Free Seven Wonders by Ben Mezrich Page A

ninety-four-foot, twenty-one-thousand-pound blue whale suspended beneath the arched skylights. Even so Jendari had no trouble picking out the debonair, rotund octogenarian standing at the edge of the crowd, propped up between two twenty-three-year-old Ukrainian girls in matching silver Hervé Léger banded dresses, the material so tight around their serpentine curves they looked like something that had escaped from the Egyptian mummy exhibit on the third floor.
    “Oh, I’ve got plenty of those too, Mr. Agastine,” Jendari said, pausing for a brief moment as the phone beeped once from inside the crystal-lined purse— text received —then joined the trio in the shadow of the giant whale’s tail. “Although tonight I thought pearls seemed more appropriate.”
    Agastine laughed, the buttons straining to contain his inflated abdomen beneath the flaps of his Armani tuxedo. The Ukrainian girls continued to look bored and hungry.
    “It’s your party, Ms. Saphra. You can wear whatever you’d like.”
    Jendari waved her hand as if banishing such hyperbole from her presence; then she ran her fingers down the three strands of natural, uncultured pearls that hung down the front of her Neptune-blue, Versace sheath. The pearls had been harvested from the volcanic atolls of the French Polynesian islands at considerable expense; at fifty-eight, she’d never be mistaken for a mummified supermodel, but she could certainly still turn heads. Especially here among her peers, the glittering fools sipping imported champagne as they danced among the life-size models of giant squids eating sperm whales, dolphins frolicking through choppy waves, and walrus clans battling across imitation ice floes that populated the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life.
    Agastine wasn’t wrong, of course; the invitations for the annual charity gala at the American Museum of Natural History might have listed a dozen corporate sponsors, and the RSVP insert might have been signed by the deputy mayor himself; but everyone in the room knew who had paid for the twenty-piece orchestra situated on the mezzanine, violinists lined up like so much krill, inches from the mouth of the great blue whale. Everyone knew who had draped the exterior of the monstrous museum—twenty-seven buildings in all, containing more than thirty-two million specimens, from one-of-a-kind dinosaur fossils, to meteors the size of compact cars, to ancient artifacts so rare and delicate they would never even be photographed, let alone displayed—with sparkling velvet tangles of blue that matched the whale, and more importantly, Jendari’s dress, for all the city to see.
    Last year, Jendari’s Saphra Industries had spent four million dollars on the gala, and then led the annual donations with another four million, to help reconstruct a coral reef off the Japanese coast that had been severely damaged by a pair of tanker spills the year before. This year, Saphra Industrieswas adding another four million to the cause; at this pace, Jendari often thought to herself, they’d be paving half the Pacific Ocean in coral, just so a bunch of wealthy Manhattanites could eat caviar bathed in the glow spilling out of Plexiglas tanks filled with faux bioluminescent eels swimming through schools of computerized jellyfish.
    Jendari had nothing against coral. In fact, she had a pair of magnificent chandeliers that had been carved out of endangered coral from the Great Barrier Reef hanging in one of her four homes in California, above a dining room table that she had never eaten off of, and probably never would. But she didn’t give tens of millions of dollars to the American Museum of Natural History every year because she was concerned about some insignificant life-form. A biological rounding error in the evolutionary equation had put mankind at the top of the food chain, and Jendari Saphra, with her billions in assets, her twenty homes in twelve countries on four continents, was at the top of the top. Her