Brian considers escaping with the elevator, but Parkhurst spies him, calling out, a feeble old bleat, “Brian, hang on!” Brian’s gluteus locks up. In the past, he would have asked Jack how the Bentley was handling. How Jack Jr. was making out at Penn. Parkhurst moves his soft body in its Armani threads onto the elevator, eschewing the separate penthouse car: he enjoys riding with the “people.”
“Counselor. How in the hell are you?” He slaps Brian on the back.
“Jack. How’s this weekend looking? Gonna get out on the links at all?”
The elevator stops and opens. It’s two stops before Parkhurst’s floor but all three of them exit.
“Brilliant weekend, really, really brilliant,” Parkhurst mutters as Esmeralda walks off headed east. As Brian watches Esmeralda’s receding back, Parkhurst leans into him. “Stay tuned — there’s a sweet little old deal coming up I want to get your eyes on. Real nice, Old Florida real estate. It’s in this spot downtown — we’re gonna call the whole area NoDo. Like it? North of Design District.”
Brian jams his hands into his pockets; he’s wobbling inside himself. His head gets heavy and suddenly he’s watching himself and Parkhurst from twenty feet down the corridor, saying, “Yeah, Jack — I’ve been wanting to talk to you about one of those projects myself. Northeast Fifty-sixth Street? I think there’s issues.”
His employer turns his big, white-haired head in his direction. “Don’t tell me — it’s the hippies again? Goddamn freaks — what’re they doing in Florida? Let them go hump the trees in California.”
“No — no — nothing like that.” Brian brings his hands together, trying to take hold of himself. He hadn’t prepared for this sort of confrontation, but suddenly it feels crucial. He’s had it with Parkhurst, his office with the elephant’s-foot wastebasket, the walrus-tusk letter opener. Sick to death of self-satisfied arrogance, the way he treats employees like possessions, his little insinuations that Brian needs him, strutting around as if his company were some version of the Isle of Dr. Moreau. “I was looking again at the neighborhood specs for the Little Haiti deal — there’s questions.”
Parkhurst stops mid-corridor. “Didn’t you sign off on it?”
“I did, sure, but new issues have come to light.”
“Like what?”
“Like I don’t think we did sufficient market feasibility study on the area.”
Parkhurst crosses his arms, tucks his spotty hands under his biceps — a thick-brained, obstinate gesture — preamble to one of his development pitches. “What issues? The whole Design District region is going insane, Brian. You can’t even get onto Northeast Fortieth anymore. I think Conrad put his finger right on it. All those nice fruity restaurants and furniture stores, a performing arts center — some fucking day. Stryker’s chomping to redev that Caribbean Marketplace. And city center, man — the midtown development deal is phase two now — all that new urbanism crap — two minutes’ walk to the dry cleaners. It’s gonna be the Italian fucking Renaissance around here in a few years.”
“Yes, yes. I’m not questioning any of that.”
“Didn’t even need a feasibility study, if you ask me — just look at it. And NoDo North is pre-gentrification — really young, super sexy. Our building’s gonna be red-hot — top architect, and Valente and his boys are laying the bricks for us. A big fat block of condo towers that’ll blow the place out of the water. Fifty stories, Venetian marble. Conrad wanted to call it the Tom Perdue. Dumb fucking name — after some nobody. I had to persuade him out of that. We’re calling it the Blue Topaz.”
When Jack gets excited about a project, it’s like watching kindling smoke: this is the deal. The one. Brian presses his hands into a kind of praying fold, lowers his face to his fingertips. His law school friend Dennis thought Brian was nuts taking a job with a developer, said that he was entering “the belly of the beast and taking an office in the colon.” Supposedly he’d be pushed into a servant’s position — devoting his energies to subverting contract wording, excavating loopholes, massaging bylaws, and generally clearing the path so his boss could proceed with the greatest of ease. But how was that different from any other corporate hired gun? He lifts his head. “Jack, I’m not sure we shouldn’t take a pass on this one.”
Parkhurst blinks slowly. The more their business has grown, the more Parkhurst likes to give outsiders the impression that his attorney lives next to his skin. Brian has never before tried to get in the way of a PI&B project, but he remembers vividly the night he’d visited that art gallery; the sound of neighbors talking in the night: a particular mood of serenity and contentment. He knows the essence of the city is its neighborhoods, most of which are being systematically broken into by developers — their constructions driving out the old homes and families, ushering in nonresident owner-investors, anti-communities made up of transients and tourists — no personal history or investment in the place where they’ve landed. He thinks of the little brown-faced doll on Fernanda’s desk. For all they know, her grandparents live on that very street. Now he takes a breath and begins listing worst-case scenarios. “It’s old, Jack, like historic old. The street in question doesn’t even border the District — it’s deep, old neighborhood. According to our new intelligence,” he lies, “there will be a citizens’ turnout that’ll make those hippie tree-huggers look like a tea party.” He shakes his head. “We could be tied up for years.” And you, he thinks, vain old man, do not always get want you want.
Parkhurst studies Brian’s face. Over the years, he’s come to rely increasingly on Brian to help guide projects. Still, the old man thrives on resistance, derives jolts of inspiration from roadblocks. “That could be fun,” he says. “Haven’t seen a goddamned crowded zoning meeting in years. ‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.’ ”
Sun Tzu. One of Jack’s favorites. Brian nods. “Right, right. But then there’s plain bad decisions. Remember the publicity nightmare when they gutted Overtown to put in I-95?”
“Terrible move.”
“Disastrous.” Brian folds his arms as they stop before his office. “We’ve got to be smart about risk-reward ratio, take another look at cash flow. There’s no parking, no infrastructure, and frankly, I’m concerned that the downtown corridor is approaching saturation.”
The recessed lighting makes a nimbus of Parkhurst’s white comb-over. He looks down the hall past Brian for a long moment. “Brian, I hear you.” Parkhurst’s tone is modulated now; his white brows lower. “At this point, we’re more than three-quarters in. Tony Malio did beautiful work greasing the zoning board and we have an initial clearance there. I met with the Aguardiente group and shook on it.” He lets the glass corridor partition swing shut behind them as Brian turns. “So here’s what we’re gonna do: we’ll send Tony back out in the field — the Citizens’ Action Corps, is that it? Have him grab a paralegal, go visit the natives, shake some more hands, throw another third, up to double, onto the payouts. Make everybody happy.”