"Very simply. Inside and out, it looks just like a common apartment house. But you don't rent out the units."
Swindell licked his teeth. "How do you make money, then?"
"You sell them."
"Sell apartments?"
"No, sell condos," Mullaney said, detaching the plastic-stucco facade from the model building.
Swindell leaned over to peer inside. He saw tiny apartments containing tiny people seated on tiny furniture.
"I don't get it," he remarked. "Looks like an ordinary apartment to me."
"Look, why do people rent?"
" 'Cause they can't afford to buy. Everyone knows that."
"Exactly. So with condos they buy their apartments."
"No one in their right fucking mind would buy a fucking apartment," Swindell said indignantly, deciding his colleague was pulling his chain. "Don't kid a kidder. No one is that crazy."
"You're right, Con, of buddy. No one would buy an apartment. What would they be buying? The inner walls and floor? The cube of air inside those walls? No way, right? But if you call it a condominium, folks will line right up. And you know why?"
"No, why?"
"Because there are so damn many young couples coming up now that there won't be houses enough for all of them. People with fine jobs and plenty of down payment rattling around in their savings accounts. But no houses. You've heard of the baby boom?"
"Yeah. I was one of the first to drop down the chute, back in forty-six. My old man knocked up my old lady as soon as he got back from Guam. Smartest thing he ever did, if I do say so myself."
"Well, there's plenty more where you came from. And they've all got an itch to own. Well, I got the solution right here."
Swindell frowned. "Never work. Not in a million years. You couldn't build these things cheap enough. Look at it, what is it? Stucco facing over concrete butresses? Too expensive. Never work."
"They will if you price them a third higher than comparable rental units," Morgan Mullaney said smugly.
"Higher! You nuts?"
"Hey, if you rent, you're throwing your money away. But if you buy . . ."
A tiny green gleam came into Connors Swindell's eyes then.
He left the conference early and sold off his entire residential inventory, using the proceeds to float construction loans.
Within a year he was building condo apartments from San Diego to Sacramento. And when he ran out of cheap land, he sank his profits into existing apartment houses and converted those into condos. Single-handedly, Connors Swindell initiated the move into condo conversion, which threw old people out of affordable apartments and into despair, but made him too rich to care.
From a California-based corporation, Swindell Properties Incorporated swept the nation like a forest fire. It built condos, condexes, and co-ops.
Warehouses fell before him. Apartment houses were exalted by his alchemic touch. By the time he was through, he was razing perfectly healthy schools, churches, fire stations, amusement parks, and even entire tracts of single-family houses, replacing them with sprawling condominium town houses.
Connors Swindell was on a roll unprecedented in real-estate history. He grew powerful, wealthy, virtually omnipotent. Bankers fought one another for his business. He could float a loan on nothing more than a toothy grin and the collateral in his wallet.
As the solid 1970's faded into the expansive eighties, Connors Swindell left them all in the dust, including Morgan Mullaney, the man who had first spoken that magic word.
The secret of his success was simple. Swindell Properties didn't build better condominiums. Nor affordable ones.
Swindell built pronounceable condominiums. "Call 'em condos," he lectured his growing sales force. "No one's gonna buy what they can't spell." And he was right.
Once "condo" became a household word, he was unstoppable.
Then came the stock-market crash of 1987.
"I can ride this out," Swindell had crowed, and kept on building. So a few yuppies had bitten the big one. The market was going to come roaring back. And it did.
What didn't come roaring back were the yuppies and the banks. Credit dried up. In a way, he was a victim of his own success. Everybody had plunged into the condo game. Competition was fierce. But demand dwindled. Loans stopped coming. Interest piled up. Defaults followed. The entire nation had been overbuilt. Somehow.
Almost overnight, it seemed, Connors Swindell went from being the darling of the real-estate industry to a desperate man presiding over a sprawling chain of halted construction projects, nervous lenders, and mounting debt.
"Somebody explain this to me," Swindell had moaned at a real-estate conference twenty years later. This one in Lake Tahoe.
No one could. They were all going around wearing the same dazed and vaguely frightened looks on their gloomy faces. Even the ones who had stayed in family homes. Prices there had shot through the roof during the real-estate-as-an-investment mania. Even house prices were flat now. No one could remember it being this bad. "Not since the Great Depression," they lamented.
After the fourth person had repeated that refrain, Connors Swindell retreated to the men's room to vomit or take a hit of coke. Possibly both.
He was unzipping his fly when he became aware of a well-dressed man standing before the next urinal. Lean and elegant, he had Princeton written all over him.
Connors Swindell calculated his age to be roughly eighty.
"Say, old-timer," he said over the sound of his liquid lunch rushing from his body, "everybody says it ain't been like this since the thirties. You lived through those times. Can you tell me what the future will bring? Are condos defunct?"
"You want to know why everything flattened out?" the old man asked.
"Sure."
"Well, finish up what you're doing and I'll show you."
Swindell hastily squeezed himself dry and followed the man over to the row of sinks. Instead of washing his hands, the man turned and said, "Got a quarter?"
"Barely," Connors grunted, fishing into his pockets. He handed the old duffer a quarter. The man turned around and put it into the coin slot of a wall-mounted vending machine. He turned the lever and the machine went thing-chuck! Something flat slid down into a slot.
The old man held it up to the weak light.
Swindell saw it was a foil-wrapped package.
"Are you deaf? This here's a fucking condom. Not a condo."
"What are these used for, my friend?"
"If you don't know by now, the information ain't gonna do you much good," Swindell said flatly.
"This little number protects against unwanted offspring."
"You ain't making a whole bushel of sense."
"Think back. When did these items become popular again?"
"Oh, about four, five years ago, when that AIDS thing started getting out of hand."
"Exactly. Before that, you couldn't get most young fellas to pull one of these on if it came packaged with Jean Harlow. She was an actress. Made Madonna look like Stan Laurel in drag. He was an actor. Anyway, birth control was a thing the women got saddled with, with their pills and diaphragms and the like. But come AIDS, and it was every man for himself. So to speak."
"I still don't follow."
"You got into this business, when? The sixties? Seventies?"
"Late sixties," Swindell admitted, eyeing the condom. "Why?"
"You, my friend rode the baby boom to success."
"Don't I know it!" Swindell said fervently.
"Well, the baby boom just bottomed out. And there ain't no baby boomlet coming along to save your butt. And you can thank that little device you got in your hands for that."
Connors Swindell regarded the foil package as if seeing it for the first time. And the truth fell on him like a rain of anvils.
"These fucking things are gonna ruin the business!"