Rampage

by Justin Scott

  The only way he knew to raise the fortune he needed— every penny of which he would have to hide from the IRS— was to succeed as a major developer on a scale that his father had never dared dream. He had to build many buildings, not just one at a time, and also had to extract a much bigger profit than bank financing would allow. The answer was joint ventures. But to attract joint-venture investors, he initially had to make his name with some big buildings on bank mortgages. He set up a meeting with his best and probably only hope, Henry Bunker, who behind his prickly facade was a cautious man.

  After greeting Chris in his office, Henry Bunker removed his wire-rimmed glasses and gave him a tart glower. “You took a vacation.”

  “You make ‘vacation’ sound like Legionnaires’ disease.”

  “Is your building on schedule?”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “Two weeks ahead, as if your little spies hadn’t told you. Pittsburgh fucked up or we’d be up three weeks. Where do I sign?”

  Bunker called his secretary for the notes due and wiped his eyeglasses while Chris signed them. After she left to make copies, Chris sat back and smiled. “Let’s get down to the real reason I came by today.”

  “The real reason?” Bunker put his glasses back on. “What do you mean, the real reason? I thought you’re trying to finish your father’s building.”

  “I’m top-heavy in management. My guys have expensive time on their hands.”

  “Fire them.”

  “I hate to break up a hot team. Why don’t we work out something with the people who hold the mortgage on that Fifty-seventh Street building?”

  The banker gasped. “Chris, you came in here to try and save your father’s building in the midst of the worst real estate depression in memory, and now you’re trying to start another?”

  “You know the one I mean?”

  “Yes. It’s standing there like a half-built tombstone.”

  “Let’s finish it.”

  “Have you any idea how much money they’re owed?” He apparently did, because he started scribbling numbers and pecking at his Hewlett-Packard.

  “If you were stuck with that mortgage,” Chris replied, “you’d sell your sister to get out of it.”

  “I would not sell my sister during a recession,” the banker replied dryly. “And we are most definitely looking at a recession.”

  “They’re looking at a recession,” Chris shot back. “They screwed up the building. But I’ve got the top people to run the job right. We’ll close it in before winter and start renting in the spring. You’ve got the cash. We can buy it for a song.”

  “There’s no one to rent it to when it’s done,” Bunker objected. “Who’s going to live in it?”

  “If we can’t rent it, we’ll sell it as cooperatives.”

  “To whom? I’m frankly not sure that this is the right time to invest heavily in Manhattan real estate.”

  “Real estate is cycles. We’re in a down cycle. Now’s the time to get in before the next up cycle.”

  “Cycle theories are dreamed up to generate sufficient hope to prevail over intelligence.”

  Chris surged toward the door and Bunker flinched at his size in sudden motion. “Come on,” Chris barked, his father echoing in his voice. “Let’s take a walk.”

  “Now?”

  “I’m going to show you the next cycle.”

  “How old are you, Chris?”

  “You want to come with me? Please.”

  “The reason I ask is I’m too young to be here and something tells me I’m older than you.”

  “Just a half-hour walk. I’ll buy you lunch.”

  “You can’t afford it.”

  But he agreed to let Chris tour him up Sixth Avenue. It was a crisp, clear summer day, the avenue thronged with people walking during lunch hour, and New York—thank God for his sales pitch—sparkled.

  “What am I supposed to be looking at?”

  “Faces and buildings. All these young executives. Guys and girls like us. All these office towers just finished.”

  “And half empty.”

  “I’ll talk about that in a minute. But all these people are commuting for hours to get here.”

  “From the suburbs.”

  “You want to live in the suburbs?”

  Bunker shuddered.

  “Neither do they. They want to live here. They want to walk to work.”

  “You can’t write off the suburbs.”

  “I don’t have to. The Arabs have done it for me. The suburbs have passed their high point and can’t grow anymore. The roads are clogged. Nearby land is running out. And single-family housing costs are going crazy. But at the same time there are more people. My class at Fordham had twice as many students as ten years ago. The baby boom kids are coming up. They’re going to flood this city and need places to live, starting with that tower on Fifth-seventh Street.”

  “Are you sure it’s big enough?” Bunker asked sarcastically.

  “As soon as we finish it, let’s go to Columbus Avenue. It’s just waiting to be developed.”

  “If Lincoln Center didn’t get that wasteland developed, nothing will.”

  “Sixth Avenue will,” Chris promised. “These people have to live somewhere.”

  “Chris, your theory depends upon renting these office buildings, and right now it’s more likely we’re going to see deer in Times Square.”

  “No. Money’s coming this way.”

  “That’s news to my bank.”

  “The world is going to hell. Half of it’s shaky dictatorships, and the other half’s already in revolution—right?”

  “Basically.”

  “But even the most miserable places have people with money. Where they going to put it?”

  “Hong Kong.”

  “So the Chinese Communists can take it?”

  “Beirut.”

  “Which will blow up if things get worse with Israel?”

  “London.”

  “With England nationalizing anything not in running

  shoes?”

  “Geneva.”

  “Swiss vaults, while inflation whipsaws it? Definitely not. They gotta make their money work someplace they can count on. That leaves the only stable democracy where the government has a healthy respect for money—the U.S. And where will these money people buy apartments, start businesses, and rent offices? The money capital of the safest country in the world— New York. So let me ask you—”

  “What were you studying in college?” Bunker interrupted. “My father told me I could study anything as long as I read the newspaper. Let me ask you something.”

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you and me get in on the ground floor before the safe and easy boys come back into the market?”

  “Dammit, how old are you?”

  “I’m twenty-two, for crissake. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three. ”

  “Wanna shake on it?”

  On Thursday nights the cops picking up college credit at Fordham’s Manhattan campus gathered after class in Jimmy Armstrong’s Saloon on Ninth Avenue. They ran the New York Police Department gamut from sergeants hoping to become lieutenants to lieutenants gunning for captain to detectives in homicide, burglary, and organized crime control. Christopher Taggart took to waiting for them around ten o’clock, his big hand wrapped around a glass of Murphy’s from which he drank sparingly.

  Having been reared around his Uncle Eamon, he was comfortable with cops and knew how to put them at ease. One trick was to honor partners and treat the sour, unfriendly, gloomy cop as politely as his cheerful, outgoing buddy. Another was not to ask questions. But the best device was to seem so rich and powerful as to not need anything from them.

  When they asked, “What course are you taking?” the answer, “I’m putting up a building over on Fifty-sixth,” did wonders.

  “Office building?”

  Taggart shrugged. “Thirty stories.”

  “My
brother’s in construction. He’s an electrician.”

  “Is he good?”

  “Busts his ass.”

  “If he ever needs work, send him over. I’m Chris Taggart.” He shook hands.

  “Nick Pomodoro. My partner, Charley Dobson.”

  Dobson glowered.

  “Chris is building a building over on Fifty-sixth.”

  “Oh, yeah? When are they going to do something about that one on Fifty-seventh? There’s planks blowing off in the wind.”

  “I just took it over.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “I’ll have her closed in by fall. What do you guys do?”

  “Homicide.” This was worthless in terms of Mafia intelligence, but it was an opening to more cops.

  “Nice work if you can get it.”

  “Steady,” Nick agreed, and even Dobson ascended from his gloom to remark, “It’s a fucking growth industry.”

  Taggart returned Thursday night after Thursday night, gaining their confidence until he was less cop buff than one of the boys. A street-crimes sergeant needed a bridge loan to close on a new house before he sold his old one; Taggart obliged. A mounted patrol sergeant everybody liked was forced to retire at sixty-five; Taglione Concrete put him and his horse in charge of security at its sprawling East River plant.

  On Wednesdays he regularly hit a cop bar behind the new police headquarters downtown. Tuesdays, a spaghetti joint next to the Fifth Precinct. On Fridays, religiously, he joined Uncle Eamon for end-of-the-week drinks with his brass hat cronies. And Monday nights it was back to Armstrong’s Saloon to catch the captains trickling in from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

  That summer, just before night classes ended, Taggart Construction contributed to the PBA’s widows’ fund. Taggart loaned the Taglione family’s Catskill acreage to several PAL-supported Boy Scout troops for wilderness camping. And in the fall, he formed the Mike Taglione Memorial Foundation, which bought a thousand bullet-proof vests for the NYPD.

  He borrowed a leaf from Sylvia’s show-biz book and invested serious money in his business image. He toyed with the idea of an elegant car like a Rolls-Royce, but settled instead upon what he described to his decorators as a “blow ’em away” office in the partially completed Fifty-seventh Street tower. Unfortunately, he didn’t make clear who his image was aimed at, so he scrapped it and tried to explain again. “My old man always drove a big white Lincoln Continental.”

  “So what?”

  Chryl Chamberlain zipped her drawing case shut with a vicious buzz. Her partner, Victoria Matthews, glared angrily and gripped a clump of her red hair as if to yank it out. A year out of Pratt Institute of Design, they were outraged that a Taggart demolition crew was stuffing their first effort into dumpsters.

  “I still think you’re tops. I’m trying to explain what I need.”

  “Not very clearly,” Chryl replied icily.

  Taggart wondered whether he would toss them out with their design if they weren’t two of the most beautiful girls he had seen in his life—women, actually, in their late twenties, who had retired from modeling to study architecture. But for hair color—Chryl was blond—they might have been sisters, with their lovely, lean faces, straight noses, and long bodies that seemed to drape over furniture as if each piece had been built with them in mind and gently placed underneath. They had a habit that enchanted Taggart; one would lightly rap the other with the back of her half-closed hand, their heads would bob, and a word, a look, or a laugh would flicker between them. Today, however, they weren’t laughing.

  “My pop used to say, ‘Most guys humping a guinea Cadillac’—that’s a wheelbarrow—‘think they’re smarter than the boss. My car makes ’em wonder.’”

  “But you just threw half our job into a goddamned dumpster.”

  “And handed you a check for your full commission.”

  “It’s not just the money.”

  “That’s right. I won’t smile at something that doesn’t work. Do you get what I’m saying about my father’s car? Forget taste. What you did looked great, beautiful.” He cracked a small smile and tweaked the dragon’s tail. “Soho chic—”

  “You son of a bitch!”

  “But it doesn’t work for me. At this point I gotta go for impact. I’ve got a problem making money people believe me. I’ve got great ideas, but they think I’m a kid. I have to get their attention before they’ll listen. Can you try again? Can you design me an office that makes a joint venturer scratch his hard head and wonder, Maybe we should be nice to this kid?”

  “What’s a joint venturer?”

  “A guy in control of a hundred million dollars, such as the assets of an insurance company. An investor I gotta convince to go in with me on a new project.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Old enough to take you both home and screw your brains out.”

  “That’s offensive.”

  “Asking my age is offensive. I just paid you for a job I didn’t like. Now I’m giving you a blank check for your biggest commission since you graduated. And you’re still bugging me about how old I am? Just like the joint venturers.”

  “That doesn’t give you the right to act like a clod.”

  “And speaking of brains, it shouldn’t take too many to figure out that if your design gets me more buildings to build, you’ll get commissions for lobbies and plazas and offices. That doesn’t give me clod rights either, but it would be a hell of a lot of fun. We can do some good buildings.”

  Victoria rapped Chryl’s shoulder, and they exchanged a speculative glance. They were very tight, so finely tuned to each other that Taggart couldn’t read them.

  “Okay, I’m twenty-two.”

  “Sounds old enough to me,” Chryl said. “We’ll put our heads together for a boyish fantasy.”

  “One more thing.”

  “What?”

  “It has to be movable. I’m a builder, and I want my office where I’m at.”

  “We’ll make you a new one.”

  “No. I want that image to come with me. You know how kings used to move from castle to castle to keep an eye on things?”

  “Carrying their tapestries with them,” said Victoria. “Right. Okay, we’ll come up with a royal boyish fantasy.”

  Chryl touched her with her knuckles. “Do we call him Your Majesty?”

  “Clod will do,” said Taggart, and they were friends.

  He got lucky and connected with a federal agent who would serve him for years. An assistant business agent of the Cement and Concrete Workers Union hit Arnie Markowitz for a payoff at the East River plant, and Arnie, who could be very street smart, sensed something was wrong and passed the guy up to Chris. The business agent started talking in circles, trying to get Chris to finish his sentences for him.

  “I don’t understand,” Chris finally interrupted. “Do I have a labor problem or don’t I?”

  “I think it’s fixable.”

  At that point, custom deemed it appropriate to lay money on the table. But Arnie’s warning, and the heightened senses Chris had begun to cultivate while scheming his revenge, told him something wasn’t kosher.

  “So fix it.”

  The business agent backed out with a frustrated look. Chris went down the stairs after him and followed him around the corner. A sedan was double-parked on Eighth Avenue. It had long, whip radio antennas. Inside was a man, barely visible behind tinted glass. The business agent shook his head as he passed. Taggart leaned on the roof of the car and knocked on the window until the glass was lowered an inch.

  “Was that prick wired?”

  “What?”

  “I’m Chris Taggart. You’re trying to sting me for bribery. What are you, FBI?”

  The agent tried to look serious.

  “If this is what my taxes go for, I’d rather buy an aircraft carrier.”

  “Take it up with the IRS. What did I do wrong?”

  “You sent the wrong guy. The turkey can’t act. Every time he opened hi
s mouth he was reading from your script, and then he expected me to read it back. If I changed one word, he almost dropped his teeth. What did you get on him?”

  “None of your fucking business.”

  “Hey. I just helped you do your job better next time and you’re yelling at me. I’ll tell you something else. You’re wasting your time. I don’t pay bribes.”

  “Can I quote you on that?”

  “I’ll sign an affidavit.”

  “Better discuss that with your lawyer.”

  “I’ll ask my brother. He’s interning with the U.S. Attorney’s office. Well, this blows the afternoon. How about a beer?”

  “Close your eyes.”

  Long, perfumed fingers closed his eyes. Chryl took one hand, Victoria the other, and they led him into his new office. He heard the door close firmly.

  “Ready? Open.”

  “Outta sight!”

  “We can’t decide whether to call it ‘Clod Chic,’ or ‘Guinea Cadillac.’ What do you think?”

  “I love it.”

  “You would.”

  They had mingled Japanese electronics and expensive-looking European antiques. An entire wall sported the latest executive toys: stereo, multiscreen television, and video games. In the center a leather ottoman faced burled-walnut bookshelves. Anchoring the business end was an art-nouveau desk with lines that flowed like a river.

  “The carpet’s for class,” said Chryl, as Victoria demonstrated the electric curtains and multilevel lighting. “John D. Rockefeller bought it second-hand.”

  Victoria touched another button. The bookshelves opened and a king-sized bed was lowered with a sigh.

  “I love it.” He walked around, toying with the electronic control panels. “What happened to my books?”

  “Since you persist in putting your own books in the shelves, we’ve had them leather-bound. As you get new ones, your secretary will send them to the bindery. Including those tacky paperbacks.”

  The first electrical contractor to set eyes on the desk said, “No wonder you’re jewing me down. What did that fucker cost?”