The Pretender by Ellen Joan Pollock

Author:Ellen Joan Pollock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2002-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

While Marty wanted to become the next Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or, more lately, Sandy Weill, he also flattered himself that he was at heart a do-gooder and champion of the disenfranchised. Way back at Whitmer High School in Toledo, he’d been deeply interested in public policy, both domestic and foreign. John Schulte and later John Hackney, both conservatives, had him pegged as an unrepentant, old-fashioned liberal. Marty could still talk the talk, and starting a charity suited his self-image.

Again, Marty turned to Tom Corbally for help. Some sixty or seventy years before, Corbally had been an altar boy, he told Marty. And he was ideally suited to Marty’s project, because he knew people with strong ties to the Vatican, both in New York and in Rome. Given Corbally’s recent performance with Bob Strauss in Washington, there was no reason not to believe him.

Corbally put in a call to an old friend with the improbable name of Fausto Fausti. An international business consultant in Rome, Fausto was a former pilot with ties to the aerospace industry. He had, at times, been a Kroll Associates source and had hosted Jules Kroll’s son while the young man studied in Italy. Corbally informed Fausti that he had a client who wanted to make a large donation to the church. For Fausti, then in his sixties, this was an ordinary business proposition, for which he expected to get a fee.

After a few conference calls, the group decided to set up a foundation in Assisi, the magnificent hilltop town in Umbria. For Marty the timing was lucky. A year earlier, Assisi, known for its basilica with ceiling frescos attributed if not to Giotto himself then to his followers, had suffered a devastating earthquake. Fausti began preliminary negotiations with a priest whose monastery had been badly damaged. The idea was that Marty would pay to build a new chapter house; architectural drawings were quickly drafted. But then, suddenly, the priest got cold feet and Marty’s hopes for a foothold in the city that had been close to his favorite saint’s heart were dashed.

The Assisi caper, however, spawned a development that would ultimately create yet more domestic chaos in Greenwich: Kaethe apparently fell in love. During a delicate point in the negotiations, a group of Marty’s emissaries had converged on Assisi. Kaethe had come to Umbria on the arm of Tom Corbally. But upon her arrival in Assisi, she almost immediately became romantically entangled with Fausto Fausti’s son, Alfredo, who was in his twenties. Alfredo, who aspired to the practice of law, often worked on projects with his father.

The smitten couple pursued their romance in Italy. Corbally returned to New York to regroup and make another run at the Catholic Church. This time he turned to Thomas A. Bolan, a seventy-four-year-old New York lawyer whose major claim to fame was that he had been a close friend and colleague of the controversial lawyer Roy Cohn. For many years, Cohn had lived and worked at an East Side townhouse owned by his and Bolan’s law firm.

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