Black Market

The bubbling crowd inside Bendel's ebbed and flowed. The predominantly female shoppers milled anxiously in all directions around François Monserrat. Finally he saw the woman he'd followed. She was sifting through a long rack of cocktail dresses, always thinking of her appearance, always defining her existence through her beautiful reflection.

Monserrat concealed himself behind a display case of sweaters and continued to watch. He felt a certain coldness in the center of his head, as if his brain had become a solid block of ice. It was a feeling he knew in certain situations. Where other men would experience the uncontrollable rush of adrenaline, Monserrat experienced what he thought of as “the chill.” It was almost as if he'd been born with a chemical imbalance.

Every man who passed checked out Isabella Marqueza carefully. So did several of the chic, well-dressed women shoppers. Her fur jacket was left casually open. As she turned, swiveled left or right, a tantalizing glimpse of her breasts floated deliciously into the cleavage. Of all the striking women in the department store, Isabella was the most desirable, the most visually dramatic, by Monserrat's personal standards.

Now he observed Isabella slink off toward a dressing room. He put his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, caught a reflection of himself in a mirror as he moved, then paused outside the dressing room.

He walked past the closed door, studied the throngs around him pursuing Christmas gifts with forced gaiety, and then darted back the way he had come.

Pretending to examine a silk shirt, like a wealthy East Side husband picking out a stocking stuffer, he listened outside the dressing room. Coming closer, he could hear the whisper of clothing as it peeled away from Isabella's body.

In one swift move he stepped inside the tiny room. Isabella Marqueza swung around in astonishment.

Why did she always look so utterly beautiful? Warmth that might have been desire flowed within him. He took his hands from his coat. She was wearing only panties, tight and sheer and black. The cocktail dress she intended to try on hung limply in one hand.

He thought she would have looked very exciting in it.

“François! What are you doing here?”

“I had to see you,” he whispered. “I heard you had a little trouble. You must tell me everything.”

Isabella Marqueza frowned. “They let me go. What were they going to hold me for, anyhow? They had nothing but a stupid bluff, François.” She smiled, but the expression couldn't conceal a look of worry.

He pressed one gloved hand lightly against her breasts. He could smell Bal a Versailles, her favorite perfume. His as well. Inwardly, inaudibly, he sighed.

“Are you being followed, Isabella?”

“I don't think so.”

“Are you sure?” Monserrat asked.

“As sure as I can be Why?” A troubled look clouded her dark eyes again. He could see her wince. From beyond the door of the dressing room he heard the Christmas Muzak, relentlessly bland and empty of all meaning.

“Good. Good,” he whispered soothingly.

Isabella's mouth fell open and she quickly stepped back against the wall. There was really no place to go in the tiny dressing room. “François, don't you believe me? I told them nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“Then why did they let you go, my love? I need an explanation.”

“Don't you know me any better than that? Don't you? Please…”

I know you only too well, François Monserrat thought as he moved closer.

The tiny handgun made an inconsequential, guttural spit. Isabella Marqueza moaned softly, then collapsed on the shiny black-and-white tiles.

Monserrat was already out of the dressing room and walking quickly, inconspicuously, toward the nearest exit.

She'd talked. She'd told them too much. She had admitted knowing him, and that was enough.

She'd been broken during the interrogation, skillfully, in a way she might not even have truly recognized. Monserrat had heard the news not ten minutes after Carroll had finished with her.

He burst into the cold wind that was raking West Fifty-seventh Street. He turned a corner, to all intents and purposes an ordinary man losing himself in the crowds that hunted the spirit of Christmas with red-faced eagerness.

11

Shiny white cabin cruisers and myriad other expensive ships had begun to haunt the perimeter of lower Manhattan. More than one inflatable rubber boat was tied to the railing of the seawall at the Battery Park City esplanade. In fact, a considerable number of individuals were willing to use the most unorthodox means to return to their Wall Street offices, whether or not such a return was authorized.

Anton Birnbaum appeared live on the “Today” show. The face of the financier was highly familiar, though few could have matched it with an equally familiar name they'd come upon scores of times in newspapers and magazines.

“Neither the American nor the New York Stock Exchange will sell a single share this Monday. NASDAQ, the over-the-counter market automated quotation system, will be down as well. The commodities exchange in New York will not open, nor will the metals exchange. This is complete madness,” he told the early morning viewers.

It got worse.

The regular Monday auction of the United States Treasury bills wouldn't take place. Among the chipped and pocked tombstones of Trinity Church cemetery, no drug dealers would palm out their usual glassine envelopes of cocaine.

No messengers would trudge the streets with even more valuable envelopes filled with securities, valuable stock certificates, multimillion-dollar checks, and legal documents.

None of the all-male luncheon clubs, would serve up their bland, overcivilized fare at Monday noon.

All the usual activities of the Wall Street community would be stillborn. It would be as if the modern money world had not yet been invented. Either that, or it had been completely destroyed.

“I want you to have lunch with me, Mr. Carroll,” Caitlin Dillon had said over the telephone. “Is twelve-fifteen today possible? It's important.”

It was a call that took Carroll completely by surprise. He'd been going through his elaborate back files-sifting through the various terrorist organizations in his search for some clue to Green Band-when the call came. The idea of a civilized lunch with a beautiful woman was the last thing on his mind.

“I want you to meet somebody,” Caitlin had told him.

“Who?”

“A man called Freddie Hotchkiss. He's important on Wall Street.”

She had a rich telephone voice. Music in a tuneless world, Carroll thought, little symphonies coming out of the impersonal Bell system. He put his feet on the desk and tilted his head back against the wall. With his eyes shut, he tried to bring Caitlin Dillon's face firmly into his mind. Untouchable, he remembered.

“Freddie Hotchkiss is co

“The name rings a bell,” Carroll said, trying to place it. “Several bells.”

“The information I have is that Chevron's a wheel in the stolen securities market and-this is what should really interest you, Mr. Carroll-there are rumors of a link with François Monserrat.”

“Monserrat?” Carroll opened his eyes. “So why can't we go direct to Chevron? Why go through this Hotchkiss?”

“Do I detect impatience?”

“When it comes to Monserrat, I'm impatient.”

Carroll could hear Caitlin exchange quick words with somebody, and then she said, “The point is that we can't get a direct co