The Prince of Risk A Novel(73)

On an early trip to Paris with Alex, he had visited the sculpture garden decorated with many larger-than-life artworks by Rodin. One black marble piece showed a powerful, confident man poised in reflection, his countenance gripped by a terrible uncertainty. Gripped by doubt. It wasn’t audacity that killed a trader. It was doubt. Doubt led to indecision, and only the decisive survived on the Street.

Astor played back the conversation with Longfellow and Goodchild. Their reasoning was sound. China was posturing. Some sort of political gamesmanship was occurring, but in the end Astor was right. And Magnus Lee had confirmed it.

Screw doubt.

“I know it,” said Astor aloud, banging his fist on the armrest.

“Everything okay, boss?”



“What?” Astor shook himself back to the real world. Leaning forward, he clutched his driver’s shoulder and gave it a friendly squeeze. “Yeah, Sully. Never better.”

Cherry Hill sat on top of a broad grassy knoll overlooking the expanse of Oyster Bay. It was an old Victorian pile built in the 1880s, when the Roosevelt family had lived nearby on Sagamore Hill. Over the years each owner had added on a room or a terrace or a porch until it resembled a sprawling hotel more than a home. The Astors had purchased it in 1950 for the then astounding sum of $175,000. Following in the tradition of their predecessors, they’d expanded the kitchen, built a sauna on the second floor, and added a gymnasium on the third for Edward, then a boy.

A paved road wound up the slope and emerged from an orchard onto an immense lawn that collared the estate and made Cherry Hill look like a frosted white decoration atop a wedding cake.

Sullivan spotted the striped tape stretched across the front door first. “We’re late,” he said. “The feds have already been by to have a look.”

Astor opened the car door before the Audi came to a halt. He was out and striding across the gravel forecourt as Sullivan hurried to join him.

“Tampering with evidence is a felony. Be careful what you touch.”

Astor stopped at the top of the front stairs. “It’s my house. I have every right to go in. Besides, who you going to tell?”

Sullivan reached his side. “Have it your way. But let me take a look first. We don’t want any surprises.”

Astor noted that the alarm system was disarmed and the door locked. He fished in his pocket for his old key. It worked like a charm. “You’re the only one who knows I’m here,” he said, ducking under the tape as he pushed the door open. “Be my guest.”

Sullivan passed beneath the tape and entered the foyer, his pistol held in front of him. “Wait here. I’m going to do a quick walk-through.”

“Knock yourself out,” said Astor.

Sullivan padded down the stairs five minutes later. “All yours. Looks like the feds took a look around and left everything here. I’d count on them being back anytime. They’ll be taking another look now that Penelope Evans is dead, too.”



From his vantage point in the orchard, the warrior monk fashioned his plan.

A car was parked in the gravel drive, a large silver SUV. The front door of the house stood open, a band of yellow-and-black tape strung across the entry. The stocky white-haired man with the florid cheeks paced back and forth on the porch. Astor must be inside.

Kill him, his brother had said.

The warrior monk revered family above all. He would not disappoint him.

Bobby Astor walked into the house and time stood still. Ten years had passed since he’d last set foot inside. The occasion had been Thanksgiving or Christmas. It had been a happy time. Katie was five or six. Alex’s career with the Bureau was starting to hum. Comstock was doing well, and his father had just sold his own firm to one of the big boys for an ungodly sum.

It was a time before their falling-out.

A time before Astor had confronted his father about the events of his childhood.

The black belt.

Three words, and they conjured up an immediate and unsettling terror that after thirty years had lost none of its ability to paralyze him.

Astor pushed away the words, pretending he did not hear them. Pretending that nothing had happened. He turned a circle on the parquet floor, studying the vaulted two-story entryway. It was more a minstrel’s gallery than a family foyer. His eye ran up the staircase, past the stodgy oil portraits of his father and his grandfather, Edward and Frederick Astor, respectively. Why was it ever the dream of first-generation immigrants to emulate the immigrants who had come before them?

Of course Astor wasn’t his family’s real name. He had discovered his true lineage when he was thirteen and home on break from prep school. Having pilfered two of his father’s Cohibas, he and a buddy were searching for matches to light them. The first place to look was his father’s desk. There, stashed away in his top drawer, was a stiff, yellowing envelope marked Private in archaic, curling script. Astor was a born snoop. He could have asked for no better invitation. He opened the envelope at once. It contained his grandfather’s immigration papers, naming him not Frederick Emile Astor but Feodor Itzhak Yastrovic of Lvov, Poland. Stunned, Astor replaced the document and fled from the room. Bobby Astor was not an itinerant Polish Jew. He was an American blueblood born on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, educated at the Horace Mann School, and confirmed at All Saints Episcopal Church in Oyster Bay, New York. He never looked at the envelope again.