James PATTERSON
Over tea in his town house, she noticed, Epstein ate all the finger food that had been put out for both of them. She found it
odd that the only book this supposedly brilliant man had left for
her to see was a paperback by the Marquis de Sade. And then
there was the call afterward from one of Epstein’s assistants — a woman Ward did not know —who told her, “Jeffrey wanted me to tell you that you looked so pretty.”
Ward is pretty, with fine English features and flowing blond
hair. She was also very pregnant then, with a bad case of morn-
ing sickness. She threw up often, sometimes in public, and these clumsy advances on Epstein’s part only added to her ever-present nausea. For a man who was supposedly brilliant, he'd struck her,
oddly, as not very smart. “Epstein is charming, but he doesn’t let the charm slip into
his eyes,” she wrote. “They are steely and calculating, giving some hint at the steady whir of machinery running behind them. ‘Let’s play chess, he said to me, after refusing to give an inter-
view for this article. ‘You be white. You get the first move.’ It was an appropriate metaphor for a man who seems to feel he can win no matter what the advantage of the other side. His advantage 1s that no one really seems to know him or his history completely or what his arsenal actually consists of. He has carefully engi-
neered it so that he remains one of the few truly baffling mystet
ies among New York's moneyed world. People know snippets, =
but few know the whole.”
The testimonials Epstein’s friends gave were glowing: 14
think we both possess the skill of seeing patterns,” Les Wexner
told her. “Jeffrey sees patterns in politics and financial markets, ds. My skills are ©
and I see patterns in lifestyle and fashion tren
146
not in investment strateg knows, his are not in fast world trends as each of us “Tm on my 20th boc Epstein in 1997, “The onl ily that I send drafts to is But Ward also talked questions and qualms ab« in lawsuits against him. C with him. One who had board of Rockefeller Uniy One powerful investn conspicuous absence frot ing desks don’t seem to animals that big to not le: Ward uncovered lega view with the SEC, given Stearns. She visited a fed: at length with Steven Ho made a major mistake in told him to stay below the accusations, about Epste denied—and Ward kne
7 mastermind, was not to b _ throughout the reporting
- concerned with what sh
with what she’d uncovere
Time and again, he '
i have on the girls?”
, Bt .
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