Chapter 3 #2
“Okay, I’ll take the two free days, and I’ll do it, but he doesn’t get to whine and sue us if he doesn’t like the piece.
Get legal to ask for a release from him.
I don’t care how rich he is, I won’t tippy-toe around and bend the truth for him.
If he wants me, he gets whatever he gets, depending on what I see and hear and whatever research material I get.
There might be some ugly stuff out there, not to mention three ex-wives, and God knows what else.
And I was supposed to be off on Christmas, anyway, by the way. So when do I go?”
“He won’t sign a release like that. We’ll take our chances. He’ll see you on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth for the interview. And Charlotte, thank you. You can handle him. It’ll be fine, and a strong piece if you write it. Some people say he’s a nice guy.”
“Nice guys don’t make fifty billion dollars,” she said, firmly convinced.
“Just so he knows the ground rules. No lies,” she said, and stood up.
Henry wished her a merry Christmas, told her he would set everything up and get her ticket, and she thanked him and left his office.
She was thinking about Ben Sharpe that night and did a superficial Google search on him, and a general search on the internet.
There was lots of material on him, most of it about the girls he dated.
They said he was a tough businessman, and two of his ex-wives had nothing good to say about him.
The third one said that he was the love of her life and a sweet person.
Charlotte thought he must have paid her handsomely when he left her for a showgirl in Las Vegas.
In any case, it was going to be an interesting Christmas with Ben Sharpe.
She had nothing else to do, and she was getting four days in St. Barth out of it.
There were worse ways to spend Christmas, especially since she’d be alone anyway.
—
Charlotte took a night flight to St. Martin on the twenty-second of December, arriving on the morning of the twenty-third, then took a terrifying short flight in a tiny plane to St. Barth, flying low over the water and landing on the short airstrip.
Henry had arranged for a car and driver to take her to the Cheval Blanc St-Barth.
Henry was as good as his word. The hotel was beautiful, said to be the best in St. Barth.
Charlotte had a villa with a private pool and her own butler.
It was all first-class service. She looked around with a smile and took off her safari jacket.
She was carrying a beaten-up old Hermès Haut à courroies travel bag that she had bought in a vintage store in Paris and she loved.
It was dark chocolate brown, and she was wearing brown combat boots.
The weather was warm but not torrid, and she opened her suitcase and hung her assortment of summer clothes in the closet.
She had brought summer work clothes, nothing fancy. This was a job.
She had arrived a day before her appointment with Ben Sharpe, and liked having time to acclimate when she did interviews in distant destinations, getting the feel of the place and the atmosphere.
The locations the subjects chose said a lot about them.
At home, or a fancy restaurant, someplace cozy, or somewhere they could show off to demonstrate how important they were.
Ben Sharpe was meeting her on his boat, on his own turf, where he felt at home.
She was curious about the boat. It was said to be fabulous.
It was four hundred and fifty feet long, the size of a small cruise ship, and it was called Karma.
It was a motor yacht, and testimony to his enormous fortune and the way he liked to live.
Ben Sharpe was a man who liked excess. He had come a long way and wasn’t afraid to show it.
She wondered if he had an enormous security staff, like most men in his circumstances.
She’d seen the photographs and read little snippets of articles about him.
He looked very modest in the photographs, simply dressed in jeans and cowboy boots, with a blue collared shirt.
He had a clean-cut boyish look to him. She had studied his face in the still shots on the internet, thinking of questions she wanted to ask him.
She hadn’t composed her final list yet. She knew that once she met him, she’d have a better sense of who he was before he even spoke.
There were cues she looked for that told her a lot about a person.
Women were more guarded, while men were usually open with her.
They trusted her and they weren’t wrong.
She never betrayed her subjects. Some had even become friends.
She had dinner from room service on her patio, and then decided to walk to the port and check out the boats. She wondered if the Karma would be in port. She wanted to get a glimpse of it before she met with him the next day.
There were many large yachts tied up at the dock, their uniformed crews adding to the atmosphere, and their owners drinking wine and champagne on the upper decks.
She saw women in jewel-toned outfits with diamonds sparkling in their ears.
It was a world she wrote about but had never been part of, and she wondered sometimes what it felt like to be them.
Their hair was beautifully done, their hands and feet were manicured and pedicured.
They wore high-heeled sandals with their outfits, and they wore diamonds with everything.
This wasn’t a sporting crowd, it was a moneyed crowd, and the people on the yachts were best of breed.
Some of them had led simple lives before they made their money, lives which they were eager to forget.
The men were always more simply dressed, with polo shirts and T-shirts, shorts, and million-dollar gold watches on their wrists.
Charlotte didn’t envy them, although she was fascinated by them, knowing the sacrifices most of them had made to get where they were.
Some of them had sold their souls to be there, and she had a feeling that Ben Sharpe was one of them.
A man didn’t buy a boat like his unless he wanted the entire world to know how rich he was.
And the women such men had with them were part of the show too.
Charlotte wondered if he’d have one of his flashy girlfriends with him.
She walked past the biggest boats to the end of the quay, where there was a yacht she thought was some kind of oceangoing cruise ship.
It was flying a Cayman Islands flag, which gave the owner a tax break, and she knew the boat was his even before she read the name.
It was the Karma. As she watched, a tall, thin man in jeans and loafers, a T-shirt, and a leather baseball jacket walked onboard carrying an overnight bag.
A cluster of uniformed crew took it from him and followed him onboard as he spoke animatedly with them, and then he disappeared, presumably to the owner’s cabin, which were usually spectacular bedrooms, suitable for royalty.
The Karma was brilliantly lit, with spotlights under the water, and Charlotte could see fish swimming around the hull.
The man came out on deck then, holding a glass of wine.
The captain was with him and they walked upstairs into what she assumed was the wheelhouse.
She felt like a voyeur watching them, like a child with her face pressed against the windowpane.
She heard the motors turn on then, and the crew freed the boat from the ropes that held it fast, and it moved slowly away from the quay, to spend the night outside the port at anchor.
Some of the owners liked getting away from the bustle of activity in the port, others liked to go to bars and restaurants and discos and party on afterward until the wee hours.
She assumed that Sharpe was part of the action.
He was the right age, at fifty-two, with unlimited money.
And judging by the women he had married, who all looked like models and showgirls in the photographs she’d seen, she could easily guess that he was a member of the party scene.
She couldn’t see his face clearly when he boarded the yacht, but he was strikingly handsome in the photographs on the internet, and could have been a movie star or a model himself.
Charlotte walked back to the hotel, as people drove past her on the way to dinner.
She read for a while and went to bed. She wanted to get up early to prepare for the meeting and have her mind sharp for the interview.
She knew he hadn’t gone to college, but everything she read about him said he was brilliant.
She believed from experience that he would be trying to outsmart her, so she had to get some sleep to be in top form.
She woke up with a start several times in the night, wondering where she was and then remembering, and drifting back to sleep.
In the morning, she put on white jeans and a white T-shirt with her safari jacket, and white secondhand Hermès loafers she had found at a garage sale in Connecticut.
She was great at finding bargains wherever she went, and they were always chic.
She was always classically and discreetly dressed and didn’t try to draw attention to herself.
Instead, she liked to disappear into the background so the subjects of her interviews knew that they were the center of attention and they were the stars. She did it well.
Her car and driver arrived at the hotel at exactly ten-fifteen, and drove her to the boat, and when they stopped, the Karma had just motored into the port and returned to the spot at the far end of the quay.
The crew were securing her with the ropes Charlotte had seen the night before when they left.