Wall Street Noir

by Peter Spiegelman

  I did not even want to know how Stu came by this information. “Yeah.”

  “Okay.” Stu sat back. Adjusted his overcoat. “How’s Katy? She doin’ any better?”

  “Thanks for asking. I’m afraid not.”

  Stu folded his arms over his chest and looked at me ternly. “She wants that you should be around more often. This she says to my wife.”

  “We’ve been real busy at work lately.”

  “This she also says to Carmen. So. Tell me about this problem of yours.”

  “You mean Hiram?”

  Stu dropped his hands in his lap. “Who?”

  “My brother-in-law.”

  “Naw.” Stu slapped at the air with a paw that was covered in black leather. “Get to him in a minute. I’m talkin’ about this crazy woman at the bank. Your boss.”

  I looked out the window. We were crawling up Park Avenue. If I had just trusted my instincts and walked I would have been there by now. And my throat was starting to feel scratchy. Need to stop off at the newsstand, get some lozenges before I go upstairs. I cleared my throat and looked at Stu. “She’s just a little high strung, is all.”

  “High strung, huh? Show me a woman that’s not. They’re all outta their fuckin’ gourds, you ask me. And it’s made worse by this thing. This women’s liberation, so-called. Now they want to be lawyers and doctors and priests and shit. They even got their own professional basketball league. It’s bullshit, you ask me. I can promise you this, we ain’t never gonna have no women partners in my line of work.”

  “What exactly is your line of work, Stu?”

  “Oh, this and that, this and that. Which brings me to this other thing. Tell me about this brother-in-law of yours.”

  I shrugged. “We’re not exactly what you’d call close.”

  “My wife says your wife says he’s a good Joe.”

  “I suppose. For an ex-con.”

  “So the guy has done some time. Doesn’t mean he’s a bad person. Personally, I liked him. He and Katy, they came over for coffee yesterday.”

  “I heard.”

  “He’s from some place I never heard of before and he talks funny. Aside from that, nothin’ wrong with him that I can see. My wife comes to me, she says, ‘Stu. Maybe you can help him out.’ And I say, ‘Sure. Why not?’ My wife likes your wife, you know?”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “We’re neighbors. At least we are until they’re done with the construction at our house in Great Neck, see. Then we’ll be movin’ out.”

  “We’ll miss you,” I said, as convincingly as I could.

  “Yeah. Same here. Been nice gettin’ to know you some, these last coupla months.”

  I looked out the window and thought, Stu, you don’t know me at all and I intend to make sure it stays that way. But I said nothing.

  “So, anyway, neighbors should help one another out. Do favors. Like that. So I say to myself, ‘Stu. You should help the man out, this Hiram from Nowhere with the funny manner of speech. Find him some gainful employment.’”

  I looked back at him. “I’m sure Katy will be very grateful.”

  “Probably just minimum wage starting out. But maybe some, you know, possibility for advancement along the way.”

  I went back to studying the snowscape. We’d only gone as far as the lower 30s. Traffic had slowed to a crawl. I toyed with making some comment about Hiram being the first made guy ever from Arkansas but decided against it. “If he clears enough take-home pay to move out of my apartment, I’ll be grateful too.”

  “Happy to do you a favor. Now I got to ask you about somethin’ else.”

  I looked his way. He was studying me like a man might study the angles on a three-rail bank shot. “Okay.”

  “This deal you’re workin’ on. The air rights thing up on Park.”

  My ears were suddenly humming. “How’d you know about that?”

  “Was in the papers.”

  “The fact that I’m working on it wasn’t.”

  “All right. Have it your way, then. The Gerstens and my family, we go way back, see. And Ray Gersten comes to my old man and tells him you and this woman boss of yours are breakin’ his balls with this thing. This right to back out after a year, they don’t get their development plan through the P and Z. My old man comes to me and says, ‘This young Texan. He’s your neighbor at that nice apartment you just moved into, right? Maybe you should speak to this young man. Ask him to show a little flex on this. Do a favor for us and our old friends Ray and Ed Gersten.’”

  I tried to think what to say but the humming in my ears had matured into a roar and my head felt like it was full of pea gravel. “Stu, I—”

  He leaned over and put a hand on my arm. “If you could give us a little help here, my family would never forget it. Meantime, I’ll talk to my people. Find something for this brother-in-law of yours to do. Get him out from under foot.” Stu took his hand off my arm, pointed out the window. “I think this is your building.”

  I hadn’t realized the car had stopped. I looked out the window and back at Stu. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “Don’t mention it. But get back to me on this air rights thing. One way or the other. So I’ll know what to tell my old man.”

  Fifteen minutes later I was sitting at my desk sucking on a cherry throat lozenge and staring into space. I don’t remember getting out of the car or going into the building or buying the package of lozenges or going up the elevator. Somehow I had done all those things without having to think about anything other than the fact that I’d just had the arm put on me by a member of a known organized crime family concerning a real estate transaction on which I was the second chair lawyer.

  The Gerstens and the Spagnolettis. Shithouse mouse.

  My clients in this air rights transaction were what we euphemistically referred to as a “high net-worth family.” This is Wall Street jargon for richer’n shit. You’d recognize the name if I were to mention it, but that I will not be doing. They’d made their money in tobacco and sold out long before the class-action lawyers came storming out of the sewer grates and sued that business back to the Stone Age. They’d invested a part of their fortune in Manhattan real estate, including a building on Park Avenue that had excess air rights. Rights that could, under the applicable zoning rules, support a building larger than what had been built there.

  So my clients had done the smart thing and made a deal to sell these unused air rights to the Gersten Brothers, for hundreds of dollars per buildable foot, payable in part at closing and in part at substantial completion of the condo project the Gerstens aimed to construct. Condos in the East 60s, with views of Central Park West on one side and all the way to Long Island on the other. Condos with blue granite fin-ishes and gold fixtures in the bathrooms. Condos they’d sell to rock stars and Saudi princes and captains of industry for three thousand dollars a foot if they sold them for a dime.

  This was the deal that for the last three months had been my own personal galley ship, with the Hell Bitch cracking the whip.

  It was Katy who gave her that name, by the way, inspired by Captain Woodrow Call’s horse in Lonesome Dove. But her real name was Diane Martin. She was the bank’s senior real estate lawyer, the woman I answered to. The woman who had taken it upon herself to ruin my life.

  But back to the deal. The rescission right that Stu had mentioned was a part of the negotiations from Day One. If the Gerstens didn’t get their condo development plan approved by the Planning and Zoning Commission within a year of closing, our clients could rescind the transaction—in effect, take back their air rights and return the Gerstens’ purchase to them.

  The Gerstens had howled about this at every opportunity. A year was a very short turnaround time at the P and Z, and their fear was that if they missed the deadline our clients would rescind the deal and sell the air rights to Trump or somebody for more money, because those rights would only increase in value with the passage of time.

  But our clients had insis
ted on this term as a way of protecting their interest in the deferred portion of the purchase price.

  I sat there, not believing the position I was in. Should I tell the Hell Bitch about this? If I did, it was sure to trigger a full-blown episode. She’d be bound and determined to go to the Gerstens’ lawyer and have it out with him. She’d raise unshirted hell about this attempt to get to her through me, which would only poison the atmosphere between the two sides even more than it already was and make it harder still to get the deal closed.

  On top of that, I had started to wonder about the Spagnolettis’ motives. Was this simply a favor—however ham-handed—for their old pals the Gerstens? Or did they have an ownership position in the condo development? One that would make them an ass-pocket full of money if the project was successful?

  I had asked the Gerstens’ lawyer at least half a dozen times for a structure chart showing the full beneficial ownership of the limited partnership that the Gerstens had formed to buy the rights. The guy had done nothing but give me the Heisman.

  It was going to be very hard indeed to say no to the Spagnolettis if they were looking to make money in the deal.

  The whole episode had left me with a world class case of the nervous high strikes, and it just figured that when my phone rang it was the Hell Bitch’s assistant calling. I lifted the handset. “Morning, Patsie.”

  “She has the Contessa with her and she has a question or two. Can you come up here please? And bring the closing binder.”

  “On my way.” I popped a cherry cough drop in my mouth and stood up and pulled the closing binder down from my bookshelves and headed for the door.

  We had represented a French Contessa earlier in the year when she had sent one of her gophers across the pond to buy her an apartment on Fifth Avenue. Two months and eight million dollars later, the woman owned three thousand square feet of prime Manhattan real estate. I knew the Contessa was in town and had been expecting that at some point I would get a call summoning me to the Hell Bitch’s office to take her through the particulars of this transaction.

  By the time I reached the Hell Bitch’s three hundred square feet with commanding views up the island, I was a touch out of breath and sweating some. Made me wonder if I was fixing to take sick.

  Please, God, not until after the Park Avenue deal is done.

  Patsie showed me in. The two of them were seated at a conference table. The Hell Bitch was looking her most professional, wearing a blue dress that thanks to some optical illusion made her look slightly less chubby. The Hell Bitch had an on-again/off-again relationship with her grooming accessories and her makeup drawer—but today it was on-again. Her brunette hair was blown dry and combed and she’d even applied some cosmetics, not that any amount of makeup could do much for her jowly, bulldoggish aspect.

  The Contessa looked like an older version of Gwyneth Paltrow. Blond hair, peaches-and-cream complexion, diamonds in her ears and at her throat and on her fingers. She was wearing a snow-white angora sweater dress that showed off a figure that might or might not have had something to do with her being royalty. She sat very erect and looked at me as a well-heeled guest might look at a doorman on her way out of her hotel.

  The Hell Bitch made the introductions and I took the Contessa’s hand and shook it carefully and allowed as how I was pleased to meet her. Then I held the closing binder up and said to the Hell Bitch, “What would you all like to see?”

  The Hell Bitch said, “The Contessa is thinking of getting a pet and wants to see the relevant building policies.”

  “Got it.” I flipped through the binder. “Okay. Here we are.”

  I walked around the table so that I was standing behind the Contessa and leaned over her and opened the binder and laid my finger along a line of text and said, “Here’s what you can own without seeking permission—”

  And just then the lozenge fell from my mouth. It made directly for the Contessa’s sweater dress and landed on the very end of her breast. No Olympic gymnast ever stuck a better landing. A perfect ten.

  Time froze.

  I plucked the lozenge from the dress, and even though it was lousy with angora hair, I popped it back into my mouth and said, “—from the co-op board.”

  I looked at the Hell Bitch and she was staring at me with her eyes wide and a look of panic and disbelief on her face.

  I said, “Maybe I should just leave you all with the binder.”

  The Hell Bitch said, “I think that would probably be best.” Her voice was two octaves higher than normal.

  I headed back to my office to wait for the inevitable Hell Bitch meltdown. Which, as I’ve already said, came after lunch that same day.

  And which I had coming for once.

  As I waited, I thought about how just yesterday, just YESTERDAY, I had for five minutes entertained notions that maybe life was going to get better around here after all.

  By the time I’d left the Gulag the previous night it was almost 2 a.m., but I judged the day a good one on account of the Hell Bitch hadn’t boiled over hardly at all. So with gratitude that it had gone smoothly, I sent out an e-mail transmitting the latest draft of the Park Avenue air rights P and Z agreement to the working group, powered down my laptop, slipped it into my Tumi bag, and headed for the elevators.

  The firm’s name is not really the Gulag, of course—that’s just what us juniors called it. As I’ve said before, it’s sort of a bank. But don’t think Bank of America or Wells Fargo—it’s not that kind of bank. And you wouldn’t recognize the name unless your family is in the Forbes 400. Think of it as the First National Bank of No Man Is a Hero to His Valet. Because we only deal with the super-rich, and we deal with them when they’re at their super-worst. Which is when they’re obsessing about their money.

  Along with the usual complement of bankers and traders, the Gulag has a large legal department, as big as some law firms. So that we can function as a full-service provider of all necessary services to our richer’n shit and secrecy-obsessed clients.

  Which is how I’d spent my five years before the mast. Representing people who’ve got enough money to burn a wet mule.

  I saw but one other lighted office on my walk through the dark halls of the Gulag, and I stopped and stuck my head in the door. Frank Biallo sat studying a law book, with his tie loose and shirt cuffs rolled up. He had suspenders on and he looked like a dealer in a back-room game of blackjack.

  “Hey, Frank.”

  He looked up. His wire-rimmed spectacles caught the lights from the overheads. “Well, if it’s not our token Texan and Diane’s very own cowboy Friday. So, what’s with this knockin’ off early shit, huh? You never leave before me.”

  “I’m like the monkey that was fucking the skunk, podna. I’ve enjoyed about as much of this as I can stand. What’s got you burnin’ the 2 a.m. oil?”

  “Memo on that transaction in Vail. Stecher wants it yesterday. So, how’s your deal coming?”

  “It’s coming.”

  “And Diane? She still treating you good?”

  “She’s a paranoid schizophrenic with a hundred and eighty IQ who is in all likelihood demon-possessed.”

  “That’s a bad fuckin’ combination, Tex.”

  “But she can also get a man a managing directorship. If she doesn’t kill him first.”

  “Or he doesn’t kill her.”

  “Tell me about it. I sometimes think a hit would be a really good idea.”

  “You slurrin’ my ethnicity, Tex?”

  “Hell no. Last thing I need in my life is a bunch of watered-off paisans.”

  “You got that right.”

  “Good luck with your memo, podna.”

  “’Night, Tex.”

  “Hasta luego.”

  I stopped in the reception area and looked north through the plate glass windows at Park Avenue. I could just see it, way up yonder—a little building on the west side of the street, and all those beautiful air rights.

  I glanced toward the sky. Clouds were mov
ing in. Supposed to snow tomorrow, according to the weather sadist.

  I missed Texas all the time but it was during the winters that I missed it most. In wintertime in New York, you see the sun maybe six hours a day and everything is gray and lifeless and depressing and the streets run with slush and even an extra fifteen pounds of clothes are not enough to keep you warm when the wind goes pounding down those canyons made by man and money.

  I was soon in the back of a cab careening through the mostly empty Manhattan streets, headed for my tiny one-bed-room apartment near Union Square. The cabbie was attired in the kind of cloth headgear that has its roots in certain nomadic cultures, and he maintained a quiet and continuous cell phone conversation in a foreign tongue as he steered the cab with one hand and outside the tall buildings went by in a blur. I hung on as best I could and wondered if what I’d heard was true, that the most common cause for emergency room admissions in this town is accidents involving taxicabs.

  And for aught that it was the wee hours and there were but few souls on the sidewalks, there was the ceaseless and implacable noise of New York, the cabbie mumbling and the radio tuned to 1010 WINS in the background and the sirens in the distance and the squeal of the cab’s tires. New York isn’t so much the City That Never Sleeps as it is the City That Never Shuts Up. So very unlike my boyhood home in South Texas where by that time of night even the coyotes have ceased carrying on and bedded down.

  I got out near the corner of Fourth and 14th and paid the fare and walked through the lobby of my building, nodding at the doorman behind the reception desk. I rode the elevator to the seventeenth floor and walked down a dimly lit hall lined by doors sporting multiple locks and let myself into 17B only to find my living room couch occupied by an ex-convict from Arkansas who also happened to be my brother-in-law.

  Seeing Hiram Redding in New York City at all was almost more of a shock than my system could handle. But here? In my living room? Drinking beer and watching porn with his feet up on my coffee table?