Chapter 9 - The Gala at the Metropolitan
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On Monday morning, Clara officially started her first day as Director of Hospitality and Private Events on the sixtieth floor of the Vane Tower—and her very first assignment was a baptism by fire.
Tomorrow night—Tuesday—Julian was hosting the annual Harbor & Maritime Endowment Gala inside the Grand Atrium of the Vane Tower for two hundred of New York and New Jersey’s most powerful shipping executives, port commissioners, and syndicate patriarchs, culminating in the midnight announcement of the fifty-year Port Newark and Red Hook container terminal leases.
Whoever won the majority endorsement of the Harbor Commission board tomorrow night controlled every ton of freight entering New York Harbor for the next half-century—and Julian’s chief rival for the bid, fifty-five-year-old Don Lorenzo Morelli of Newark, was on the guest list.
"Why on earth would you invite Lorenzo Morelli into your own building tomorrow night after he sent a gunman to my father’s hospital floor on Friday?!" Clara asked on Monday afternoon as she stood beside Julian in the soaring three-story marble atrium on the second floor, holding an iPad with the seating chart while florists unloaded white winter roses.
Julian stood beside her in a bespoke navy pinstripe suit, hands in his pockets as he surveyed the upper mezzanine balconies where Dante was positioning counter-sniper and security teams.
"Because under Commission and Port Authority rules, if I bar Morelli from the public endowment bidding floor without proof that ties him personally to that dead shooter at Sloan Kettering, Morelli claims I rigged the vote through intimidation, and the Jersey commissioners walk out," Julian explained smoothly. "Morelli knows Gallo is gone and his shooter failed. Tomorrow night, Morelli has to come through those front doors with a smile on his face—and try to flip two of my Manhattan commissioners before midnight."
"And how am I supposed to help stop him from flipping your commissioners?" Clara asked, tapping her stylus against the VIP table map. "I’m running the catering, the wine pairings, and the floor timeline."
"At the St. Regis, you ran twenty diplomatic and billionaire summits," Julian said, turning to look down at her with a glint of steel in his blue eyes. "Men like Morelli don't pass bribes in envelopes anymore, Clara. They use the banquet floor—sommeliers, coat-check tickets, private cigar-lounge rotations—to pass encrypted hardware tokens to the commissioners they’ve bought. Dante’s guards look like guards; when they walk near a table, everyone stops talking. You know how to run a dining room floor so seamlessly that nobody realizes the director is watching every hand that touches a wineglass."
Clara felt a thrill of pure professional adrenaline sharpen her focus. "Show me the faces of the five Harbor Commissioners on the board."
Julian tapped five photographs onto her iPad screen.
Four of them were older men in their sixties. The fifth was a sharp-eyed, forty-two-year-old woman named Commissioner Victoria Sterling, who oversaw the Port Authority’s environmental and customs compliance committee—the swing vote on the board.
Wait.
Clara stared down at the high-resolution photograph of Commissioner Victoria Sterling on the screen—and then looked at the woman’s husband listed in the biographical sidebar: Arthur Sterling, Managing Partner at Sterling Maritime Law.
Suddenly, a memory from eighteen months ago at the St. Regis Hotel flashed into Clara’s head like a camera strobe.
"Julian," Clara said slowly, her finger freezing over Victoria Sterling’s photograph. "Look at her husband, Arthur Sterling. Two years ago, right before I left my job as assistant director of private dining at the St. Regis when my dad got sick... I oversaw a private, off-the-books wine tasting in the cellar vault for six men."
Julian’s brow furrowed sharply. "Who was at the table?"
"Arthur Sterling was hosting it," Clara said, her pulse speeding up as the details locked into place. "And sitting right across from him, drinking a four-thousand-dollar bottle of Screaming Eagle paid for on Arthur Sterling’s corporate card... was Lorenzo Morelli! They made me sign a non-disclosure agreement because they claimed they were negotiating a real estate divorce settlement—and at the end of the dinner, I saw Morelli hand Arthur Sterling a keycard to a private villa in Turks and Caicos!"
Julian went dead still beside her in the marble atrium.
"Victoria Sterling has sworn to my lawyers for six months that she and her husband have zero connection to Lorenzo Morelli’s New Jersey companies," Julian murmured, his voice dropping an octave. "She’s scheduled to cast the deciding third vote in my favor tomorrow night at eleven—unless she’s Morelli’s Trojan horse, waiting to flip her vote at the podium when it’s too late for me to lobby the alternate commissioner!"
"If Morelli paid for their villa in Turks and Caicos through the St. Regis wine cellar bill two years ago," Clara said rapidly, "the St. Regis private dining archive keeps physical hard-copy signed sommelier chits with the guest roster and credit-card imprint in the sub-basement manager’s vault for seven years for state liquor-tax audits!"
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Julian looked down at her, his eyes blazing with dark fire. "Who has the key code to the St. Regis private dining archive vault?"
Clara smiled slightly. "My best friend Chloe took over my job as Private Dining Director when I left two years ago—and her shift starts at five o’clock tonight."
