by Peter Israel
“But not all of that was Teddy’s.”
“Even so.”
“No. Look at our part of it. Only half the profits, at the top, were yours, and you split that with me.”
“That’s right. And how much did you pay him?”
“Half,” she said.
“Half!” I exclaimed. “Jesus Christ! You were being pretty damned generous, weren’t you? With our money?”
“Oh, come on, Tommy. We wouldn’t have made anything if it hadn’t been for him.”
“Maybe so,” I said, “but who ran the risk? And who put up the capital?”
She didn’t answer.
“Even so,” I said, “half of your half would be twelve and a half percent of the total, wouldn’t it? Assume that was what he averaged, twelve and a half percent of a hundred and eighty million is still over twenty million dollars.”
“He didn’t collect everything,” she said. “Not on Safari, anyway. Not from Thorne.”
“How come? Didn’t he have an agreement?”
“Yes, but not in writing. Nothing was ever in writing.”
“So Thorne took it to the grave with him?”
“I don’t know where he took it,” she said, “but Teddy never saw a lot of it.”
I still found it hard to believe that Goldmark was broke, and I said so. He held one of the top jobs in a field where the top jobs are known to pull down eight figures annually. Besides, an operator like him would have seeded a lot more outlets for his information than just his sister, me, and Robert Thorne, and I’d have bet he’d found some way, in spite of everything, to invest on his own account.
“What can I tell you?” Kitty said tensely. “He says he can’t cover himself. Why would he say that if it wasn’t true?”
I think by this time I was standing, staring down at her on the wicker couch.
“So he comes to his sister?” I said. “Because he knows the guy she’s married to has just gotten access to more money than God?”
She didn’t answer.
“Well, if it’s that important to you,” I said, “and I gather it is, why don’t you lend him the money yourself?”
“I can’t,” she said. Then, instead of leaving it at that, she started to say something else. “I’ve already—” But she caught herself and glanced away, as though momentarily confused. “Anyway,” she said, catching herself again, “he needs more than I could ever raise.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You’ve already what?”
“Never mind.”
I’d never—not once—heard Kitty say something inadvertent when it came to money.
“Don’t tell me ‘never mind.’ What did you start to say? You don’t mean to tell me you’ve lent him money yourself?”
She hesitated; still looking away.
“Well? Did you?”
She nodded.
“How much?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Oh yes it is,” I retorted. “If you’re about to ask me to do something I may or may not want to do, it certainly is my business!”
Her head swiveled abruptly, and she stared up at me, eyes large, as though I’d just slapped her. Or was it in surprise that, in the midst of confrontation, I hadn’t already folded my tent? Or in some belated recognition that the Stark-Thompson money was mine to deal with, and not necessarily hers?
She bit at her lower lip, and then she admitted the truth. Over a period of a month, more, she had taken her company’s credit line, already stretched through its acquisitions, out to its limit. For her brother. For him of whom she’d said, not all that long ago, My brother’s a son of a bitch. What else is new?
At least, I thought, it explained one thing: why, other than sheer greed, Kitty had been almost frantically trying to expand her business. Also why, when it had appeared that I might have to come up with two and a half million in cash for Corky Stark, she had pushed me not to offer anything.
Why? Because the money, it seemed, was already gone.
Still, I found it hard to believe. Of all Kitty’s qualities, one that stood out strongly was her sound business sense. I’d seen it at the beginning, in our days with the Sprague estate, how she’d worried me over every last detail and penny. She ran her business the same way, forcing it to profitability, sharp eyed for opportunities. Yet here she was, throwing money into what sounded like a widening hole. For, whatever she’d given Goldmark already, it clearly hadn’t been enough.
I pointed all this out to her, dotting, so to speak, the i’s and crossing the t’s. And for once in her life, at least in our life, she took it. Neck arched, head down. It turned out that the new number Goldmark had quoted her—what he claimed he now needed—boggled even Kitty’s imagination, even though, according to Kitty, he had figured out a way to do it that involved no cash. All he wanted was that I, as Trustee of Stark-Thompson, authorize the shifting of funds within Braxton’s from my accounts to an account number he would give me, and then he and Angeletti would take care of the rest. It would be short term, he’d told Kitty, a few weeks probably, the end of the year at the outside, and he’d pay a handsome premium for it.
By this time, I remember, the drink in my hand was Laphroaig.
“But how do we know that’ll be the end of it?” I asked Kitty. “How can we be sure it won’t keep escalating and that he won’t need a still bigger number?”
“We don’t,” she answered.
“Then why, Kitty? For Christ’s sake, why?”
“Because he’s my brother,” she said. “Because when push comes to shove, I’m the one who feels responsible for him. That’s just the way it is.”
Just the way it is.
Such fine and sororal sentiments weren’t, of course, the whole story, but they were, in a weird way, genuine enough. I remember gazing down at her in that wickered room, the woman I loved, her eyes wet, her mascara smudged, and thinking that, yes, she meant it, also that I didn’t understand and probably never would understand, and going inside from anger to incomprehension and back to anger again.
“So you want me to do it?” I said. “In spite of everything?”
She didn’t answer at first.
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Kitty. Whatever I do or don’t do, I think the borrower had damn well better come apply in person, and not through the intermediary of his sister.”
“That’s what he said you’d say,” she said faintly.
“Oh? Did he?”
“He said you’d be a tough nut. He said you were too smart to entertain a proposition like this without hearing about it firsthand. He’s at your disposal. Only he needs to move quickly.”
“And where am I supposed to reach him?”
“He asked that you call his office, anytime, day or night. They’ll know where to patch you into him.”
“Well, then, let me ask the question again. Is this what you want me to do?”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes averted.
“I’m sorry, Kitty, but that’s not good enough. I want you to look me in the eye when you say it.”
It would take some literary genius to describe her expression at that moment when her head lifted and she brought her eyes up to meet mine, someone who could capture in a single flow of words the rigidity of her body, the defiant jut of her jaw, the slight trembling in her right lid signifying—what? Tension? Fatigue? And above all the steady boring of her black pupils into mine in overt and unmistakable animosity. But why the sudden animosity? Was it because, for once, she had lost control of a situation? Or had it always been there from the beginning, part and parcel of her erotic challenge, which I had chosen to ignore?
But as for me, a mere attorney and one inexperienced, besides, in courtroom theatrics, I can only say that, facing the naked hostility of her gaze, I’d have gladly withdrawn the question, had there only been someone to order it struck from the record.
But there was no one. Only Kitty and I.
“Yes,” she repeated, and then th
e look was gone, and the clocks could tick again and life go on.
“There’s something else you’d better keep in mind when you talk to him, Tommy,” she said. “Don’t forget, he could bring us down, too, if he wanted to.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning Safari and all the rest.”
“That sounds like blackmail again to me,” I said. “Is that what he told you?”
“Not in so many words, but he alluded to it. Said that if he’s ever put under oath, in his own defense, against charges of insider trading—”
“But it’s diversion of funds he’s up against now.”
“He said one thing could lead to another.”
“So instead of blackmailing Braxton’s because he thinks they’d crucify him, he does it to us? Your dear brother?”
No answer.
“Well,” I said, “what do you think? Would he bring us down with him? In extremis?”
Her eyes gazed up into mine again, unflinching.
“Yes,” she said.
22
She’s a real ballbuster, that sister of mine,” Ted Goldmark said to me in the back seat of his limousine the next morning. “I never would have had the nerve to ask you myself, Tommy. I mean, why the hell should you? You’ve just been named Trustee—that’s one humongous responsibility. You’d want to get your feet wet first or, knowing you, prove yourself. Why the hell should you run any risks? Not that there are any, but you try telling Kitty it’s going to rain when there’s thunder and …”
I’d heard him on this kind of gambit before, though.
“That’s not the way she told it to me,” I said. “She said you kept after her to talk to me. She—”
“Did she? Really? Well, look, Tommy, I’m very grateful to you for even giving me a hearing. Genuinely grateful. I—Excuse me a minute, will you? This’ll only take a sec—”
A red light was blinking on the console between us: the telephone. Goldmark picked up the receiver and started talking first:
“I said I don’t want to be interrupted, not for—Who? He what? At seven-thirty in the morning? Well, you tell him to go fuck himself. No, tell him if he comes with a subpoena, he’ll get all the cooperation he—What? Well, let him. Put him outside in Reception, give him all the magazines he wants. But tell him he can sit there till hell freezes over and nobody’ll talk to him, not me or anybody else. Not until he produces a subpoena. You got it?”
He hung up with a bang, saying, “Damn. They’re all over me like a tent, Tommy. I’m sorry. You’ve no idea. Now, where were we?”
Where we were was on the parkway headed into the city in the middle of rush hour. The time and place had been his idea, not mine. He hadn’t wanted to use his office—it was a zoo these days—and he didn’t want to come to mine, not even if he could break away, which he probably couldn’t, because he was convinced he was being followed. Paranoia? Paranoia with reason, he’d said. I had no idea. So? He lived farther up the line than I did, why didn’t he pick me up and we’d drive in together. We could talk in peace and quiet, and nobody to listen.
The peace and quiet were relative. We were interrupted frequently by the phone, and I half listened while he barked instructions to, I gathered, underlings at Braxton’s, mostly having to do with the investigations. I use the word bark advisedly, for he had a staccato style on the phone, firing out short sentences, or half sentences, as though his mind was working twice as fast as his tongue. I wondered fleetingly if it was all staged for my benefit—the self-important businessman at work, with shirt sleeves rolled up, metaphorically, that is, for Goldmark wore elegant navy serge over a white-on-white shirt and regimental tie—but I decided it wasn’t. The limousine was clearly his rolling office, complete with telephone, dictating machine, coffee maker, bar, even a small computer call-up screen, and he claimed to accomplish more in his couple of hours’ commuting than at his desk at Braxton’s.
In substance, his version of Braxton’s predicament and his own personal bind largely corroborated what Kitty had said, but his rationale for it was new to my ears. According to Goldmark, Braxton’s had been mediocre when he got there, slipping in the rankings each year and nowhere in profitability. But they’d been on a roll ever since, cutting deals they never would have even gotten a sniff at before him, cutting a few corners, too, and stepping on some people’s toes, sure, but who the hell didn’t? That’s what they’d hired him for in the first place. Behind the genteel facades, the business was cutthroat, but the profits he’d made Braxton’s were humongous. And why shouldn’t they be? What the hell else were they in business for, if not to make money?
“Look, Tommy,” Goldmark said, “all this shit about insider trading? It’s been going on for years! The Street’s based on it, couldn’t survive five minutes without it. So what’s the difference? I’ll tell you what the difference is.”
Another phone interruption, followed by: “Where was I? Oh yeah, the difference. You know what the difference is? It’s the old-boy network. All those guys—Charlie Braxton, for instance—they never had to spell it out, no contracts, nothing. They did it with the wink of an eye, the pull of an ear, a buzzword here, a buzzword there. And nobody got caught. They ran their own show. But then they let us in, you know? Jews, wops, anybody with brains. But we didn’t speak their fucking language, we didn’t go to the same schools, we didn’t give a shit about their Union League Club, which nobody ever heard of anyway.
“Look, why do you suppose they hired me in the first place? Because Braxton’s wanted a Jew? You gotta be kidding. The day I made Managing Director—and I was going to leave if I didn’t—the entire Union League Club pissed in its pants. No. It was because they finally woke up and realized there were too many people around they couldn’t even talk to, much less do business with.
“But”—turning abruptly toward me, with a suddenly boyish grin—“I don’t have to tell you, Tommy. You know what I’m talking about. Hell, you’re one of them. Is that why you don’t like me?”
“It could be,” I answered.
What it was about him that made me want to tell him the truth, I’ve no idea.
“That’s okay,” he said, brushing quickly past my reply. “Since when do you have to like somebody to do business with him?”
Still, he said, it was no accident that of all the people who. had already gone to jail, who had actually gone to jail, not a one of them had gone to Andover or Groton or St. Mark’s or any of “my” fancy prep schools. That was the old boys’ revenge. And they’d do it to him, too. He was going to save Braxton’s for them (single-handedly, it seemed), but if they found out he himself was in trouble on the side, they’d run like rats from the sinking ship.
“I had two goals when I got there, Tommy. The first was to make Managing Director by the time I was thirty, and I’ve done that. The second was to have a net worth of a hundred million, and I’m going to do that, too.”
“It doesn’t sound as if you’re off to too good a start on that score,” I said.
“Temporary,” he said with a wave. “It’s all temporary.”
“But how could a guy as smart as you,” I said, unable to resist the dig, “get himself into such a fix? With his hand in the till on top of it?”
“Impatience,” he admitted freely. “I got carried away, made some mistakes. Bad timing, bad luck, bad judgment. But nothing I can’t weather. It’s only a liquidity problem.”
“If that’s so,” I said, “why does the number keep changing?”
“What do you mean?”
“What you need,” I said. “Kitty tells me she’s already lent you money, but now you need more. A hell of a lot more, from what she tells me.”
“Shit,” he said, “you don’t need me to tell you how volatile the market’s been. Up and down, up and down, nobody knows where it’s going. I’m subject to margin calls just like everybody else.”
That part was true enough. The major market indices, which had been on a steady upswing for several years, h
ad lately started to yo-yo, with big swings day to day and heavy trading. Still, Goldmark must have had some margin calls. When I pointed this out, he admitted—freely again—that instead of simply covering himself at Braxton’s with Kitty’s money, he’d tried to recoup in a hurry, which had only compounded his problems. But now all he wanted to do was cover, and he described how he intended to go about it, with my help, accompanying his words with succinct strokes of his hands.
“The way I’ve structured it, Tommy,” he said, “you’ve got to look on it purely as an investment, and a pretty fair one too, I’d say. You’ll make a regular loan agreement with the account I name, and I’ll countersign it myself. I’m ready to pay prime plus three—plus four if it goes past the first of the year, but it won’t. Plus an extra point to you personally if you twist my arm. Now how many deals does Stark-Thompson have that are better than that?”
“And supposing you can’t pay up?”
“What do you mean, supposing I can’t pay up?”
“It happens,” I said, thinking: even to very smart people.
“It won’t happen to me,” he answered.
“Well, that’s fine. But what kind of security can you give me?”
“You mean to tell me my handshake isn’t good enough?” he asked, grinning.
“No, I’m afraid not.”
He shook his head.
“Kitty warned me you’d be a tough nut to crack,” he said.
We had, by this time, already passed through upper Manhattan, where the traffic, joined by the commuters using the bridge, had slowed to a virtual standstill, and Goldmark, communicating with the driver by intercom, had instructed him to try the local streets. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that he and Kitty played a strange game, sometimes echoing each other, sometimes contradicting each other directly. They bad-mouthed each other freely, yet hadn’t Kitty mortgaged her company to help him save his neck?
“What can I offer you, Tommy?” he asked with an apologetic smile. “My house? This car? Sorry, Braxton’s leases both for me. If I had the collateral unencumbered, would I be talking to you in the first place? And paying a premium on top?”
