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, had 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?”

“In that case,” I answered, “I don’t see how I can help you.”

To his credit, he didn’t flinch or bluster or, as I expected he would, bring the blackmail element into play. Not yet, that is. Instead he fell silent—for the first and only time that morning—until on a green light we’d inched a few blocks farther south, through a kind of no man’s land which made me glance to be sure the car doors were locked. Then, smiling as though at some inner thought, he said:

“There’s one thing I could put up, of very definite value. Only I’d have to swear you to secrecy, Tommy. Someone we both know would cut my throat from ear to ear if she ever found out.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“My share in Enterprises,” he answered. “Katherine Goldmark Enterprises.”

He watched me with the same conspiratorial smile, enjoying, I suppose, my dumbfounded reaction.

“You mean she never told you about it?” he asked.

“No.”

“Well, it’s true,” he said, laughing. “I own fifty percent of it. Drives her absolutely bananas—not that it should. Who do you think financed it? Raised the capital for it? She’s always tried to buy me out, but I’ve never let her. It’s too good an investment. Hell, why do you think she lent me money, Tommy? Out of the goodness of her heart? She thinks maybe I’ll default, and if I default, there goes my fifty percent of Enterprises!”

And if that were true, I thought, why would she have pushed me to bail you out? But I’d been doing another mental calculation, as always with Goldmark: How old could he have been at the time, if he’d actually financed Kitty?

“I always understood it was her husband who’d floated her company,” I said.

“Who? Sprague? You gotta be kidding. Oh, maybe in the beginning, when she was working out of her kitchen. But when she really got it going? With an office? Employees? Hell, he turned her down flat! That’s when I stepped in, with every cent I could scrape together. I knew it was going to fly. But that was the dumbest thing Sprague ever did, and she never forgave him. She destroyed the fucker.”

“What do you mean by that?” I said, feeling myself tense.

“Just what I said,” he answered noncommittally. “She’s a real ballbuster, my sister. Though why she ever married him to begin with I’ll never understand.”

“People do a lot of funny things when they’re on the rebound.”

“What rebound?” His eyebrows raised in a question.

I hesitated.

“I’d gathered she lived with someone for a long time,” I said. “Before Sprague.”

“Oh, that? The piano player? The one she likes to say walked out on her?”

“That’s right.”

“And you believe that bullshit, Tommy?”

“I didn’t know it was bullshit.”

“No? Well, who do you think threw who out? The guy moved in with her, they lived together three months, six months max. Then one day, everything of his out on the street, including the piano. She even changed the locks on the doors. I know because—”

He stopped midsentence, as though he’d said more than he’d wanted to. He reached idly for the phone, which hadn’t rung, then gazed out the window a moment, thinking, then back to me, grinning that boyish grin again.

“Well, I helped her. She asked me to. He wasn’t such a bad guy, either. Better than Sprague. Said she didn’t want to pay his bills anymore. Well, hell, that’s my sister for you. Don’t say I never told you, Tommy: she eats guys alive.”

Laughing again.

The first time he’d said it, it had been me. Then, I think, me and himself. Now it was men in general whom Kitty ate alive—me, Goldmark, Sprague, the piano player. That was a hell of a way, I thought, to talk about someone who had been trying to save him, even if she had something to gain by it.

I felt a sudden claustrophobia in the limousine, an urge to get out and walk. But our business was unfinished, and, trying to look at it as objectively as I could then, maybe I’d rather have had the Funds own half of Kitty’s company, if it came to that, than somebody else Goldmark might peddle it to.

“There’s something you’ve left out,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“From what Kitty said, it sounded like blackmail.”

“Kitty could make anything sound like blackmail. What do you mean?”

“What will happen if I say no to you? What will happen if you don’t raise the money?”

“Oh, that,” he said offhandedly. “Let’s leave that out of it.”

“Let’s not leave anything out,” I said sharply.

“Oh, come on, Tommy, maybe you want to call it blackmail, or she does. Call it what you want. All I said was that under pressure—I mean under oath, under interrogation … Hell, you’re an attorney, you know what I’m talking about …”

“You mean, if you had a chance to plea-bargain?”

“That’s not what I said.” Then, smoothly: “Look, Tommy, let’s be honest about it. I’m not saying it’d even come up, ever. Maybe it’ll never have to. But I happen to know a lot about you and Kitty, your activities. And I’m not just talking about Safari, either.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“Thorne, for one.”

I had to at least give him credit for his chutzpah, if nothing else.

The last part of the conversation had taken place in the street in front of my building, where the driver had double-parked, Goldmark’s side toward the curb. We stared at each other. There was no menace in his expression, no desperation, just the steady gaze from under thick dark eyebrows.

“What about Thorne?” I said.

“Shit, Tommy,” he said scornfully, “who do you think ordered her to kill him?”

He opened the door then, holding it for me as he stepped into the street. I got out after him. We stood face to face for a moment while horns honked. I’d forgotten I was a good five or six inches taller.

“Either way,” he said, holding out his hand, “I’m very, very grateful. But do we have a deal?”

I thought about it for a second even though I’d made up my mind in the car. I didn’t take his hand.

“I want to see the papers first,” I said.

“Great. I’ll have them on your desk this afternoon.”

I turned away, but he called after me.

“With or without Enterprises?” he said. “But you’ll promise to keep it secret?”

“With,” I answered.