An Imprint of Richard Altschuler & Associates, Inc.
The Last Resort. Copyright © 2012 by Laurence Geller. For information contact the publisher, Richard Altschuler & Associates, Inc., at 100 West 57th Street, New York, New York 10019, (212) 397-7233, or richard.altschuler@gmail.com.
This e-Book was originally published in hardcover format by Chaucer Press Books / Richard Altschuler & Associates, Inc.
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-884092-31-2
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-884092-84-8
Hardcover Library of Congress Control Number: 2012906377. CIP data for this book are available from the Library of Congress.
Chaucer Press Books is an imprint of
Richard Altschuler & Associates, Inc.
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To
Ana, Massimo, Naomi, Gemma, Gigi, Raffaello, Isla
You are my tomorrow
WHERE NO COUNSEL IS, THE PEOPLE FALL, BUT IN
THE MULTITUDE OF COUNSELORS THERE IS SAFETY
Proverbs X1/14
Mossad’s guiding ideology
St. Paul de Vence
The Audley Resort, like a French Valhalla, looks down at the village of St. Paul de Vence and the Riviera coastline from its aerie in the hills of the Côte d’Azur. The village, once summer playground to Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and James Baldwin, still serves as an attraction for rich tourists and famous artists. But the very rich and the very famous go to the Audley—if they can get a reservation.
To call the Resort a luxury hotel is to minimize it. Instead of individual bedrooms, guests are welcomed into a two-bedroom villa, totally secluded from its neighbors. There they will find hand-woven silk contemporary Tufenkian rugs and hand-crafted Grace Leo furnishings atop African hardwood floors; 3-D TVs, an endless stream of movies, iPod docking stations, Bose sound systems hidden in electrically opened recesses, and wireless high-speed Internet lend technology to each villa; and 600-plus thread-count pale yellow and cream striped Frette linens add comfort and style to each suite’s subtle blend of modern and Art Deco design. Hiroshige prints or Jasper Johns watercolors and one of three editions of Jim Dine bronzes, cast uniquely for the Resort, stand in the reception area for each villa; and a black-bottomed infinity pool, sparkling like a field of diamonds in the Mediterranean sunshine, are the finishing touches. Absolute discretion and privacy are assured to all guests, and a personal butler attends to their every self-indulgence. Yet, should they choose to rouse themselves, they have the choice of a spa with wellness and beauty treatment centers cantilevered into tree-covered hills; a Jack Nicklaus-designed championship golf course; a Michelin three-star restaurant, under the direction of much acclaimed Chef Jorge Peres; or—for those who combine work with play—a conference center carpeted in hand-sewn lush Wilton, and cherry-paneled boardrooms featuring state-of-the-art telecommunications, touchscreens and leading-edge technology.
The Resort is surrounded by “Les Residences,” luxury homes set in at least an acre of landscaped and wooded property, often used as a summer getaway for those who can afford the minimum price of Euros 10 million—and for an additional Euros 10,000 per day they can rent Elite, the 110-foot Azimuth luxury yacht moored at the Resort’s marina, set fifty yards from the Audley’s beach club, bar and restaurant. It is said that Jordan’s King Abdullah owns one of the houses, and the movie stars Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt another, though management discretion makes such rumors unverifiable.
The Audley Resort was the inspiration of Rolfe Ritter, founder and former chief executive of Kestrel Hotels, who bought the dormant Audley Hotels Group in 1993 and, less than a decade later, saved himself from the very brink of personal and financial disaster by selling both the Kestrel and Audley chains to the multinational conglomerate EUF. As EUF’s deputy chairman, the Dutch-born Ritter persuaded his boss to let him realize his long, meticulously planned dream to create sister resorts by appealing to his vanity—“our shareholders will see you’ve built the very best in the world on land you already own”—one on the Riviera, the other on the coast of Southern California. The Audley Resort, St. Paul de Vence, was completed in 2005. One year later, its twin sister, the Audley Resort, San Diego Cliffs, opened to fanfare usually reserved for a Frank Gehry museum, and was quickly booked up a year in advance.
Ritter always selected his general managers carefully. For the Audley Resort, St. Paul de Vence, he had taken special care in anointing Bertrand Le Roi, GM of his Kestrel Hotel at Hyde Park Corner in London. The multilingual, diminutive, balding, rotund, impeccably dressed Le Roi had moved back to his native France with the aplomb and grace of a latter day Maurice Chevalier, becoming a minor celebrity among the most powerful people in the world.
*
“Merde!” screamed Le Roi in the privacy of his office. And again, “Merde!”
His assistant GM, Raymond Pelletier, alarmed by the shouts, rushed into the office. Le Roi rarely swore; only a disaster could have caused the outburst.
Le Roi stood transfixed by what he was watching on his monitor. The back of his neck was bright red; sweat ran down his cheeks.
“Sir …” Pelletier began.
“Look!” Without turning, Le Roi pointed at the screen. Pelletier moved closer. It took him a moment to recognize the Presidential Suite, another to make out the unmistakable features of Prince Jamail Al Saif, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Defense, and a horrendous third moment to realize the prince’s guests were two pre-pubescent boys, and that what he was doing with them was unspeakable.
“We shouldn’t be watching,” Pelletier said when he had breath enough to talk. “The closed circuit isn’t intended to intrude on our guests’ privacy.”
“Closed circuit?” Le Roi wheeled, apoplectic. “It’s on the Internet, you idiot!”
“Oh, mon Dieu!” Indeed, Le Roi was staring at his computer screen, not at the closed-circuit monitor. Pelletier grasped the implications immediately. “The Resort. It’s been humiliated. Defiled. No one will stay in that suite again.”
Le Roi sighed noisily, and drew in a deep breath. Finally he said, “It is far more of a problem than a single suite. Our reputation for discretion, privacy and security is shattered. Our regular guests will scatter like leaves in the wind, never to return. Travel agents will shun us, the media will condemn us, no self-respecting guest will book us and our competitors will rejoice at our demise. Our Resort will never recover. We might as well shut the doors; we’re finished, completely finished. I will be known as the clown that let this happen. I am finished! Merde! Merde! Merde!”
Mesmerized, Bertrand Le Roi watched messages scroll across the screen below the action: HE IGNORED OUR WARNING.
Le Roi’s voice was shaky, his demeanor stricken. “That suite has the highest security. The prince’s own security detail stand guard over it twenty-four hours a day. His people inspect every detail many times during the day. How in God’s name did anyone get those cameras inside it?”
The two men looked at each other. Le Roi answered his own question. “Impossible,” he whispered. “It’s completely impossible.”
Bali
In January, a fire, cause unknown, swept through the four-star Bali Oasis Resort on the Nusa Dua Peninsula, sending its panicked guests to the haven of the civic center in the nearby town of Denpasar. The following month, the five-star Putri Palace and the Sheraton Nusa Dua were also set ablaze. Clearly the fires were not coincidental, though the police could find no incendiary device to explain any of them. The American State Department suspected terrorists; Balinese officials blamed rivals in Jakarta. The Indonesian government replied that the Balinese hotel owners themselves had set the fires to claim the insurance money. The frightened hotel community, reacting with understandable panic, sent out confusing P.R. press releases that comforted no one.
Whoever the culprit, it looked like someone was out to destroy every leading hotel on Nusa Dua, a suspicion confirmed when, in early April, a massive explosion leveled one wing of the five-star Nusa Cliff Hotel, killing twenty-seven guests and thirty-four employees unlucky enough to be inside that part of the property at midday.
“Why not us?” wondered Sammi Chalabi, general manager of the Kestrel Resort, the crown jewel of all the hotels on the Peninsula. “We’re clearly the most prominent property in Nusa Dua. Yet we’ve been untouched.”
He was right about the Resort’s prominence. Designed by the renowned Japanese architect Toshio Toshiro, who had been inspired by the gracious Balinese water palaces of the past, the Kestrel meandered over forty acres of winding rivers, waterfalls, koi-filled pools, and tropical gardens that hosted clouds of vividly- colored butterflies, which hovered above the flowers like pieces in an ever-changing kaleidoscope. Guests stayed in two-story bedroom wings and private villas strewn about the property, dined in one of four restaurants, and got married—for the Resort had quickly become the favorite honeymoon destination for Japan’s upper classes—in one of two glittering wedding chapels set on meticulously landscaped and manicured remote promontories on the outskirts of the property. The Resort’s ballroom, with its Dale Chihuly glass ceiling, could accommodate up to 1,500 guests for spectacular ceremonial dinners, making it the largest on the Nusa Dua Peninsula.
Rolfe Ritter had first spotted Chalabi working in the sales department at the Kestrel in Paris. Impressed, he had put the young Lebanese into the Kestrel Star Track advancement program; the Bali post followed after his rapid progression through a series of increasingly important assignments in the company’s hotels, putting his fluency in six languages to good use. Chalabi, not yet forty, slim and elegant to a point of parody, had earned the admiration of his competitors, who elected him president of the Balinese Hotel Association. He felt it his responsibility to find the attackers—and to quiet their natural suspicions when the Kestrel remained unscathed. To his growing frustration, every avenue of investigation had led to a dead end.
Perhaps the Kestrel’s turn had simply not yet come, Chalabi mused. All had been calm since the Nusa Cliff explosion, but still … He entered Conference Room A where the Crisis Committee had assembled, and took his place at the head of the table.
“Reports?” he inquired.
Günthe Kutsche, the Resort’s chief of security, was the first to speak. “We’ve quadrupled our manpower, instituted full property inspections, checked the backgrounds of all the nearly one thousand full-time and part-time staff members, begun car checks at all entrances, reviewed and double-checked the references of all new employees who have joined us in the past six months. Nothing suspicious to report.”
“Same for my departments,” added Robin Broadbent, head of the food and beverage division.
“And mine,” said Hank Merritt, the Texan who commanded accounting and controls.
“What about you?” Chalabi asked Bill Petrie, the dour grey-haired Australian who ran the engineering department as if it were a nuclear submarine and sported a ’60s-style military crewcut.
Petrie bristled. “Damn it, Sammi, if there was a problem, you’d have heard about it!”
Joan Chu, the Resort’s unflappable rooms division manager, held up her hand, then quickly withdrew it.
“You were going to say …?” Chalabi asked.
“Nothing. Just a feeling, an instinct.”
The Chinese woman was too reticent by half, Chalabi thought. “In the absence of evidence, feelings and instincts are all we have to go on. Don’t be shy, Joan. Tell the group.”
“It’s the Pakistanis, Mr. Chalabi. We have them staying with us all the time, so I generally wouldn’t have noticed them, but I happened to be at the desk when they came in yesterday, and they didn’t make reservations at any of the restaurants.”
Chalabi raised his eyebrows. The Kestrel’s internationally acclaimed restaurants were unsurpassed on the Peninsula. There were no eateries nearly as good within miles of the Resort. “How many were they?”
“Four. Two couples. And another strange thing: Neither of the women made appointments at the spa. Usually that’s the first thing they do. It was odd enough for me to look up their records. Both couples had been guests here on three occasions already this year.”
“When?” Chalabi asked.
“January, February and April.”
“How long are they staying?” the general manager asked, a tremor in his voice.
“Four days. But they didn’t seem to have much luggage. I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything, but …”
If an alarm had gone off in the room, Sammi Chalabi could not have been more alert. He turned to his technology manager. “It could be a coincidence but it’s the same months as the bombings. Pull up their information quickly, Gusti. Let’s have a look at it.”
The young Balinese I.T. expert switched on the computer in front of him and began typing. He stopped. Typed again. Stopped. “Strange,” he muttered.
Chalabi moved to his side. “What is it?”
“It can’t be!” The young man anguished.
“What can’t be?”
“The data’s disappeared.”
“Impossible! What about the backup files?”
Gusti swung around slowly to face his boss. “That’s just it, Mr. Chalabi. They’ve disappeared as well. All of the guest information for the past two weeks has just vanished, evaporated, gone. Every file for every guest in the hotel has been systematically and completely erased. The server’s been wiped clean.”
Silence paralyzed the room, as the stunned team members looked at each other.
“A disaster!” Joan Chu shouted, all reticence gone. “That means we’ve no idea who’s in the hotel or where they’re staying. No bills, no check-in or check-out dates, no credit card information, no accounts receivable, guest preference records, no security logs. Nothing.”
“Pakistanis! Why in God’s name didn’t you say something to me before?” Chalabi seethed, his breathing labored. “I suppose we’ll never find out who the mysterious foursome are.”
“What about employee records? Reservation requests, Internet booking records, sales department data?” Kutsche asked. “We may be able to find out who made their reservations and when.”
The young Balinese’s fingers flew over the keyboard. “Gone! It’s all gone.”
Kutsche muttered, “Unless we get very lucky, we’ll never find out who these people are. Even if we check with Customs and Immigration for the times Joan thinks they were here, I’ll bet a month’s pay they came in on false passports.”
Gusti said, “The hotel’s been damaged just as badly as if it was set on fire.”
“How long will it take to recreate the records?” Chalabi’s words came out with the speed of machine-gun fire.
Gusti turned back to his computer. “I don’t think it can be done.” He scratched his head. “No, it can’t be done.”
“What do you mean? Get the experts in. They can recreate anything from the server!”
“I’ve never seen anything like this, maybe it’s a virus. Whatever it is, it has gobbled up every file; every single file,” Gusti answered, his eyes fixed on the screen. “Everything’s disappeared. Completely gone. Forever.”
The general manager was close to tears. “What have we gotten ourselves into?” he moaned.
At that very moment, not four miles away, an explosion rocked the Regent Resort Nusa Dua, demolishing its convention center, killing forty-nine people and injuring over twice that amount.
Santa Monica
“Beth?”
“This is she.”
“Rolfe Ritter here, calling from New York.”
Beth Taylor’s hands trembled, whether out of anxiety or excitement, she could not tell. Maybe both. “Mr. Ritter! How can I help you?”
Rolfe was responsible for … well, her life, she reflected. It was he who provided her current job, general manager of the Kestrel Santa Monica; he who had faith in her when she had so little in herself; he who had inspired her still-increasing, albeit fragile, sense of self-worth.
“Only doctors can help,” he answered. Beth remembered hearing a rumor that Mrs. Ritter was sick. “No, I’m simply wondering how my ex-protégés are faring, and you’re on my list. Hotel running smoothly? Any problems with the new owners?”
“That’s very kind of you. I really haven’t had much to do with them. I suspect they’re more concerned with the Audleys than the Kestrels.” She could hear his intake of breath.
“The Kestrels are as important as the Audleys. Please don’t consider yourself a second-class citizen.”
“Oh, I don’t. Really. It’s just that …”
“Business good?” he interrupted.
“Close to capacity, 93 percent.”
“They won’t like ‘close.’”
“Well up over last year.”
“That’s because the former owner didn’t know the trade.”
She knew his self-deprecation masked enormous pride. Rolfe Ritter was unparalleled as the visionary and marketing-oriented taskmaster of the Audley, Kestrel, and Metropolitan chains, who only accepted excellence from himself and his team. Any response from her would be fatuous.
“How’s Mrs. Ritter?”
A pause. Uh-oh, she thought. Forbidden territory.
“Doing as well as could be expected,” he said at last. “Meanwhile, if you need advice, call me. The Kestrel Santa Monica still hosting the pre-awards dinner?”
“As always.” She tried to be friendly. “Any predictions on who’ll win the Oscars?”
“Not a clue.” His voice was cold. Mistake.
“Thanks for calling,” she said lamely.
“Keep up the good work. You know I’m fond of you, Beth. Do the company proud.”
“I will, sir.”
He had hung up.
*
Elizabeth Taylor’s parents named her after the movie star, so their child insisted that she never be called by her full name—she wanted to be compared to no one. Beth was fine, or Lizzie or Liz, just never Elizabeth. Nevertheless, the thirty-four-year-old woman had matured into a beauty in her own right. True, her figure was less full than the idol’s in her prime, the eyes not as luminous, her hair chestnut rather than black, but several of her male friends obviously preferred her looks to yesteryear’s goddess; and her women friends, judging their looks against hers, found themselves wanting.
California-born Beth was the daughter of an actor and actress who never rose beyond regional theater, but who found steady employment in two-character shows such as “The Gin Game,” “The Owl and the Pussycat,” and “Two for the Seesaw.” Their profession necessitated continuous changes of venue, and as Mr. Taylor joked, the itinerant couple knew the inside of every hotel between Wheeling and Walla Walla.
But they didn’t know Beth. Between rehearsals and performances, her parents had little time for her, and so attributed her sullenness and anger to the constant changes in schools, rather than to something more deep-seated. “She’ll grow out of it,” they assured themselves when sitters or the administrators of the dozen- plus schools she had briefly attended complained about Beth’s truancy, truculence, strange assortment of boyfriends, her hair—one day purple, another day green—her endlessly erratic behavior or her tantrums, which persisted long into adolescence.
Rolfe’s call brought up myriad memories: the time she tore a fourth-grade classmate’s hair from its roots, which was the first of three times she was expelled from different schools; the moment when, as a pre-adolescent, she took her first toke of a joint; the high of her first hit of cocaine and the pain of losing her virginity to the boy who supplied it; the cold of the streets in Milwaukee, where she had been deposited when she was old enough to be left at school; her pregnancy at eighteen; the long, lonely years of self- imposed estrangement from her parents; the birth of a daughter; the agony when the girl was torn from her arms by a social services do-gooder who gave the child up for adoption.
At least that had cleansed her. It had also soured her relationships with men—initially dating often but never consummating a relationship; always justifying her decision not to do it with reasons why her would-be lover was at fault; never acknowledging that the thought of making love repulsed her as, over time, her revulsion grew at the memory of her lovemaking sessions with her daughter’s father. As the years went by, dates became increasingly infrequent and their inevitable conclusions became more painful and acrimonious, as her spurned would-be lovers were left in confused frustration.
Beth had grown up dreaming of all the wonderful things that happened in the hotels her parents couldn’t afford to stay in, and, after a cross-country Greyhound Bus trip, she talked her way into a two-year course in tourism at Sacramento Community College, then to a job at the Kestrel Hotel in Union Square, San Francisco, as a front desk assistant. That Kestrel was Rolfe Ritter’s first triumph, the flagship of the line, so he stayed there whenever he came to San Francisco, despite ownership of the newer, more luxurious nearby Audley Hotel. Though married to a woman of matchless desirability, he was still struck by Beth’s grace and beauty, to say nothing of the ease with which she handled herself with the Kestrel’s patrons; and she became a protégé, like Le Roi and Chalabi. Ten years after they first met, Rolfe promoted her to general manager at the Kestrel Santa Monica, a dazzling centerpiece of the chain’s Southern Californian coastal properties, situated on the beach. At night, the Santa Monica pier, with its sparkling Ferris Wheel, provide a backdrop to Fantu, the “beautiful people’s” award-winning champagne and sushi restaurant, run by its eponymous celebrity chef who created the now-famous Caviar and Gold-Leaf Martini for the grand-opening celebration, and the location of many pre- and post-Oscar parties, where Beth previously attended to, among others, Elizabeth Taylor. Every time she walked through the lobby with its thirty-feet-high mummified palm trees filling its soaring atrium, or entertained at the rooftop poolside restaurant, she pinched herself to see if it was real; she really was the general manager of Santa Monica’s centerpiece hotel.
She shut out her past, learned her trade, rationalized that she sacrificed personal relationships for professional success, and every day prayed she wouldn’t be discovered as the fake she knew herself to be. At least Rolfe Ritter had been taken in, and she blessed him for it.
*
On the afternoon of his call, she was peremptorily summoned by Sheldon Lovell Jr., Kestrel’s latest general counsel. “The FBI wants to talk to you,” he told her, adding nothing but, “five o’clock. The Bob Hope Room. I’ll be there to protect the company.” Now she sat uncomfortably at Lovell’s side in the meeting room named after the comedian, facing two huge, well-muscled men in gray suits—Fafner and Fasolt, she mentally dubbed them, after the giants in her parents’ favorite opera, Richard Wagner’s “Das Rheingold”—awed despite herself. No one was smiling. What could she possibly have done wrong?
Fafner, the older of the behemoths, began. “Is it true, Miss Taylor, that Chiang Shui-kan is a guest at this hotel?”
Beth hesitated. The man had registered under an alias. “Answer truthfully,” Lovell instructed.
“Yes.” Beth’s heart raced.
“You know, of course, he’s the Vice President of the Republic of China, perhaps better known to you—incorrectly—as Taiwan?”
Where was this leading? “I was aware of that, yes. He checked in under the name of Wong Hong-ren. Important people commonly use pseudonyms when they stay at the Kestrel Santa Monica.”
“Do you know the purpose of his visit?”
“To spend time with his son who’s studying film-making at the University of Southern California.”
Fasolt looked up from his notes. “He stayed in the Douglas Fairbanks Suite?”
“Our best,” Beth said with a flash of pride, then caught herself. Fasolt had used the past tense.
“Strange, then, that you do not provide it with adequate security.”
Had something happened to Shui-kan? A knot of anxiety cramped Beth’s neck. “On the contrary. Besides his own agents, who occupied the suites on either side of his, cameras in the corridor and in the foyer of the suite, linked to our own security room, operate 24/7. If something untoward occurred, we’d have seen it.”
Fafner rose, put his fists on the table, and leaned toward Beth, breathing fire. “But something did occur. And you did not see it. Last night, the vice president’s face came in contact with a rare and potent poison, a particularly virulent variation of Dioxin. He’s now in critical condition at Cedars of Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. If he survives, and I stress the ‘if,’ he will be horribly scarred forever.”
Beth felt poisoned herself. She looked to Lovell for help, but he only put his hand on her arm and said nothing. “What do you mean, if he survives?” The silence that followed gave her time to think. “That’s dreadful! But we at the Kestrel couldn’t possibly have …”
Fafner interrupted in a voice so low Beth had to strain to hear it. “Miss Taylor, we found traces of the poison on the pillows on the bed Shui-kan slept in.”
Electricity traversed Beth’s spine like fire up a fuse. “Our pillows?”
“All four of them.”
“How did it get there?”
Fafner sat back with a grim smile. “That’s what my colleague and I are here to determine.”
“Then look at the surveillance tapes,” Beth cried. “Nobody could have slipped into that suite without being filmed.”
“Ah, Miss Taylor. That’s why you’re here. Your security tapes have disappeared.”
Beth began to shake. Lovell’s grip on her arm tightened.
Fafner was implacable. “Yes, disappeared. How did that happen, Miss Taylor? Please explain.”
Chapter 1
The second of “Rolfe’s Twins,” set on a cliff some twenty miles northeast of San Diego, had much in common with its sister in St. Paul de Vence. The size, facilities and amenities were almost identical, the décor Southern Californian but clearly inspired by its Mediterranean namesake. Here the two Tom Fazio courses boasted six oceanside fairways and greens between them, the Azimuth yacht was ten feet longer, the beach club featured caviar and sushi, and the award-winning, three-star restaurant ‘C’ was run by Jason Avington, the renowned British chef and TV personality, whom Ritter had persuaded to leave New York’s fashionable La Belle Reve Restaurant with promises of a free hand and a no-questions-asked construction budget.
The adjoining residences went for a minimum of $15 million (the most recent had been sold to a biotech oligarch for $41 million), but the attention to detail—everything from the way fresh rose petals were patterned on the made-up beds each morning to the height of the hibiscus plants in the lobby—reminded everyone of the Audley St. Paul de Vence who was lucky enough to have stayed there.
General Manager Matthew Dirksen, thirty-nine, Cornell trained, Rolfe Ritter-tutored, treated the place like a royal baby. His first high-end hotel general manager’s job had been at the 800-room Kestrel, on the Magnificent Mile, Chicago, a busy rooms factory with a tough and antagonistic union. It was here that Ritter spotted the lean, six-foot-two-inch, Indiana-born, high-school basketball star, and immediately saw his potential. He smoothed off his rough edges, advised him on the subtleties of dress, decorum and attention to detail, taught him to upsell and yield-manage his room rates, made him understand how to read the hotel’s balance sheet—and not only the profit and loss accounts—stiffened his backbone for the labor negotiations, and pronounced him ready for his next career step, the most prestigious job in Kestrel’s North American universe, at the Audley San Diego Cliffs.
The rough edges needed considerable smoothing. Matt’s mother, who had deified him, he later figured out, to make up for the loss of feeling for her husband, died when he was fourteen; and his father, an accountant in Chesterton, Indiana, had little to teach him beyond discipline and organization, both of which he reluctantly mastered. His height and natural athletic ability lead him naturally to excel at high school basketball. His father rarely attended games, and only when pressed by local peer pressure to see “an important one” would he grudgingly seat himself on the bleachers. Rarely venturing further than Chicago or Indianapolis as a teenager, Matt was self-taught in music and literature—his passions—and considered himself warm, where his father was cold, in relationships. He attracted many women, was attracted by some, but formed no lasting ties. Every serious relationship ended in tears. Maybe he couldn’t find anyone to match his mother. He’d wait, he justified to himself; the peripatetic world of hotels meant short tenures if he was to rise in the business, and as such a wife and growing family would be a hindrance. He never believed that he retained a bit of his father’s icy core, even when women themselves pointed it out to him.
Dirksen considered himself at the pinnacle of his profession; he’d come a long way, he reflected, from his first job as a busboy at Sand Creek Country Club in Chesterton.
To his amazement he had been selected by Ritter from seven shortlisted candidates for the post of general manager, and had overseen the Resort’s debut two years ago. Now, as he strolled the footpath that ran from the porte cochère to the summit of the cliff, he believed he had fulfilled the mission his mentor had laid out for him: create the best resort in North America and perhaps the world.
When the teenage Dirksen carried his first tray of dishes through the swinging door from the kitchen to the Sand Creek country club’s restaurant, he thought he had entered a world of luxury and opulence he could never have imagined. Now, twenty-five years later, he laughed at the memory. Luxury? The staff dining room at the Resort made Sand Creek’s restaurant look shabby. At Ritter’s instruction, he had traversed the globe visiting the top properties within the Audley brand, inspected any potential competitor’s resorts, spent time shadowing Le Roi in St. Paul de Vence and compiled a best practices list of everything, every detail, no matter how big or small, that he thought would make his property the very best. He had methodically and relentlessly implemented every item on the list and was always searching for more ideas to further set his Resort far above all others.
Deep inside, he understood he was no more than an actor on a stage. Matt knew where he had come from and would never forget it. He would never be rich enough or grand enough to stay at a property such as his Resort. He belonged in the staff dining room, not in Jason Avington’s gourmet restaurant.
His humility endeared him to the team he had carefully assembled to run the Resort. He would regularly eat with the property’s associates, chatting in Spanish with the maids and gardeners, knowing not only their names but also their children’s. No airs, no graces. Just doing his job as well as he expected them to do theirs. Matt Dirksen was always available to his staff, and he would often reach into his own pocket to help if circumstances didn’t fit the Resort’s policies. He had paid for more than one set of kids’ braces, as well as medical treatments and, on one occasion, the funeral of a Mexican laundry attendant’s teenage son, killed in a hit-and-run car accident.
He remembered himself still as the pimply teenager from Chesterton, and while his face had cleared and his clothes and manners were impeccable, he knew himself to be nothing more than a master of ceremonies, put at the Resort to please and entertain the blueblood guests and the newly rich who considered him another of their servants. He often repeated one of Rolfe Ritter’s adages—“Noveau riche is better than no riche at all.” The team at the hotel knew how he felt about his role as part of the team and revered him for his modesty, never considering the psychological underpinnings.
The sky, he reflected, looked as though God had only one color on His palette: the blue glittered. But there were man-made clouds on his personal horizon. Six weeks earlier, Fabrizio Battini, Chairman of Blenheim Partners, which in January had acquired the Kestrel Hotel Corporation from EUF, had arrived in person to tell Matt that, from then on, he was to report to a senior vice president, Dieter Weiss, who, although new to the company, was now in charge of all Blenheim Partners Californian properties. Weiss and Matt had yet to meet, but that was about to change. Matt had been summoned to the Blenheim corporate offices in Los Angeles six days hence. The GM mistrusted corporations, especially those with Germans in senior positions. His grandfather had been blown to pieces by Panzer shrapnel in North Africa, and his father had never lost his hatred of “the Huns.” Matt did not consciously share that hatred, but it lingered, he knew, in his bloodstream. Meanwhile, there was a far happier event to anticipate. Rolfe Ritter had asked if he and his wife could come for the weekend. Could they? Matt had arranged for the Imperial Suite to be repainted, the spotless carpet shampooed, the drapes dry-cleaned, and the limousine polished like fine armor. Ritter had insisted that Matt not personally meet the chartered Citation X when it landed, but rather provide transportation to the resort.
His cell phone beeped. “Twenty minutes out,” Freddie Garcia, the resort’s head chauffeur, told him.
Matt raced down the hill, arranged the pre-prepared executive committee under the bougainvillea-covered porte cochère, and stood them at attention in a line straight as any presidential guard, as the Resort’s midnight-blue Bentley pulled up.
A human missile bounded out and grabbed his protégé in a hug. “Matt!” Rolfe exclaimed. “You’ve no idea how great it is to be here!” He took a step back. “And you, you handsome hotelier. You look terrific. And so does the place. Good job. Good job. It’s just like I imagined it. Better. I’m proud of you.”
Warmth more transporting than the summer air filled Matt’s heart; he felt he had leave to unburden it. “I’ll give you the nickel tour before dinner, then we can dine together or serve you in your suite. Your choice. But there’s a matter I need to discuss with you.”
“In the suite, please,” Rolfe said. “You can join me there. Mrs. Ritter’s tired after the plane ride. She’ll want a nap. I don’t think she’s up to a lavish dinner.”
He moved down the reception line, introducing himself and shaking each committee member’s hand. Matt smiled to himself, recognizing the practiced charm of the old pro—the best in the business, everyone said. He’d have replied that no one came close.
He was distracted by movement near the limousine. Freddie had gone to the passenger door and opened it for Mrs. Ritter—Momo, Matt remembered. He had met her once before when Rolfe and she had stayed at the Kestrel Chicago. He, the GM at the time, had been astonished not only by her beauty—her Eurasian black eyes, the sheen of her hair, her full lips, an imposingly tall figure that was both slim and voluptuous—but by the confident grace with which she moved and the musical modulation of her voice. Leave it to Rolfe Ritter to pick the “Jewel of the Orient,” he recalled thinking.
Why had she taken so long to get out of the limo? he wondered. But then he saw her and knew the answer.
The woman who emerged could barely stand. She wore a woolen knit cap to cover her head; underneath it, her once remarkable face was puffy, as though reflected in a fun-house mirror. Her arms and hands were so swollen she could barely hold the walker Freddie had set before her. Matt had seen that look before, on his mother, whose brain tumor was treated with prednisone after the surgery and radiation. Sorrow for his past and pity for the Ritters engaged his soul. His father had borne the brunt of his mother’s illness, and after she died he became even more remote; but he knew the pain himself: He had been robbed of his champion.
“Breast cancer,” Rolfe said softly by Matt’s side. “A double mastectomy, and a hell of a lot more on top of it. We had the surgery done at Sloan Kettering. That wasn’t too bad but the radiation and chemotherapy have been hard for her to bear. She’s very weak. That’s why we thought a few days of luxury would be an elixir,” he laughed, “so where else but the illustrious Audley San Diego Cliffs?”
Matt heard the agony behind the laughter. “I’m so terribly sorry,” he said. “It must be tough for you.”
Rolfe turned his head away. “Only if you aren’t a fan of the Spanish Inquisition.”
“Is there anything I can do for her?”
Rolfe regained his composure. “Absolutely nothing.” He squeezed his wife’s hand as she sat propped up by pillows in a wheelchair. “She’s a real fighter, and not used to losing. If I were you, I wouldn’t bet against her.”
*
The setting sun filled the Imperial Suite with pink and gold hues. Matt remembered that his ex-boss’s drink was a chardonnay, Far Niente, and filled Rolfe’s glass with it.
Rolfe smiled gratefully. “An apropos name, isn’t it? Means ‘do nothing.’ And ‘no far niente’ means ‘it doesn’t matter.’” He waited for Matt to fill his own glass, and they toasted each other before he continued. “After the doctors told me how bad things were with Momo, the ugliness of everything that’s gone on with the company didn’t matter in comparison. At first, I simply didn’t give a shit about anything or anyone except her. Now, though, I’m so pissed off with the way I hear things are going that I’ve taken a morbid interest in Blenheim Partners. Keeps my mind off my impotence.” He sighed. “I tell you, Matt, there’s nothing worse than having no control. I can get her the best doctors, the best medicines, proven and experimental, the best home care. But it’s all stop-gap. This disease is going its own way, for good or ill, and all I can do is make her as comfortable as possible, boost her morale, then sit by and hope for the best.”
Matt could not find words to console him. “I haven’t seen you since Chicago, when you offered me this job,” he said instead. “We were owned by EUF then. What happened? What ugliness do you mean?”
Rolfe seemed glad to get off the subject of his wife. “Everything started out well. I didn’t like having a boss after all those years of independence, but Martin Treadway and I saw things the same way, and he let me build this and the St. Paul de Vence property. I thought things were going along just fine, but it didn’t take me long to discover that Treadway has a short attention span and a gigantic ego. He lost interest in the hotels, only seemed to care about the next megadeal du jour. He started hanging out with the likes of Tony Blair and Bono, even traveled with a bodyguard like a rock star. I realized I meant nothing to him, that he’d offered me the deputy-chairmanship so I’d agree to the acquisition. All his seductive words about partnership and building a legacy were pure bullshit. My autonomy disappeared and the bean counters took control.”
He held out his glass and Matt refilled it. “Two thousand five and six were good years for the industry, supply growth was nonexistent. I knew it was a great time to buy new properties. Everything for once was going the right way. I approached Treadway with a plan—facts, figures, statistics and opportunities; he sloughed me off. From that point on I had to make a damned appointment to even have a telephone conversation with him.”
“And soon after EUF sold out to Blenheim?”
Rolfe leaned forward. “Right. You know how I found out? Treadway announced it at a board meeting—he’d sold the hotel division for ‘a staggeringly high price.’ It needed the board’s approval, of course, but everyone had already been told about it, and the approval was a rubber stamp. Everyone, that is, except me.”
Rolfe’s fury was palpable. Matt had never met Sir Martin Treadway, but he could imagine the scene.
“I went ballistic,” Rolfe went on. “Not a good move. I told the board that if it wanted to sell, we should have held an auction. At the very least I should have been given the chance to match Blenheim’s bid, since I had created the business in the first place.”
Momo spoke for the first time in a half hour. “Treadway laughed at him. Told Rolfe in front of the board that he had a short memory, that it was Rolfe who had lost the business, and that it was he, Treadway, who had rescued it. But it wasn’t worth arguing the point, he said. Rolfe would be resigning from the company and the board of directors effective immediately. They didn’t even allow him the dignity of waiting until the end of the meeting.” Her voice was so soft Matt had to strain to hear it. But her outrage was as strong as her husband’s.
“He thanked me for my service,” Rolfe said. “Imagine that! As though I were the building’s elevator man. That miserable son of a bitch wanted to humiliate me—probably was the only way he had left to get his jollies.”
“Rolfe wanted to be done with the whole thing,” Momo added. “But when Blenheim contacted him the next day, I persuaded him to find out what they wanted and would offer.”
Rolfe finished his second glass of wine and waved away Matt’s offer of a third. “And that’s the strange thing. Seems they wanted me around—the prestige factor, institutional knowledge, transitional help, the usual. They offered me $3 million a year, plus a $10 million bonus if I stayed for five years. After Momo and I discussed the offer, I accepted, although not without serious misgivings.
“Not because Rolfe cared about the money,” Momo said quickly, “but because he wanted to protect ‘his’ people from this man Battini’s thinly-veiled threat of the Blenheim axe, he accepted. People like you, Matt, and Bernard Le Roi, Sammi Chalabi and Beth Taylor … he won’t tell you this, but you’re all very precious to him. And when he heard on the news about those awful fires and explosions in Bali, he became a raving lunatic until he managed to get a call through to Sammi …” She stopped, exhausted.
“Blenheim’s chairman actually came out to see me,” Matt said. “Fabrizio Battini.”
“Oho!” Rolfe was clearly surprised. “What did you think of him?”
“A pompous popinjay. I wondered how he could be running a multi-billion dollar enterprise; he seemed like a business lightweight to me. But what do I know about titans of industry?”
“You’re being too kind,” Rolfe laughed. “You might add oily, glib and untrustworthy. I wonder the same thing. What did he want?”
“To tell me I had a new boss, fellow named Dieter Weiss. I’m to meet him next week in Los Angeles. Do you know him?”
“No. I only met Battini and a landfill of lawyers. If you want, I can have him checked out.”
“Would you?” Matt was as grateful as an eight-year-old offered a new bicycle. “I’d be even more in your debt than I am now.”
*
Momo was asleep in the bedroom. Matt and Rolfe were finishing their light supper of smoked Scottish salmon omelets and a mixed green salad. Flames from the fireplace cast flickering shadows across the room and the faces of the two ex-colleagues. Matt felt an intimacy grow between them, as though now that they were no longer boss and employee, they could talk as friends.
“Months later, why did you suddenly quit Blenheim? Was it because of Momo?”
“In other words, why did I leave you and the rest of my team in deep shit? Partly because of Momo, of course, but also …” He paused.
“Go on.”
Rolfe pushed his virtually uneaten supper away. “You’re the only one besides Momo I’ll have discussed this with, so be very careful with whom you share it, if at all.”
Matt flushed. “Rolfe, I swear …”
“I trust you and the old gang, but you’re with Blenheim now, so promise me you’ll be cautious. I say this for your own good.”
Ominous, Matt thought, remembering his conversation with Battini. “I promise.”
“As soon as Kestrel changed hands, I suggested to your friend Fabrizio that we spin off our downscale brand, Metropolitan. I told him it didn’t really fit in the long term with Kestrel and Audley. We could use the money, I said, to build more hotels like the twin sisters and buy more hotels to convert to the Kestrel and Audley brands.”
Matt shrugged. “Makes sense.”
“But I couldn’t get an okay on any new hotel—indeed, on any new deal whatsoever. I couldn’t even get permission to build a ten- suite addition in D.C.”
“Was he stonewalling you?”
“I still have scars from butting up against it. What’s more, I began getting orders from Blenheim executives: Install so and so as house manager in the Audley St. Paul de Vence; put in thus and such as the new comptroller in Bali; a different head engineer in Santa Monica; a new chief of security; a new head of technology—Jesus, a new head housekeeper! Granted, these requests were spread over all the hotels, but it rankled. What was wrong with the people my GMs had hired? The hotels were operating smoothly, profits were going up over the previous year at a greater pace than we had budgeted for, forward bookings were stronger than ever. Why change?”
Apprehension coiled around Matt’s gut. “They got at me, too. I received e-mails from a department called Human Capital Development, whatever the hell that is, telling me to hire new people I’d never heard of. No one promoted from within the company. My controller, who came with me from Chicago, was replaced. I screamed and screamed, but nobody cared. ‘Give him a bonus and send him on his way,’ they said. So a different guy—their guy—comes in and barely talks to me, preferring to report to ‘corporate.’ I can’t even see my own figures until after they’re sent to Los Angeles.”
This was one of the matters he wanted to talk to Rolfe about. Plainly he had his mentor’s attention, but decided it wasn’t the moment to elaborate. Rolfe had his own history to recount.
“Not long ago we were primarily a decentralized organization, relying on great GMs like you. Today Kestrel’s a rigidly controlled corporate monolith. That might work if you’re manufacturing a single product like breakfast cereal or paper clips, but with luxury hotels it’s a disaster. I’ll grant you that limited service hotels can operate in a more standardized way—after all, they’re more or less identical—but I’ll never believe anything but that high-end hotels are organisms that can flourish only if their own individual environments are taken into consideration. That means the local GMs must be given their head so their flair, culture and personality are imprinted on every aspect of the guest experience and the operation. So what does the company get? An autocratic CFO with a regiment of comptrollers counter-signing every purchase order and paying all bills centrally: four general counsels located in Los Angeles who wouldn’t know local laws if they fell over them; regional vice presidents who are in charge of all the hotels in their district and are so overwhelmed they barely can find their way to an individual property’s front desk. They in turn are to report to a few senior vice presidents of operations, all brand-spanking new to the company, and who are so removed from the hotels themselves that they just know what they’re fed by the VPs and have a steady diet of major league suck-up. The GMs—the people who know their properties like the inside of their hands—are no more than order-obeying functionaries.” He stood, waved his arms. “Can you blame me for being pissed off? I struggled for decades to build a great culture, one that bred excellence in every way. We built a family of the very best professionals ever assembled in our industry, and in months this gang has turned the whole organization to shit!”
Dieter Weiss, Matt thought, taken in by Rolfe’s rage. A man who’s never even been to the Audley San Diego Cliffs is going to be telling me what to do. It was as though his dispassionate father had made actuarial judgments without every studying the books. He felt sick.
Rolfe began to pace, his agitation like a wasp’s trapped in a bottle. “When Battini told me about the changes, I barely held my temper. But by then I knew about Momo’s health and figured the fight wasn’t worth it. It was their money, their company. Intellectually I knew it could and should be their culture. So I shut up and vowed to protect the old gang, yourself included, as best I could.” Rolfe stopped pacing. Matt could see his fatigue and frustration. He shrugged. “Didn’t do a very good job, did I?”