He pressed the button, lowering the window between the front and back seats of the car. Chiang, his chauffeur- bodyguard, handed him a cassette. Another addition to the Gwai-lo file. It was time to discuss matters with Kershman.
Gerald Kershman was sprawled face down on the bed, his hands and feet bound to the corners by velvet cords. Sweat stung his eyes and he gulped for air as the strips of leather bit into his already tortured flesh. He turned his face into the silk sheets that muffled his cries of pain. The naked young man standing over him with the cat o’ nine tails was hard and lithe; his blond hair tumbled in sweaty ringlets over his forehead.
Finally Kershman turned his face towards the youth. ‘Enough,’ he gasped.
The blond, who was in his late teens, lowered the whip and stood over him. Kershman took several deep breaths and shivered involuntarily and then relaxed. ‘Untie me,’ he said.
The young man freed him, and Kershman, his back and rump slashed with red welts, struggled from the bed soiled with his own semen and grimaced with pain as he sat on the edge. He was a small, fat man with thick, contemptuous lips and froglike eyes. Black hair curled obscenely on his shoulders and back. He reached out to the night table near the bed with chubby, trembling fingers, feeling for his thick glasses and putting them on with some effort.
‘Okay I get dressed now?’ the youth asked.
Kershman stared at his naked body for a few more moments and nodded. He wiped the sweat from his face with a towel and watched as the young hustler slipped on a pair of red bikini briefs and arranged himself. ‘You really love t, dontcha?’ he said. ‘1 never seen nobody eat up a beatin’ like that before.’
‘Shut up,’ Kershman groaned. He got up and walked towards the bathroom, a silk bathrobe trailing from one hand.
‘Hey,’ the blond said, ‘how about my bread?’
‘You’re not through yet,’ said Kershman. ‘Come in here.’ He lay face down on a massage table in the opulent bathroom and pointed to several bottles of ointment and balm in a tray attached to the table. The boy spread them on carefully, chattering aimlessly as he did. Kershman turned his face away from the youth. Tears edged down the side of his nose. They were tears of humiliation, not pain. The blond completed his task and Kershman eased himself off the table.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘you can leave now.’
‘The bread, the bread,’ the hustler said, snapping his fingers at Kershman. The small man looked at him and hate filled his eyes. His lip curled viciously.
‘You snap your fingers at me one more time,’ he said, ‘and I’ll have them broken, one at a time.’
‘Hey,’ the blond said. He stepped back, balling up his fists.
‘Your bread,’ Kershman said wearily, ‘is on the dresser.’ The younger man went into the bedroom and emptied the contents of a brown manila envelope, eagerly counting the bills. His eyes lit up. ‘Jeez, thanks,’ he said, ‘ya want me to come back again tonight?’
‘I don’t want to see you again,’ Kershman said. ‘You show your face around this building again and you’ll regret it.’
The hustler looked at him for a moment and then grinned. ‘Wotsa matter, doll, was I too rough on you?’
Kershman stood in the bathroom doorway, regarding him through thick glasses that distorted his already bulging eyes, his mouth still trembling from the combination of pain and ecstasy. He said, ‘If it makes you feel any better, you were magnificent. I happen to prefer one-nighters.’
‘Sure, honey, that’s cool. Different strokes for different folks, right?’ He pulled on his leather jacket and left.
Kershman struggled into his clothes and left his apartment, taking a private elevator down one flight to the eighteenth floor of the Mirror Towers, where the giant computer awaited him. There were only three entrances into the sprawling computer complex which consumed most of the eighteenth floor. One was by private elevator from Kershman’s apartment, the second a private elevator between DeLaroza’s office and the console room. The third was by the exterior elevator, which had to be programmed to stop as it descended from the top two floors. Special keys activated the computers and the elevators.
Only three other people worked in the computer complex, none of whom really understood its complexities or the maze of interlocking information it contained. They were simply technicians.
It was a little after 2:30 when Kershman’s elevator opened and he entered the main console room, the nerve centre of the complex. A young woman wearing a white uniform was stringing a spool of tape on one of the computer banks.
‘Anything unusual? Kershman asked.
‘Not really,’ she answered brightly. ‘We have to complete the annual audit on WCG and L today. I’m running the totals now.’
‘Fine,’ Kershman said and went into his private office. The audit on West Coast Gas and Light Company, when complete, would require Kershman’s final personal touch, since DeLaroza planned to have its directors apply for a rate increase.
It was a measure of Kershman’s financial genius and tenacity that while still an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business he had once appeared at the office of the president of Ticanco, one of the world’s largest conglomerates, and asked for an appointment. Although he was told it would be impossible, Kershman had appeared at the office every morning at precisely 8:30 and remained there until five in the afternoon. After twenty-six consecutive working days, be had exhausted the executive’s resistance and was finally ushered into his office.
‘You have two minutes,’ the man said sternly. ‘If you can’t state your business by then you’re wasting your time as well as mine.’
‘Oh, I can do it in one sentence,’ Kershman replied confidently. ‘I can show you an absolutely foolproof method that will save you eight million, three hundred thousand dollars in corporate income taxes this year. Are you interested?’
The actual saving was a little under seven million dollars, but it had earned Kershman, an orphan from the slums of East Saint Louis, his tuition and a generous living allowance for the remainder of an educational odyssey that included two more years at Wharton, three years at Harvard, where be earned a doctorate in corporate finance, and a stint at Georgetown Law School, where he received his degree in international law. After completing his studies with distinction at all three universities, Kershman had refused a generous offer from Ticanco, to go to work instead for the Internal Revenue Service where during the next three years he designed an infinite variety of schemes for beating the income tax laws. By the time be was thirty-three Kershman was earning six figures a year as a consultant for several corporations.
To Kershman the world became a giant financial chess board and he took Machiavellian delight in developing methods for circumventing the international trade agreements and treaties which were its rules. In 1968 Kershman had proposed to one of his clients that within a few years the Arab nations would use their control of oil to dominate prices all over the world. Kershman, a Jew, had negotiated a dangerous and volatile deal with two Arab nations which, in exchange for enough guns and ammunition to supply their armies, would provide to the company Kershman represented crude oil at a low fixed price for fifteen years. The arms were delivered by boat to Turkey and from there were shipped overland by caravan to the Mid-east. The oil was sold to a refinery in Jakarta, shipped to a refinery in Yokohama, and re-sold as surplus to the Y and D Oil Company in Philadelphia. By 1975 Y and D had grown into one of the largest U.S. gasoline companies, with its own coast-to-coast chain of filling stations. It constantly undersold all competitors by two or three cents a gallon.