Final impact

His lawyer, Ms. O’Brien, looked exasperated, as usual. He often thought that uptight was her natural state of being. Their relationship had changed some since the early days, though, when she’d acted more like his drill sergeant than his employee. O’Brien was a player in her own right now. Probably one of the richest women in America, if you didn’t count heiresses. And he didn’t. They tended to be stuck-up bitches who wouldn’t give him the time of day. But as his business got bigger and he grew more and more powerful, she came to…what? Admire him, he guessed. She was only a little more deferential than she had been, but if he didn’t know any better he’d say she almost respected him for the way he’d handled the last few years.

“We were discussing your testimony in the Rockefeller suit, Mr. Davidson,” she said. “It’s important. You can’t slide through this one on a boyish grin and southern charm. These guys are out to snap you like a twig.”

He shrugged. “Assholes like this been beating on me since-”

“Oh please. Let’s not do your E! channel bio today. Let’s work through the brief I zapped over. You did read it, didn’t you? They’re not going to let you wear your Oakleys in court, so I can’t send you notes up on the stand.”

“Yeah, yeah, I read it,” he grumbled. Most of what he did nowadays seemed to be reading and signing big piles of paper. Most of it he didn’t understand. He preferred sitting down with a couple of guys over a beer and talking shit through like men. He was a good listener. You had to be when you’d made your living as a grifter.

Ms. O’Brien started in on him like a prosecutor going after an ax murderer. It’d been a little scary the first time she’d done it, but she explained it was just like in the navy when he’d trained for war. The courtroom was no different. He had an enemy that was coming after him, trying to destroy him. He had to be ready. She kept firing questions at him. Real curly ones, too, and he practiced saying as little as possible that’d get him in trouble. The only real joy of it was contemplating what a bloody pulp Ms. O’Brien was going to reduce those Rockefeller assholes to when they got onto the stand. She had a well-earned reputation for brutality in the courtroom. It was partly why he expected this bullshit case to settle, and why only part of his mind was really on it. Another part, the old Slim Jim, was thinking about the party he was gonna throw in his penthouse over the weekend. He had half of Hollywood coming over to rip it up in his rooftop pool and artificial beach. They were the only original features he’d kept when he bought the Oviatt Building. Everything else-the Lalique chandeliers, the art deco bar, the exotic woods in the floors and walls-he’d had torn out and replaced with the closest facsimiles of twenty-first materials his personal designers could find. Ms. O’Brien had been aghast and argued vehemently against the “vandalism,” as she called it, but Slim Jim wasn’t having a bar of it. The next century had been very kind to him, whereas this one had done nothin’ but kick his ass from the moment he’d crawled out of the cradle.

And anyway, 21C was the hottest style in modern architecture. Nobody built old anymore.

“Are you concentrating, Mr. Davidson?”

“Nope,” he admitted.

“Are you thinking about your party this weekend?” she asked, putting down the flexipad she’d been holding.

“Uh-huh.”

“You thinking about copping a blow job from Hedy Lamarr again?”

He grinned. “No, but now that you mention it-”

“Well, knock it off!” she barked. “Because if you can’t, the only blow jobs you’re gonna be getting will be from the jailhouse cat in a federal pen.”

Chastened, he apologized and tried to focus on the questions. But before long he was daydreaming about Hedy Lamarr again. And splitting beers with Ernest Hemingway. And sailing with Errol Flynn. And playing poker with Artie Snider, the war hero he’d met at a Kennedy fund-raiser. They were all great fucking guys. And unlike those society snobs, they didn’t look down on him for what he’d once been.

3

D-DAY + 4. 7 MAY 1944. 2045 HOURS.

BUNKER COMPLEX, BERLIN.

It was no longer safe at the Wolfschanze.

Indeed, there was no Wolfschanze to speak of-not now. Allied bombers had struck there in a massive raid just three months ago. Had the fuhrer not been delayed in Berlin, he might even have been killed. More than a thousand men of the SS had died on that day.

Himmler rubbed the hot, grainy feeling from his eyes. This bunker offered none of the comforts of Rastenburg, but it had one major advantage. The British and Americans did not know of its existence. Or at least he thought they didn’t. One could never be sure these days…