The Devil You Know (12 page)

After her dinner, Rose told her mother she was going to the library.

‘That’s real good, honey.’ Mrs Fiorello smiled proudly, glad that Rose was finally going to do some homework. Her grades had plummeted, but her parents had attributed it to stress. Rose was so responsible, they just knew she’d come around.

Rose walked to the large, uninviting brick building three streets away. Her backpack was empty of schoolbooks. She walked straight to the real estate investing section, then to the personal finance section. Ten minutes later she was back in her apartment with a full load of books.

Tll be down later,’ she told her parents. ‘I’m studying for something .special.’

‘What is it, honey?’ Daniella asked.

Rose thought about it. ‘Just a project.’

She went into her new bedroom, shut the door, and laid the library books out on the secondhand desk Paul had found her at the consignment store. Her bedroom was plain, apart from the posters.

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Other kids her age had DefLeppard and Motley Crue stating back at them from the walls, maybe with a touch of Madonna or the Beastie Boys.

P,.ose Fiorello had pictures of skyscrapers. New York prints in black and white, tattered around the edges so she’d gotten them for a discount; fifty cents, mostly. She was in the low-rise, low-rent, dirty Bronx, but she had glittering dreams; soaring buildings, covered in wraparound granite and sparkling glass, with smooth black tinted windows, jabbing into the sky.

And now she had these books to start offwith. Eagerly, lose bent her lovely head, her glossy raven hair pooling on to the chipped wood in front of her, and started to read.

After less than an hour, it became clear to her that ‘no credit’ was a crock. The chapters for ‘no credit’ dealt with how to get yourself credit.

‘Take a thousand dollars and deposit it in the bank, then ask for a secured loan and -‘

And where was she supposed to get a thousand dollars? ‘Borrow it from a relative,’ the infomercial king suggested. Urn, yeah. So many desperate people would pay three hundred dollars for the infomercial co.urse to find out the first great ‘secret’ was to borrow money from a relation. If you had a relation rich enough to loan you a thousand bucks, you wouldn’t need these books, would you?

P,.ose refused to be put off. After all, if you could buy real estate for free with no credit, nobody would be renting. Her parents paid their rent cheque in each month and never saw that money again.

Nobody would do that unless they had to.

Still, there had to be a way.

She thought about the money she’d saved up so assiduously from her summer job at the accountant’s. There was over two thousand dollars there, just sitting in a bank. Her parents’ credit was worse than non-existent. Pose mulled this over, then turned back to her books.

It seemed simple enough. Get enough money together for a two family house, rent out one unit, live in the lower one … that way, you would get rent to cover the mortgage, each month.

Of course, you needed to find the right property, cheap enough. And the right loan, and you’d need to join a credit union, and check tenants, and you’d need to buy in an area with great rentability and one which was improving …

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Rose read until darkness fell, then switched on her light and read some more.

She was startled when her door opened sharply, and her father

stood there, shielding his eyes in his worn-out bathrobe.

‘What the… ? You know what time it is, Rose?’

‘No.’ Rose rubbed her eyes. They were aching, but she hadn’t noticed.

‘It’s two a.m. Get to bed, now! You got school tomorrow.’ She tumbled into her bed and tried to sleep, but she was too excited. Rose tossed and turned, full of adrenaline. There had to be a way to find properties better than the crazy stuff they put in the get rich-quick books. P,.ose wasn’t a sucker; she knew it was all a load of crock. ‘Driving for Dollars’, ‘Hand Out Flyers’, ‘Hold a Real Estate Seminar’ … Puh-leese. And what were you supposed to do in the

real world? She wasn’t going to start her empire that way.

What did the professionals do?

Rose finally got to sleep a few fitful hours before dawn woke her. She never drew her curtains; natural light was the best alarm clock in the world. When she rubbed the sleep from her eyes, she felt a

crackle of excitement, despite her tiredness.

‘

All the books talked about appraisals. An independent

“

apprals.er

would value the house for the bank. You could hardly buy a hou without one. Mostly, the get-rich-quick books talked about ways to avoid paying for the appraisal, which could be well over a hundred dollars. But wouldn’t appraisers be the best-placed people in the world to know what a house was worth, and what it cost? They might even get to know where the bargains were. At any rate, they wouldn’t get ripped off. How could they, their job was to know what everything was worth.

R.ose figured she had two years to learn. She’d be eighteen then. She : lade a vow; on her eighteenth birthday she was going to own a house.

She packed up the real-estate books in her backpack and got dressed in her school uniform, ready to take the bus into Manhattan to go back to school. Her parents had been determined not to break that last link to their old life, and Rose agreed. She wanted to be in Manhattan.

That was where the action was.

At school that day, in between paying as little attention as she could get away with, Rose studied her books at break. At lunch she went to the phone booth in the hall, which kept a copy of the Yellow

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Paes chained to the wall. Rose took a pen and her rough notebook, flipped to the Property section, and started writing down names and

numbers.

‘Hey!’

Mike Chastain, the King Jock, their star quarterback with aspirations to N6tre Dame, was tapping on the windows. Rose flipped him the bird.

‘Get out of there, Fiorello!’

‘When I’m done,’ lose snapped. It wasn’t done to cross Mike at

this school; he was super-popular, the favourite of the blondes in

white bobby-sox.

‘Bitch,’ Mike snarled, turning away. Rose had turned him down

for dates twice, even though her family was way too poor - which everyone knew - and he drove a BMW. Mike and his buddies had a bet on who was going to pop that cherry. He didn’t like the fact he hadn’t collected yet.

Mike thought it was about time 1Kose got taught a lesson. She

wasn’t even the super-brain any more. Her grades were dreadful, and she kept getting sent up to Sister Heloise’s office. The teachers wouldn’t be so bothered about her now, now she wasn’t a scholarship prospect.

Rose moved out of the booth, holding her notebook. Mike

snatched it from her.

‘Give me that back!’ Rose snarled, making a grab for it. Mike laughed and held it up out of reach. ‘Pay for it,’ he said. ‘Give me a kiss.’

‘With your dog-breath?’ Rose said. ‘I don’t think so.’

A small crowd of kids had stopped walking through the hallway

and were watching. Some of them giggled. Mike Chastain’s face darkened.

‘The price went up,’ he said. ‘Now I want to feel up your tits.’

‘You asshole,’ lKose said.

‘Let’s see what we got here.’ Mike held the book up out of reach,

taunting her. ‘Manhattan Real Estate Appraising. Option One Appraisals, Inc. Oooh.’ He read out her notes in a sing-song voice. ‘Norman Hubbard Appraisals. I think I see a pattern here. What are you having appraised, Fiorello? A house? Oh wait, you don’t have one, you got evicted.’

‘Fuck you,’ 1Kose said.

‘Any time, baby.’ He threw the notebook back at her - a teacher

was heading their way. ‘Do you know how dumb you have to be to

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get evicted from a rent-controlled apartment? That was nice going by your parents there, Rose. Hey, I got fifty bucks whenever you want to supplement your father’s income. I got some friends that’d be interested too.’

Rose reached across and slashed at him, her nails raking viciously across his cheek, drawing blood.

Mike gasped and put his fingers to his face. The kids scattered, and

Rose felt a heavy hand descend upon her shoulder.

‘Name?’

‘Rose Fiorello,’ Rose muttered.

The teacher was wearing a heavy tweed suit and a thunderous scowl. ‘Physical violence is cause for expulsion, Ms Fiorello. Unless it was self-defence?’

‘I never touched her!’ Mike started whining.

‘He didn’t hit me,’ ROse said.

‘Go straight to Sister’s office, Ms Fiorello. Right now.’

‘You must really like this dScor,’ Sister Heloise said dryly. ‘You can’t seem to keep away from this office.’ ..

Rose mumbled something, but Sister wasn’t letting her get away with it. Her face was crinkled under the dark-blue habit and crip white wimple, and the old eyes, green and watery, stared piercingly back at her.

‘Lift your head, girl. I’m going to give you my theory.’ Sister lifted the sheet of paper in front of her. ‘Grade A student until eight months ago, when your father lost his business and you moved out

of your apartment near here.’

‘We were evicted.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Sister said unapologetically. ‘This is a school. Word gets around. Your teachers have been wondering about the drop in your grades, your lack of discipline and attentiveness; but they heard the children talking.’

Rose smothered a small smile at hearing her classmates referred to as ‘children’.

‘But,’ said Sister Heloise firmly, ‘to use a colloq-uial expression, I don’t buy it. You may be many things, Rose, such as stubborn and wilful. But you are not lazy. You are also not responsive to stress. I do not subscribe to the fact that you have been traumatised by your family’s financial troubles. There is some other reason for your behaviour. Now, what is it?’

8i

Rose found herself squirming a little on the burgundy leather armchair. She preferred the usual lecture and detention …

‘The reason for me hitting Mike Chastain was that he… said bad things about my fther ‘

‘You are neither stupid nor five years old,’ Sister said firmly. ‘He insulted your father. If you want to carry on pretending to be stupid that’s your affair, but you will not do it in this office.’

‘Yes, Sister,’ P,.ose said, taken aback. ‘He insulted him. And he

then said I could make some money on the side by - by ‘ She looked at the nun’s habit and blushed.

‘I see,’ Sister Heloise said. ‘Sounds as though he deserved it, but violence is not the answer.’

Rose wasn’t sure she agreed with that. Violence had certainly made her feel better.

‘Why have you decided to stop trying to succeed here?’

‘I haven’t.’

‘I do assure you, young woman, I am not stupid.’

l

‘As what?’

‘As making money,’ Rose admitted.

Sister Heloise sighed.

‘First, man does not live on bread alone. Someone said that once. But I understand that the viewpoint is not as fashionable as it might be. Second, even if you are not cut out as a pure academic, staying in school, and in your case winning a scholarship to an Ivy League university, is a good plan even from a mercenary point of view.’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘By taking one path, you will become a salaried employee who will be lucky to work your way up to middle management. By taking the other, you become a white-collar executive.’

‘There is a third path.’ Rose had settled slightly in her chair, and,

the old nun was relieved to see, was speaking to her as an equal. ‘Enlighten me.’

‘I could get a .job and train in something and then become an entrepreneur when I learned the trade.’

‘I assume you have something in mind?’ ‘Real estate,’ Rose said, proudly. Sister’s eyebrows lifted a fraction more. ‘You sound very certain of that.’

‘| am.’

‘I’ll make a deal with you,’ Sister Heloise said. ‘You can go ahead and get a part-time job. I will see to it that your homework is reduced. But not eliminated; you may have to study on weekends. However, I expect your grades to improve, starting tomorrow. You are going to go to college. And if your work and your attitude does not improve, I will call your parents and tell them everything before I expel you. I think their sorrow will be enough of a motivation for you to avoid that eventuality.’

Rose grinned. ‘Thank you, Sister. I’ll be going to interviews tonight.’

‘Not tonight you won’t,’ Sister said. ‘Tonight you have detention. We do not tolerate physical violence. That will be all, Miss Fiorello.’

Rose had six interviews before finally landing a job. It was out in Brooklyn, and she was to do filing and typing for two hours a night, cleaning the offices, and acting as a receptionist on Saturdays.

She made the most of it. Small as her salary was, she banked it each week, and her work was efficient. Rose countered the mindnumbing tedium by racing to get each job done as fast as possible. After two weeks, her fingers flew over the keyboard, and she cmald assign a file to its proper place by merely glancing at it. This maSe time for what she really wanted to do, which was talk to tl’. appraisers. ‘

‘This is your ambition?’ they asked, and Rose would answer sincerely, ‘Yes.’

It wasn’t so hard to believe. The top appraisers wore fancy suits and drove nice cars. There was plenty of work; appraising values all over the Tri-State area. Many of the best guys worked nights, frantically typing up jobs, trying to free up space in the day for even more appointments. Rose even saw one thirtyyear-old, keen and ambitious, sleep in his office.

But this was the go-getting Eighties. Nobody thought twice about

it.

‘How do you work it out, though?’ Rose kept asking.

Tll tell you when I’ve got some time.’ Keith Harding, the thirtyyear-old, laughed. ‘I guess that’ll be the Tuesday after never, huh?’