Rough Trade

by Hartzmark, Gini

  “It won’t help us to go public if we go bankrupt first,” complained Colin miserably.

  It occurred to me that this was probably what the SEC had had in mind all along, but I didn’t say so.

  “Perhaps you should sit down with your investment bankers and see about setting up some kind of short-term bridge loan,” I offered, not eager to get into a discussion of Avco’s cash-flow problems.

  “That’s exactly what we’ve just been discussing,” Avery assured me. “But afterward, talking to Stuart here, my brother and I had a little thought. You see, all we really need is a small bridge, somewhere in the neighborhood of a million dollars, just to get rid of some long-running payables and meet our payroll until we close the IPO. Grisham and Polk say that naturally they’d be happy to raise the money, but their fee is fifteen percent right off the top. Do you have any idea how much money that is?”

  “A hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” I replied, pleased to be offered this opportunity to show off my mastery of simple arithmetic.

  “But don’t you see? If we’re really just a week or ten days away from SEC approval, then we’ll end up paying a six-figure fee for a ten-day loan.”

  “Very few people have the liquidity to write that kind of check,” I said. “That’s what you’re paying for.”

  “I bet you do,” said Avery.

  “Pardon?”

  “I bet you could write that size check.”

  For some reason my thoughts immediately turned to the apartment renovation—probably because that’s what the plumbing contractor thought about my checkbook, too.

  “I’m afraid that I’m not in a position to do that,” I said. It was horribly inappropriate for them to even ask, and I was furious that Eisenstadt had let them put me in this position.

  “Oh, I’m sure for someone with your background what we’re talking about is pocket change,” pressed Avery.

  I wanted to tell him that no matter what anyone’s background was it was still a million dollars. Instead I said, “Perhaps Stuart didn’t realize it because he’s relatively new to the firm, but Callahan Ross has a policy against attorneys investing in a client’s business. It’s a clear conflict of interest.” I didn’t even bother to keep the contempt out of my voice. I was having a hard enough time trying not to sound as if I’d just been slimed.

  When I got back to my office, I ripped open the bag of M&M’s and had Cheryl hook me up to the telephone headset I used when I had an impossibly long string of calls to return or was feeling too hyper to sit down. Whenever I used it, I felt like a cross between a Hollywood agent and an air traffic controller, but today was definitely one of those days when I knew I’d think better on my feet.

  First Milwaukee’s refusal to budge on the default deadline had put us on immediate combat footing. There were a million things that all needed to have been done yesterday. Not only that, but I couldn’t help but feel handicapped by my incomplete knowledge of Beau Rendell’s business dealings. I called Harald Feiss, hoping to get some answers and offer him the professional courtesy of letting him know that he’d be receiving a change-in-representation and transmittal-of-records letter from Jeff Rendell shortly, but his secretary said that he was unavailable to come to the phone. I suspected he’d instructed her to refuse my calls.

  I tried to call the Honorable Robert V. Deutsch, the mayor of Milwaukee, but was informed by an aide that hizzoner was attending an international conference of mayors in Beijing of all places. However, he was planning on cutting short his trip in order to return for Beau Rendell’s funeral. I explained that I was the new attorney for the Milwaukee Monarchs, and the aide agreed to set up a tentative meeting for me with the mayor the afternoon of the funeral. After I hung up with city hall, I put a call in to Jack McWhorter and left a message for him to get in touch with his people in L.A. It was time for them to come up with a proposed timetable for making a deal.

  As I worked, the irony of what I was doing did not escape me. While I was prepared to fight to the death to allow Jeff and Chrissy Rendell to hang on to their football team, the truth is, I don’t really much care for football.

  Talk of sports lubricates the world of men. It gives them a common language and sets them on common ground. In my office, at Super Bowl time, men who command $500 an hour joke and wager as equals with men who empty their wastebaskets for minimum wage. I can think of nothing else, not even religion, that is such a powerful leveler.

  I started reading the sports page when I first came to work at Callahan Ross. I did it for the same reason that a refugee makes the effort to master the language of his adopted country—to assimilate and survive. I have also, in the interests of entertaining clients, gone to see every kind of game that can be played with a ball. Over time I have even learned to appreciate the rough ballet of pro hoops, the indolent poetry played out by the boys of summer, but I have never really developed a taste for football.

  There is a reason for this. At its primitive heart football is a game about knocking people down. It is also monumentally boring. There was even a time when I was foolish enough to tell people this. Whenever I did, they would look at me sadly, start talking slower, and explain that I didn’t really understand the game. After seriously weighing the possibility, I have to say that they are wrong.

  Last year I handled a transaction involving four telecommunications companies from three different countries. My clients traveled to Chicago from Tokyo, Frankfurt, and Taipei because I’d figured out how to put $2 billion in their pockets in a way that had simply not occurred to anyone else. I refuse to believe that the game of football is beyond my understanding—especially when it is widely assumed that men with beer bellies the size of the moons of Jupiter are able to grasp every nuance of the game.

  But that doesn’t mean that I don’t understand what football means to people, how it lifts them up and binds them together. With Beau’s death, the Monarchs might now belong to Jeff and Chrissy Rendell, but they also belonged to the working people of Milwaukee who, year in and year out, put down their hard-earned dollars and went to the stadium to root for the team they’d grown up cheering for.

  Of course, I knew that Jack McWhorter would probably disagree. He would argue that football was a business, and when they bought their tickets, the fans got their money’s worth. To him the NFL was a brand, entertainment was the product, and the players, albeit overpaid, were as interchangeable as workers on an assembly line. As I worked on through the afternoon, sifting through the possibilities and weighing the alternatives, I found myself wishing that I could subscribe to his point of view.

  In the unyielding language of the balance sheet, moving the team to Los Angeles provided the easiest road to salvation. However, given the tax burden placed on the team by Beau’s death, the terms that L.A. was offering suddenly seemed less generous. But once you strayed from the realm of the merely black and white, the thought of moving the team was deeply disturbing. It was like contemplating a disfiguring amputation. You knew that you would survive, but you also knew that you would emerge from the experience forever changed.

  The other options at this point were much more difficult to pin down. An important chunk of arithmetic depended on how far Beau had gone with his discussions of a stadium renovation deal with the city. Unfortunately, I was going to have to wait until Thursday to find out.

  While never much of an option, selling the team was no longer a viable alternative. Whatever the Rendells could get for the team would immediately go to the government for inheritance and capital gains taxes. They’d end up literally with nothing.

  What the team needed, I decided, was a white knight. Someone with more money than sense who’d be willing to ride to the rescue of the team. Surely there must be a Milwaukee millionaire who would be willing to spend a chunk of change for a piece of a debt-riddled franchise in exchange for civic sainthood. I started jotting down a list of likely candidates.

  In the meantime there were still some ground balls to be run dow
n. I still hadn’t received Sherman’s memo on likely lease issues, and there were other things I hoped to learn as soon as I received Feiss’s records. I felt like I had twenty-seven different facts in front of me; it was at the same time too many and not enough.

  Cheryl came in tapping the face of her wristwatch, reminding me that it was time to meet Stephen and the decorator at the new apartment. My mother was also coming just to round out the party.

  “You go,” I groaned. “I’m prepared to pay you handsomely.”

  “You couldn’t afford what it would cost,” replied my secretary, taking my coat from the hanger and holding it for me.

  On my way out I bumped into Skip Tillman, the firm’s f managing partner, who stopped long enough to congratulate me on landing the Monarchs as clients for the firm.

  “Norm Halperin in the Milwaukee office just called to give me the news. He was practically beside himself. What a coup! I told him you’d be in touch to coordinate about making sure that you have the manpower you need. Remember, it’s big-name clients that make us such a big-name firm,” he concluded with a knowing chuckle before moving on.

  I breathed a sigh of relief to see him go. As a rule I was much more accustomed to Tillman’s censure than his praise, and it made me nervous to suddenly find myself on his good side—especially since the new client he was so delighted with didn’t have a dime to pay us.

  CHAPTER 10

  I hadn’t been to the new apartment in more than a week, so I was surprised when I stepped off the elevator to see that after months of hideously expensive structural work-plumbing and electrical repairs that seemed to involve more demolition than restoration—a momentous corner had apparently been turned. The plasterers had been hard at work, and most of the duplex’s walls were now crisp, flat, and straight. The floors, sanded but still unvarnished, showed warm promise from beneath a layer of plaster dust.

  I found Mother and Mimi, the decorator, already in the solarium, studying wallpaper samples and fabric swatches. Mother was dressed in her most casual clothes—a pair of slate gray Yves Saint Laurent trousers that hung on her slender frame like sculpture, a navy cashmere shell, and a pair of diamond stud earrings only slightly smaller than dimes. Mimi, who’d spent half her career decorating and redecorating Mother’s houses, wore a red St. John’s suit so old that it sagged in the seat and a pair of scuffed Ferragamo pumps.

  “You realize this would be much easier if we could do it in the daylight,” complained my mother without bothering to even look up.

  “Unfortunately, I work during the day,” I said.

  Over the years our relationship had acquired a certain efficiency. We no longer worked our way up to an argument, but instead had them always at the ready and just jumped right in.

  “Well, at least you made it. I was beginning to think that your secretary was lying to me again when she said you were on your way. It’s amazing how I can come all the way from Lake Forest and still manage to get here on time while all you have to do is travel a few blocks and yet you always keep us waiting.”

  “Not only do I not have a driver, but traffic is worse in the city,” I pointed out. “Besides, I don’t see Stephen here yet.”

  “Oh, I’m afraid he’s not going to be able to make it, my dear,” cooed Mimi, who adored Stephen with a decorator’s passion for what was pleasing to the eye. “He phoned just as I was leaving to say that his flight was delayed in New York. These ambitious young men have to work so hard these days,” she declared as if sharing some wondrous insight.

  I couldn’t believe it. Of all the passive-aggressive bullshit that had been pulled since we’d started in on the apartment, this had to be a new all-time low. It was bad enough that he’d stood me up on the meeting, but the fact that he didn’t have the nerve to tell me himself and instead had wimped out and called Mimi was the last straw.

  It also didn’t help matters any that by the time Mother and Mimi got through with me, I was practically begging for mercy. I felt as though I’d had my brains scrambled. I don’t care what anyone says, one Brunschwig & Fils wallpaper looks very much like another, especially once you’ve already looked at a hundred. It seemed incredible to me that after everything I’d been through over the past couple of days, it took choosing curtains for the downstairs powder room to send me over the edge.

  After the decorating mafia had gone, I spent some time alone in the apartment, wandering through the empty rooms, reacquainting myself with why I loved it, and marveling at how it was all coming together. It was a magnificent place, one of the last apartments designed by the legendary David Adler, and in every room you could feel his genius given physical expression in plaster, wood, and the space they defined. But as the work moved on toward completion I felt something else, as well: the weight of expectations bearing down on me.

  Mimi assumed that people who chose light fixtures together must also be in love with each other. My mother assumed that because Stephen and I were moving in together, we would, as a matter of course, get married. I could see it in her eyes every time she crossed the threshold of the apartment. It was like she was mentally filling the place with place cards and bouquets.

  My reaction to all of this was visceral and certain. Just thinking about it made me want to run away. Unlike Chrissy, my instincts for rebellion have remained intact from my bad-girl days; now they just play themselves out in different ways. That was the problem. Was it instinct that made me want to run, or was it self-preservation? Was rebellion a habit or a matter of survival? How could I justify saying that I was driven to flee when for three years I have not been bound to Stephen in any way and yet have chosen to stay?

  I was surprised when the house phone rang and even more surprised when Danny, the night doorman, informed me that a Mr. Abelman was downstairs to see me. I told him to go ahead and send him up, but as soon as I hung up the phone I was seized by a kind of panic I hadn’t experienced since junior high school.

  It wasn’t so much the prospect of seeing Elliott, but rather the idea of having him see the apartment. As long as I lived in Chicago and didn’t change my name, there was no way to hide who I was or where I came from, but up until now Elliott’s view of my personal possessions had been limited to my office, which was not technically mine, the apartment I shared with Claudia, which was little more than a student tenement, and my car, which was frankly a disgrace.

  This was different. Even in its present, unfinished state, it was like hanging a sign around my neck.

  I paced nervously across the foyer waiting for the elevator to deposit him. The apartments in this building were one to a floor. This was the building’s only duplex and had been formed by connecting the seventh-floor apartment, which had once belonged to my parents, to the one directly above, where my grandparents had lived, by means of a grand reverse staircase that swung gracefully through the entranceway. Taken together, the two floors made it almost as large as Chrissy and Jeff’s house in Milwaukee. Standing there alone it suddenly felt as big as a cathedral.

  Elliott stepped off the elevator and slowed his step in order to take it all in. He made his way across the room to the enameled fireplace and ran his hand along the top of the mantel.

  “You may be moving uptown,” he declared with a wolfish grin, “but I can see that your housekeeping hasn’t changed.”

  “Once a slob, always a slob,” I replied, greatly relieved that he hadn’t immediately fallen down in shock or decided to hit me up for a loan.

  “How did you know I would be here?” I asked, wondering what exactly it was about him that attracted me. Compared with Stephen he was certainly nothing to look at, six foot one with a mop of soft brown hair that fell into his eyes like a schoolboy’s. He had dark brown eyes that were flecked with gold and strong hands that felt dry and warm. He smiled seldom but when he did it was wonder, like the arrival of spring.

  “I’m a detective, remember,” he admonished, flashing a grin. “I called your secretary and she told me where I could find you.
” He cast his arm casually around my waist as if this was the most natural thing in the world. “So how about giving me the nickel tour?”

  “This whole block of buildings was erected in the early thirties during the heyday of the Beaux Arts period,” I began, feeling flustered and starting to prattle. “It’s one of the last ones that David Adler designed before his death. Adler was—”

  “—an architect justifiably famous for his sense of proportion and eye for detail who specialized in designing city apartments and country houses for the old guard of Chicago society,” Elliott cut in. Chicagoans know architecture the same way that the French know cheese; they grow up surrounded by its infinite variety. Even so, I was impressed.

  “Adler was a fanatic for detail,” I said, beckoning for him to follow me into the library. “Look at the paneling. You can really see it on the doors. There’s English paneling on the library side, but it’s different on the sides that face the two adjoining rooms. There’s French paneling on the bedroom side and a concealed door on the parlor side. Only Adler would have gone to the trouble.”

  “So is this your favorite room?” he asked, taking in the pin-and-dart moldings and the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of burled wood.

  “No. Come upstairs. I’ll show you my absolute favorite place in the world.”