by Predators
Should she have known? Maybe it was because she didn’t want to know. Perhaps someone had bewitched her. This same Mma Serote had consulted the diviner. “Who can be so sure about those white doctors,” she’d said. She had anointed her man with a potion she bought from the diviner. Mma Serote said maybe Mma Michael had angered someone and they had gone to a moloi, a witch. She shuddered at the possibility.
“Perhaps,” Mma Serote had said, “you are not appreciating the customs, are not respecting the ancestors.”
Everyone knew Mma Michael had modern notions.
No! She shook her head. She did consider herself a modern woman and had put those old beliefs behind her, but…why so much bad luck? Another shake of her head. No, Michael had the disease and she did not know it in time. That was all there was to say about the matter.
People called her Sanderson. Her full name was Mpoo Kgopa Sanderson. The naming came from her uncles, one of whom, when seeing the saucy look in her three-day-old eyes, thought kgopa, which means snail, would keep her humble. It didn’t. The people of her village called her Mma Michael, but elsewhere, at work, she was just Sanderson, the game ranger.
She left the room to find her daughter. Where was that girl? It was time to make porridge and dress for work. Mpitle should be ready to go to school. Sanderson washed up in the tub just inside the door and sponged her uniform. She would have to see to washing it soon. Perhaps if all went well, she could take it to Ms. Maholo. Ms. Maholo owned a washing apparatus. She would ask her if she could use it.
She worried about her daughter. That boy, that David Mmusi, he was too pretty, too insistent. He might not take the precautions, even though the President himself said everyone should, even though condoms were sold everywhere, at the pharmacy, at the checkout counter at the market, everywhere. Should she ask if he’d been tested? No, that would be overstepping. But, he might be one of those who wished to believe phamo kate came from the spirits, or from witches, or the wind. Many in her village still did. Rra Kaleke said the education brought it on. Before the government started sending just anybody to school, there was no disease. He was very old with wulu, white hair, and was thought to be very wise, but in this she believed him wrong. She would speak with Mpitle. She had lost too much already: her cousins, a husband, and soon a son. No more.
She would put a condom in Mpitle’s backpack.
She could not lose another child.
CHAPTER 3
From his window, Bobby Griswold stared vacantly across Lake Shore Drive at the lake. Automobiles, red brake lights winking, their exhausts billowing white in the chilled air, crept bumper-to-bumper working their way north in the late afternoon rush hour. At his back, to the west, a sharp-edged winter sun glittered in a cold, gray sky. In Lake Michigan, low waves lapped along its shore and splashed against concrete abutments. Ice had already formed on some of them. The autumnal equinox had come and gone, and winter hovered just over the border in Canada, waiting to pounce on Chicago with its annual icy fury.
“Dead? What do you mean, you want your stepfather dead? What’re you planning to do, shoot him?” Brenda, his wife of a few months, slouched on the sofa sipping a diet Coke.
“I’m just saying…”
“You’re just saying…what, Bobby? I know Leo is no treat, but he’s your stepdad…why would you want him dead?”
“Leo is so not my stepfather. He married my mother. She died. Now he’s married to Lucille and I’m out.”
“You said he adopted you after your mom died.”
“Yeah, well dream on. At her funeral he comes up to me and he goes, ‘That’s it, kid, you’re on your own.’ So, that’s the deal on the adoption thing. We’re in for nada, zilch.”
“Look, you don’t know. He gave you a job, didn’t he, and you still have your mother’s stock in the company, right?”
Bobby turned and walked to the wall and flipped on the recessed lighting. He paused to inspect the Mondrian original on the wall. He hated that painting, just a bunch of colored squares and lines. He’d wanted to buy a Stephen Holland painting of Brett Favre, Super Bowl XXXI. But Brenda had taken an art appreciation course at night and had overruled him,
“Don’t you?” she repeated.
“The job is bogus, Brenda, I sit at a desk in accounting and count paper clips. Some days I go to lunch and don’t come back and it’s, like, nobody even notices.”
“Jeeze, Bobby, are you bragging or complaining?”
“You don’t understand, Brenda. I mean, I should be a vice president or something, you know. Now, if Leo goes through with the IPO, if he takes the company public, I’m toast. I work there because he says so. He exercises all his stock options, collects all that cash and retires, and who’ll want me then?”
Leo Painter manipulated their lives like a marionette master. Once, Brenda thought, he cared for them in his own peculiar way, but now he seemed to enjoy watching them fail; well, watching Bobby fail. Somewhere between Leo’s second wife, Bobby’s mother, and wife number three—that would be Lucille—he had suffered the latest in his series of cardiac accidents and had turned from being distant but tolerable to personal and nasty.
“Maybe he’ll have another heart attack in Africa and you’ll get your wish,” she said, “But I don’t see how that works for you. You should want him alive. You should be in there making nice to him, so even if he does sell or whatever, you’ll have something.”
Brenda studied her husband as he wandered aimlessly around their apartment. He had been an only child who’d been coddled by an overprotective mother, so that he’d achieved manhood without a clue about what it meant to be a responsible adult. She’d found his boyishness attractive in the beginning, that and his money—especially the money—and their life together had been an endless party. Then his mother died, and all that came to a dead stop. No allowance, no free rein. Leo gave him a job as much to get him out of his hair as a sign of paternal felicity. Bobby was a man-boy. She wondered if he would ever grow up.
“He hates me, Brenda.” His voice had taken on the whining quality she’d come to detest. “He’ll just laugh me out the door. And listen, if he goes, you can kiss your Michigan Avenue boutiques goodbye, too. Never mind me and not having a job; how about you? Can you get a job? What are you good at, babe, besides maxing out our VISA card? Are you ready to go back to pole dancing? Besides, Lucille would get it all anyway.”
She nodded. She’d thought of that, and the idea that the money could really dry up, however remote or incomprehensible, scared her. She’d been poor before and knew what she would face. She did not like it. The idea of even relative poverty coalesced and condensed into something akin to a black hole in her mind. Fall into that and…no way was she going back to dancing as Brenda Starr—“yeah, like in the funny papers,” she’d told her friends, though few of them had ever heard of the comic strip, its intrepid gal reporter and her eye-patched mystery man, much less read it.
She’d danced as near to naked as the Chicago vice squad allowed. Every night, except Mondays when she had a night off, she performed for a legion of grubby, groping, intoxicated strangers. All that ended, though, when she’d managed to snare Robert Scott Griswold, presumptive heir to the Earth Global fortune, and acquired this soft berth on the Near North Side. Brenda no longer worked for a living; she shopped.
There’d been talk at first, of course, and she had that private detective Leo hired to handle, and the other things, but she’d done it. No, whatever this new wrinkle was, there had to be a way out. Brenda Starski was not going back to that life if she could help it.
“You still didn’t answer me. What about your stock?”
“I sold it to Travis Parizzi.”
“You did what?”
“Hey, the way you go through money, what was I supposed to do?”
Brenda groaned. “You’re an idiot.” Bobby, she realized, had the brains of a guppy.
“Hey, I have an option to buy it back at 10 percent over the sale price. It’s mine
, sort of, like collateral on a loan, so it’s safe and all. He gets to use the stock for stuff, and we get money.”
“You mean, if you can raise the scratch to actually buy it back. How long is that option good for? Why did he want your stock, anyway?”
“He said he wanted to secure a voting position if the time came, or something. The option’s good for, like, a year…” Bobby didn’t sound so sure.
Brenda sighed. Of course he could buy it back, only he wouldn’t. If he ever got the money together, he’d find some other way to spend it.
“That is so totally lame, Bobby. How much is left?” Bobby shrugged and shook his head. Not much, she guessed. Well, at least now she knew where the Maserati and the trip to Europe had come from.
“Maybe something could happen to both of them, Leo and Lucille, I mean…you know, like an accident or something. Isn’t Africa, like, dangerous to drive in and stuff?”
Brenda’s knowledge of the Dark Continent derived almost entirely from movies and the cartoons she’d watched as a child. Black men with bones in their noses and brandishing spears, jumping up and down and dancing—the Watusi, something like that. And there were elephants and tigers, too. Was that right? Her friend Desiree said there were no tigers in Africa. She couldn’t remember where Desiree said they came from, but that couldn’t be right. Her father had taken her to the circus as a child and the big cat tamer had lions and tigers. Of course they must come from the same place. Bobby wheeled around the coffee table and grabbed a handful of trail mix from a bowl in its center and stuffed it into his mouth.
“Lucille and Leo are hardly speaking to each other. She’s probably as ticked about the public offering as me. The board forced it on him, I don’t know why, but he’s hot to go with it, anyway. Her pre-nup assumed all of Leo’s net worth was in a privately held company. If he takes it public, he can bury 85 percent of it in paper with no assessable value, and then dump her. Maybe she’ll kill him. That would solve all our problems.”
“You think?” Brenda frowned in concentration. “How?”
“It’s complicated,” he said.
“Tell me anyway. I’m not as stupid as some people think.” Brenda’s education had been limited to eight grades of formal schooling before she’d run away from a sexually abusive stepfather. It had taken three attempts to leave before her parents gave up trying to find her. As part of her newly found freedom, she’d majored in personal survival. In her twenty-one years of making it on her own she’d learned to stay ahead of the curve. A return to exotic dancing was definitely not on her radar screen. Her husband flopped down on the sofa next to her and put his head in her lap.
“I don’t know, Brenda. There’s a will I guess, and then if the IPO goes through, whatever holding anybody has is either converted to preferred stock or maybe can be turned into common, but the percentage you hold is, like, diluted by the stock held by the new buyers. It’s something like that. I don’t know. He told me, but I couldn’t get it straight.”
“Who?”
“Travis Parizzi, I just told you.”
“Maybe you’re going to inherit. He can’t last forever. What’s in his will?”
“No clue. I’m pretty sure I’m not.”
“Because…?”
“Because he said I’m on my own at the funeral and all.”
“If Lucille did it and got caught, wouldn’t she go to jail, and then you’d get a whole lot of money, right?”
“For Christ sake, Brenda, how many times I gotta tell you? We’re out of it. Besides Lucille isn’t about to do anything. She’s more likely to file for divorce before the papers are signed. You know, like a quickie divorce in Las Vegas or some place, and cash out before the money gets lost in one of Leo’s shell games. We have to do something, Brenda, and soon.”
“Do? Do what, Bobby. You want me to ask Frankie to get us a hit man? How’s that going to work?”
He nuzzled her belly and took her hand. She sighed. That was his answer to all his troubles. What is it with men anyway? You have a problem; you work on it. Bobby never faced a problem in his life. They call women ditzes. Like, they should meet Bobby Griswold. His idea of how to solve a problem was to blot it out with booze and sex and let someone else figure it out. Since his mom died, that job had fallen to her. She looked at his boyish face and sighed again. She disliked doing what he wanted but, hey, where else was she going to get a gig like this?
CHAPTER 4
Leo Painter stared at the same slate gray lake. His view, however, was considerably better than that from the Griswolds’ Oak Street Beach apartment. His office was high in the Willis Tower. He liked it better when it was the Sears Tower. Sears said Chicago. Who in the hell was Willis anyway? On a clear day, Leo could see across the lake all the way to the Michigan shore or south to the Indiana dunes. The view was spectacular. For what he paid for the space, it ought to be.
Travis Parizzi sat on the edge of an expensive leather chair, briefcase open in his lap. He shuffled the papers it contained and sorted them into the order he wished to deal with them. Travis had learned years ago that Leo liked his sessions with his COO to be quick, to the point, and no nonsense. Travis looked up, waiting for Leo’s signal to begin. This morning, it seemed, Leo was in no hurry. Finally he turned from the window.
“We’re set for Africa?” he asked.
“Yes, I think so. Has Mrs. Painter made up her mind if she’s going?” There had been a debate about Leo’s wife being included in the trip. Somehow she’d discovered the company would be going public and had thrown a hissy-fit. She’d threatened to dump Leo on the spot. He promised to renegotiate her pre-nup, but Travis doubted it would happen. Ethical behavior and fairness were never part of Leo’s makeup as far as Travis could determine. If they were, Leo would still be running errands for Harry Reilly, his first wife’s father. But his shrewd sense of mining, a growing emphasis on their newly developing oil business, and his inability to feel guilty about anything had culminated in the ouster of the old man, a quick divorce from the daughter, and transformation of tiny Reilly Petroleum to Earth Global, now the third largest oil, gas, and mining company in the country. Its real-estate department alone rivaled Donald Trump’s. Or at least Leo believed so. Travis had his doubts.
“No, she decided to take a pass on this one. She’s going to fly to Des Moines and visit her sister.”
Leo Painter was not political, just eager to have a voice in the regulatory process and access to public lands, if and when it seemed they might become available for exploitation. So, he made generous political contributions to both parties and at every level. He’d learned early on that state legislators often had as much influence in the areas in which he held an interest as their better known federal counterparts, and their patronage was considerably cheaper to acquire. Charities, on the other hand, had less to do with altruism than with providing access to people and events that could prove useful in the future. Travis admired Leo who, he decided, was Hamiltonian in his belief that money, power, and prestige drove people and nations to achieve greatness. Had he known him better, he might have been surprised at how off the mark he was in this estimation.
The State Department, at the request of the President, asked Leo to travel to Botswana to consult on the extraction of methane and any other natural resources that lay beneath Botswana’s soil. It wasn’t that Botswana had a shortage of willing companies eager to exploit its resources, but the State Department desired a more substantial hegemony in the area. Leo had agreed, less out of a spirit of expanding capitalism in Africa than to forward his ambition to assume an interest, a controlling interest preferably, in a nickel mine recently acquired by the Germans. He thought if he spread around some cash, twisted a few arms, and applied the right sort of hard-to-come by information judiciously, he might be able to convince certain people to see it his way.
But that wasn’t the big prize. Securing or, worst case, obtaining an exclusive U.S. license for ActiVox could net the company billions and effec
tively put all of his competition out of business. A dozen other mining conglomerates had lost out in the bidding war for the process previously but would be back eager to secure a license as well. Travis knew about Leo’s intentions even though he’d not been told directly. A COO had a need to know, even if his boss didn’t care to share.
Leo finally sat and turned to him. “Tell me who finally agreed to go.”
He was not cooperating with Travis’ agenda this morning, and Travis had to remove a sheet of paper from the bottom of the stack. “You, me, Rose Hayward from the PR department, Henry Farrah, your stepson and his wife—”
“He’s not my stepson. He is an idiot. I give him a job and he won’t take direction. Half the time he leaves at noon. He thinks no one notices. If it weren’t for my promise to his late mother, he’d be on the street with his paltry trust fund.”
Leo had managed three wives and probably myriad lovers. The drill, however, meant Travis feigned ignorance of any and all, true or false—Reilly’s daughter, Margaret Griswold, who had died and left Leo a widower and with the responsibility for a putative stepson and Lucille. They were all anyone dared acknowledge. Travis wondered sometimes about Leo Painter and what about him so intimidated his employees. But then, he guessed he already knew.
He completed the list, which included core staffers from the engineering and research department. The party had to be kept to twelve to match the company’s Gulfstream V seating configuration.
Leo turned toward the window again. “You’re going to have to drop one of the engineers. I need a place for a man named Greshenko, Yuri Greshenko.” Travis lifted an eyebrow. “He’s…ah, let’s just say he’s a consultant. I contracted for his services last week.” Travis lifted the other eyebrow. Leo spun around and gestured dismissively. “I didn’t tell you about him sooner because a certain amount of, shall we say, discretion is required here.”
Travis didn’t like this. Whenever Leo said he needed discretion, things usually moved into areas that ultimately required the combined skills of the company’s legal department and possibly another handful of private operatives to straighten out.
