At half past ten, on a morning budding with the promise of joy, Esau Rose hurried to a FedEx office on Columbus Avenue, filled out the international shipping form, and sent a package containing a rolled-up canvas to former general De Solis in Argentina. It was a late spring day, and a light wind followed him. Crossing over to West 81st Street, he reached inside his jacket pocket, pulled out a note he’d written to his twin brother, checked the address on the envelope, and dropped it in the dark blue mailbox on the corner.

    Returning to his apartment, Esau smiled: This is a good day for singing a song. Truth be told, he felt like jumping up and kicking his feet in mid-air. He settled for singing a Doors’ tune:

    Love me two times, baby.
    Love me two times girl …

    He mixed up words and stanzas and he didn’t care. This was unquestionably the moment to phone the general in Argentina.

    The general picked up the phone immediately. “Your mission is accomplished?”

    Esau paused a moment to hum the tune he’d been singing. “Yeah, all squared away. Dotted the i’s and crossed all the t’s. The package will arrive tomorrow in the a.m.”

    “And we’ll drink a toast with champagne when you get to Buenos Aires tomorrow.”

    “Yeah, we’ll toast with the most expensive bottle of bubbly from your collection,” he lied. For Esau, double-dealing and lying had been part of his adult life as a covert operative for the U.S. military for twenty-five years, and as a key aide to De Solis for the last six.

    He glanced at his watch. Six hours and thirty-two minutes before he’d lock the door to the apartment for the final time, hail a cab to drive across Central Park, then down to the Midtown Tunnel, and on his way to JFK to board his flight. He’d leave yet again, this time for good, arriving the following dawn for the Fiji Islands to meet up with his lover and live secretly, thousands of miles from New York or Buenos Aires with funds from a numbered bank account stuffed with eighty million dollars.

    Esau was a brutish man of fifty-one years, with an abundance of red hair on his head and body. For the past four days, he’d been closing deals with Saudi bankers as a liaison for the general. Yesterday, he transferred money electronically into two nameless, numbered bank accounts—one in the Cayman Islands and one in Switzerland. The plan was to avoid any paper or disk trails. Once the weaponry that General De Solis was selling arrived at its destination, Esau would encrypt account numbers representing the $88 million on the back of the painting. Instead, Esau set aside a generous portion of that money—some $80 million—for himself. He could have kept all the cash, but took pleasure in picturing the general’s face when he realized he’d been duped.

    But at 2:25 p.m., after putting away three tumblers filled with bourbon over ice, he stumbled through the living room of his West Side apartment and made it to the sofa. When he got there he hollered, “The attaché case.” He staggered back into the kitchen to check on the rolled-up painting—an identical canvas to the one that he’d sent off this morning to De Solis. “That’s eighty mil in the bank!” Attempting to refill his glass, his hand shook and he spilled the contents on the kitchen floor. Esau groaned. He edged his way back to the sofa and finally collapsed in a stupor.

    In the bedroom, a broad-shouldered figure emerged from behind the thick, brown draperies that remained drawn to keep out the mid-afternoon sun. As this man with one arm and a pinned-up sleeve that hung to his left side stepped into the living room to look down at Esau’s body, which had tumbled to the floor, he cracked a broad smile. The tablet of Flunitrazepam that he’d dropped in the bourbon decanter worked.

    With a latex glove on his right hand, the man placed the glass and decanter in a plastic bag, pushed an old .38-caliber pistol in Esau’s mouth, placed Esau’s anesthetized hand on the gun, checked the silencer, pulled the trigger, and left the apartment as quietly as he had entered.

The Esau Swindle is a 308 page action-packed mystery novel. Copyright 2008 by Saturday Books Corp. All rights reserved. Unauthorized distribution, transmission or republication strictly prohibited.