The Eighth Day Read Online Free PDF Page A

in a wing chair that might as well have been a leather throne, watching Danny as he made his way past a flotilla of empty easy chairs and couches. Nearby, three men in business suits sat nibbling honey-roasted peanuts and sipping Coca-Colas. Although they didn’t talk among themselves, they were obviously together—a phalanx of well-dressed pawns guarding their king’s perimeter.
    To Danny, they seemed like Xerox copies of one another: each of them was thirty-something and squarely built, with thick black hair cut close to the scalp. They’d be difficult to tell apart, he thought, except for the guy in the middle, whose right eyebrow was cleft in two—so that he almost seemed to have three.
    Belzer shared the same palette as his bodyguards (or whatever they were). Everything about him was dark, from the suit that he wore to his pitch-black hair and wraparound shades. He removed these as Danny approached, revealing fathomless brown eyes. When he got up to shake hands, Danny noticed, first, the silver-handled cane he leaned on, the gold blob of a Rolex, and the leather boot encasing a deformity of some kind.
    “Danny Cray.”
    “Jude Belzer.”
    Rangy and athletic-looking, Belzer had a powerful grip and was handsome enough that he flustered the young woman who materialized to ask if they’d like something to drink. The lawyer had the presence of a movie star, and Danny could see the wheels turning behind the waitress’s eyes as she tried to place him in her firmament of celebrity. Blushing and stuttering, too eager to please, she finally dashed off to fill their order: coffee for Danny, Pellegrino for Belzer.
    Belzer put his sunglasses back on, apologizing as he did so. “My eyes are sensitive to glare,” he said in a regretful tone.
    “So,” Danny said, settling into an easy chair. “Here we are.”
    “Yesssss.” With a smile, Belzer leaned forward and, without any introduction at all, quietly explained why the two of them were there. “I’d like to retain you for a little damage control.”
    “ ‘Retain’ me?”
    Belzer’s hands fell open, like a book. “A bit of freelance investigation. You do that, don’t you?”
    Danny nodded. “Sure.”
    “Well then . . .” A flash of teeth. “I have a client—a businessman in Italy—Zerevan Zebek. . . .” The lawyer paused, as if waiting for a reaction. When none came, he resumed talking. “For some time now, Mr. Zebek has been the target of . . . I’m not sure what to call it . . .
a campaign
to destroy his reputation.”
    A sympathetic frown settled on Danny’s face as the waitress arrived with their drinks. “When did it start?” he asked.
    “A few months ago,” Belzer replied. “One of the Florentine papers—
La Repubblica
—began to publish certain rumors. . . .”
    “About?”
    “Mr. Zebek’s businesses. Our first reaction—”
    “And what did they say?” Danny asked. Unused to interruption, Belzer frowned. “I mean—I was wondering about the allegations,” Danny explained.
    The lawyer shook his head, closed his eyes, and made an impatient gesture with his hand, as if he were waving good-bye to someone he didn’t care about. “What difference does it make? There’s nothing to them.”
    Danny sat back in his chair, sipped his coffee, and let the silence between them grow—which wasn’t easy. The lawyer’s body language expressed an attitude somewhere between annoyance and contempt.
    Finally, Belzer relented with a sigh. “Okay, they say he’s in bed with the Mafia—that he’s an arms dealer . . . a polluter, and a cheat.
They say
he’s the devil incarnate.”
    Danny grinned. “Whereas . . . in fact . . . ?”
    Belzer shrugged. “He’s a venture capitalist. Secretive? Of course. But that goes with the territory, doesn’t it? We’re talking about someone who’s invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a string of small companies, some of which have done very, very well—and may do even better. We’re talking about