‘You snap your fingers at me one more time,’ he said, ‘and I’ll have them broken, one at a time.’
‘Hey,’ the blond said. He stepped back, balling up his fists.
‘Your bread,’ Kershman said wearily, ‘is on the dresser.’ The younger man went into the bedroom and emptied the contents of a brown manila envelope, eagerly counting the bills. His eyes lit up. ‘Jeez, thanks,’ he said, ‘ya want me to come back again tonight?’
‘I don’t want to see you again,’ Kershman said. ‘You show your face around this building again and you’ll regret it.’
The hustler looked at him for a moment and then grinned. ‘Wotsa matter, doll, was I too rough on you?’
Kershman stood in the bathroom doorway, regarding him through thick glasses that distorted his already bulging eyes, his mouth still trembling from the combination of pain and ecstasy. He said, ‘If it makes you feel any better, you were magnificent. I happen to prefer one-nighters.’
‘Sure, honey, that’s cool. Different strokes for different folks, right?’ He pulled on his leather jacket and left.
Kershman struggled into his clothes and left his apartment, taking a private elevator down one flight to the eighteenth floor of the Mirror Towers, where the giant computer awaited him. There were only three entrances into the sprawling computer complex which consumed most of the eighteenth floor. One was by private elevator from Kershman’s apartment, the second a private elevator between DeLaroza’s office and the console room. The third was by the exterior elevator, which had to be programmed to stop as it descended from the top two floors. Special keys activated the computers and the elevators.
Only three other people worked in the computer complex, none of whom really understood its complexities or the maze of interlocking information it contained. They were simply technicians.
It was a little after 2:30 when Kershman’s elevator opened and he entered the main console room, the nerve centre of the complex. A young woman wearing a white uniform was stringing a spool of tape on one of the computer banks.
‘Anything unusual? Kershman asked.
‘Not really,’ she answered brightly. ‘We have to complete the annual audit on WCG and L today. I’m running the totals now.’
‘Fine,’ Kershman said and went into his private office. The audit on West Coast Gas and Light Company, when complete, would require Kershman’s final personal touch, since DeLaroza planned to have its directors apply for a rate increase.
It was a measure of Kershman’s financial genius and tenacity that while still an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business he had once appeared at the office of the president of Ticanco, one of the world’s largest conglomerates, and asked for an appointment. Although he was told it would be impossible, Kershman had appeared at the office every morning at precisely 8:30 and remained there until five in the afternoon. After twenty-six consecutive working days, be had exhausted the executive’s resistance and was finally ushered into his office.
‘You have two minutes,’ the man said sternly. ‘If you can’t state your business by then you’re wasting your time as well as mine.’
‘Oh, I can do it in one sentence,’ Kershman replied confidently. ‘I can show you an absolutely foolproof method that will save you eight million, three hundred thousand dollars in corporate income taxes this year. Are you interested?’
The actual saving was a little under seven million dollars, but it had earned Kershman, an orphan from the slums of East Saint Louis, his tuition and a generous living allowance for the remainder of an educational odyssey that included two more years at Wharton, three years at Harvard, where be earned a doctorate in corporate finance, and a stint at Georgetown Law School, where he received his degree in international law. After completing his studies with distinction at all three universities, Kershman had refused a generous offer from Ticanco, to go to work instead for the Internal Revenue Service where during the next three years he designed an infinite variety of schemes for beating the income tax laws. By the time be was thirty-three Kershman was earning six figures a year as a consultant for several corporations.
To Kershman the world became a giant financial chess board and he took Machiavellian delight in developing methods for circumventing the international trade agreements and treaties which were its rules. In 1968 Kershman had proposed to one of his clients that within a few years the Arab nations would use their control of oil to dominate prices all over the world. Kershman, a Jew, had negotiated a dangerous and volatile deal with two Arab nations which, in exchange for enough guns and ammunition to supply their armies, would provide to the company Kershman represented crude oil at a low fixed price for fifteen years. The arms were delivered by boat to Turkey and from there were shipped overland by caravan to the Mid-east. The oil was sold to a refinery in Jakarta, shipped to a refinery in Yokohama, and re-sold as surplus to the Y and D Oil Company in Philadelphia. By 1975 Y and D had grown into one of the largest U.S. gasoline companies, with its own coast-to-coast chain of filling stations. It constantly undersold all competitors by two or three cents a gallon.
Y and D was owned by Victor DeLaroza. He was amazed by Kershman’s ability, as well as by the alacrity with which a Jew had dealt with Arabs. In the seven years that had followed the oil deal Kershman had become the financial architect of DeLaroza’s tentacled empire, carefully constructing a maze of contracts, stock transfers, holding companies, and silent corporations throughout the world which concealed the ownership of more than three hundred corporations, controlled the prices of three major industries, and had on its payrolls (including several heads of state) more than a hundred thousand people. Only Kershman and the electronic brain on the eighteenth floor understood the complicated corporate polygamy he had created, although two men were being groomed to succeed him if the need should arise.
In exchange DeLaroza had insured Kershman’s loyalty by providing him with an opulent cocoon, an outrageous lifestyle which Kershman could never have achieved personally a salary of two hundred thousand dollars a year, stock equity in several key corporations, an executive jet, homes in Tokyo, London and on Crete. To satisfy Kershman’s gluttonous appetite for gourmet food, there were open accounts in the world’s greatest restaurants and a personal chef from the Cordon Bleu who created exotic dishes in Kershman’s own kitchen when he was not travelling. And there were bonuses, each one unique, among them an awesome pornography collection that included five priceless volumes stolen from the personal collection of King Farouk by the same thief who had stolen a Picasso from the Musee de l’Art Moderne, a Rembrandt from the National Gallery in Washington, and three Van Goughs from the private collection of a Greek shipping magnate.
Finally, to protect Kershman from the danger of scandal- making indiscretions, a one-time film actor named Tod Donegan, whose sexual deviations had destroyed a promising film career, had been hired as Kershman’s Judas Goat, to cruise the gay haunts and deliver to the financial wizard young lambs for his sexual slaughter and —
