by Adam Pelzman
Months later, Julian watched from his apartment as the taxi made it up over the peak of the snowy mound, caught its rear wheels on the pavement, and shot east toward Ludlow. He repositioned the rags to better fill the hole in the window, but as he twisted the cloth, his right thumb grazed the sharp glass and sliced the skin over his top knuckle. He shook his hand, sucked the blood from the wound, examined it, confirmed its superficiality. Then he cursed Austerlitz—the shadowy and private figure who had paid many millions to assemble the surrounding properties and who, Julian surmised, was responsible for the broken window.
According to neighborhood gossip, the developer intended to demolish the entire block and erect a hotel, a high-rise and a row of retail shops. However, Julian’s landlord, a prideful Greek who refused to sell the tenement, was frustrating Austerlitz’s plans. “I’m a holdout, a principled and irksome holdout,” Fotopoulos would announce to the dwindling universe of people who would listen to him, to his tale of futile resistance.
The tenement stood dead center in the middle of the street and blocked the construction of the new building. Austerlitz had offered Fotopoulos an amount that was only a small fraction of its inherent value and an even smaller fraction of its market value, given its importance to the development. But when Fotopoulos stood firm, demanding a higher price, the developer resorted to acts that were devious and illegal, yet difficult to prove. First, the power lines to the building were cut, leaving the tenants in darkness for several days. Then the underground pipes were mysteriously severed, causing floods and leaving the tenement without running water. These inconveniences, life-threatening to some, caused an exodus among the tenants; only Julian and the landlord remained.
As Julian applied a sheet of tape over the rags, Fotopoulos knocked on the door. The landlord looked agitated, unstable. He held a cigarette in one hand, burned low against the filter. In his other hand he waved a document that had been rolled into a thin tube.
“We’re at the end. . . . I’m at the end,” Fotopoulos fumed. “No tenants, no rent. I haven’t paid the mortgage in months.” Fotopoulos tossed the roll of paper to the table and pointed. “There, a foreclosure. And then this bastard will get his wish.”
Julian picked up the paper, unrolled it. He trembled at the injustice, enraged not only by the depravity of Austerlitz, but also by his own powerlessness. “Maybe I can pay you a few months’ rent in advance,” Julian offered. “I don’t have much, you know, but it might help you hold on for a bit.”
Fotopoulos grimaced and shook his head. “That would be very kind, but I couldn’t. It would be money wasted. Even worse than wasted, if there’s such a thing.” The landlord snatched the foreclosure notice from Julian’s hand and tore it to pieces. He stuffed the shredded paper into his coat pocket, waved farewell dramatically and descended the buckled stairs to his first-floor apartment.
Julian checked his watch, remembering that he had early dinner plans with Sophie. His wallet emptied of cash, he put on his coat and headed around the corner to the bank, where he withdrew money from the machine. He removed the receipt and, expecting once again to see irrefutable proof of his struggle, looked at the account balance. But Julian was shocked by what he saw, and he carefully examined the balance several times until he was satisfied that he was reading the numbers correctly.
Classic, fucking classic, Julian muttered with a mixture of dismay and regard—for it was at this moment that he first learned of Frankmann’s death. There was no telephone call from Kira, no letter from a rabbi, no legal notice from a Russian probate lawyer. Rather, Julian learned of his mentor’s demise when he checked the bank receipt and, expecting to find a balance of several thousand dollars, instead discovered that his net worth had ballooned to just over one million.
Julian knew that only one person could give him so much money—would give him so much money—and he smiled at the crafty manner with which Frankmann had announced his own death. He recalled the beloved iconoclast’s gruff affection after his mother died, the months that he slept on Kira’s sofa, played with her nieces, even kissed the one with the blonde hair and the scabby knees—how he stuck close to Frankmann’s side, absorbing as much of the old man’s business cunning as he could.
With the receipt in his hand, Julian walked out to the street and imagined what he might do with this windfall: a bright apartment uptown, a cottage in the country, maybe a car. He wondered if he should finally propose to Sophie. Walking up Avenue A toward Sophie’s apartment, he approached the antiquarian bookstore that he loved. In addition to books and old autographs, the aromatic shop sold loose tea and pipe tobacco in enormous glass apothecary jars. The store was closed, but he stopped for a moment to look in the window. There was a stuffed fox baring its sharp teeth; a misshapen globe with the sprawling splash of the Soviet Union in red; several leather-bound volumes of indeterminate authorship; and there, leaning against a shelf draped in gold velvet, was an English edition of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.
The book’s plastic cover glistened in the streetlight, and Julian was reminded of the painter with the feminine features and his collection of fine books. Recalling with specificity Frankmann’s lesson on scarcity, need and knowledge, he looked again at the receipt—at the million-dollar balance—and considered again what he might do with the money. This bequest was, Julian concluded, Frankmann’s final lesson, his final challenge. The old man had guided Julian to the States years earlier, and now, with this ultimate act, he was leading the boy—the man—toward abundance.
He imagined what the old Jew might say to him at this instant. Remember your wiring, Julian, the greatness of your lineage. Remember your mother’s beauty, her faith. Her guidance. Submit to no man. And remember your father’s courage, his quiet power. Go, boy, go. Just like I taught you. And don’t screw it up.
As he recalled Frankmann’s preternatural ability to make money—to identify some quiet inefficiency in the marketplace that was invisible to others—Julian dismissed the idea of a cottage and a car, and this impulsive longing for immediate comfort was replaced by a hunger to turn this million into many more. Without intention or effort, his gait increased in speed and length, a reactive response of the nervous system that propelled him into a full sprint—an indication that his brain had transmitted a command to his body but had not yet revealed to him the reason for this command. A half block from home, still in full stride, a signal from deep within penetrated the lustrous membrane that separates unconsciousness from sentience, and an idea began to crystallize.
Julian considered the scarcity of the building and the land beneath it, how, given its singularity, it could not be more scarce; he thought of Austerlitz’s need to own the property, its critical importance to the massive project; he estimated the many years and many millions that the developer had spent to assemble the surrounding properties and how those investments would naturally inflate the value of the tenement.
Julian pounded on the door of the landlord’s apartment. After a few moments, Fotopoulos answered—holding yet another cigarette burned down to the filter. “No, boy, I cannot take your money,” he said, closing the door.
Julian jabbed his foot into the doorway before the lock could engage. “Even if it’s more than just a few months’ rent?”
“Two, three, four . . . It doesn’t matter, he wins.”
Julian smiled. “He’s not going to win.”
The landlord dropped the cigarette into a bucket of sand on the floor. “How do you figure?” he asked.
Julian waved the bank receipt in the air. “What I have in mind is this. Through good luck, bad luck, some of both, I now have enough money to make your mortgage payments. And if necessary, I can hire some people who are as smart and nasty as Austerlitz. I put up the money, I join the fight, and we go from hunted to hunter. And after I get my money back, we split the profit fifty-fifty.” Julian paused to let Fotopoulos consider the offer. “What do you think?”
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br /> Fotopoulos extended his hand. “Deal.”
That night, flush with both cash and optimism, Julian took Sophie not to the cheap bar on Stanton with the great burgers but out for a grand dinner in the West Village. They settled into a cozy banquette; seated side by side, their shoulders touching, supporting each other, they reveled in the pop of the wood in the fireplace, the smells of pizza and cedar-plank salmon escaping from the wood-burning oven, the beautiful, prosperous people. Julian recalled the magical dinner with Frankmann and Kira, and he wondered what ever became of the young painter. He considered the series of unrewarding jobs he had held since college. And as he reached for Sophie’s hand, he—like Frankmann at the age of eighty—wondered what role he might one day play in the world.
The ability of Fotopoulos to avert foreclosure with Julian’s money—with Frankmann’s money—first surprised and then infuriated the developer. When Austerlitz learned that Julian was bankrolling the landlord, that minor intimidation would not expel them from the building, he increased the pressure. Hardened by decades of competition in the city’s vicious real estate market, Austerlitz knew every trick and was willing to resort to most of them. The developer hired a retired detective who was crooked enough to imply violence but, given his age and comfortable pension, disinclined to resort to it. The man showed up, unarmed, at Julian’s apartment one evening, intending to bribe him with a knapsack full of cash. “A down payment on a new apartment,” he said, raising the bag.
When Julian responded with nothing but a shake of the head, the man opened the top of the knapsack and turned it sideways, revealing stacks of hundred dollar bills. He pushed the bag toward Julian. When Julian again shook his head, the man refastened the bag and placed it on the hallway floor. He made a circular gesture with his folded right arm, a loosening up of the shoulder joint that was not a precursor to violence but a test of the young man’s resolve. The detective looked for signs of panic that might indicate some willingness to compromise, a timorous reaction that he had elicited so often during his years on the force.
Julian, though, remained composed, leaving the detective to wonder if the young man’s poise was the result of an exceptional confidence or if Julian’s mind was so dull that he could not process the implications of his disobedience. And then, with a shiver, the detective considered another possibility; he wondered if his inability to instill fear was caused instead by his sagging pink skin, his tight-fitting suit, the osteoarthritic difficulty with which he had rotated his arm—if he had crossed into that age where a man can evoke fear only with a gun or the power to sign a paycheck.
Austerlitz was the most rational of economic animals, and when he heard the detective’s report he understood that he had little choice but to raise his bid for the tenement. Resigned to an additional expense, he arranged to meet with Julian and Fotopoulos.
“How much do you want?” the developer asked, pointing to the building.
Fotopoulos looked at Julian, who nodded his encouragement. “Three times your last offer,” the landlord said. The price was millions more than the previous bid, but still within the high end of the range that Austerlitz deemed acceptable. Cursing the added cost, Austerlitz extended his hand in agreement. But before Fotopoulos could shake it, Julian cleared his throat, nodded again and held up four fingers. Fotopoulos smiled. “Four times,” he said with a wild grin. “Make it four.”
Austerlitz withdrew his hand and considered the price. He stared at Julian, assessing his character. He saw in the young man’s eyes not the denseness about which the detective had speculated, but a fierce yet quiet resolve, a determination that could not be shaken by another man; it was a look that he admired—calm and purposeful.
“Fine,” Austerlitz said. “You’ll have the money by the end of the week.”
The next time Julian pulled a receipt from an ATM and checked his bank balance, he confirmed that he was worth several million dollars. This big score was not a terminal event that sated his desire for financial success; instead, his sudden wealth had an energizing effect—for after translating Frankmann’s commercial theory into practice and finally eliminating the disconnect between his talents and his accomplishments, Julian was just getting started.
THE NIGHT
Julian would later recall that the beginning of the night was as perfect as a night could be—the opalescent twilight that seduced Pollock and Rothko and de Kooning, a light that sliced through the sky at seemingly incongruous angles, as if several suns of varying intensity hovered on different planes above, a light that blistered off the waves of the sea, yet softened to the north and tickled the textured bay.
Julian directed the car down Further Lane and pulled over to the side of the road, a hundred feet from the party. He stepped out of the vintage Porsche Speedster, a silver beauty from the late 1950s that he had obsessively restored. Julian and Sophie inhaled the air, sweet and saline, that blew in from the south, from the sea. Julian marveled at his good fortune, at the remarkable way that a life can, out of nowhere, change for better or for worse—the randomness, the violence of the swings, the transience of people, of things, of money, of states of being, the delusion of security and constancy to which a person reflexively clings.
Julian walked around the front of the car, opened the passenger-side door and extended a hand to his wife. As Sophie stood, he noticed the curve of her lower back, revealed by the tantalizing aperture in her dress. He guided her under a birch pergola, beneath drapes of pungent purple wisteria. They stopped to admire the house, a grand, weathered Georgian mansion with arachnoid fractures in the façade and a dead branch of ivy that wrapped, denuded, around a first-floor window. The cracks and the lifeless bough triggered in Julian a recollection of the orphanage, of the decay and debasement of his childhood. He wondered how it was that the neglect of a mansion, the indolent disinterest in its upkeep, could actually suggest even more confident wealth than a well-maintained home—while the same flaw in an orphanage, a crack running from the roof’s edge down to the front door, merely magnified the wretchedness of the place.
The party was not atypical for a party in this particular town during the summer season. In attendance were several prominent bankers, men whose sartorial ease (a frayed collar, a carefully placed abrasion on the khakis, a scuffed loafer, a braided string bracelet) didn’t so much hint at fiscal sobriety as it howled an insincere aw-shucks, as if their purposeful sloppiness could mask their great prosperity, a false modesty that, in light of his own impoverished upbringing, Julian found distasteful.
There was a cluster of those with inherited wealth who, comforted by proximity to their similarly situated peers, stuck closely together; it was this group with which Julian felt most comfortable, because even though their birthright was the opposite of his own, he related to the absurdity of being born into such an extreme, to a person’s being defined by something that he had no role in creating. For Julian, having been both poor and then rich, there was little difference between the outliers of poverty and wealth; for those who were born into money, every accomplishment was—in the eyes of others and sometimes even themselves—unfairly diminished, explained only by their good fortune and the advantages that accompanied their legacy. For those born impoverished, those same great accomplishments were too unfairly diminished, but in that case by the cynical suspicion that any such accomplishment could only be achieved through either extraordinary luck or the commission of a crime.
Julian and Sophie were not big drinkers: a couple of glasses of wine at dinner, a beer or two at a ball game, the occasional cocktail after work. When Sophie went out with her girlfriends, she might splurge; she might have one or two martinis, feel the hot flush in her cheeks, a numb buzz, then back home not to make love with Julian, but to fuck him in a collegiate stupor, evoking the rebellious, sloppy sexuality of her youth.
At the party, Julian and Sophie drank more than usual. They reached for flutes of champagne that, with bi
zarre frequency, danced by on tarnished trays. To save their appetites for the meal, they nibbled on frugal hors d’oeuvres, but realized an hour into the party that dinner would not be served, that their hosts’ intention, consistent with the maintenance of the home, was to offer only drinks and sparse snacks with an early end to the evening. Dehydrated from a day at the beach, their stomachs not adequately filled to counteract the carbonated alcohol, Julian and Sophie experienced a simultaneous wooziness.
A rivulet of perspiration sluiced down the channel in Sophie’s lower back. She reached for Julian’s elbow and steadied herself. “Let’s go,” she said.
Julian nodded. “Agreed, but I don’t think I can drive. I’m a little buzzed.”
“Come on, babe, it’s only a half mile,” Sophie said, playfully pushing Julian toward the car.
“Let’s just walk,” Julian countered, as he slipped from Sophie’s grasp. “It’s a nice night, and we can get the car in the morning.”
Sophie extended her hand. “Give me the keys. I’ll drive.”
Julian held the keys behind his back. “Come on, Sophie, it’s only a fifteen-minute walk.”
“I’m tired, don’t want to walk. We’ll be home in two minutes. Please, my feet are killing me.”
Julian thought about the short ride home, about his desire to please Sophie—and he capitulated. He guided her to the car. He opened the passenger door, got her settled in the low bucket seat, and waited until her right foot rested on the floorboard. He walked around the front of the car, pausing to place his fingertips on the hood for balance. Julian opened the door, settled in behind the wheel and ignited the engine.
