The Deal

by Adam Gittlin

  “I can’t!” I broke in. “That’s why I fucking hate you! You have no idea what kind of possibilities for my life you presented the other night.”

  I was curiously, surprisingly incensed. Indeed, I did hate her for being a liar and possibly a serious threat to my well-being. But that wasn’t it. There was something else there, something more needy, more selfish.

  “Seeing you standing there the other night at the wedding was mind blowing. It was almost like, as cliché as it sounds, for the first time I could feel what destiny means. I looked at you and I knew we’d click right away, like we had already known each other in a past life or something. I knew we’d click, and I was right.”

  I noticed that my right hand, the one holding my drink, was shaking, quietly rattling the glass against the bar. My emotions were unraveling. I quickly spun them back in.

  “Every day I live with the fact that all of my conquests serve as nothing more than filler for the woman I really want. I also live with the fact that they serve as this filler because I have no choice since that woman for me is out of reach. The other night I actually thought you had proven me wrong. Instead you turn out to be nothing more than some sick joke, and I find myself chalking it all up to my senses being clouded by the booze and drugs that were running through my system. Trust me, I would never pretend to deny what happened. It was you who fucked with that. Not me.”

  She gently touched my hand, letting out a giggle, trying to win me back over.

  “Jonah, you don’t need to be so serious about—”

  I pulled my hand away.

  “What is it that you want?”

  Again, the weird smile.

  “What do you mean, sweetie?”

  Could it be? Fuck! I didn’t want to say it, but I had to.

  “You’re part of all this. That’s why you were there that night,” I said it out loud for the first time.

  “Part of all what?”

  I said nothing.

  “What Jonah?”

  “I want to see your driver’s license.”

  “Don’t have my wallet.”

  “Shocking.”

  I slammed down the rest of my drink.

  “You are to stop coming near me.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t.”

  “Fine. To tell you the truth I don’t even want to know your real identity. I have too much to worry about as it is. So here it goes. I have supplied my apartment building as well as the Chrysler Center with your picture. Each has been instructed to call the police first, me second, upon sight of you even near the premises.”

  “That isn’t necessary.”

  Her face changed into a combination of sadness and restrained rage. All of a sudden it was as if I was actually staring into the eyes of Lucifer.

  “I appreciate the input,” I responded, sarcasm intended, “but I’m going with my instincts on this one. Your words, your tough little attitude, your fragile, kooky tone and mood shifts, none of it means shit. The moment I found out you were nothing but a lie is the moment you became an insignificant little insect to me.”

  I stood up.

  “Understand that I’ll crush you if I need to.”

  “I need access to you, Jonah. I need to be able to get to you.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “I’ll find your father, Jonah. Or perhaps your perky little partner, Perry—”

  Infuriated, gripped, I sat back down, demeanor in check. I took out my Paul Smith pen from my inside jacket pocket.

  “I would think twice about that if I were you.”

  I grabbed the cocktail napkin that came with my drink and started writing.

  “Is that so?”

  “It is.”

  “Why?”

  I held up the cocktail napkin so she could read it. Matter-of-factly, it said, “Because I’ll kill you.”

  Once I was sure her eyes had scanned, her brain had processed the words, I crumbled the napkin and held it in my fist.

  More freaked out than I was letting on, I left. I still had no idea who the hell she was, and why it mattered to me, if it even did. Also, I had given no one her picture. Not my apartment building, not the Chrysler Center. It was all a bluff. The last thing I could do was willingly bring the cops into my life, no matter how much I was starting to feel that I could possibly use them. No matter how much I wanted to know who she was.

  Knowing my visit would be short, I had a car waiting for me out front. It was my father’s stretch, and Mattheau, Pop’s Haitian driver of twenty-five years, was at the wheel. I would often call upon him when my father wasn’t in need of his services and that night I was meeting my father at a restaurant a block from his office. Therefore, Mattheau was free.

  I jumped in the back, and as quickly as the car pulled away I opened my briefcase on the seat next to me. Mattheau, an extremely pleasant and accommodating man with cautious eyes, knew where we were going so there were no words spoken. I removed a small, emergency vial of coke from one of the inside compartments along with a fresh joint. In a perfect contradiction of drug use, a contradiction that mirrored some of the emotions stirring inside of me, I took a nice bump in each nostril then sparked the grass cigarette. A simple dose of “up” followed by a simple dose of “down.” Coke to keep me aware, pot to scrape away some of the edge.

  “Jonah, are you sure you want to—”

  Mattheau had seen me grow up, from the money to the wildness to the drugs to the entertaining of women, therefore nothing about me fazed him anymore. He always kept everything he saw between us, which I rewarded every Christmas by giving him cash on top of what Pop gave him.

  “I’m okay, Mattheau. Really. Crazy day.”

  “I know you’re okay. It’s just that when—”

  “Mattheau, really. It’s cool.”

  He retreated.

  “Sure, Jonah. Of course.”

  One hand on the wheel, the other working the keypad of his cell, he returned to the tasks at hand.

  “Yves?” I said.

  He loved to “text” his only son. He looked at me in the rearview mirror and nodded.

  “Tell him I say ‘hi.’ ”

  I always found Mattheau to be an interesting concoction of a soul. He had the manners of a topflight English butler yet the instincts of a lion for working Manhattan’s infamous asphalt grid. He was soft-spoken and mostly an introvert. Even though he had a child of his own, at times he looked out for me like a guardian. Especially when he sensed I was acting reckless.

  I cracked the window as Mattheau seamlessly attacked the city. After only a couple of drags, I put the joint out on the bottom of my shoe and threw both drugs back into my briefcase. My cell rang. It was Perry calling me from the office.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m here with Jake.”

  They were on speaker.

  “I was just telling him about how you handled the guy from Gallo.”

  “You fucking stud!” Jake screamed.

  “Just trying to make you some money, kid.”

  “I mean it, man, that’s some kick-ass work.”

  I heard a quarter start bouncing haphazardly around Perry’s glass desk top. Jake had missed.

  “Sorry —”

  “Where’s Tommy?”

  “At a broker party for Seven Twelve Third,” Perry said. “God bless his young heart.”

  Broker party: bash thrown by the ownership of a property at the beginning of a big marketing campaign to lease available space. They invite all of the hungry power brokers in the industry to the building. Then they let them see the available vacant space firsthand, have some kind of testosterone-driven raffle—possibly a golf weekend in Hawaii or a pair of jet skis—and serve free booze. All of the players get up to speed on one another’s deals, exchange some sensitive information, look for leads to infiltrate—you get th
e idea.

  “You might say he’s really submerged himself in this role of playing his younger self,” Jake commented.

  “Good for him and good for us,” I replied.

  “Always thinking with your wallet. That’s why I love you.”

  “Where are you?” asked Perry.

  “On the way to the Four Seasons to have dinner with my father. Tell me what’s up.”

  “I think you may be right, Jonah. I hate that I did it, but I think you may be right.”

  “You called a board member.”

  “I called two. Both easily reachable, both in New York City. I also have a call in to another in Boston. His assistant told me that he’d contact me around nine tonight.”

  “That fucking prick,” I bashed him.

  “Tell me about it. I really didn’t want to make that call, but I couldn’t deny what you said. It just made too much sense.”

  “It was the right move, Perry. We’ve got a client to please. Collateral damage gets handled later.”

  “You got that right,” Jake jumped in. “We simply don’t have the time to be lied to. What this motherfucker did, after all these years you two have been friends, he deserves whatever he has coming to him now.”

  “Cantrol’s board will slaughter him, Jonah. Think about it. Not only withholding an offer to them, but actually responding to that offer?”

  “Not your problem, Per.”

  “I know that. I’m willing to put him against the wall for it. It’s just that, I guess I’m disappointed.”

  “In what?”

  “The fact that this could ruin him. Not just with Cantrol but beyond if it really gets out. All I wanted was to make sure the deal was moving along properly.”

  Perry’s personal life was more than showing chinks in her armor. Her remorse was nothing more than a by-product of her newfound loneliness. She was scared to lose anyone else, especially someone she had known for so long.

  “And you did that, so let’s keep moving forward,” I pushed her.

  “Definitely,” said Jake.

  Perry didn’t say anything, which meant she had gotten the message.

  “What now?” I continued on.

  “I told her to not make any rash decisions until she hears from number three. Boston,” Jake said.

  “I agree,” I countered.

  “Once I hear from him,” Perry continued, “if it’s what we all expect it will be, I work through the night on a confidentiality agreement to be sent first thing in the morning and signed for individually by each board member. From there we move forward with the board and, hopefully, lose nothing more than these past couple of days.”

  She paused, then, uncharacteristically, quipped into the air to no one, “This is unfucking believable!”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “About—” I probed.

  “What pisses me off more? The fact that James would so easily spit on our friendship or the fact that I’ve lost substantial time.”

  Perry wasn’t kidding. She really wasn’t sure. It’s hard enough to swallow a real estate foe screwing with you in the first place. It must be a whole different story when it’s a friend. On the other hand, Perry hates being thrown off schedule. She adjusts as well as anyone when it happens, but she hates it.

  As for what happened between Perry and Auerbach, I wouldn’t know. I’ve never given anyone professional, whom I remotely consider to be a friend, even one second to think that sticking it to me would be a wise move. So I thought about how I react to people who try to fuck with me in the business world, and I gave her the same advice my father once gave me.

  “Let James Auerbach go, Perry.”

  “I know, Jonah. But when—”

  “I mean it. Let him go, angrily. When you have, nothing will be more of a lesson to him than if this deal gets made in spite of his efforts. He’ll have to think about it every day. Nothing will gnaw at him more. Perry, you need to steamroll over him. You need to knock him to the ground. And when he’s down, you need to make sure his eyes are still open. This way he’ll be able to see the sole of your shoe as it comes crashing into his face.”

  I walked into The Four Seasons on east 52nd street. Within one step of entering the space I was transported to the 1970s. Not the ’70s of trippy colors and tight shorts, the one of elegance and taste. The one of growing American wealth and splendor. The Four Seasons was the same place to eat for the privileged today that it was then. Same smart hues, same subtly crisp Philip Johnson architecture, same timeless aura.

  After walking upstairs to the dining room, I was immediately greeted by Julian Niccolini, of Julian and Alex fame. The two together are responsible for fuelling the restaurant’s success from the beginning. Julian, the crowd pleaser, has a reputation built on his outgoing personality and charm, especially with the ladies. Alex Von Bidder, his reserved counterpart, has always been thought of as the establishment’s lightning rod. Together, they make a formidable restaurateur team.

  I walked through the narrow hallway, the one with the huge, earth-tone Picasso on the wall, then past the wine room and into the main dining area. The cavernous, high-ceilinged room was dimly lit, as it usually is in the evening. The warm cherry wood walls seemed to be absorbing, then evenly redistributing, all of the room’s energy. The famous drooping, pink and bronze metal chain-link curtains gently shimmied in tiny vertical waves up and down the walls. Orderly, proper staff members glided about with little distraction. The square pool of cool pale blue water located in the center of the space muffled all of the room’s voices into a single calm entity. I spotted my father, and a woman I had never seen before, sitting at our usual table right up against the pool’s south edge.

  A bit uneasy I sat down. I hated the fact that I had to be near my father, possibly putting him directly in harm’s way, but therein lay the problem. He knew me better than anyone and would have become suspicious had I started blowing him off. One of the few constants in my life had always been our time together. In his eyes, anything that ever threatened that routine came across as erratic.

  I shook my dad’s hand.

  “Jonah, say hi to Cesara. She’s Spanish.”

  Cesara, who looked younger than me, had olive skin, huge breasts, and chiseled facial features. She wore a short, slinky black cocktail dress and three-inch heels. Her dark, lustrous hair was long and flowing. Her nose was buried in her BlackBerry.

  “Hey!” Pop barked. “This is my son here! Finish up with your goddamned e-mails later.”

  Cesara mumbled something in Spanish under her breath. She hit the miniature keypad a few last times and lifted her eyes to give me a quick once over.

  “Nice to meet you.”

  I could see right past her eyes into the smutty thoughts forming in her gold-digging brain.

  “Stanley,” she went on, her voice spiked with Latin flavor, “I really need to get back to these people. Since the two of you are probably just going to talk business anyway, I—”

  “Yeah, yeah, just go,” Pop quipped, as if he’d been through this exercise before.

  Cesara jumped up. BlackBerry still in hand, she picked up her purse and cell phone, and scurried out of the dining room.

  I sat down. A Sapphire and tonic was waiting for me.

  “What’s doing, kid?”

  The dope had made my mouth a bit dry. I downed a third of my drink.

  “Not much,” I said. “Didn’t know there would be three of us tonight.”

  When I arrived Pop had a few business papers out on the table along with one of my favorites of his Mont Blanc pens, Hemingway, but he was looking at a New York Post. He was taking one last glimpse at whatever article he had been reading as he put it aside.

  “This egg thing is unbelievable,” he said, nearly throwing me from my seat.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Fabergé egg that was stolen from the embassy. Haven�
��t you been following it?”

  “Actually, not really. I haven’t had all that much time for the news lately.”

  My insides began to simmer. I was surprised by my father’s interest. His nose was usually buried in the business section. I had never thought of him as a current events kind of guy.

  “Yeah, well, it’s simply sickening to me that someone would steal something like this. I just don’t understand it.”

  Shaking his head, he placed the paper on the floor next to his chair.

  “Maybe it was Sam,” he continued, smirking, as he took a sip of his drink.

  “Sam who? Archmont?”

  “You never know,” he shrugged, half-kidding. “You know the story behind his going to prison? He was a dockworker. He stole some artwork that was headed overseas right out of the shipyard.”

  All of a sudden it felt as if my head had been placed in a vice. Then, in a blink’s time, the Pool Room at The Four Seasons had become my own personal time machine. I was back at Archmont’s wedding, standing at the bar. I could see, not well, only peripherally, Robie/Hart putting my cigar case back in my briefcase. And I could see the cops that seemed to be milling about on the beach.

  I had requested—pushed for—that meeting with Sam that evening. I thought, had I simply fucked myself inadvertently, putting myself in the proverbial wrong place at the wrong time?

  Pop looked at his Patek Philippe.

  “How was your drink earlier?”

  “Irrelevant.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Also irrelevant.”

  “How come?”

  “Pop if it’s cool I’d rather just pass over it. Some bimbo who isn’t even worth discussing.”

  “Fucking women,” my father pushed out under his breath. “My lifelong dilemma. Of course, only since your mother passed, that is. Every day since has been the same crap, Jonah. They’re too damn needy to want around during the day, and too damn warm and pretty not to want around during the night.”

  “Nice sentiments. James Brown would be proud.”

  “Joke all you want, Jonah. But for me there will never be another like your mother. That’s why I don’t waste too much time on any one girl. If they’re young, have a tight ass, and look great in an evening gown, I keep them around right up until the time they get used to the lifestyle and start expecting things. Once they do, I’m on to the next. I keep my mind on making deals, I limit my exposure and possible commitment levels and have some great sex along the way.”