It’s a very simple two-step process: One: Get even. Two: Create massive success by re-capturing the wealth I lost playing the marriage game. Payback and wealth creation are the best forms of revenge a man can conjure up. Maybe it wasn’t the road to happiness, but it’s the road I’m taking, with my team of specialized agents. My revenge would be sweet, and the screwing her over wouldn’t have any bedroom on the horizon.
Happiness was an illusion. I believed being happy was running hard and screwing harder next to a woman I thought was a racehorse, like myself. She ran a lean takeover operation of my assets. Maybe she would have upped it to the optimum level, since we had no children. She would have been my sole beneficiary. While I wasn’t looking, the person I thought I was closest to dug in deep through opportunity and, yeah, because I’m a good guy at heart.
No more. Fuck Mr. Good Guy. I’ll be taking no prisoners. I’m a vacuum cleaner in a phonebooth full of million-dollar bills. And yes, they do exist. The Treasury Department printed some for me so I could frame one to hang in my office.
Tony Abruzzo told me about The Bachelor Towers (lots of sound effects there…or at least there were every time he spoke those words). He said it was mostly inhabited by younger men of my ilk. Up-and-comers and monied trust fund babies who could be my sons, if I’d been a bad boy in high school and knocked someone up.
At first, I wasn’t interested. I was still seething from the betrayal Rebecca had played against me, taking half my wealth and costing me most of the other half defending what I had left. The anger was fresh with me. And since I never gave up, I knew it would never go away until it was satisfied. Those fires quenched.
I remembered that conversation well—when he “sold” me on the idea just like he’d sold me Bentleys over the years.
“Marco, one thing’s for sure, with the average bachelor age being around thirty-five, there won’t be many women over that age. Ripe, beautiful. Looking for love and money. And I’ll bet many of them are tired of boys—or boys trying to behave like real men. You’ve got the experience they crave. Been a Navy SEAL and have the scars to prove it. You came from nothing and carved your way out with years doing hard time on the battlefields and used it to your advantage. You’re smart. You’re lean and primed for some old-fashioned good times you so richly deserve.”
“You’re forgetting one thing, I’m focused on revenge,” I told him that day.
“Even better. They love men who are driven to obsession.”
“Why would that be?”
“Because a man who can’t fight can’t fuck. You remember that quote from Patton?”
“Yeah, we used to say it every night in Coronado after we got our leave.”
“Women love to be the object of desire by a man who knows better. Not a man who is beginning to get the lay of the land. They want an experienced lover who will ride them wet and leave them panting for more. You’re the original Italian Stallion, Marco. You’re the guy they’ve been looking for their whole lives.”
I must have looked skeptical, but I was seriously chewing on the idea.
“Here’s an added bonus,” Tony said as he sipped his purple martini that looked like it could be a Dr. Death cocktail. “You don’t even have to tell them to flaunt it in front of your ex. Women love to do that shit all the time. It’s human nature to them. It’s the, “‘see what a prize you threw away?’” stuff. Wars were fought over this, Marco. You know I’m right.”
He had several valid points, and then I investigated.
So here I was, walking into the marble foyer of the Bachelor Towers in Boston. It wasn’t much to relocate from New York City proper, and I was done with that whole life anyway. Boston had plays and musicals, opera, art galleries, museums and parks. And before I decided, I spent a day just walking around the city, finding its people were real, gritty, and not snobby like New Yorkers could be. It had great restaurants, lots of movers and shakers there. I would still maintain my apartment in D.C. so I could slip in and out without detection and with the security and anonymity I required since a lot of my business was generated there. Rebecca didn’t know about the safe house in Coronado and the lot in Florida, if the shit really hit the fan.
And it almost got that bad.
Everything that was important to me was in the small black leather duffel bag with the Bone Frog logo on it in my left hand. My right hand held a half dozen hangars of suits I couldn’t bear to part with. These had been specially made for me in Hong Kong and South Korea, sewn of the finest wool and linen blends, the seaming thread so lightweight it almost floated. Everything else I left with the brownstone in New York. I even left her my jewelry and my wedding ring. I didn’t want any taint of it permeating my new life as a bachelor.
Since the reception desk was empty, I looked for the person whose job it was to greet the residents of the Bachelor Towers, the person who I would probably get fired. I crossed the lobby to the neat bar sparsely packed with couples and three-somes, speaking in hushed tones. A piano player tinkled the ivories in the background. The bartender, Oliver, I’d been told had been stolen from the Waldorf. Hired for his discretion, he knew the tastes of just about any living legend, down to the number of orange peel slices, shavings or
