Page 147 (1/1)

37

A giant set-high-tech and industrial with hints of Art Deco and Mission -appropriating an apartment in either the 8th or the 16th arrondissehes, Bentley Harrolds, Ta autu a 5,000-square-foot triplex that has been paid for with Iraqi et into the house you have to deactivate an alar circular staircase joins all three floors and the color scheht brown and soft pink, and in the bases An expansive open kitchen designed by Biber contains cabinets made from Makassar ebony and dyed tulipwood and there’s a Miele oven and two dishwashers and a glass-door refrigerator and a Sub-Zero freezer and custom-made wine and spice racks and an industrial restaurant sprayer installed in a stainless-steel alcove with teak-lined drying racks holding gilded polka-dotted china A giant mural by Frank Moore loos over

Serge Mouille chandeliers are suspended over sparkling green-and-white terrazzo floors and rugs designed by Christine Van Der Hurd Everywhere there are glass walls and giant white citronella candles and glass-box towers filled with CDs and white glass fireplaces and Dialogica chairs covered in Giant Textiles chenille and padded leather doors and stereo systems and Ruhlital satellite system that picks up five hundred channels around the world, and bookcases filled with bowl arrangements line the walls everywhere and piles of cellular phones lie in heaps on various tables And in the bedroos by Maurice Velle Keep and Hans Wegner’s lounges and ottomans in Spinneybeck leather and divans covered in a Larson chenille and dwarf fruit trees often sit next to them and the walls in all the bedrooms are leather upholstered The beds were made in Scandinavia and the sheets and towels are by Calvin Klein

A cohout the apartment (and the outside ca with a vast alared weekly, ree have been equipped with global-positioning tracking systems, as well as untraceable license plates, bulletproof windshields, run-flat tires, blinding halogen lights in front and back, ra bumpers The apartment is swept twice a week-phone lines, outlets, PowerBooks, la electrical Behind locked doors are rooms and behind those rooms are other locked doors and in those rooe- to be used In other hidden roo renades, M-16 rifles, ers, detonators, Se caps A closet contains dozens of designer suits lined with Kevlar, which is thick enough to stop bullets froments

All the phones in the house analyze callers’ voices for subaudible iving the listener constant LED readings All the phones in the house are installed with analyzers that send electrical pulses down the line and, bouncing the for the listener if the call is being traced All the phones in the house have a digital binary code scrambler that converts voices to numbers and allows the person on the other end of the line to decode it but keeps third parties fro but static

Suddenly, that first week in Paris, Bobby threw an elaborate cocktail party in honor of Joel Silver, who ended up bragging to Richard Donner, who had just flown in from Sacramento, about his new three-s over on the Concorde and then Serena Altschul showed up and gave us the inside scoop on the Bush tour and a soon-to-be-slain rap star and Hamish Bowles arrived with Bobby Short and then-boom boooslavia, Prince Pavlos of Greece, Princess Su a Prada suit and a shirt with spread collars and seemed happy at first to see me even if the last ti away from him down a darkened street in SoHo Skeet worriedly noticed the way I eyed a dropped Mentos lying on the terrazzo floor I bent down and, after brushing it off, popped the Mentos intorapidly

"You just need to, us," Skeet toldhello to oblivion," I told Skeet, chewing rapidly