Accidentally in Love, page 3
If only she didn’t still have that crush she’d had on Tony since she was a teenager. He’d been a chef in her father’s restaurant for a few years now… Sara had known him since she was a little girl when he had begun to earn a little extra cash by working for them as a waiter. Then he had fallen in love with the restaurant business and had decided to become a chef and after college he had returned to the place where everything had begun. And just as he had so many years before, Tony continued to be kind and sweet to Sara while seemingly completely ignoring her special interest in him.
She had tried to give him some kind of signal over the years, turning up at the restaurant all dolled up and looking glamorous, wearing sparkling necklaces and high heels. But to no avail. It seemed that Tony just didn’t get the message. Or even worse, he didn’t want to get the message. She had almost given up hope. Almost. The way she started sweating every time Tony appeared on the scene continued to betray her, though, and her normal way of talking went straight out of the window as soon as he spoke to her, which made her feel absolutely pathetic. Her sister had been out with more boys in the last six months than she’d been out with in the last ten years. Her longest relationship had been with Freddy, who she’d met at law school, but only because they ended up sharing a table during the study period. And then they had dragged it out for two long years while living in two different and distant cities. As interns, not only had they hardly ever had time to see each other, they hadn’t even had the time to call off the relationship either. They just stopped calling each other.
Eva distracted her from her depressing thoughts. “Anyway, like I said – this evening I want you dressed up! Don’t forget!”
Sara tried to suppress her annoyance and decided not to contradict her. “Ok…” she mumbled. Anyway, her sister hadn’t specified exactly what kind of clothes she was supposed to get dressed up in.
*
The Greenhouse was a fairly well-known nightclub in Manhattan – the kind of place that Sara would normally only have seen the inside of if she’d been forced in there at gunpoint. But unluckily for her, that was pretty much what Eva was doing.
Eva’s unique – although bad might be a more accurate way of putting it – taste had brought them to the immense two storey club, which sat impressively on Varisk Street in the Soho district, a very trendy area which was mostly inhabited by stars of the world of music and cinema who had fled the palm trees of California. These rich eccentrics loved to show how different they were from all from the others by buying up vast lofts in a neighborhood that had once been known as the ‘cast iron district’. Sara had never been much of a lover of the clichéd fashion for transforming all these big old industrial buildings into luxury homes. As far as she was concerned, there were much better ways of spending all that money.
Being forced to wait for more than half an hour at the entrance to the Greenhouse had put her in a bad mood, first of all because she had never wanted to go there in the first place and secondly because she kept seeing the most ridiculous looking people being allowed to enter.
“How long are we going to have to wait?” she grumpily asked Eva, who inexplicably was managing to preserve her buoyant mood and was passing the time chatting cheerfully to the dozen or so friends who had turned up for the occasion. But Eva had always been pretty good at ignoring what was going on around her. It was a virtue Sara did not possess in the slightest, unfortunately.
“Come on, quit being your usual party pooper self,” her sister replied. “You’ll see, we’ll be inside in no time, we’re practically dancing already.”
“That’s exactly, word for word, what you said twenty minutes ago… ‘Now’ means a pretty long time for you,” she said, pulling her light jacket around her. These early April evenings were still quite cool, especially if you’d had to put on a short skirt.
“I called one of my friends. He’s on his way, and when he gets here, he’ll get us inside,” said Eva calmly.
Even though she didn’t have as much faith in Eva’s friends as her sister did, Sara had the good grace to bite the bullet and not show how annoyed she was. It was Eva’s right to celebrate her birthday standing on a grimy sidewalk if that was what it took to make her happy. And fortunately for them, a few minutes later, the long awaited friend made his appearance on the scene and succeeded in the titanic undertaking of convincing the bouncers on the door to let them in.
Though convincing probably wasn’t the right word… Basically, he’d just given them a big enough banknote – one with a nice picture of Ben Franklin on it. If she’d known that was all it took, Sara would have done the same thing half an hour ago. The same old boring power of money.
And so the noisy gaggle of girls made their excited way into the dark temple of flashy clothes and bad music – because she still couldn’t convince herself there was anything good about house music. As far as she was concerned, it was all just noise, and to hell with her sister’s complaints that she had the musical tastes of an octogenarian.
As it was nearly midnight, every square inch of the place was jam-packed with sweaty, drunken people dancing – or at least, lurching. Sara decided the reason the Greenhouse was so dark was not to make it more exciting, but simply to hide the fact that the people inside were as sad as the club itself.
“What a lovely place…” she hissed, with obvious sarcasm. But it was so loud in there that none of the group even heard her.
Her sister took the situation in hand and dragged everyone to the bar, ordering drinks to celebrate the occasion. It was as clear as day that Eva had decided to get her friends drunk in order to stop them from complaining. Not that any of them, apart from Sara, appeared to be complaining. In fact, she seemed to be the only fish out of water there.
She found herself holding a dubious looking blue cocktail which tasted like a mixture of straight alcohol and disinfectant .
Eva and her friends quickly drained their glasses and then launched themselves onto the dance floor, which was illuminated by a million tiny, annoying lights. Sara tried to make herself invisible and hung back, hoping her sister wouldn’t notice and force her to follow the others. Also because she still had a full glass of the blue stuff in her hand and had no idea where to put it. Chaos reigned and there didn’t seem to be room on any of the tables dotted about to put it down. On the other hand, drinking it was completely out of the question.
“What the hell am I doing here?” she asked herself aloud, certain now that no one would be able to hear her. The decibel level made the place absolutely deafening and it was obvious that the clients of the Greenhouse were no great admirers of the art of conversation. Or maybe she was wrong and it was actually a club for sign language experts.
Miserably, she decided to take a look round the rest of the club, in the illusory hope of finding a quiet corner. She made her way downstairs, only to discover that it was even darker. By some divine grace the music was less annoying than the house beats thumping away at the top of the stairs. Compared to that racket, R&B felt as relaxing as listening to Bach. Even the crowd seemed to be a little less dense. As soon as she spotted an empty table she made her way towards it so that she could rest legs still tired after the long wait at the entrance.
As she tried to reach that quiet oasis of peace, however, she banged into the adjacent table, which had been moved so that it wasn’t in line with the others. In the darkness of the club, Sara hadn’t even noticed. She lost her precarious balance and to avoid falling to the floor she let go of the glass of blue disinfectant she’d been holding and grabbed the back of a chair occupied by one member of a rather rowdy group of people to steady herself. It hadn’t been a conscious decision – just an instinctive gesture to prevent an embarrassing pratfall.
Once she had straightened up, she tried to figure out what the hell had happened and was about to apologize profusely to the poor people she had drenched, but the words died in her throat when a dark shape, barely visible in the total blackness of the place, jumped up at her as if it had been given an electric shock.
“What the hell are you doing ?” shouted the hysterical silhouette as it approached Sara threateningly. A very angry man was attempting to wipe away a drop of the drink in question from his hand. Not a pint, mind you – a drop…
Sara looked doubtfully at the two other guys who were sitting right in front of her and who were both completely wet through and then turned her gaze on the guy who was screaming. She peered at him, feeling increasingly confused: from what she could see – and now that he had moved closer to her she could see him much better – he only had a splash of it on his hand. He’d wrapped a napkin around it, even though by now it must surely already be dry. Okay, the cocktail was awful but it wasn’t pure hydrochloric acid, for God’s sake.
“I’m so sorry, please forgive me” she said to the man who was glaring at her angrily. The whole scene felt surreal, because by any normal logic she should have been apologizing to the people who actually had been liberally drenched in sugary alcohol. Her sixth sense told her there seemed to be some sort of hierarchy between them, so it was necessary to get this ridiculous guy out of the way before moving on to the real problems.
“No way am I going to forgive you!” shouted the blonde guy who, once he had stood up, revealed himself to be of considerable stature. Six two, at the very least. And she preferred not to think too much about the breadth of his shoulders. In any case, Sara retreated instinctively.
“Hey, let’s try and stay calm about this,” she suggested in the tone that she normally used with agitated witnesses in the courtroom.
“Who the hell is this idiot, John?” he shouted at a man who had instantly appeared at his side .
John, who must have worked there, had materialized on the scene instantly like he’d been teleported in from the Enterprise, bearing in his hand an immaculate white towel. The screaming guy, who was dressed all in black with weird platinum hair that went down past his shoulders, grabbed it as though it was perfectly normal for people to run over and sort things out for him and started drying his hand with it, even though by now it must have been drier than midday in the Sahara. If he carried on rubbing there was the serious risk that he would take off a layer of skin.
“I’m so sorry, Mr Phelps,” a cringing John kept on repeating. The only thing missing from the scene was for John to throw himself to the floor and start begging for forgiveness. And judging by the terrified expression on his face, that was a possibility that John had not yet excluded.
Sara observed the awful ‘Mr Phelps’ as he continued to clean his hand as though he was afraid of catching ebola from the tiny splash of blue disinfectant that had actually made contact with his skin, undecided as to whether she should try to apologize to that bizarre individual again or just make the best of a bad job and get the hell out of there. The more she looked at him, the more the second idea started to look like the best one .
“Had you drunk any of that blue swill?” the platinum haired man suddenly blurted out, staring at her with eyes which were bloodshot and puffy from all the alcohol in his system. It was a shame, because the lunatic actually had very attractive turquoise eyes, unless he was just wearing contact lenses. In the dim light that emanated from above their heads and set against the darkness of the room, their color seemed almost unnatural.
“Er, yes, I had…” she replied, and almost laughed at the look of panic that appeared on the man’s face. Maybe she should have lied.
He let out a kind of angry roar and John disappeared immediately, only to reappear an instant later with some kind of antibacterial gel in his hand.
“I don’t have any incurable diseases, I swear!” she couldn’t stop herself from saying with just a hint of sarcasm in her voice. This guy was a complete whacko. The germophobe gave her a scornful look as though she were dirt, and set about cleaning himself for the third time. His skin must be pretty damn tough, she thought, otherwise he would have removed at least three layers of epidermis in the last couple of minutes.
For some odd reason, Sara felt curious rather than offended.
“John, get her out of here and close this part of the room off to the public! I don’t want any more incidents, is that clear?” he shouted, as though he were the undisputed master of the place.
“Sure, of course…” the poor man stammered, coming over to Sara and indicating that she should move somewhere else.
Sara was on the verge of doing as she was told when suddenly she stopped in her tracks. She just wasn’t able to overcome the desire to have her say. Call it a quirk of her profession, call it a question of character, but the Di Giovanni who could back down and keep her mouth shut after being provoked like that had yet to be born, as everyone in her family could testify. “Hey, Goldilocks,” she said loudly. “Get yourself a shrink – and a good one!” she said before turning her back on him and walking away deliberately slowly. She had to make it clear that she was not running away.
As she climbed the stairs, she could hear the lunatic shouting and cursing about the scum of the earth and other such nonsense. Obviously, her words had hit home.
If Eva insisted on dragging her to a similar venue next year, she swore to herself she would feign some serious illness. Because there was no way on earth she would ever set foot in that place again.
Chapter 2
Come Monday morning, Sara had completely forgotten about the incident at the Greenhouse because she had much more important things to be getting on with. To begin with, Judge Richter had summoned her to her office at half past eight on the dot, even though the trial wasn’t until ten.
What the hell could Richter possibly want from her? It wasn’t that unusual for lawyers to be called in to discuss procedural details but the case in question was still only halfway through and she couldn’t really see what there was to discuss. Her opponent was just clutching at straws, and this was obvious to everyone.
When she arrived, the judge’s assistant let her into the office and assured her that Judge Jane would be arriving any minute – and sure enough, Richter, being the punctual woman she was, entered the room about a minute later.
“Good morning,” she said warmly, shaking Sara’s hand, before adding in a peculiarly kindly way, “and sorry for getting you out of bed at the crack of dawn.” Sara immediately started to become suspicious. She wasn’t one of those cynics who automatically smelled a rat when other people were nice to her, but years of being a lawyer had taught her that few things were ever offered out of pure generosity, and in the legal world even being uncharacteristically nice was one of them.
“Oh, no problem, I always get up early,” she assured her, sitting down where the judge indicated. At this point she was genuinely curious to find out what the judge had on her mind.
“Me, too, me too” said the judge, taking her seat at her desk. “Okay, I guess you’re wondering why we are here…” She left the phrase hanging in the air and looked Sara straight in the eyes.
“Yes, actually, I am,” said Sara, half smiling.
“Well, since I very much doubt that the other people I asked to come will turn up with the same punctuality, I wanted to take advantage of this time to tell you what this is all about.”
Sara relaxed and pinned back her ears.
“Okay. I have to ask a favour of you,” said Richter, looking almost embarrassed.
“Certainly…” replied Sara immediately. No lawyer was crazy or stupid enough to refuse a request for a favour from a judge. Or at least, no lawyer who was actually interested in continuing working as a lawyer.
“You should know that I am tied by a longstanding friendship to an important New York family, and in my own small way I’ve tried to give them a hand with various legal issues whenever they’ve needed it. Have you ever heard of Phelps & Phelps, Ms Di Giovanni?”
“Sure I have,” answered Sara. “Who hasn’t heard of them? The chain of department stores, right?”
“Among other things,” the judge said. “They started out with the department stores, but now they’ve got a finger in pies all over the place – they’re a full blown multinational, if you know what I mean. Well, just over six months ago, my dear friend Markus Phelps, the president of the company, left us after having a sudden heart attack.”
“I think I read something about it in the papers at the time…” Sara admitted, as she began to remember the story.
“Insofar as the immense size of the company is concerned, it has always been under the direct control of the family, and even after it went public they never wanted to give up their controlling share. Things seemed to be working really well. Markus had thirty per cent and his brother Kirk, the CEO, the other thirty.”
Sara sat up straight in her chair. “And on Markus’s death who did it all go to?” she asked.
“Well, I see that you’re quick off the mark, Ms Di Giovanni. The thirty per cent was divided between Markus’s two sons, James and Ethan. But, as I said, my friend’s death took everyone by surprise. By all appearances, Markus was the healthiest man on the planet – one of those lucky people who grow older but somehow stay in fantastic shape, physically and mentally. So obviously, no one was expecting him to die so soon. Or at least, not without at least a little bit of warning beforehand… So he’d done absolutely nothing to safeguard his stock. He hadn’t drawn up shareholders’ agreements, he hadn’t imposed clauses or limits. Nothing. Nothing was written down. And since he didn’t have a will – which is almost unbelievable, given the situation – there was nothing else to do but divide the shares into two equal parts. There was no legal precedent for doing otherwise.”
“Well, it seems right to me that the shares were assigned to the two sons equally…” Sara commented. But Richter’s face immediately grew serious.
