Buch lesen: «Sidney Sheldon’s After the Darkness»

Chapter One

New York, Six Months Earlier

‘What do you think, Gracie? The black or the blue?’

Lenny Brookstein held up two bespoke suits. It was the night before the Quorum Charity Ball, New York’s most glamorous annual fund-raiser, and he and Grace were getting ready for bed.

‘Black,’ said Grace, not looking up. ‘It’s more classic.’

She was sitting at her priceless Louis XVI walnut dressing table, brushing her long blond hair. The champagne silk La Perla negligee Lenny bought her last week clung to her perfect gymnast’s body, accentuating every curve. Lenny Brookstein thought, I’m a lucky man. Then he laughed aloud. Talk about an understatement.

Lenny Brookstein was the undisputed king of Wall Street. But he hadn’t been born into royalty. Today, everyone in America recognized the heavyset fifty-eight-year-old: the wiry gray hair, the broken nose from a childhood brawl that he’d never gotten fixed (why should he? He won), the sparkling, intelligent amber eyes. All these features made up a face as familiar to ordinary Americans as Uncle Sam or Ronald McDonald. In many ways, Lenny Brookstein was America. Ambitious. Hardworking. Generous. Warmhearted. Nowhere was he more loved than here, in his native New York.

It hadn’t always been so.

Born Leonard Alvin Brookstein, the fifth child and second son of Jacob and Rachel Brookstein, Lenny had a horrific childhood. In later life, one of the few things that could rouse Lenny Brookstein’s rarely seen temper were books and movies that seemed to romanticize poverty. Misery Memoirs, that’s what they called them. Where did those guys get off? Lenny Brookstein grew up in poverty – crushing, soul-destroying poverty – and there was nothing romantic or noble about it. It wasn’t romantic when his father came home drunk and beat his mother unconscious in front of him and his siblings. Or when his beloved elder sister Rosa threw herself under a subway train after three boys from the Brooksteins’ filthy housing project gang-raped her on her way home from school one night. It wasn’t noble when Lenny and his brothers got attacked at school for eating ‘stinky’ Jewish food. Or when Lenny’s mother died of cervical cancer at the age of thirty-four because she couldn’t take the time off work to see a doctor for her stomach cramps. Poverty did not bring Lenny Brookstein’s family closer together. It pulled them apart. Then, one by one, it pulled them to pieces. All except Lenny.

Lenny dropped out of high school at sixteen and left home the same year. He never looked back. He went to work for a pawnbroker in Queens, a job that provided him with more proof, if any were needed, that the poor did not ‘pull together’ in times of trouble. They ripped one another’s throats out. It was tough watching old women handing over objects of huge sentimental value – a dead husband’s watch, a daughter’s cherished silver christening spoon – in return for a grudging handful of dirty bills. Mr Grady, the pawnbroker, had had heart bypass surgery the year before Lenny went to work for him. Evidently the surgeon had removed his compassion at the same time.

Mr Grady used to tell Lenny: ‘Value is not what something is worth, kid. That’s a fairy tale. Value is what someone is willing to pay. Or be paid.’

Lenny Brookstein had no respect for Mr Grady, as a person or a businessman. But the truth of those words stuck with him. Later, much later, they became the foundation for Lenny Brookstein’s fortune and Quorum’s sensational success. Lenny Brookstein understood what ordinary, poor people were willing to accept. That one person’s concept of ‘value’ was different from another’s, and that the market’s could be different again.

I owe the old bastard for that.

The story of Lenny Brookstein’s rise from pawnbroker’s lackey to world-respected billionaire had become an American legend, part of the country’s folklore. George Washington could not tell a lie. Lenny Brookstein could not make a bad investment. After a successful run of bets on the horses in his late teens (Jacob Brookstein, Lenny’s father, had been an inveterate gambler), Lenny decided to try his luck on the stock market. At Saratoga and Monticello, Lenny had learned the importance of developing a system and sticking to it. On Wall Street, they called a system a ‘model’ but it was the same thing. Unlike his father, Lenny also had the discipline to cut his losses and walk away when he needed to. In the movie Wall Street, Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko had famously declared: ‘Greed is good.’ Lenny Brookstein profoundly disagreed with that statement. Greed wasn’t good. On the contrary, it was the downfall of almost all unsuccessful investors. Discipline was good. Finding the right model and sticking to it, through hell or high water. That was the key.

Lenny Brookstein was already a millionaire many times over by the time he met John Merrivale. The two men could not have had less in common. Lenny was self-made, confident, a walking ball of energy and joie de vivre. He never spoke about his past because he never thought about it. His brilliant amber eyes were always fixed on the future, the next trade, the next opportunity. John Merrivale was upper class, shy, cerebral and prone to depression. A skinny, redheaded young man, he was nicknamed ‘Matchstick’ at Harvard Business School, where he graduated top in his class, as his father and grandfather had both done before him. Everybody, including John Merrivale himself, expected he would go into one of the top-tier Wall Street firms, Goldman or Morgan, and begin his slow but predictable rise to the top. But then Lenny Brookstein burst into John Merrivale’s life like a meteor and everything changed.

‘I’m starting a hedge fund,’ Lenny told John the night they met, at a mutual acquaintance’s party. ‘I’ll make the investment decisions. But I need a partner, someone with a blue-chip background to help bring in outside capital. Someone like you.’

John Merrivale was flattered. No one had ever believed in him before. ‘Thank you. But I’m not a marketing guy. T-t-t-trust me. I’m a thinker, not a s-s-salesman.’ He blushed. Goddamn stammer. Why the hell can’t I get over it already?

Lenny Brookstein thought: And a stammer, too. You couldn’t make this guy up. He’s perfect.

Lenny told John, ‘Listen. Salesmen are a dime a dozen. What I need is someone low-key and credible. Someone who can get an eighty-five-year-old Swiss banker to trust him with his mother’s life savings. I can’t do that. I’m too…’ He cast around for the right word. ‘Flamboyant. I need someone that makes a risk-averse pension fund manager think: “You know what? This guy’s honest. And he knows his shit. I like him better than that sharp, cocky kid from Morgan Stanley.” I’m telling you, John. It’s you.’

That conversation had been fifteen years ago. Since then, Quorum had grown to become the largest, most profitable hedge fund of all time, its tentacles reaching into every aspect of American life: real estate, mortgages, manufacturing, services, technology. One in six New Yorkers – one in six – was employed by a company whose balance sheet depended on Quorum’s performance. And Quorum’s performance was dependable. Even now, in the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, with giants like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns hitting the wall, and the government bailing out once untouchable firms like AIG to the tune of billions, Quorum continued turning a modest, consistent profit. The world was on fire, Wall Street was on its knees. But Lenny Brookstein stuck to his system, the same way he always had. And the good times kept rolling.

For years Lenny Brookstein believed he had everything he wanted. He had bought himself homes all over the globe, but rarely left America, dividing his time between his mansion in Palm Beach, his Fifth Avenue apartment and his idyllic beachfront estate on Nantucket Island. He threw parties that everybody came to. He donated millions of dollars to his favorite causes and felt a warm glow inside. He bought a three-hundred-foot yacht, interior-designed by Terence Disdale, and a private Airbus A340 quad jet that he flew in only twice. Occasionally he slept with one of the models who made it their business to be around him, should he suddenly find himself in the mood for sex. But he never had ‘girlfriends.’ He was surrounded by people, many of whom he liked, but he did not have ‘friends’ in the traditional sense of that word. Lenny Brookstein was beloved by all who knew him. But he didn’t ‘do’ intimacy. Everybody knew that.

Then he met Grace Knowles.

More than thirty years Lenny Brookstein’s junior, Grace Knowles was the youngest of the famous Knowles sisters, New York socialite daughters of the late Cooper Knowles. Cooper Knowles had been a real estate guy, worth a couple of hundred million in his heyday. Never as big as ‘the Donald,’ Cooper was always far better liked. Even business rivals invariably described him as ‘charming,’ ‘a gentleman,’ ‘old-school.’ Like her elder sisters, Constance and Honor, Grace adored her father. She was eleven years old when Cooper died, and his death left a void in her life that nothing could fill.

Grace’s mother remarried – three times in total – and moved permanently to East Hampton, where the girls’ lives continued much as they had before. School, shopping, parties, vacations, more shopping. Connie and Honor were both pretty and much sought after by New York’s eligible young bachelors. It was generally accepted, however, that Grace was the most beautiful of the Knowles sisters. When she took up gymnastics competitively at thirteen in an attempt to distract herself from her ongoing grief for her father, her elder sisters were secretly relieved. Gymnastics meant training, and traveling out of state, a lot. Once they were safely married off, it would be fine to have Grace come to parties with them again. But until then, Connie and Honor heartily encouraged their baby sister’s love affair with the parallel bars.

By the time she was eighteen, Grace’s days as a competition-level gymnast were over. But that was okay. By then Connie had married a movie-star-handsome investment banker named Michael Gray, a real up-and-comer at Lehman Brothers. And Honor had hit the marital jackpot by landing Jack Warner, the Republican congressman for New York’s 20th Congressional District. Jack was already being hotly touted as a candidate for the Senate, and perhaps even one day for the presidency. The Warners’ wedding was all over Page 6, and photographs of the honeymoon appeared in a number of national tabloids. As the new Caroline Kennedy, Honor could afford to be gracious to her little sister. It was Honor who invited Grace to the garden party where she first met Lenny Brookstein.

In later years, both Lenny and Grace would describe that first meeting as the proverbial thunderbolt. Grace was eighteen, a child, with no experience of the world outside her cosseted, pampered East Hampton existence. Even her friends from gymnastics were wealthy. And yet there was something wonderfully unspoiled about her. Lenny Brookstein had grown used to what his mother would have called ‘fast’ women. Every girl he’d ever slept with wanted something from him. Jewels, money…something. Grace Knowles was the opposite. She had a quality that Lenny himself had never had and wanted badly. Something so precious and elusive, he had almost given up believing it existed: innocence. Lenny Brookstein wanted to capture Grace Knowles. To hold that innocence in his hands. To own it.

For Grace, the attraction was even simpler. She needed a father. Someone who would protect her and love her for herself, the way that Cooper Knowles had loved her when she was a little girl. The truth was, Grace Knowles wanted to go back to being a little girl. To go back to a time when she was totally, blissfully happy. Lenny Brookstein offered her that chance. Grace grabbed it with both hands.

They married on Nantucket six weeks later, in front of six hundred of Lenny Brookstein’s closest friends. John Merrivale was best man. His wife, Caroline, and Grace’s sisters were the matrons of honor. On their honeymoon in Mustique, Lenny turned to Grace nervously one night and asked: ‘What about children? We never discussed it. I suppose you’ll want to be a mother at some stage?’

Grace gazed pensively out across the ocean. Soft, gray moonlight danced upon the waves. At last, she said: ‘Not really. Of course, if you want children, I’ll gladly give them to you. But I’m so happy as we are. There’s nothing missing, Lenny. Do you know what I mean?’

Lenny Brookstein knew what she meant.

It was one of the happiest moments of his life.

‘Do you know what you’re wearing yet?’ Lenny pulled some papers out of his briefcase and put on his reading glasses before climbing into bed.

‘I do,’ said Grace. ‘But it’s a secret. I want to surprise you.’

Earlier that afternoon Grace had spent three happy hours in Valentino with her elder sister Honor. Honor had always had an amazing sense of style and the sisters loved to shop together. The manager had closed the store especially so that they could peruse the gowns in peace.

‘I feel quite the rebel.’ Grace giggled. ‘Leaving it to the last minute like this.’

‘I know! We’re kicking over the traces, Gracie.’

The Quorum Ball was the society event of the season. Always held in early June, it marked the start of summer for Manhattan’s privileged elite, who decamped en masse to East Hampton the following week. Most of the women attending tomorrow night at The Plaza would have begun planning their outfits like generals before a military campaign months ago, ordering in silks from Paris and diamonds from Israel, starving themselves for weeks in order to look their flat-stomached best.

Of course, this year there would be some belt tightening. Everyone was talking about the economy and how dire it was. People in Detroit were rioting, apparently. In California, thousands of homeless people had pitched tents along the banks of the American River. The headlines were dreadful. For Grace Brookstein and her friends, nothing compared to the shock they’d felt the day they heard that Lehman Brothers had gone bankrupt. Lehman’s collapse was a tragedy far closer to home. Grace’s own brother-in-law Michael Gray had seen his net worth decimated overnight. Poor Connie. It really was too awful.