Good Faith

by Jane Smiley

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s surprising how little anyone knows about the IRS.”

  “Afraid to ask, you know. Afraid to look, afraid to say a word.”

  This time he really laughed, but he nodded too. “I’ll tell you something about the IRS, but of course you’ll keep this to yourself.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well, you know Gordon’s little problem?”

  “Not in detail but in general, yes.”

  “The first step was to get his file transferred to my old office. The second step was to put a call in to some of the boyos there.”

  “Then?”

  “Oh, Jaysus, lad, you can’t imagine what gets lost in that office!”

  We laughed together. He returned to the seat by my desk. I tried again. “But why bother? You met Bobby in a bar.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Why not? Do you think twelve years with the IRS made me a believer in the social benefits of the tax code? I’m going to tell you something. You know what a card counter and number cruncher I am?”

  “I’ve heard from Bobby, yeah.”

  “Well, the main thing about me is that I know the tax code backwards and forwards. It wasn’t like I was bad at my job. I wasn’t fired. I was a government bureaucrat, and I got exactly what I signed up for after college—a lifelong job and a steady income—except after a couple of years, after the death of my mother, say, I realized that a lifelong job and a steady income and sobriety were good but not best. And I started really looking at the tax returns I was going over, and you know what? I saw other sorts of lives there, perfectly legal lives, lives where the government backed a little risk, and the risk paid off, and it wasn’t that these people were just making lots of money, it was also that they were having fun. And believe you me, the way things are going in Washington, there is going to be more fun, more more more fun than anyone has ever had since God knows when, because the tax code is transforming before your very eyes, and everyone is perfectly happy to see it happen.”

  “Well, Gordon is perfectly happy to see it happen, since his mastery of the tax code was totally lacking.”

  “Chaos! The auditors could come in and make absolutely anything they wanted of his whole career. In spite of myself, I was appalled. I mean, it’s not like he has two sets of books. Most businesses have that. He has no sets of books. He has little slips of paper, most of which have been through the wash.”

  “He’s had accountants. After a while he just says to them, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it, we’ll see what happens. It’ll be fine.’”

  “And for years it was. But I’m telling you, even organized crime doesn’t run like that. Most people in the world want to know how much money they have.”

  “Gordon just wants to know if there’s enough. The answer to that question has always been yes, at least as long as I’ve known him, so he doesn’t go on to the next question, which is, ‘How much is there?’”

  “Here’s another thing. This isn’t an IRS thing, just an accounting thing. Accountants are in the business of making sure the books balance. That’s all. You could steal a company blind, but if the books balanced, the accountant would have done his job. I knew this case in Brooklyn where a company wrote off its whole inventory as scrapped—something like fourteen million dollars’ worth of heavy equipment. They even shipped it off the premises, out to Jersey somewhere. Then they bought it back. They got a tax break for the loss, and a tax break for the purchase. But the books balanced perfectly.”

  “Huh,” I said. “So what do you think about Crosbie? That was the first time I’ve met him. I guess he came in from somewhere out West.”

  “There’s some books I’d like to get hold of,” said Marcus.

  “Portsmouth Savings? They should be in pretty good shape. Frank Perkins was very conservative.”

  “I talked to Crosbie, you know. I took him out to lunch a couple of times. He was perfectly willing to talk. Saw me as a kindred spirit. They’re getting ready to do some other kinds of business. He told me they’re putting in a big new computer system that’s going to take something like a year to get running, and until then they’ve hired some outfit from California to computerize everything. My guess is, they want to get out of the residential lending business altogether.”

  “How can they?”

  “Don’t know if they can at this point. And even if they do, I don’t see Crosbie being the one to do it. He’s been in the S and L business too long, shuffling papers this way and that. When there’s rules to follow and auditors looking over your shoulder all the time, that puts a premium on thinking small. How old do you think he is?”

  “Bart told me thirty-seven,” I said.

  “So he started out as a teller when he was twenty-two, putting money in a drawer and taking it out, and he’s been thinking small for fifteen years. The S and L business has hardly been high-risk.”

  “God forbid,” I said.

  Marcus laughed, a loud hearty laugh. Then he said, “Look. Why don’t you stay away from Crosbie? I’ll do the talking. This is a guy who thinks he’s been around, and here he finds himself out in Hicksville. I’m not saying he’s out to dazzle anyone; how can he? as you say, given all the rules and regulations. But if there’s a deal to be made, he wants to be the beneficiary, and he thinks he will be, because Hicksville is Hicksville, after all. But all the hicks down in Hicksville were not created equal, were they, Joe?” He winked at me, and we laughed together. As he walked out, he drew my eye to his check, sitting on the corner of my desk, and he tapped on it with his forefinger and gave me a nod.

  CHAPTER

  9

  WHEN I GOT TO the Thorpes’ the next day, I had all my paperwork in order and a bank draft for a quarter million dollars in my wallet. I drove through the big gate and down the curving driveway to the front of the house. The whole drive was shaded with huge spreading trees that looked like chestnut to me and moved slowly and heavily in the breeze. It was warm but dim, with a few rays of sunshine lighting up the beveled-glass windows on either side of the double front door. As I walked up the brick steps, the door opened, and the butler said, “Good morning, Mr. Stratford. The Thorpes are in the study.”

  Neither Jacob Thorpe nor Dolores looked well, but he, at least, was beaming very pleasantly at me. I shook his hand and greeted Mrs. Thorpe, who said, “H’lo.” Through the bank of French doors that ran along the south side of the room, I could see pinpoint white blossoms against the green of the hedge. We sat down at the table. I felt self-conscious as I spread out the papers, all neatly marked with flags for signatures. They acknowledged that we had a good-faith deal, and that Mr. Thorpe was in receipt of a check for 10 percent of the purchase price, and that the closing would take place on October 1. Paper-clipped to the receipt was the check.

  I was moving very smoothly, smiling and never pausing, so as not to give anyone an entrance for hesitation. I pulled out a chair and said to Mr. Thorpe, “Sir? Would you like to have a seat?”

  The butler, who had been standing in the doorway, departed. Mr. Thorpe stood up shakily and made his way to the table, not without supporting himself on the backs of first one armchair and then another as he came. Mrs. Thorpe took out a handkerchief and blew her nose. Mr. Thorpe glanced in her direction and then said to me, “Maybe I should come to your office.”

  I helped him to the waiting chair. I said, “There’s no need to go to the trouble, sir. We can do it right here.”

  He sat down. I handed him the pen and slid the receipt with the check underneath his hand. His head and neck twitched, which I didn’t understand until Mrs. Thorpe said, “Jacob.” His head and neck twitched again; he was stopping himself from turning toward her. She said, “Daphne Lawrence said that even though you signed the papers before, we don’t have to do this.” He touched the pen to the line but didn’t make a mark. She continued, “We can change our minds at any time. Mr. Stratford, that’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Of course, Mrs.
Thorpe. You don’t ever have to sell your house.”

  Thorpe’s pen was still touching the line. There was a long moment of silence. Finally he said, “I don’t want to go through another winter here, Dolores. I’m too old for that. Last year I couldn’t even get down the front steps for two months.”

  “I don’t either, Jacob. I’m not talking about living here.”

  “This place makes me feel old.” His voice was a bit petulant.

  She didn’t say anything. Still, he didn’t move the pen. I said warmly, “Tell me what your place is like in Florida. Is it in Palm Beach?” I knew it was.

  “Very spacious,” said Jacob Thorpe. Mrs. Thorpe didn’t say anything.

  “When was it built? I’ve seen some very elegant places in Palm Beach.”

  “I’ve lived here for fifty-seven years, Jacob,” she said.

  “Yes, and in New York and Florida and England. Don’t pretend that we’ve spent fifty-seven continuous years here, because we haven’t. We talked about all this.”

  I got a picture in my mind of the way we had sat, the day before, around the table at Portsmouth Savings, grinning and eager, and in spite of myself, I said, “Maybe you need to talk about this some more, sir.”

  He looked up at me and laid down the pen. He sighed. Rather shakily, he stacked together the papers and the check and handed them to me. I was a little shocked at what I had done, and I knew I didn’t know what to tell Gordon and Marcus and Crosbie and Bart. I took the papers. In the first place there was having screwed up the deal, and in the second place there was my injured pride in failing at the one thing I thought I could do, which was to shepherd a deal to its close. Thorpe stood up and put his hand on my elbow. We crossed the room. I paused beside Mrs. Thorpe, thinking he would sit down with her, but he squeezed my elbow and kept on walking. We made our way out of the library and into the entry hall. He propelled me all the way to the front door without saying a word. This allowed my regrets to build, but I didn’t see any way out of my situation. I couldn’t very well tell him he was bound by the deal, because he wasn’t, and obviously the check, which might mean something to a seller who needed to sell, was meaningless to him.

  I opened the heavy front door. The butler was nowhere in sight. It was still beautiful and shady in front of the house, and my car was right there. I turned to shake his hand. He said, in almost a whisper, “I’ll come to your office. I’ll come to your office this afternoon at three o’clock.”

  I looked at my watch. It was about eleven-thirty. I said, “All right, sir. I’ll be there.” I went down the steps and the door closed behind me.

  I did an errand or two, picked up some lunch at a deli in Deacon, and stopped for a moment at the Davids’ house. Only David Pollock was there with the dogs. He had removed the back door and was cutting a wider opening, for a French door to lead out onto a large deck to be covered by a pergola. Grapes. Local variety. Huge leaves. Very shady and elegant. Didn’t the kitchen floor look fabulous? I nodded and smiled appreciatively and went back to my office.

  It was hot. I closed the blinds and cleared my desk several times. Bobby, in whom I did not confide, was sitting at his desk reading Runner’s World magazine. I said, “I thought you had an appointment in Portsmouth at three-fifteen.”

  “Canceled. I’m going to try—”

  Just then we heard a noise I will never forget. It was a quick, loud, clicking noise, rhythmic but fast. It may have lasted a couple of seconds or less, but it was so strange that we stared at each other and listened attentively. I said, “What in the world is that?”

  Bobby set down his magazine.

  There was a crashing thunk right outside. We both jumped up and ran to the window. I pulled up the blinds. A large black car—an older-model Lincoln, it looked like, black, with an oval-shaped chrome grille—had come to rest against the lamppost next to the sidewalk leading past my building to the rest of the stores in the strip mall. The front of the car had run along the picket fence I had built, popping the pickets off; that was the rapid ticking sound we heard. Pickets lay around on the grass, and the top stringer of the fence was broken in two. The amazing thing was the bottom stringer, a sixteen-foot two-by-four (I knew its dimensions because I had bought it myself), which had inserted itself like a skewer through the grille. Inside the vehicle, unmoving, was Jacob Thorpe. Bobby and I ran to the door of the office, and in a second we had the door of Thorpe’s car open. The first thing I noticed was that the stringer of the fence had continued through the firewall and up into the cabin of the vehicle. It had missed Jacob Thorpe’s head by three or four inches and poked a dent in the ceiling of the car just to the right of the interior light. The second thing I noticed was Thorpe’s heavy breathing. He was alive, untouched, eyes wide, his hands still on the wheel. I said, “Mr. Thorpe?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Would you like to get out of the car, sir?”

  “Not just at the moment, thank you.”

  I reached in, turned off the ignition, and sent Bobby in to call the police.

  I took a step back from the car and surveyed the scene. Thorpe would have been coming from the northeast and probably had attempted a right turn into the parking lot on that side of the building, but possibly he didn’t recognize the driveway quickly enough. At any rate, he had crossed about ten feet of grass and hit a large bush, then veered off to the right and gone straight down the pickets to the fence post, the lamppost, and another large bush, which by that time were sufficient to stop him. Everything was quiet for the moment. Cars passed; faces turned our way and stared. I didn’t think Thorpe was in any danger because the back of the car was fine; there were no fumes of any kind. I didn’t want to take the responsibility for moving him. Bobby came out. I shouted, “Go back in and call an ambulance!” He went back in.

  Thorpe said, “Oh, my. Do you think it’s that bad?”

  “That’s for you to say, sir.”

  “Would you call my wife?”

  “Is she at home?”

  “Yes. 398–1836.”

  “You sound pretty good, sir.”

  “I have been startled, that is all.” He turned his head and looked at the length of white wood right beside it. He said, “I suspect I have escaped serious injury by a very small margin.”

  “That’s the way it looks, sir.”

  We heard sirens in the distance. Mr. Thorpe said, “Perhaps you could help me out of the car. I would like to enter your office and clean up, if possible.”

  “I would prefer it if you would stay where you are until the ambulance gets here, Mr. Thorpe. You never can tell.” He nodded. After that, we became the passive objects of several operations. Two policemen, professionally unimpressed, went about taking down information for their report. The ambulance attendants arrived and got Thorpe out of the car and laid him on the grass, where they examined him briefly before putting him in the ambulance and taking him away, though without haste. The only thing wrong with him was that he had wet the front of his trousers in a large circle, which we all, including Thorpe, studiously avoided noticing. After the ambulance left, there was a lull, during which I called the number he gave me and spoke to the butler, and then the flatbed tow truck arrived, and the elderly car was hoisted up, still skewered by the fence stringer, and carried away.

  After that, traffic picked up out on the street, as there was nothing more to see. It was about five. I reflected as I walked around the scene that I had expected to have a done deal by this time, the check safely transferred, the property one step closer to Gordon’s possession. The scene of the accident was a mess: two bushes broken, grass torn up, fence posts smashed, and pickets scattered, not only on the ground around where the car had been but up against the building, out in the street, in the parking lot of the strip mall, even across the road. He must have been going pretty fast, because they had shot off like rockets and landed all over the place.

  Bo
bby kept saying, “Wow, man! Did you see how the two-by-four went through there? He must have been scared shitless. Have you ever seen anything like that? Doesn’t he have a chauffeur or something? I mean, wow!” He enthusiastically told the story to the police, the ambulance people, and the tow-truck people. When I was looking around afterward, I could see him inside on the phone, slapping his head emphatically. I suppose he was glad to have an amazing tale of misadventure that didn’t involve himself.

  Gordon called me about eight-thirty at my condo. He said, “How is the old guy?”

  “Well, I called the hospital. They didn’t keep him, so he must be okay.”

  “What was he doing over at your place? He signed the papers, didn’t he? I thought you were going out there.”

  “I did go out there, but the wife was having cold feet. He was trying to get to me to sign the papers in my office when he ran into the fence.”

  “He hasn’t signed the papers? You didn’t get him to take that check?”

  “Nope.”

  “I’m telling you, Joe, he’s going to look at this as a bad omen. I can’t count how many times I’ve had deals fall through because something went wrong, something completely outside the deal itself, but which the seller or the buyer saw as a sign and backed off.”

  “I know.”

  Marcus Burns called at nine. He said, “The good thing is that you’ve got the signed purchase agreement from four months ago.”

  I said, “The bad news is that it’s about to expire.”

  “Monday.”

  “Monday.”

  “Gordon says there’s trouble with the wife.”

  “She’s backing off. My guess is that the problem at the beginning was between the father and the kids, and she isn’t so adamant.”

  “Or she understands the development possibilities better.”

  “Or that.” One thing I liked about Marcus was that he wasn’t afraid to name the real problem. Gordon, for example, was superstitious and thought straightforward mention of a difficulty evoked it and gave it substance. No doubt that was why his “books” were in such chaos.