This was the deal that for the last three months had been my own personal galley ship, with the Hell Bitch cracking the whip.
It was Katy who gave her that name, by the way, inspired by Captain Woodrow Call’s horse in Lonesome Dove. But her real name was Diane Martin. She was the bank’s senior real estate lawyer, the woman I answered to. The woman who had taken it upon herself to ruin my life.
But back to the deal. The rescission right that Stu had mentioned was a part of the negotiations from Day One. If the Gerstens didn’t get their condo development plan approved by the Planning and Zoning Commission within a year of closing, our clients could rescind the transaction — in effect, take back their air rights and return the Gerstens’ purchase to them.
The Gerstens had howled about this at every opportunity. A year was a very short turnaround time at the P and Z, and their fear was that if they missed the deadline our clients would rescind the deal and sell the air rights to Trump or somebody for more money, because those rights would only increase in value with the passage of time.
But our clients had insisted on this term as a way of protecting their interest in the deferred portion of the purchase price.
I sat there, not believing the position I was in. Should I tell the Hell Bitch about this? If I did, it was sure to trigger a full-blown episode. She’d be bound and determined to go to the Gerstens’ lawyer and have it out with him. She’d raise unshirted hell about this attempt to get to her through me, which would only poison the atmosphere between the two sides even more than it already was and make it harder still to get the deal closed.
On top of that, I had started to wonder about the Spagnolettis’ motives. Was this simply a favor — however ham-handed — for their old pals the Gerstens? Or did they have an ownership position in the condo development? One that would make them an ass-pocket full of money if the project was successful?
I had asked the Gerstens’ lawyer at least half a dozen times for a structure chart showing the full beneficial ownership of the limited partnership that the Gerstens had formed to buy the rights. The guy had done nothing but give me the Heisman.
It was going to be very hard indeed to say no to the Spagnolettis if they were looking to make money in the deal.
The whole episode had left me with a world class case of the nervous high strikes, and it just figured that when my phone rang it was the Hell Bitch’s assistant calling. I lifted the handset. “Morning, Patsie.”
“She has the Contessa with her and she has a question or two. Can you come up here please? And bring the closing binder.”
“On my way.” I popped a cherry cough drop in my mouth and stood up and pulled the closing binder down from my bookshelves and headed for the door.
We had represented a French Contessa earlier in the year when she had sent one of her gophers across the pond to buy her an apartment on Fifth Avenue. Two months and eight million dollars later, the woman owned three thousand square feet of prime Manhattan real estate. I knew the Contessa was in town and had been expecting that at some point I would get a call summoning me to the Hell Bitch’s office to take her through the particulars of this transaction.
By the time I reached the Hell Bitch’s three hundred square feet with commanding views up the island, I was a touch out of breath and sweating some. Made me wonder if I was fixing to take sick.
Please, God, not until after the Park Avenue deal is done.
Patsie showed me in. The two of them were seated at a conference table. The Hell Bitch was looking her most professional, wearing a blue dress that thanks to some optical illusion made her look slightly less chubby. The Hell Bitch had an on-again/off-again relationship with her grooming accessories and her makeup drawer — but today it was on-again. Her brunette hair was blown dry and combed and she’d even applied some cosmetics, not that any amount of makeup could do much for her jowly, bulldoggish aspect.
The Contessa looked like an older version of Gwyneth Paltrow. Blond hair, peaches-and-cream complexion, diamonds in her ears and at her throat and on her fingers. She was wearing a snow-white angora sweater dress that showed off a figure that might or might not have had something to do with her being royalty. She sat very erect and looked at me as a well-heeled guest might look at a doorman on her way out of her hotel.
The Hell Bitch made the introductions and I took the Contessa’s hand and shook it carefully and allowed as how I was pleased to meet her. Then I held the closing binder up and said to the Hell Bitch, “What would you all like to see?”
The Hell Bitch said, “The Contessa is thinking of getting a pet and wants to see the relevant building policies.”
“Got it.” I flipped through the binder. “Okay. Here we are.”
I walked around the table so that I was standing behind the Contessa and leaned over her and opened the binder and laid my finger along a line of text and said, “Here’s what you can own without seeking permission—”
And just then the lozenge fell from my mouth. It made directly for the Contessa’s sweater dress and landed on the very end of her breast. No Olympic gymnast ever stuck a better landing. A perfect ten.
Time froze.
I plucked the lozenge from the dress, and even though it was lousy with angora hair, I popped it back into my mouth and said, “—from the co-op board.”
I looked at the Hell Bitch and she was staring at me with her eyes wide and a look of panic and disbelief on her face.
I said, “Maybe I should just leave you all with the binder.”
The Hell Bitch said, “I think that would probably be best.” Her voice was two octaves higher than normal.
I headed back to my office to wait for the inevitable Hell Bitch meltdown. Which, as I’ve already said, came after lunch that same day.
And which I had coming for once.
As I waited, I thought about how just yesterday, just YESTERDAY, I had for five minutes entertained notions that maybe life was going to get better around here after all.
By the time I’d left the Gulag the previous night it was almost 2 a.m., but I judged the day a good one on account of the Hell Bitch hadn’t boiled over hardly at all. So with gratitude that it had gone smoothly, I sent out an e-mail transmitting the latest draft of the Park Avenue air rights P and Z agreement to the working group, powered down my laptop, slipped it into my Tumi bag, and headed for the elevators.
The firm’s name is not really the Gulag, of course — that’s just what us juniors called it. As I’ve said before, it’s sort of a bank. But don’t think Bank of America or Wells Fargo — it’s not that kind of bank. And you wouldn’t recognize the name unless your family is in the Forbes 400. Think of it as the First National Bank of No Man Is a Hero to His Valet. Because we only deal with the super-rich, and we deal with them when they’re at their super-worst. Which is when they’re obsessing about their money.
Along with the usual complement of bankers and traders, the Gulag has a large legal department, as big as some law firms. So that we can function as a full-service provider of all necessary services to our richer’n shit and secrecy-obsessed clients.
Which is how I’d spent my five years before the mast. Representing people who’ve got enough money to burn a wet mule.
I saw but one other lighted office on my walk through the dark halls of the Gulag, and I stopped and stuck my head in the door. Frank Biallo sat studying a law book, with his tie loose and shirt cuffs rolled up. He had suspenders on and he looked like a dealer in a back-room game of blackjack.
“Hey, Frank.”
He looked up. His wire-rimmed spectacles caught the lights from the overheads. “Well, if it’s not our token Texan and Diane’s very own cowboy Friday. So, what’s with this knockin’ off early shit, huh? You never leave before me.”