The Best Revenge (8 page)

“Mary, banks fight with each other to lend money to businesses that could get along without it, and they turn their backs on the starter-uppers, the people who made business possible. I've seen smart businessmen whose asses have been kissed for years by bankers suddenly hit a snag, a bad deal, something, and the same gray-suit guys are touching the edge of their eyeglasses as if they can't really see you. The guys they turn away are the ones who show up at my father's, hate steaming out of their ears about how banks treated them. So they use my father's money to get back on their feet, terrific, and then what do they do? They go back to their fair-weather friends with the fake marble pillars. Guys like my father ought to get medals for what they
do to save businessmen.”

“Doesn't your father charge more interest than the banks?”

“Sure,” Nick said. “Doesn't a lawyer who takes a case on contingency charge more because if he doesn't win he doesn't get paid? My father takes risks banks won't take.”

Shylock
was the word I needed to shake out of my head. “Don't people like your father use, well, men who put pressure on borrowers if they don't repay on time?”

“What do you expect him to do, report the delinquents to Dun and Bradstreet? If he didn't get his money back from the people who owed him, there'd be no more to lend the next guy the banks turn their back on.”

Thugs
was what I thought. “Why are you glaring at me, Nick?”

“I'm not glaring. I'm looking. Are you ashamed of me?”

“I'm not ashamed of anything you do,” I said.

I'd lied before. Everyone does. But that was my first important lie. Was being a shylock a vocation? My father, who had that wonderful store, once said to me, “Marry a shoemaker, somebody who makes something. Marry a farmer who makes food. Marry a carpenter who makes houses. Don't marry a man who makes nothing, a businessman.” Was he disparaging himself, a storekeeper and a businessman? You can't skip centuries and go back to everybody making something. Even then there were men who put deals together, got the ships going to the Indies. Besides, my father was a reacher, he didn't really want me to marry a workingman. Didn't the “businessmen” he scorned by the way he pronounced the word, didn't they make things? My father was as unrealistic as the dropouts who want to live on barter. Wasn't the important thing that a man enjoyed what he did for a living? Wasn't Nick proud of something that rubbed me the wrong way for the wrong reasons?

Maybe this is all hindsight. At that age what I knew was that I was happy when he telephoned, happy when he took me out, and happiest when eventually he made love to me and it blinded me the way that first blast at Los Alamos blinded the onlookers.

At the wedding, my father met his father. “In the old country,” my father said to me, “we would have met earlier. He eats with his fingers.”

On the airplane to St. Thomas, where we spent our honeymoon, Nick said, “My old man joked to me about your old man's pointy-toed shoes.” We laughed a lot over the imperfect world of our elders.

You might say that in due course we realized my father's dream. Nick and I had a boy and a girl, blond and not at all Italian-looking,
and by the time Nick made his first million and won the respect of both fathers, he made love to me only once a month or so, perfunctorily, or in the middle of the night in response to some physical urge, you couldn't call it lovemaking, and I realized what every wife realizes when her husband comes home very late with half-baked excuses ready to sleep. When I finally was able to talk to him about the other women, to ask what had happened with us, he said that if I didn't like the way things were I could take a lover as long as the man didn't come to the house or meet the children.

6

Nick

It was time
for me to say the thing that always cleared the air. “Mr. Riller, I'm listening to you to find out if I can make money on this deal.”

Riller coughed into his fist. “Mr. Manucci,” he said, “most of my investors make money most of the time.”

“Not on this turkey. You said you raised only twenty-two percent. Somebody knows something.”

“In my judgment, it's the best play I've come across in more than ten years.”

“Maybe something's happened to your judgment, Mr. Riller. My rule is I get mine, win or lose.”

Hochman the lawyer decided it was time to earn a living. He said, “What is your proposal, Mr. Manucci?”

“Okay,” I said. “You gentlemen comfortable? Here's the way I see this.”

Riller crossed his legs, trying to look relaxed, but he looked to me like a smoker who just gave up smoking.

“According to this memo—this is your memo, Mr. Hochman, isn't it?”

“The facts in it are mine,” said Riller.

“I don't really care whose, this is what you're selling me, right? This budget for the production is five fifty out of which you've raised one hundred twenty-one thousand, leaving me to supply the missing seventy-eight percent, or four hundred and thirty thousand or so.”

“Correct,” Hochman said. “Actually it comes to four hundred twenty-nine thousand dollars exactly.”

“Wrong. I think Mr. Riller's budget is too low. It should be six fifty.” I was enjoying this.

I could hear Riller breathing ten feet away. He said, “I can't renegotiate with those who've already invested on the basis of a five fifty budget.”

“You won't need to,” I said.

“Besides,” Riller added, “I plan budgets carefully. We don't need the extra hundred.”

“Ah,” I said. “The production doesn't need it, but I do. What happens is I lend the production five hundred and twenty-nine thousand and at closing you give me a hundred back in cash. That's my management fee.”

“Management fee?”

“I'm managing to get your show on the road, ain't I? On the five twenty-nine, I'm not charging street vigorish, which is six for five. I'm charging—”

Hochman butted in. “What's six for five?”

“Twenty percent a week,” I said.

“That's illegal,” said Hochman.

“Sure it's illegal. I said I'm not charging that. You need Q-tips for your ears? I'm charging on a per annum basis, prime plus six, just like a factoring division of whatever bank you do business with, very fair.”

“I can't pay interest out of the budget,” Riller said.

“Oh, I know that. It'll have to come out of your share of the general partnership, which will be forty-nine percent because the other fifty-one percent is my payoff if the play works.”

I could see Hochman straining to keep from going into his briefcase for his calculator. Riller leaned back like a real gentleman and did it in his head.

Riller's face got formal. “Mr. Manucci,” he said, “let me be sure I understand. As a limited partner, you get what you'd normally get, seventy-eight percent of fifty percent, the rest going to the other investors. But in addition, you would be getting fifty-one percent of my half plus a payback of the whole five twenty-nine, including the hundred thousand I paid as a management fee? Even if the play is a smash, what's left might not be worth the candle.”

Carefully, like tightening my finger on a trigger but not pulling it, I said, “I didn't realize you were ready to ditch the play.”

Riller clasped his hands together like a kid making a London bridge. Maybe his left hand and right hand were teaming up to hold each other from doing something they shouldn't do.

“Mr. Manucci,” he finally said.

I said, “Yes,” to help him along.

“I can't abandon the production because I can't return the money already invested. It's been spent. And I've committed to expenses well beyond that.”

“How well?”

“At least two hundred thousand dollars.”

“Which you don't have?”

He nodded, so I said to his Mr. Hochman, “When Mr. Riller spent the investors' dough before the partnership was officially complete, that wasn't exactly legal, was it, Mr. Hochman?”

What could either of them say? I moved forward in my chair so my face could be closer to Riller's face and I talked real low as if what I was saying was a secret. “Mr. Hochman will tell you that using escrow funds is a criminal offense, the kind you go to jail for. If you don't raise the balance, the Manhattan district attorney, considering how famous you are, he'd get a reelection headline taking you to the grand jury, wouldn't he? More coffee?”

Riller said, “No coffee.”

Hochman said, “No coffee.”

This was my play, not his. I leaned over toward Riller. “I don't want you to feel uncomfortable about any decision you make. It's got to be an absolutely free decision on your part.”

He looked over at Hochman.

I said, “It's still your choice. You can walk out of here, we'll shake hands, remain friends, no harm done.”

When I'm at this stage of a negotiation I think someday this guy whose nuts I'm squeezing is going to want revenge. But the only casualty rate in my business is from competitors, not from the public. The public learns to eat and swallow real good.

“Mr. Manucci,” Riller said, “I'll put my cards on the table.”

Listen to that Hebe, cards on the table! He's got his guts on the table.

“Please do,” I said.

“It must be clear by now,” Riller said, “that I must have the money and I haven't been able to get it elsewhere. I need the four twenty-nine.”

“Five twenty-nine,” I reminded him. “You haven't put anything on the table that wasn't there. I knew your situation like a road map before you walked in. I don't waste time on cold calls.”

For a second, when Riller grabbed the side of the coffee table, I thought he was going to upend it. My mistake. He controlled himself real good, so in a sweet voice I said, “I can understand how you feel. A man with your reputation wouldn't back out of this production even if he could.”

Riller actually cracked a smile. It was like we were both looking at the truth and saying yeah, that's the way it is.

“Getting angry,” I said, “doesn't do anybody any good.”

He said, “I'm not angry.”

“Good,” I said, “because I'm going to need a little security to make sure I get my principal back. I know you're famous. Famous isn't collateral. Don't worry, I'm not asking to hold your wife on my farm upstate.”

I laughed, waiting for him to laugh a little too.

I said, “Mr. Hochman, I assume Mr. Riller has used all of his cash assets?”

Riller took the ball. “Yes.”

“Any equity in your house?”

“Maybe four hundred thousand.”

“I'll take a second on that.”

“Second?”

“Mortgage.”

Riller said, “That's out of the question!”

“The way I figure it, your house is already in jeopardy. What about your stocks?”

“I've borrowed against them already.”

“Municipals? A man who's made what you've made over the years must have municipals.”

“I can't be left totally without resources if the production doesn't
work.”

“I'm lending you money, not giving it to you, and I got to be sure to get it back.”

“The only municipal I've got is for sixty thousand and it doesn't mature for four years.”

“That's okay, I'll just take an assignment of it. I know it's your rainy-day money, Mr. Riller. This is your rainy day.”

I know Riller had his hands on his knees to keep the shake from showing. I looked at his hands so he would know I knew he was nervous.

“Don't you worry about resources,” I said. “If the production works, maybe you won't be rich, but you'll be out of trouble. Tell you what. I'll hire you as general manager for my next production, how's that? We have a deal. It's nice to do business with you, Ben. Call me Nick from now on.” I stood up so we could shake hands on it.

Riller stood up, too, but the color in his face was high red.

His lawyer says to him, “What's up, Ben?”

Riller says, “Mr. Manucci, you've had a lot of experience in business.”

“You bet.”

“Then you must have learned that a deal is good only if it's good for both sides.”

“Oh, sure, I agree with you,” I say. “This deal gets you off the hook with your play and puts me on the hook for a lot of dough. We're even steven.”

“Like hell we are. You aren't risking a penny. If the play doesn't work, you've got everything I own as security. That isn't business.”

“It's the price of money.”

“It's extortion.”

I turned to his mouthpiece and said, “Mr. Hochman, I get an earache from a word like
extortion.
You are guests in my office. If Mr. Riller is uncomfortable with the terms, take him and his play shit somewhere else.”

“Now just a minute,” Hochman says. “I'm sure we can—”

Riller's hand on his arm stopped him. “Enough.”

This king of Broadway, this low-grade nothing, wasting my time. Who the hell does he think he is? “Fuck you, Riller. Go and don't come back. And take your goddamn lawyer with you.”

BOOK II

7

Louie Riller

They all say the only person Ben listens to is his father. He hears me, but does he listen? He didn't listen when I was alive, why should now be different? These days, who listens to a father anyhow?