House of Lords

By Philip Rosenberg

Jeffrey Blaine is a good man, a wealthy and powerful Wall Street broker with impeccable social standing. But his wife—who supports charitable foundations from their Park Avenue townhouse—seems to have lost interest in their marriage, and his daughter, a beautiful debutante ready for Yale University in the fall, has turned sullen and rebellious. Having achieved everything he'd ever dreamed of, Blaine now feels unsettled, stagnant, hungry for a new challenge—a challenge that presents itself suddenly in the person of Chet Fiore, an ambitious entrepreneur rumored to be tied to organized crime. When Blaine rebukes Fiore's offer to participate in an illegal business proposition, he discovers that the mafia lieutenant has laid an elaborate trap to ensure Blaine's cooperation: the abduction of his beloved daughter. To ensure her safe return, Blaine is forced now to become a partner in a money laundering scheme of immense proportions. But once the transaction is completed, Blaine is a changed man, unexpectedly empowered by Fiore's demands, a man ready to shed his staid past for the urgency and risk of a life of crime; and so they form an alliance that forever changes the lives of both men, leading to the demise of one and the corruption of the other.

House of Lords is a riveting investigation of power and corruption—part human drama, part thriller—that has the potential both to be a critically acclaimed portrait of our age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061857195

Book preview

PART ONE

1

Jeffrey Blaine gave himself a moment to take it all in.

His eyes ran quickly from the bar on his right to the tables that glowed with gold and russet wildflowers all the way to the bandstand at the far end of the room. People were still coming in, the men brushing snow from their shoulders, the women carefully lifting the plastic covers they had put over their hair, the girls gloriously shaking their heads, letting the melting droplets spray anyone lucky enough to be around.

In a minute he would check outside, to make sure the streets were being kept clear. Now he just wanted to take stock.

Judge Borklund and his wife found Jessica and kissed her, offering their congratulations. She glowed in their admiration. Her closest friends, Renée and Amy and Grace, hovered by her bare, smooth shoulder, smiling restlessly, the bored glow of perfect and beautiful girls when a party hasn’t yet come alive. In a minute the greetings will be over and the guest of honor won’t have to hear again how radiant she is and how splendid the room looks and how utterly unbelievable it is that anyone could actually have her birthday party at a restaurant like Stasny’s (as though there were a restaurant like Stasny’s), and Does she know how lucky she is? and Nonsense, dear, she deserves every bit of it, and How did your father ever manage to get this place?

The band would be playing in a few minutes. Their instruments were already on the bandstand, which had been erected for the occasion at the side of the room nearest the kitchen. The musicians weren’t in sight, though. They came out, set up, and then withdrew back to the kitchen.

Jeffrey watched his daughter as she luxuriated in the certainty of being, for this moment at least, the center of the known universe. Outside, he knew, the photographers who were kept penned behind police barricades on the other side of the street, who were limited to long-lens shots of Jeffrey Blaine’s guests, or Jessica Blaine’s guests, as they arrived, would have killed for a picture of the radiant Jessica being kissed by the Jacob Krentses, shaking the hands of the Willard Botins, bending her long Botticelli neck to listen to a whispered confidence from Itzhak Perlman.

A waiter slid up beside Jeffrey with a tray of the braised stuffed mushrooms that were one of Stasny’s more celebrated hors d’oeuvres. Jeffrey waved the man off and walked briskly toward the back of the room. He was captured on the way by Ed Wuorinen but hesitated just long enough for a handshake from Ed and a kiss from Ed’s wife Thelma. I’ll be right back, he said, apologizing for running off. As he turned to go, his hand was caught by Wilton Maser, who said, I won’t take your time, you must have a million things to do. Your daughter’s beautiful, everything’s beautiful, and Jeffrey said, Wilton, since when do you know anything about what’s beautiful? They both laughed.

Jeffrey threaded his way through the busy kitchen toward the office. He had told the band he would want to talk to them before they started, and so they were waiting for him, the four of them, sprawled across the available space in Erill Stasny’s private office as though they imagined themselves to be common fixtures one would find in any well-run kitchen. Their names were Johnny Balls, Ted Diddle, Bo Job, and Jake August. They called themselves Falling Rock Zone, and the one named Johnny Balls, who identified himself as the lead singer, had a tattoo of a penis that ran the length of his upper arm. It seemed to Jeffrey that they were nowhere near as young as they wanted to appear. He guessed that Jake August, who said he was the bassist, was at least thirty if not up into his thirties, and the others weren’t much younger. A jumble of facial hardware and a lot of streaky black makeup that made them look like demented raccoons were all apparently designed to put them into a much younger bracket.

You know there’s no amplification, Jeffrey reminded them.

Right, right, Johnny Balls agreed.

I wanted to ask you about your lyrics.

Like what about them?

Well—Jeffrey stumbled, not quite sure how to pose the question—what about obscenity?

Some.

Some?

"You got words you don’t want us to say? How about cunt? We won’t say cunt. Okay, guys, no cunt."

The others all agreed, each of them repeating No cunt like a mantra.

That isn’t exactly what I meant, Jeffrey said.

Johnny Balls raised an eyebrow, waiting. Two rings and a stud raised with it.

I was more concerned with violence, Jeffrey said.

For or against?

Now it was Jeffrey’s turn not to answer.

Sorry, man, just jakin’, the singer said. You mean like kill pigs and knife the bitch, that kind of shit. That’s rap. We don’t do rap.

What do you do?

You won’t like it, Johnny Balls said, with the first sign of candor he had displayed so far. But the kids will. That’s the point, right?

Part of the point.

Right. You don’t want to be getting a lot of shit from a lot of people.

Now you’ve got it.

But it’s got to be real, right? ’Cause we can do wedding shit if you want. ‘Hava Nagilah.’ ‘September Song.’ Which sucks. You don’t want that.

Right, Jeffrey agreed. It’s got to be real.

Phyllis was talking to Everett Layne, the only surviving direct descendant of either Jacob Layne or Ezra Vaughan Bentley, the long dead founders of Layne Bentley, the investment firm in which her husband was now a partner. Jeffrey came up behind her and slipped his arm around her waist. Everett Layne greeted him with a thin-lipped smile and said something gracious about the party.

In his early eighties now, the gaunt old patriarch came into the office only once a week. He had never before been known to attend the social functions of the firm’s partners, yet here he was, still wearing his overcoat, a plaid wool muffler around his neck. His servant Gregory, a man of almost his own age, stood mutely at his shoulder. Obviously Mr. Layne wouldn’t be staying, but for Jeffrey it was a triumph of sorts that he had at least deigned to put in an appearance. Everett Layne was ratifying Jeffrey’s unique position at the firm.

Phyllis glanced at her husband with a radiant smile the moment she felt the touch of his hand. She was wearing pale gold silk, a magnificent dress that followed the still-perfect lines of her body the way a man’s hands would, caressing her thighs and hips. She was, Jeffrey realized, still quite beautiful, in fact the most beautiful woman he knew. She leaned her body to his, subtly, not suggestively, just enough to put anyone looking on notice that Jeffrey and Phyllis Blaine had the perfect marriage. Jeffrey returned her smile. There were moments like this, not many of them, but enough to unnerve him, when she put on that perfect smile and made her perfect body touch his, that made him realize how easy it might have been to be still in love with her.

Mr. Layne was just telling me that he finds the music surprisingly pleasant, she said.

Indeed, the old man said. But why must they look like that?

Jeffrey laughed. Phyllis laughed. They looked at each other as they laughed, sharing the pleasure of being together for the wittiest thing they had ever heard in their lives.

Not far away, Jim Thornton peered over the top of his whiskey glass and gestured with a slight waggle of his head toward where the old man was standing with the Blaines. Holden Martins and Todd Wynebrook looked in the direction indicated. All three of them were partners at Layne Bentley. Everett Layne hadn’t attended Wynebrook’s wedding, or Thornton’s either, for that matter, and that was almost ten years ago, when he was a much younger man still putting in a full week at the office. They looked at each other, trying to decide how they should feel about his appearance at Blaine’s daughter’s birthday party.

Way to go, Jeffrey, Wynebrook said at last, raising his glass.

Thornton, who had been on the verge of giving voice to his envy, thought better of it. It wouldn’t have sat right. No one begrudged Jeffrey Blaine his success. There was something about the man that simply made you feel happy for him.

Or at least that’s what you were supposed to feel.

Clint Bolling came out of the men’s room and looked around, like a man getting off a train. He sighed. This party had all the earmarks of a waste of time, but at least he felt a lot better. There was a slight buzz between his ears that just might be enough to turn a goddamned birthday party for a teenage girl he had never met into a decent enough way to spend an evening two thousand miles from home.

He had been here since eight o’clock even though he knew it was stupid showing up exactly at eight just because Blaine told him eight. It was just that he hated hotel rooms. For some reason he felt obliged to put in an appearance because Blaine invited him. If he had to guess, he would guess that Blaine had that effect on most people. They wanted to do what he wanted them to do. The guy was just so fucking sincere it made your skin crawl. The fact of the matter was that Blaine wanted to be his banker. By rights Jeffrey Blaine should be kissing his ass, not dragging him off to kiddie parties.

What the hell, Bolling thought. If he wasn’t here, where would he be? Probably picking up a cocktail waitress, for Christ’s sake. He was better off here, where he could avoid temptation. Or at least, if there was going to be temptation, it would be with a better class of people.

He spent his first hour at the party trying to find a reason why he shouldn’t simply find Blaine, shake his hand, thank him for the invite, and leave. Now he was feeling better about everything.

At least a dozen teenage girls rushed passed him, heading somewhere in a hurry. He looked around for a movie star or a rock star or something.

The girls all looked delicious, teenage girls at that age when a female can look innocent and blatant at the same time, their hair sleek and dramatic, brilliantly blond or midnight black, cropped short like show dogs, flared back from their faces as though they had been caught in a sharp, surprising wind, their eyes and lips bathed in colors like exotic insects. Maybe he’d ask one of them to dance.

The headlong rush of all these girls in evening dresses, Clint Bolling discovered, was aimed at a rather remarkable looking young woman in her middle twenties who wasn’t dressed for this kind of party at all. She was wearing a sheepskin coat and a peasant skirt that reached down to the floor, the kind of thing Bolling’s wife wore all the time back in Oklahoma. She also had on burgundy-red calf-high boots, and she had that magical kind of presence that announced that she was someone, certainly someone Clint Bolling wouldn’t have minded getting to know.

I think it’s Mia Hamm, he heard a woman say. The name meant nothing to Bolling. He turned to see who had spoken, and his eyes and the tilt of his head asked the next question. The soccer player, she explained.

The soccer player, Bolling thought. Why in god’s holy name would a bunch of teenagers be excited about a soccer player? Bolling had only a vague memory of a female soccer team that had done something illustrious a year or so ago, maybe more. Typical, he thought. A man like Blaine would pick up the phone and call a soccer player he didn’t even know simply because his little girl probably played the game. Or maybe he called her agent. Did soccer players have agents? Probably. Everybody had agents. She probably charged for showing up.

Still, it was an opportunity not to be missed. He liked athletic women, even though they made him feel his age. Under that sheepskin coat there was undoubtedly a great body, firm and relentless.

He squared off his shoulders and moved forward to introduce himself. He was conscious of cutting an impressive figure in his lizard boots and string tie. He had been born and raised in Oklahoma and he still lived there, so he enjoyed a sort of natural right to the rough-and-ready cowboy air he affected. Still, it was an affectation. Like an actor playing himself in a film, he often found himself weighing his words and actions not so much in terms of what should be said or done under the circumstances, but more in terms of what Clint Bolling would say or do. For as long as he could remember, this double consciousness had been part of his being. At eighteen he carried it with him when he enrolled at Yale, eight years before Jeffrey Blaine’s freshman year. Beyond the fact of their Yale educations, however, the two men had little in common. Bolling came east with a firm and almost fanatical resolve to let nothing he learned there change him, a pledge that was, if anything, solidified when he found himself surrounded by hundreds of guys like Jeffrey Blaine, blond and good-looking small-town bearers of civic pride who showed up precisely to collect on the college’s implicit promise to change everything.

Four years after he came east to be a Yale freshman, Clint Bolling was able to return to Oklahoma essentially a wilier version of the youth who left. He was for this reason understandably reluctant to credit his Ivy League education with any significant role in sharpening the skills that enabled him to amass an incredible fortune over the next two and a half decades. He didn’t own oil but his company was sitting on about a hundred patents for interesting things to do with oil. No one, including Bolling, actually knew what all of them were, but that didn’t matter. Some of them had to do with medicine, while others involved food actually synthesized out of petrochemicals. There was a lot of interest, which translated into an explosive rise in the value of Clint Bolling’s company, PetroBoll.

The story of how Bolling came to control these patents told a great deal about the man. He raided the petrochemistry departments of three large universities in Texas and Oklahoma by offering immense cash donations that the fortunate institutions eagerly transformed into libraries, laboratories, and endowed professorships. None of the scientists involved ever knowingly went to work for Clint Bolling or PetroBoll. They all remained in the employ of their universities, even though a series of Bolling trusts paid their salaries. But the fine print in the deeds of trust that created the funds turned out to give the trusts, which in turn turned out to be PetroBoll under a series of other names, the patents on the work products generated by the recipients of the trusts’ generosity. No one but Bolling had understood that this would be the case at the time the gifts were made and accepted. Naturally, the universities bellowed like bulls when they realized what was happening. The courts, though, upheld Bolling, although they went out of their way in each separate ruling to cluck their judicial tongues about the sharp practices on the one hand and the slovenly lawyering on the other that forced them to such unpleasant but unavoidable conclusions.

Bolling himself remained the same crude but ingratiating man he had always been, boisterously friendly in a way that served double duty as both welcome and warning, Hi buddy, and Don’t fuck with me at the same time. Where the ladies were concerned, he was conscious of holding an immense advantage over these New York types. Just by not being one of them.

He had come to New York because he was looking for things to do with his money and Blaine’s name kept coming up whenever he asked about investment bankers. Before getting on a plane, he had his research people do a bit of digging. They started with the Yale yearbook and followed it back as far as they conveniently could. They weren’t interested in what the banker had accomplished after he left Yale because it went without saying that he had accomplishments. Clint Bolling believed that you knew what a man was only when you knew where he came from. What they found was more or less what Bolling expected they would find. Jeffrey Blaine was a Bright Young Kid from a failing industrial town in central Massachusetts—which could just as easily have been New Hampshire or Mississippi, Georgia or Vermont. The story would be the same anywhere. Inevitably this Bright Young Kid would be the only son in a family that traced itself back through twelve generations, not one of which had ever amounted to anything. Families like that regarded their insignificance as a direct result of their virtue, and so their hearts were filled with a grubby pride that was in no way diminished by the fact that the world around them refused to validate it. On the contrary, these people looked at failure as a badge of distinction, leaning on their rectitude the way simpler folk leaned on religion. Sooner or later one of the males in the line would marry a woman who was fed up with inadequacy, who put no faith in rectitude, who possessed enough ambition to raise her only son to believe that he was entitled to more. Off he would go to Yale or Princeton, Harvard or Dartmouth, certain only of two things: that he would never come back, and that he would become in reality everything that his family had always imagined itself to be.

The Jeffrey Blaines of the world, Bolling believed, were young men with missions, ambitious but grounded. What this meant, as far as Bolling was concerned, was that they were fighters but you could trust them. They had a duty to fulfill and a calling to answer, and so they programmed themselves to make vast multiples of the money their mothers thought their fathers should have made, but they had principles at the same time. He contrasted them in his mind with people like himself, people without either grounding or principles. He knew better than to trust people like himself. He had found, over the years, that there were men he liked and men he trusted, and they were hardly ever the same men. What his research told him about Blaine put the banker in the second category, which is why Clint Bolling was in New York. Ready now to take advantage of what the situation offered.

He moved toward the girls clustered around the soccer player. One of them was certain to be Blaine’s daughter. The almost-blonde in the blue dress, he guessed as he headed toward them, taking stock, suddenly thankful for having no children, especially no daughters. Their bodies sheathed in golds and blues and blacks offered tantalizing views of young legs, young thighs, young breasts.

One of you must be Jessica, he drawled.

I am, Jessica said.

Just as he thought. The prettiest one in the lot. Did each girl get a turn at being the prettiest at her own party? he wondered. It was a lovely world these children lived in.

The Blaine girl’s restless eyes never met his as he offered and she took his hand. He told her his name and wished her a happy birthday. There’s Daddy, she said, pulling her hand from his. Nice meeting you.

He watched her run across the restaurant, as though she were in sneakers and jeans. There was something magic about rich girls, he thought, and then he put her out of his mind.

You’re Mia Hamm, aren’t you? he said, turning to the soccer player.

She seemed pleased to be recognized.

Considering the weather, it was probably a good thing Chet Fiore wasn’t going anywhere. It made tailing him that much easier. With the engine idling smoothly, the heater didn’t even have to be set very high to keep the two men comfortable in the car. Warm, in fact, warmer than they needed to be. Wally Schliester wouldn’t have minded opening a window, but that wasn’t an option because Gogarty was behind the wheel, and when Gogarty was behind the wheel Gogarty controlled what he liked to call the environmental variables.

Gogarty was always behind the wheel. It was one of the perks that came with his seniority, and Schliester, who had no seniority at all, was in no position to question it.

This was their third night of tailing Chet Fiore and so far they hadn’t seen anything worth staying awake for. Blind, random tailing of a subject is widely regarded as just about the worst way to conduct an investigation, and with good reason. For the most part it’s a waste of manpower. They had been investigating Chet Fiore for a little under two months and had absolutely nothing to show for it. They resorted to random tailing simply to have something to put in their reports.

Schliester fought to keep his eyes open in the stupefying warmth of the car. They were parked just down the street from a restaurant called Seppi’s on Elizabeth Street in lower Manhattan. There was no Giuseppe. The place was run by a man named Artie, but Chet Fiore owned it, named it after his grandfather, and used it more or less as his office. He didn’t involve himself in the management of the establishment. He declared a small income from the restaurant on his income tax so that you couldn’t get him in trouble that way.

The only difference between this night and the two before it was that tonight a blizzard was raging around them, which added an interesting wrinkle. If they cleared the windows, their presence in the car would be obvious from a block and a half away. If they let the snow accumulate, as it was accumulating on all the other cars parked on the street, they wouldn’t be able to see a fucking thing.

Schliester raised this issue as a conversational gambit. Once in a while it helped to have something to talk about. Gogarty countered by suggesting they go with the flow. He claimed to be able to make out the front of the restaurant just fine through the snow.

Schliester shrugged and gave up the struggle to keep his eyes open. They weren’t doing him any good anyway.

Chloe Adams Todd hugged Phyllis Blaine as though they were sisters. She kissed her as though they hadn’t seen each other in years.

I was in a total panic, Chloe whined in her high-pitched voice. She was thirty-eight years old and talked as though she were a teenager. "I mean, if he doesn’t take me, who exactly is going to do my hair? He’s the only man who has so much as touched my head since I was sixteen years old."

Phyllis managed a laugh. Well, it worked out fine. You look stunning. Really, she said, trying to make her getaway.

There were people she had to talk to. And the waiters needed another reminder about the wine now that most of Jessica’s friends had arrived. As she walked across the dining room, her eyes swept over thousands upon thousands of flowers, a Rose Parade of blooming colors dominated by the stalky daffodils, yellow with orange centers, the rainbows of tulips, all of them deferring, as though on orders from Phyllis Blaine herself, to the discreetly muted tints of the clustered wildflower blossoms that surrounded the flowers and set the tone for the evening. What, Phyllis had wondered out loud when she first conceived the theme of the floral arrangements, would announce the birthday of a young woman with more perfect candor than the blossoms of wildflowers?

But Chloe Todd wasn’t about to let her get away. She moved around so that she was in front of Phyllis. I couldn’t believe it when I called, she went on. "The girl said he didn’t have anything. I mean, didn’t have anything? Please. I said to myself, this can’t be Adrian, it’s got to be a new girl. She doesn’t know who I am. But it was Adrian. Can you believe that?"

Phyllis was threading her way between the tables, Chloe keeping pace with her. Phyllis stopped to adjust a floral arrangement.

"I said, ‘Let me talk to him,’ and she said, ‘Really, Mrs. Todd.’ As though I was the one being troublesome. So I said, ‘Yes. Really. And now, if you know what’s good for you.’ I actually heard her gasp. Well, not a gasp, but that sound people like that make. And then he comes on the line. ‘You know I love you, Chloe,’ he says, ‘you know I’d do anything I can,’ and I say, ‘I cannot go to the Blaines’ party with my hair like a rat’s nest,’ and he says, ‘Well, that’s the problem, because all the girls are being done, there isn’t—you know I wouldn’t lie to you—a minute, not a minute the whole day.’ You know how he talks."

Phyllis said to a waiter, Eduardo, you promise me you’ll keep your eye on the wine bottles.

She absolutely was not going to let the children get their hands on the wine. At Jessica’s seventeenth a distressing number of the kids managed to get themselves drunk. It wasn’t going to happen again.

Yes, Mrs. Blaine, Eduardo agreed enthusiastically. The entire staff had been given enough pep talks to last a football team a whole season.

Phyllis moved on. She sampled one of the shrimp-and-avocado hors d’oeuvres and her eye caught Erill Stasny’s. She nodded her approval. He answered with a curt nod. His own approval was really all that mattered to him.

All the while Chloe Adams Todd continued her eternal chatter. "He actually offered me an appointment on Thursday. Thursday. What good was Thursday going to do me? What was I supposed to do? Sit with my head in the refrigerator?"

Well, it worked out, Phyllis said.

It worked out because Phyllis called Kenneth herself. Please do something for this woman, she told him, before she drives me out of my mind.

Phyllis stopped in front of Monsignor Fennessy, an insufferably pompous archbishop who was on the boards of some of the same charities as Phyllis. Monsignor, she said, you know Chloe Todd, don’t you?

She slipped away while the monsignor pumped Chloe’s hand. Perhaps the saga of Chloe Todd’s hair would be of interest to a Prince of the Church.

According to the official version of the story, Erill Stasny was a Czech from Paris, where he worked for five years as sous-chef at Archestrate under Alain Senderens. Stasny was certainly Czech, and he knew Paris intimately. But Archestrate? Senderens? Three prominent food critics came out and doubted it in print. None of the people who frequented the best of the Parisian restaurants could recall ever having seen him there. Or anywhere else, for that matter. He simply showed up in New York one day in 1994 and announced his presence.

Six months after his arrival, Stasny’s was open for business on two floors of a brownstone in the East Forties between Third and Lexington, an auspicious location for a restaurant intended for instant primacy. It didn’t matter in the least that Erill Stasny probably wasn’t who he claimed to be. The upper end of the restaurant business has always operated with a higher quotient of lies per word spoken than any other industry in the world. Charm and genius are all that matter, and even charm doesn’t matter greatly. With enough talent, one is assumed to be charming. Stasny was rude to virtually everyone, without exception, but as word spread, even before the first glowing reviews came in, his surliness came to be seen as an important, even an essential, part of his appeal. So, too, did the air of mystery that surrounded everything about the man and his establishment.

The biggest mystery was how to get a table. The secretaries of some of New York’s most influential people, including elected officials, commissioners, financiers, and the owners of major-league baseball, football, basketball, and hockey teams, called for reservations only to be told that no tables were available for six, seven, eight weeks. Others called Stasny’s in the afternoon and were dining there that night. No one ever managed to figure out if there was a list or how to get on it. The pecking order seemed whimsical, or at least it seemed whimsical to those to whom it didn’t seem outrageous.

Jeffrey Blaine was the first person who ever approached Stasny about buying out the entire dining room for an evening. Le Cirque had been the scene of lavish parties, Lutèce even in the days of its greatest glory surrendered itself to private affairs. But Stasny’s? Never. Because it hadn’t been done, it was generally assumed that it couldn’t be done.

The whole thing started out as Jessica’s idea. Her seventeenth birthday party had been held at the Yale Club, with sushi and roast beef, stuffed mushrooms and cotton candy, with carnival-style booths set up in the three downstairs reading rooms where the kids could pitch rings around little plastic frogs or throw softballs into milk jugs and darts at balloons. Smashing Pumpkins played in the large room upstairs, filling the building with sounds the Yale Club had never heard before. People devoted three pages of pictures to the party, which was also featured on Page Six of the Post, where photos of teenagers with champagne glasses in their hands were accompanied by a satirical text by Noel Garver proclaiming that the Eighties were alive and well on the East Side of Manhattan.

The party was more than a success. It was a triumph. The kids loved it and talked about it for months. Parties of two and three years earlier, the sixteenth and seventeenth birthday parties of Jessica’s friends’ older brothers and sisters that had seemed so wonderful at the time, were suddenly second rate as Jessica Blaine’s party set a new standard. In the months that followed, no one managed to outdo Jessica’s party despite unimaginable expenditures. Money, after all, couldn’t buy originality. Copies were only copies.

Nevertheless, Jeffrey could have done with less publicity. The Eighties were not alive and well, not in the least. Hedonism wasn’t part of his makeup and never had been. He prided himself on being a sensible and socially responsible man. Yes, he had money, and of course he was willing to spend some of it on his only child. What parent wouldn’t? But he wasn’t in any sense of the word an extravagant man. Although he never said anything to Phyllis or Jessica about the press comments on the party, they hurt him in a way he couldn’t fully explain. Besides, an elderly bartender who had been at the Club since the Korean War lost his job as a result of the scandal. And so, as one season rounded into the next and Jessica’s eighteenth birthday loomed on the distant horizon, Jeffrey worried about how they could celebrate it without either disappointing her or opening him up to more criticism.

And then one night over dinner at Stasny’s, Jessica looked up from her dessert and said, Why don’t we have my party here?

She was only joking, she said later, but Jeffrey glanced at Phyllis, whose eyes went to his at the same time, and the decision was made.

For more reasons than Jessica could have possibly understood, it was a wonderful idea. Stasny’s reputation was based almost as much on his discretion as on his food. A senator, a tenor, or a police commissioner could take his mistress to Stasny’s without worrying that the paparazzi would be on the sidewalk when he came out.

The very next morning, hours before the restaurant opened for business, Jeffrey Blaine was at the door. A waiter who pulled a suit coat over his T-shirt to answer the door seated him in the empty dining room. Coffee was brought. Erill Stasny himself followed a few minutes later, smiling and smelling of an herbal cologne. When Jeffrey told him what was on his mind, Stasny was cool to the idea. He wanted no part of carnivals or Smashing Pumpkins. There wasn’t, he said haughtily, enough money in the world to make him turn his restaurant into a circus.

He left Jeffrey at the table and walked back to his kitchen.

Jeffrey followed him there. All right, he said. What do you suggest?

When Jeffrey Blaine wanted someone to do something, he always asked questions. He never gave orders. When the people answered his questions they were telling themselves what it was they were supposed to do. Stasny, though, didn’t take the bait. He looked at Jeffrey the way he might have looked at a roach in the risotto. Customers did not walk into Erill Stasny’s kitchen. Ever. Under any circumstances. Not when it was functioning in the evening, not when it lay in morning torpor, manned only by two sullen young men uncrating vegetables.

I cannot permit this, Stasny said.

That seemed to be the end of the matter. On his way to the office, Jeffrey called Phyllis to tell her that Stasny’s was out.

But it wasn’t out. Later that afternoon, Stasny himself telephoned Jeffrey at the office. He didn’t say what had changed his mind, but now he seemed willing to explore the idea. I have question for you, Monsieur Blaine, he said in his strange, unidentifiable accent. This young woman—he pronounced it ooman—is to be eighteen years old. Why must she celebrate like a heathen child?

Negotiations began that afternoon and lasted through the fall and into winter. It took three months just to get Stasny to relent on the question of music, and then only on the condition that there be no amplifiers and no microphones. Unplugged, Jessica said, nodding her approval, surprising her father with her enthusiastic acceptance of the terms.

No, no, Stasny said. No plug, no noise, no machines.

Yes, right, exactly, Jessica said, enunciating clearly to boost her words over the language barrier. "Unplugged. No plugs. No machines."

With barely a month to go until the party, there remained only a few details of the menu to be worked out. The dinner wouldn’t be catered in the usual sense. Jessica’s guests would order from the menu. But, since the menu changed every day, depending on the whims of Stasny and the market, Jessica wanted to assure herself that at least a few of her favorite dishes would be available. The lobster crepes. The Morello mushrooms in a beef broth. The sautéed veal with dill and lemon. And above all, the poached cherries and raspberries in a mousse of white chocolate with a light orange glaze. Jeffrey and Phyllis insisted that Jessica be there for all these negotiations. She was, after all, going to be eighteen. It was time she learned to accept responsibility.

Phyllis made the reservations and made Jessica cancel her plans for a weekend on Long Island with her friends so that she could be there. Stasny himself seated them when they came in, gesturing to a waiter with a crook of his finger as he bent close to Jeffrey’s ear. Your drinks will be presently, Monsieur Blaine, he said.

Their waiter, dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-suited, materialized immediately with the drinks they hadn’t ordered yet, a Bushmill’s on the rocks for Jeffrey, a chilled Chardonnay for Phyllis, a diet Coke for Jessica. They were given no menus. Stasny said, Stasny makes the selection, adding a flourish of the eyebrows that turned it into a question.

Yes, please, Jeffrey said.

Stasny bowed and withdrew. Jessica said, Is he weird or what?

He’s very nice, her mother corrected. He is being extremely cooperative.

I’m sure Daddy’s paying him a fortune, Jessica said.

Then you could show some appreciation.

To Mr. Stasny?

And to your father.

Jeffrey looked away, annoyed. It seemed to him that Phyllis was picking on the girl more and more lately, most of the time for no discernible reason. Jessica didn’t fall all over herself saying thank you, but she was certainly appreciative of the things she enjoyed in her life. Most of the girls in her set had no idea, really, of how privileged they were, but Jessica wasn’t like that in the least. She knew she was lucky and she even said so from time to time. She expresses appreciation, he said coldly, not looking at his wife.

Phyllis reached for her wine glass and looked around the room over the rim of it. She didn’t like being corrected, especially where Jessica was concerned. It had always been her belief that Jeffrey stood up for the girl too much and that this was why she was so spoiled. Sometimes, it seemed to her, it was as though the two of them had two different daughters.

Stasny joined them when the salads were served. Jessica let her mother do the talking, and the menu was finalized by the time the soup arrived.

Jessica, Amy, Grace, and Renée swept this way and that across the dining room with the force of a tide and the capriciousness of ripples on a pond, pushed and pulled by the need to talk to this boy, to that girl, to share a joke or whisper a story. Jeffrey’s eyes followed his daughter’s movements. He heard her tell someone, an older woman, one of Phyllis’s guests, that it was all so beautiful, really, just beautiful, and the warmth of her smile reached across the space to where Jeffrey stood watching, wanting only, first and last, to make his little girl happy.

Well, she was happy. Radiantly happy. He couldn’t have asked for more.

And yet, as he watched her, a distinct and troubling shiver ran the length of his back. There is a sense one has, when one has everything, that everything is surely enough. For a moment Jeffrey Blaine felt this, but the feeling never lasted. As always, other things got in the way. These were the times he could have cursed himself for his nervous inability to enjoy what he had.

Shaking off this unexpected and inexplicable feeling of discomfort, he told himself that it was time he checked outside. As he reached the front door, Jessica ran up to him and threw her arms around his neck. Oh, Daddy, she gushed, hanging on him, everything is so utterly perfect.

He put his arms around her, tightening the hug. He felt her warmth the way he used to feel it when she was a baby and he had to carry her around the apartment until she fell asleep. They didn’t hug much anymore, because of her age, and he missed it. This felt good. Still, he found himself inexplicably unable to manage more than a forced and fleeting smile or to shake off that sense of sudden apprehension that seemed all the more gripping because there was no reason in the world to feel it. This was a recent thing, it seemed. It had been going on for less than a year. He nodded to Phyllis as he left, holding up a finger to indicate that he’d be back in a minute.

On the other side of the inner door, he paused for a slow, deep breath. He had no idea what was wrong. In fact, he doubted that anything was wrong. It was just that…

No, he almost said aloud, it wasn’t just anything. Everything was exactly as it should be. Almost all the guests had arrived, none of them kept away by the storm. Jessica’s guests, his guests, Phyllis’s. And Phyllis, of course, had overlooked nothing. In a closet in the office off the kitchen at this very moment there hung half a dozen dresses in different sizes—dresses by Badgley Mischka and Donna Karan, Carolina Herrera and Vera Wang, dresses with sequins and without, dresses in black and pink and turquoise, thousands of dollars’ worth of dresses—waiting on hangers just in case anything got spilled. Everything was under control. Everything had been foreseen and seen to. Jeffrey knew all this and knew that he had no business feeling anxious. Or restless. Or anything less than perfectly satisfied.

The problem, he told himself as he pushed open the street door, was simply that he was not the sort of man who could ever permit himself to settle into contentment. It was his nature to be restless. Nothing wrong with that. A man’s reach, etc., etc., whatever that saying was. If he was restless, he told himself, as he always did at moments like this, it was only because, even with all his success, even with the emblems and reminders of it all around him, there was still so much to be done with his life. He didn’t pursue this line of thought further because he knew that he wouldn’t have been able to say what exactly remained to be done, other than endlessly more of what he was doing already.

Sometimes, not often, but more often than he cared to acknowledge, the prospect made him numb.

Outside, the snow swirled around him as though the whole world were a shaken globe. Four sanitation workers in foul-weather gear swept the snow with broad, straight-bladed push-brooms. Beyond the small rectangle where they were working, to their left, to their right, across the street, and in the street, the snow was accumulating steadily, already more than three inches deep. But the broom battalion didn’t allow a single flake to settle in front of Stasny’s. A pair of garbage trucks with plows mounted on their front ends came around the corner from Lexington, one following on the other’s flank, their plow blades angled in opposite directions. As Jeffrey took a deep breath and walked out to the curb, enjoying the feel of the snow on his face and on his hair, a waiter, obviously acting on urgent orders from inside, rushed out from the restaurant clutching an umbrella, which he deployed over Jeffrey’s head with a push of a button and an explosion of springs. Startled, Jeffrey whirled to the young man. He hadn’t asked for an umbrella and his first impulse was to send it back. But that was impossible. The waiter would only be sent out again.

Thank you, Jeffrey said, resigned to having this person hovering over him as though he required looking after. He crossed the street to pay a courtesy call on the reporters and photographers herded behind police barricades set up well away from the restaurant entrance.

Look, he said, letting his eyes move from face to face as though these people were his friends, we want to keep things orderly. The police tell me they don’t want any congestion in front, especially with this storm. I’ll see what I can do later to get you some pictures.

No one quite believed him but that was okay because it wasn’t meant to be believed. The reporters knew they were on the other side of the street because Jeffrey Blaine wanted them there. But that was Blaine’s style. He got what he wanted but he made nice.

Right, one of the photographers had the bad grace to mutter loud enough to be heard.

Jeffrey came right back at him. Lighten up, he said. It’s only a birthday party.

The reporters all laughed.

Ah, yes, Noel Garver purred. But not just any party. The party of parties. Isn’t that the idea?

Noel Garver was an outlandishly gay and desperately alcoholic former actor, former novelist, and former journalist whose multiple careers had all come to a complete stop until a few years ago when he miraculously massaged his knack for cadging invitations into a position as society columnist for the Post. When he was too drunk to write, which was much of the time, his columns were ghosted from press releases by the twenty-two-year-old Princeton graduate who constituted Garver’s entire staff. But when he could manage it, he cranked out hilariously scathing commentaries on social events to which he nevertheless continued to be invited. His secret, insofar as he had one, was that he reserved his satire for the husbands who paid for the bashes, but was unfailingly kind, even generous, in his flattery of the hostesses. He never got too drunk at a party to remember who was wearing what or even who disappeared for how long with whose husband. It was Noel Garver who wrote the critique of Jessica’s seventeenth birthday party in which her father was compared to Ivan Boesky.

Which of course Jeffrey knew. And ignored. Just a party, Noel, he answered graciously.

Not even his eyes betrayed the animosity he felt for this man.

For just a minute Jessica wanted to be by herself. She stood at the side of the room, letting her eyes drift at random while she thought pleasantly satisfying thoughts about Eddie Vincenzo. He had the most beautiful black eyes she had ever seen.

She was in love with Eddie Vincenzo and her parents didn’t even know he existed. But they were going to find out tonight. The thought sent a delicious shiver down her back.

2

In her mind, if not out loud, Sharon Lamm was swearing like a sailor. She wasn’t a gossip columnist like the drunk standing next to her. She was a goddamned fucking journalist. She was a respected journalist. She hadn’t won any Pulitzer Prizes or anything like that, but she had been told on good authority that she had been considered for one. So what in heaven’s name was she doing covering the birthday party of the little bitch daughter of the big bitch wife of some arrogant prick with the cash and the connections to buy out Stasny’s for a night? The little cunt showed up in a blue silk dress that showed off her rather impressive and expensive set of tits. How was that for a lead? Oh, you don’t like it? Then you tell me how the hell you cover a birthday party. Do you pretend it’s news? How exactly do you do that?

For a moment she toyed with the notion of taking a taxi back to the office and plunging a letter opener all the way in between the shoulder blades of Herb Adkin, the moronic city editor with bad skin who dreamed up this pathetic excuse for an assignment. She didn’t even work for him. She was on the Wall Street desk, where a pusillanimous editor whose name she couldn’t even think without wanting to scream consented to lending her out to that imbecile Adkin, who actually believed that assigning a financial reporter to cover a birthday party would give the piece an interesting slant.

Sharon Lamm had found, over the years, that editors who talked about slants missed their calling. They should have been in television.

The drunk standing next to her was Noel Garver, who thought he was I. F. Stone and that East Forty-seventh Street was the Tonkin Gulf. He actually didn’t mind standing out in the snow because he swore, promised, guaranteed—that was the word he actually used, guaranteed—that before the party was over he would get inside, and that if Sharon was a good

Reviews for House of Lords

[dpappas_25 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A few times in one's life, on unchosen occasions, a door will open and someone unexpected will step in, and one realizes with irrefutable clarity that what just happened was not in fact unexpected. In just this way, Jeffrey knew that Chet Fiore himself would bring the answers to all the questions he raised.This book happened to catch my eye during a run to the library. Once I read the book description I knew that I had just picked out something really interesting. This book starts off with the events that happened at the main character's (Jeffrey Blaine) daughter's birthday party. A girl was found to have been raped there and a mysterious man, Chet Fiore, comes and helps Jeffrey smooth everything over. Jeffrey has never met Chet before but once the party is over he finds himself trapped in a partnership with Chet, not that he is altogether unwilling.This book changes point-of-view between many characters and as there seem to be all these plotlines that are connected by the birthday party this really allowed for a richer story. Everyone begins the book off as relatively sane but slowly as the book progresses a sort of madness seems to creep up on every character. Characters as discovering sides to them they didn't know they had or they develop obsessions.One thing that I didn't like about this book is that I couldn't find one female character of this book that I liked. Blaine's daughter, Jessica, was a spoiled brat who desperately needed some real discipline. I pitied Blaine's wife but still didn't like her. I thought Elaine was pathetic and hoped that everything she did would blow up in her face. The male characters were definitely not any better but for some reason I feel like even though they did some horrible things, the men were portrayed in a better light.Whenever I would pick this book up I immediately was hooked back in to the plot. As everything was heating up towards the end I found myself wanting certain characters to finally be held responsible for their actions. I wasn't altogether happy with what happened at the end but I didn't hate it either. I would recommend this book if you are looking for a book that mixes the mob with wall street and leaves readers wondering just who is the bad guy in this situation?