New York Fantastic

by Paula Guran

  The potential buyer this afternoon hadn’t screamed: she was a herpetologist, and Tom had really thought that was going to be perfect—he’d pitched it to her as free food supply for her snakes. “But apparently they don’t eat beetles,” he said.

  “Well, you win some, you lose some,” Doug said. “Let’s see if we can get the clients to put up the fee for another eradicator. It’s breaking my heart to see that place list for half a million under market.”

  The real estate market in Manhattan was always an adventure: everyone wanted to live somewhere in the city. The elves fought tooth-and-nail with Wall Street wizards over Gramercy Park townhouses and Fifth Avenue co-ops, developers tried to pry brownies out of abandoned industrial buildings in Greenwich Village so they could build loft conversions for rock stars and advertising execs, college students squeezed in four-to-a-lBR with actors and alchemists trying for their big break.

  Doug had slogged through the dark days of the early nineties, when there’d been seven years of inventory on the market and nothing selling. The immortals were the worst: unless you had a co-op with a limit on how long you could sublet, good luck getting a rakshasa or a vampire to lower their asking price no matter how bad the market was. It was always, “I’ll hang in there another decade and see how things go.”

  Even then, he’d liked the challenge of finding the perfect match of buyer and seller that moved Manhattan real estate, and he liked it a lot more now that he had his own offices tucked into a corner of the Richard Merriman Inc. corporate headquarters, handling the clients with his own team and farming out the boring overhead to the firm.

  Right now, though, it was getting a bit more challenging than he liked. Just last week, a $6M deal for one of his exclusives—down from an ask of $7.1M at peak, and happy to get it—had fallen through after an accepted offer. The buyer had lost a quarter of her net worth in the huge Ponzi scheme that had just gotten busted, as though there weren’t enough bad news out there.

  “Oh, it was brilliant,” she’d said grimly, calling to tell him why the deal was off. “They put all these zombie investors on the books, paid them out of our money, then the zombies fell apart and their accounts went to the animators, who turn out to be working for a firm owned by the partners in the fund.”

  “Can you get any of the money back?” Doug asked.

  “Ask me in five years after I finish paying the lawyers,” she said.

  It made every sale twice as important and ten times as fragile. He was a little surprised they’d gotten the vampire from Black Thomas Phillips, actually, even with the two co-op rejections.

  Speaking of which, he sat down to make a few phone calls to people he knew with condo exclusives, but before he got the phone off the hook, it was ringing under his hand.

  “What the hell kind of crazy buyer are you bringing me?” Rina Lazar said, without so much as a hello. She was the selling broker on the Riverside apartment.

  “Oh, boy,” Doug said. “What happened? Did Kell back out?” That would be great, two new records: quickest sale, quickest flameout.

  “Ohhh, no,” Rina said. “Backing out, backing out would have been fantastic. He got my sellers’ number, don’t ask me how, called them up and told them, quote, their bleeping apartment was a bleeping pile of bleep, the built-ins were a disgrace, and the place smelled like dead old lady—I am not kidding you here—and nobody in their right mind would pay more than one million for the wreck, take it or leave it, end quote. The daughter just called me up in tears!”

  “Oh my God,” Doug said.

  “Plan on sending me a financial sheet on anyone you want to bring to any of my exclusives from now on,” she said, and banged the phone down hard enough to make him wince.

  “Oh, dear,” Henry Kell said, when Doug called. “I gather that this means the deal is off … ?”

  “Uh, yeah, the deal is off,” Doug said. “Mr. Kell, maybe I need to explain this, since you’re a first-time buyer. Once you make an offer, you can’t just—”

  “No, no, I perfectly understand,” Kell said. “I assure you, I had no second thoughts myself. It must have been—he must have had strong feelings on the subject, I can’t think why—”

  “Is this your partner we’re talking about?” Doug said. “Mr. Kell, if you aren’t the sole purchaser here—”

  “Well, I am, legally speaking,” Kell said. “Only, er, he can make his opinion felt in, in other ways, as you see.”

  Doug rubbed his forehead and looked at the balance sheet on the open laptop in front of him, although he really didn’t need to; he could keep track of all the contracts he had out right now in his head. “Mr. Kell, I’m sure we can find a place that will make both of you completely happy,” he said. “But I really am going to need to speak to your partner, too.”

  “Oh dear,” Mr. Kell said.

  “Wow, they’re a super-interesting touch, very Kafkaesque,” the art dealer said, considering the bug swarm on the wall.

  “It’s definitely a unique feature,” Tom said, trying not to look at the wall too hard himself. The bugs made a low raspy sound climbing over each other, which he could hear even though he’d cracked the windows to let in some of the noise of the First Avenue traffic outside.

  The buyer’s broker—she was backed into the far corner of the living room—looked at him with raised eyebrows as her client went to poke around in the kitchen. Tom shrugged at her a little. What was he going to do?

  “I do like the details,” the art dealer said, coming back out. “There’s something special in the contradiction between the formal style of the classic six, the stained glass windows and the wood paneling, and the raw brutality of the insect swarm.”

  “Oh?” Tom said. “That is—Yes, absolutely. The clients are very negotiable,” he added, with a faint stirring of hope.

  The art dealer stood looking around the apartment a little more, and then shook his head. “It’s a really tough call, but I don’t think so. The apartment is great, but, you know, Tudor City. It’s so—stuffy. I just can’t see it. It would be almost like living on the Upper East Side. But tell the sellers I love their style,” he added.

  “Why is the maintenance so high?” the vampire said suspiciously, reading the offering sheet for the Battery Park apartment.

  “Well,” the selling broker said, and then he admitted that it was a land-lease, meaning the co-op didn’t actually own the ground underneath the building, and also the lease was running out in fifteen years and no one had any idea what the term renewal was going to be. “But we’ve got a brownie super, and there’s a fantastic sundeck on the—” He stopped at the look Jennifer shot him.

  Waiting in the lobby as the vampire dispiritedly bundled himself up again, Jennifer said, “I’ve got a few condos lined up that we could take a look at this weekend.”

  “I don’t want to live in a condo,” the vampire said, muffled, as he wrapped a scarf around his head. “Those places let anyone in.”

  Jennifer opened and shut her mouth. “Okay,” she said, after a moment. “Okay, a co-op it is. You know what, could I maybe get you to send me your last board application?”

  “I’ve got the money!” the vampire said, offended, his eyes glowing briefly red from behind the scarf.

  “No, I’m sure you do!” Jennifer said, not-fumbling for the little crucifix she’d worn under her blouse. “I don’t even really need the financials, I’m just thinking maybe there’s something we could do to—polish it up a little extra for a board. It might be worth getting an early start on it.”

  “Oh,” the vampire said, mollified. “All right, I’ll have my last broker send it to you. I guess it couldn’t hurt.”

  Oh, but it could. One of his three personal reference letters was from his mother.

  “I thought it was sweet,” the vampire protested. “Shows I haven’t lost touch with my mortal life.”

  “She’s ninety-six and lives in Arizona,” Jennifer said. “When was the last time you saw her?”


  The vampire looked guilty. “I call every day,” he muttered.

  The other two letters were from a pooka—just the kind of guest everyone wanted visiting their neighbor, especially in horse form and snorting flames—and a necromancer.

  “The necromancer is in-house at Goldman Sachs, with the lost wealth research division,” the vampire said.

  “Okay, see, that’s excellent,” Jennifer said. “Let’s maybe ask her to revise this letter to focus on that, and let’s just skip mentioning the necromancer part. Now, about the pooka—”

  “He’s a biotech entrepreneur!” the vampire said.

  “Let’s see if there’s someone else we can get, okay?” Jennifer said.

  The goblin doorman let Doug up without any hassle this time, even doing a good goblin impression of beaming. It took some effort not to glare at him. No wonder he was so happy Kell and his partner were looking for a new place, if the other guy was some kind of nut.

  Kell was in the apartment alone, looking even smaller and hunched in a large shapeless sweater, and he twisted his hands anxiously as he let Doug in. “I suppose,” he said, “I suppose there’s no way to reopen the deal? I’d be willing to pay more—”

  “Not a chance,” Doug said. “Mr. Kell, I don’t think you get it. If you or your partner does something, uh, unusual, you look unreliable, and that scares sellers. Closing can take two or three months. Even if you pay more, it’s not worth having a sale fall through at the last second.”

  “Oh,” Kell said, dismally.

  “Honestly, the solution here is to find a place that your partner will be happy with, too,” Doug said. “Is he here? I really do need to meet him.”

  Kell sighed and said, “Just a moment.” He went to a cabinet and opened it and took out a bottle of whiskey and a glass. He brought them over to the table and poured a glass.

  Doug had seen a lot weirder things than a client needing a drink, but it did take him by surprise when Kell slid the glass over to him instead of downing it. “Thanks, but—”

  “No,” Kell said. “You’ll want it in a moment.”

  Doug started to ask, except Kell wasn’t talking anymore. He’d fallen back onto the couch, and he was doubled over with his face in his hands, and something weird was happening to him. He seemed to be— growing.

  “Uh,” Doug said, and then Kell lifted his face out of his hands, and it wasn’t Kell anymore. The eyes were the same color, but bloodshot and wider-apart in a broader face, with a flattened nose and a jaw that looked like it had been carved out of rock. His neck was thickening even while Doug watched.

  “Well, fucking finally,” not-Kell said, straightening up even more. The couch creaked under him. “So you’re the broker who took him to that shithole?”

  Doug paused and said, “And you’re—?”

  Not-Kell was coughing a little bit, thumping himself on the chest as he finished growing. He would have made about two of Kell with some leftovers. He belched loudly and bared his teeth in what you could’ve called a grin, if by grin you meant a mouth full of more shining white teeth than anybody should’ve had. “Call me Hyde.”

  “Okay,” Doug said, after a second. “So that would make him—”

  Hyde snorted. “I know. He changed the name when he moved here. Fucking pathetic.” He pointed to the drink. “Are you going to have that?”

  Doug looked at the glass, then slid it back across the table. “So, Mr. Hyde,” he said, “can you tell me what you’re looking for in an apartment?”

  The eradicator stepped back from the wall of bugs and shook his head slowly and lugubriously.

  “Really? Nothing?” Tom said, heart sinking.

  “Sorry,” the eradicator said. “These people, they’d lived here like twenty years or something. They put down roots. This,” he waved a hand at the bugs, “this goes way, way down. I could charge you ten grand and strip off the top layers of the curse, wipe the bugs out, but they’d be back in two months. Might be even worse—millipedes or something. I hate those things.” The eradicator shuddered his shoulders up and down expressively. “Anyway, you’re not getting this out for good until you rip down the whole building.”

  He stopped and thought about it, and after a moment added, “Or you could get the two sellers back in and get them to make up. That can clear stuff like this up sometimes.”

  Tom looked at him. “The sellers’ divorce took two years to finish, and they’re still in court on some issues.”

  The eradicator shrugged. “Do they want to sell their apartment or not?”

  Tom sighed. Then he paused and said, “So—wait, if you tried to take off the whole curse, the bugs might get worse—”

  “Right,” the eradicator said.

  “If you didn’t try that,” Tom said, “could you maybe—do something else with them?”

  “What did you have in mind?” the eradicator asked.

  The vampire’s application was still pretty disheartening, especially when Jennifer compared it to the one she was putting the final touches on that afternoon. She didn’t like to jinx things, but kitsune or not, it was pretty much guaranteed Mei Shinagawa would be a shoo-in at the no-dogs-allowed Berkeley. Six letters of reference, terrific financials, and she’d even tucked in tiny origami cranes to be included with the copies of the application, one for each of the board members. The vampire’s tax return, on the other hand, had a suspicious reddish-brown stain on the front.

  To make the day complete, after she’d gotten off the phone with the vampire, Jennifer’s phone went off with another all-caps CALL ME!! text message from one of their former buyers, a lawyer who’d bought into the top-drawer Oryx co-op for the panoramic views from the twenty-fourth floor apartment. Now those were about to go away, thanks to a new development, and she was having fits.

  “If the Landmarks Commission has approved the renovation, and there’s nothing in the zoning to stop it …” Jennifer said, apologetically.

  She felt bad, but what could you do? That was Manhattan: you put one building up, somebody else put a bigger one up next door.

  “My view was supposed to be protected!” Angela said. “It faces onto a freaking landmarked church!”

  “I’m sorry. They’re going to preserve the exterior shell and put up a new building on the inside, mimicking the facade and carvings all the way up,” Jennifer said. “We could look for a new place for you, if you want?”

  “How can I afford a new place with this millstone around my neck? Who is going to pay two million for a one bedroom with a view of a brick wall accessorized by carvings of smiley angels or whatever these guys are putting on their monstrosity?” Angela said. “No one, that’s who! Oh my god, why did I buy at peak? I knew better!”

  Of course she hadn’t known better; nobody knew better, that was why it was peak. Jennifer said some comforting things with half a mind while she collated pages of the kitsune’s application, and got off the phone; then she stopped and picked the phone up again and called back. “Angela? Can you get a picture of the facade and email it to me?”

  “Granite countertops!” Hyde said. “I want some granite fucking countertops. None of this cheap Formica shit.”

  “Okay,” Doug said, adding that to the list under high ceilings, Subzero fridge, central A/C, and hardwood floors. The list was getting pretty long. “Any particular neighborhoods?”

  “That’s another thing, I want someplace where there’s a little goddamn fucking life, you understand me?” Hyde said. “I mean, what the hell was he thinking, Riverside Park. Yeah, because I want to live next to a bunch of elves singing “Kum-ba-yah” to the sun every morning. Not unless I get to pick ’em off with a shotgun.”

  “That wouldn’t be such a great idea,” Doug said.

  “Fun, though,” Hyde said, sort of wistfully.

  “So,” Doug said, getting off that subject, “can you tell me anything about what your, er—what Mr. Kell wants? He hasn’t been all that clear—”

  “That asshole just wants to
crawl under a rock and read books,” Hyde said. “Look at this—” He pointed to the particleboard bookshelves, sagging with hardbacks. “All this IKEA crap everywhere, Jesus. And this is a dream compared to what he had in here before those. Purple fucking built-ins! I had to take a sledgehammer to the whole pile of shit.”

  He glared at the bookshelves, and then abruptly heaved himself up off the whimpering couch and headed for them with his fists clenching and unclenching, like he couldn’t handle looking at them a second longer.

  “So, you know,” Doug said hastily, “I do have a place I’d like you to take a look at—”

  Hyde paused before reaching the bookcases, distracted. “Yeah? What the hell, let’s go now.”

  “I don’t know if I can reach the broker—” Doug started.

  “We can look at the outside,” Hyde said.

  The vampire called her up less than a minute after Jennifer forwarded the email. “What the hell was that!” he yelled. “I almost dropped my iPhone in the gutter!”

  “Really?” Jennifer said. “So—that actually hurt?”

  “It was a picture of five million crosses!”

  “Fantastic,” Jennifer said. “Can you meet me at 75th and 3rd in half an hour?”

  Getting Hyde into a taxi involved waiting fifteen minutes for one of the minivan ones to come by empty, but Doug was just fine with that: he spent the time frantically texting back and forth with Tom to get the selling broker down to the apartment in time to meet them. He didn’t completely trust Hyde not to just knock down the front door and go inside, otherwise.

  He got a call back from the broker while they were heading downtown. “I just want to make sure you realize—” the guy said.

  “Yes, I know,” Doug said. “It’s completely mint inside, though, right?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” the broker said. “Architect-designed gut renovation.”

  They got out in front of Marble Cemetery. One of the wispy sadeyed apparitions paused by the iron railing to watch as Hyde climbed out of the cab, which almost bounced as he finally stepped out. It looked up at him. Hyde glared down at it. “You want something, Casper?” he said. The apparition prudently whisked away.