47

Eduardo had a private screening room just off his office in the penthouse of the Barker’s Hill Enterprises Group Headquarters. When Angelo Partanna told him the film was your-eyes-only stuff, Eduardo told the office boy who usually ran the machine to go and get a cup of coffee and he asked his personal secretary, Arrigo Garrone, to run it.

He enjoyed the film. They sat together in the screening room discussing it afterward.

“You mean that on top of this crazy movie, Farts Esposito has a tape on which Mallon actually puts out the contract on Charley?” Eduardo said incredulously.

“Absolutely.”

“This is unbelievable. The Mallon kid gets released down there this morning. The girl refused to bring charges and she and her mother went back to Texas, et cetera, et cetera,” Eduardo marveled.

“He’ll think Gennaro spread his money around and got instant results.”

“This guy has to be the first nine-year-old who ever ran for mayor. Did you tell Charley?”

“Charley has his hands full with his engagement party coming up.”

“This is terrific work you did here. Leave the movie with me, and when the audio track comes in from Gennaro, send it over, straight to my apartment.”

The following Tuesday afternoon, at the cocktail hour, George F. Mallon arrived at Eduardo’s mansion apartment and was shown into the intimate study on the third floor, which was the sixty-first floor of the building. Mallon had got off the elevator at the fifty-eighth floor and Eduardo’s houseman led him into a second elevator, which took him to the most elegant room Mallon had ever seen.

Flowers, arranged in the nine parts of the Rikka style (Muromachi, fifteenth century) by an ikebana master, dominated the room at center and in its four corners. Covering almost the entire east wall was the James Richard Blake portrait of a perfect gardenia. The furniture was made of gleaming turned silver and glass, with deep-emerald upholstery. The interior window frames were made of silver. The elaborate and wholly compelling rug in front of the large emerald and silver sofa had been woven into an enlarged replica of a sketch made by a ninth-century Chinese emperor while shaving. From somewhere a tape machine was delivering exalting sounds of a great fiddler playing Tchaikovsky before a sonorous orchestra. Reflexively, Mallon glanced at his watch to see whether time had stopped.

Edward Price was seated on the large sofa. He rose to greet his guest. Mallon had heard of Edward Price as a great financier, a patron of the arts, and as a generous contributor to the evangelical church, which was not only Mallon’s own passion but his principal source of income. He had no idea why Edward Price had invited him here, but, overcome with curiosity, he had come with some eagerness.

“How good of you to come, Mr. Mallon,” Edward Price said. “The Most Reverend John Jackson has often spoken of your abiding interest in the American television church.”

“That is very kind, Mr. Price, I am sure. Dr. Francis Winikus of the Southeastern Evangelical Movement, who is such a friend of the White House, has been equally praising of you.”

“He’s a great man. Please sit down here, Mr. Mallon.”

Seating himself, Mallon said, “This is a magnificent room. May I ask who decorated it?”

“A firm called Price-Hoover. Very talented young people.”

“It is an extreme pleasure, but also something of a mystery, to be invited here.”

“I have something I want to show you.”

The two men were seated side by side, facing the Blake painting on the east wall. “Would you like a drink?” Eduardo asked his guest. “An RC Cola? A Dr. Pepper?”

“No, thank you. The fact is, I cannot contain my curiosity.”

Eduardo pressed a button on the end table. The Blake portrait of the perfect gardenia lifted itself into the ceiling exposing a motion picture screen. The window curtains drew themselves. The lights were dimmed. A moving picture image of George F. Mallon in fullest Eastmancolor came on the screen and began to talk to them. By the time it was over, Mallon’s face had become dead white. His mouth moved but he made no sounds. There was a light foam at the corners of his mouth.

Edward Price said, “And that’s not all.” He turned on a tape recorder, which was also built into the table at his end of the sofa, and they heard George F. Mallon’s voice ordering the murder of Charley Partanna.

“What are you going to do with that?” G.F. managed to say, although his voice hardly sounded like his own voice.

“Both the film and the audio tape are going into my deepest vault, Mr. Mallon,” Eduardo said.

“You are going to blackmail me.”

“Not unless that becomes absolutely necessary.”

“What are you going to do, Mr. Price?”

Eduardo smiled on him benevolently. “My dear Mr. Mallon,” he said. “You have only to do as you are told and this information will never leave my vault. I am going to run you for the United States Senate and—who knows?—perhaps someday for an even higher office.”