the bench, leaning slightly forward as she played. Her shoulders were pulled back, her torso balanced over her hips and her forearms precisely parallel to the floor. Both the piano and the bench were custom-built; Claire suffered near-constant back pain if she wasn’t seated correctly. Facing her were Kate and a tall, skinny Asian boy wearing wire-rimmed glasses. Kate had lost her baby fat as a teen, and her hair had lightened, but she still had Claire’s Mediterranean coloring and full features. The combination gave her a slightly exotic look, like a blond Roman. She’d grown as well, towering over her mother and only a few inches shy of my six feet. Despite her height and her slim, womanly figure, she’d