“I hope Putilov drops daisy cutters on the UN.”
—President J. T. Tower
Dark of night on the top floor of J. T. Tower’s needle-thin skyscraper in New York City. At 59th Street and 2nd Avenue, one hundred stories up, the penthouse offered its owner, James T. Tower, also President of the United States, a 360-degree view of New York City. He was presently facing south and staring out over Midtown, the Village, Wall Street, even the new Freedom Tower—formerly the World Trade Center—as well as the tugs, barges and ferries plying New York Harbor. He could even discern the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island in the dim distance. Like the boats and buildings, they too were brilliantly illuminated.
“Now you can’t tell me this apartment doesn’t have the best view in the whole goddamn world,” Brenda Tower, J. T.’s older sister, said.
President Tower stared at her a long moment, then grunted:
“Jules Meredith, my eternal journalistic naysayer, probably can.”
“Fuck Jules Meredith,” his sister said.
Brenda Tower was seated in an overstuffed blond leather armchair directly across from her brother, who was slumped at the end of a matching couch. On her right was a circular polished oak end table upon which sat a liter bottle of Rémy 100-year-old Napoléon cognac, a square cut-glass ash-tray and a large, hammered-silver cigarette holder—bearing the initials B. C. in black gothic type—containing two packs of Gauloises Blues. Alongside it was a matching initialed sterling-silver lighter. The woman was drinking brandy and smoking. She was always drinking brandy and smoking.
Decked out in a slinky black silk cocktail dress and ebony heels, she wore no jewelry. Slender of build, her thick shoulder-length hair was colored a tasteful lemon blond. Some of the most discreet, distinguished and exorbitantly expensive cosmetic surgeons on earth had artfully sculpted her exquisitely shaped facial features, most notably her high angular cheekbones. She consequently appeared at least fifteen years younger than her sixty-six years. Highly photogenic, she was routinely referred to by the fashion magazines as “a timeless beauty” and continually commented on her “patrician elegance.” Most people, upon meeting her, confirmed that assessment.
Unless, of course, they looked into her eyes.
Granite-hard and glacier-cold, they discouraged intimacy, and she had few, if any, friends outside of her brother. Nor were the eyes misleading. Bitterly cynical, innately misanthropic, she neither sought nor wanted people’s friendship; she mocked their opinions and cruelly spurned all but the most intrepid of lovers. Men often mistook her habitual disdain for all things male as presumptive evidence of lesbianism. In truth, Brenda Tower scorned most forms of physical and emotional contact regardless of gender.
“Jules Meredith says my needle towers are some kind of international criminal conspiracy,” her brother said.
“Since when do you care what some hack reporter says?” Brenda asked with an indifferent shrug.
“That’s what John D. Rockefeller said about Ida Tarbell, the so-called hack reporter whose History of the Standard Oil Company brought his business empire down around his ears.”
“Jules Meredith isn’t Ida Tarbell.”
“Really?” Tower said. “Listen to what she wrote on the New York Times op-ed page this morning:”
* * *
Tower’s last real estate development coup, which he had finalized just before his ascension to the U.S. presidency, was his erection of a half dozen one-hundred-story New York City needle towers. Each of them is a mere forty-six feet on edge, which, given their heights of over one thousand feet, makes them inherently unstable. These vertiginous, hideously dangerous eyesores are nothing more than another ugly example of J. T. Tower once again erecting monuments to his greed and hubris, a further flaunting of his ill-gotten riches and monstrous megalomania.
He calls these six eyesores “J. T.’s Towers of Power.” He should have called them “Edifices of Avarice,” since his company demands $40 million apiece for the condos, $150 million for the penthouses. Most purchases are made in cash, and virtually all of their purchasers buy them anonymously through shell companies. ISIS, al Qaeda, the New United Islamist Front and the Sinaloa drug cartels could be buying Tower’s condos, and no one would know. Paying that much untraceable clandestine cash for real estate certainly suggests criminal activity. (Some would say such transactions are “presumptive evidence of criminal activity.”) Otherwise why would his purchasers hide their identities and the source of their questionable currency? Tower’s customers are truly members of that disreputable elite that Theodore Roosevelt called “the criminal rich” and the “malefactors of great wealth.”
The people who buy Tower’s condos and penthouses don’t love New York City. They don’t even live in it. They’re just parking their foul-smelling lucre in J. T.’s odious abodes, so they can visit their money once every year or two and look down their noses at the rest of the city’s inhabitants.
* * *
“Fuck her and the laptop she wrote that shit on,” Brenda said. “She’s just jealous she doesn’t have a view like this.”
“Times are changing, sis,” J. T. said. “The world’s metamorphosing all around us, and the ground is shifting under our feet. The country’s madder than hornet-stung harpies at people like us. She could beat us.”
“Are you saying that the UN’s Anti-Inequality Initiative has a chance?” Brenda asked her brother.
“A better chance than it had a year ago,” Tower said. “The Senate’s Democratic majority is also pushing hard for the UN Anti-Inequality Resolution. They not only want to charge wealthy people like us with tax dodging, they want to expropriate half our offshore funds.”
“At least the UN bill only wants to take a third of our offshore funds,” Brenda said.
“You can’t blame its supporters,” Tower said. “It’s a good deal for them—even though it’s terrible for us.”
Sighing wearily, President Tower glanced out over the city and caught his window reflection: a tall man—nearly six feet, four inches—casually attired in a black leather western-cut sport jacket, matching cowboy boots and pale blue jeans. He slowly nodded his approval. He liked the Wild West look. He thought it suited him. Then, however, his eyes drifted over to his face, and he winced. Heavily lined and hard-used, the face stared back at him, empty of affect or expression, its gaze pitiless as the sun. He was staring at a face that felt nothing, that cared for nothing, a face that neither asked nor gave with eyes cold as the grave. The face and eyes bothered even him.
No wonder you and your sister are so close, he thought. You’re two of a kind—raised by the same heartless old man.
“I blame a lot of it on Jules Meredith,” Tower said. “You ask me, she’s a fucking Communist.”
“And if she and the UN have their way,” Brenda agreed, “Marx would finally win.”
“It could happen,” Tower conceded. “It’s very hard for legislators to reject the will of their constituents.”
“Then why don’t you seem more concerned?” Brenda asked.
“Putilov says he’s got something in the works,” Tower said. “It’s so hush-hush he won’t tell me about it. He says it’s because you and I need ‘plausible deniability.’ He also warned us not to go to that UN conference.”
“Oh shit,” Brenda said. “This could get ugly fast. Remember how Putilov consolidated his dictatorship?”
“Oh, yeah,” Tower said.
“He blew up five Russian apartment complexes,” Brenda said, “killing and injuring over thirteen hundred people. Blaming it on Chechen separatists, he declared martial law, invaded Chechnya and became Russia’s dictator for life.”
“Sheer fucking balls,” Tower said, nodding appreciatively.
“Jimmy, it sounds like Putilov’s going to hurt some people at the UN.”
“Knowing Putilov,” Tower said, “a lot of people will get hurt very bad.”
“Very, very, very bad,” his sister said. “And that doesn’t bother you?”
“You mean because a bunch of pasty-faced, one-world, peace-creep assholes might get hurt,” Tower asked, “I’m supposed to fucking care? Are you nuts? I hope Putilov drops daisy cutters on those UN cocksuckers.”