Лоуренс Блок - Catch and Release

“And everybody’s welcome but me?”

“You would be welcome enough,” he said, “but you would hate it, as I expect to hate it myself. I won’t have Kristin there, and wouldn’t be there my own self had I any choice in the matter. Come on the Saturday, and bring herself.”

“Friday’s your last night,” I said.

“It is. And the following night there’ll be none but the four of us. And haven’t our best nights always been after closing time?”

We walked down Ninth and over Fiftieth, where the last of the Street Fair vendors were dismantling their booths. “Like nomads in Central Asia,” Elaine said. “Packing their yurts and heading for richer grazing.”

“A few years back their flocks would have gone hungry here,” I said, “or been prey for the local wolves. Now they sell T-shirts and Gap knockoffs and Vietnamese sandwiches, and the block association spends the fees installing security cameras and planting more ginkgo trees.”

“And look at the ornamental light posts,” she said. “Like the ones we saw in Paris.”

Grogan’s came into view as we neared Tenth Avenue. The tavern occupied the ground floor, with three levels of rental units above it. All the apartment windows facing the street had big white X’s on them, indicating that the building was scheduled for demolition. No light showed behind the X’s, and Grogan’s looked to be dark as well. I wondered if perhaps Mick had changed his mind and gone home, and then I saw one light glowing dimly through the front door’s little window.

We hesitated at the curb, although there were no cars coming, and Elaine responded to my unvoiced thought. “We have to,” she said.

Kristin unlocked the door for us. A light glowed softly in a leaded glass shade hanging over a table way in the back. There were four chairs grouped around the table, the only chairs in the room that hadn’t been put up on top of other tables. Mick wasn’t at the table, and I didn’t see him anywhere else, either.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “So’s himself.” She rolled her eyes. “‘So’s himself.’ Listen to me, will you? He’s in the office, he’ll be out in a minute. And now that you’re here—”

She arranged a cardboard CLOSED sign so that it covered the window. “Double duty,” she said. “Tells them we’re closed and keeps them from seeing there’s a light on.”

“All the world sees you as a Jewish-American Princess,” said the former Elaine Mardell. “Yet it’s clear you were born to be an Irish saloonkeeper.”

“A wee village pub in Donegal,” Kristin said. “On the wind-swept shores of Lough Swilly. That’s our favorite fantasy. The funny thing is I think I could actually enjoy it well enough. And so could he, for three weeks tops. Then he’d want to put a match to the adorable thatched roof and come home.”

She led us to the table. Her drink was iced tea, and we said that sounded good to us, too. Mick’s bottle of twelve-year-old Jameson was on the table, along with a glass and a little water pitcher. The Jameson bottle is clear glass, so I could note the color of its contents. I still like the color of good whiskey. Or of bad whiskey, for that matter, because the color doesn’t say anything about the quality. All it tells you is that you’ve got a thirst for it.

Before Kristin was back with our iced tea, Mick had emerged from the office in back, a paper bag in hand. “I had the devil’s own time finding a bag to put this in,” he said, “as if it would have been a hardship to tuck it under your arm and carry it unwrapped through the streets. We’ve no place for it in the house, and himself made the mistake of admiring it.”

I knew what it was before Elaine got it out of the bag, a 9x12 framed Irish landscape.

“It’s Conor Pass in the Dingle peninsula,” Kristin said. “It really looks like that, too. I think it’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.”

“It’s a hand-colored steel engraving,” Elaine said. “There was no color printing at the time, so there were people who added color one at a time by hand. There’s a lost art for you, but then so’s steel engraving.”

“The few arts not yet lost,” Mick said, “have their heads on the chopping block, waiting for technology to lop them off.” His hand moved first to the bottle, then to the water pitcher, then back to the bottle; he picked it up and poured a small measure of good Cork whiskey into his glass.

“Quite the affair last night,” he said.

“I was going to ask.”

“Oh, it was a right hooley. They paid their twenty dollars at the door and for that they got to drink until the well ran dry. ’Twas for the help, you know. I had four men working, and they got to divide just over eight thousand dollars.”

“Not bad for a night’s work.”

“Well, it was a long night, and that crowd kept them hopping. But they had their tips on top of that, and the tips are decent when the drinks are free.” He’d had his glass in his hand, and now he took the smallest sip from it. “I stood at the door taking the money, and being asked the same fucking questions all night long. ‘Wasn’t it terrible that the greedy landlord sold the building out from under me?’”

Kristin laid a hand on his arm. “When all along,” she said, “the man himself was the greedy landlord.”

“I was the best landlord that ever lived,” he said. “Three floors above me packed full with rent-controlled tenants, and the heat bill for the building was higher than its rent roll, and I never even bothered putting in for what rent increases the law allowed me.”

“A saint,” Elaine said.

“I was that. If the Creator were half the landlord I was, Adam and Eve would never have left Eden. My lot would be late with the rent, they might not pay for months on end, and I gave them no trouble. If there’s one thing that’ll save me a bit of time in Purgatory, it’s how I treated my tenants. And then, as a final sweetener, I gave each of them fifty thousand dollars to move.”

I said that was generous.

“I could well afford it. Don’t ask what Rosenstein got them to pay for the building.”

“I won’t.”

“I’ll tell you anyway. Twenty-one million dollars.”

“A nice round sum.”

“The sum,” he said, “was to be twenty million, which is rounder if not so nice, and then Rosenstein went back to them and said his client was fond of the old English system, and preferred guineas to pounds. Are you familiar with guineas?”

“You don’t mean Italians.”

“A guinea was a gold coin,” he said, “back when they had such an article, and it was the nearest thing to a pound sterling, but with twenty-one shillings instead of twenty. So a price in guineas is five percent higher than the same in pounds. I suspect the notion died out when decimal currency came in, but there was a time when your carriage trade liked prices in guineas. Rosenstein told me he didn’t really expect this to work, but that it wouldn’t be outrageous enough to kill the deal altogether, and we could always back off and take the twenty. But they paid us in guineas after all.”

“And that small lagniappe paid off your tenants.”

“It did.” He put his glass down. “You’d have thought they’d won the Powerball, and in a sense they had. Of course there was one wee fucker, fourth floor rear on the left, who thought there might be a toy or two left in Santa’s sack. ‘Oh, I don’t know, Mr. Ballou, and where am I gonna move to, and how’ll I find something decent that I can afford, and all the expenses of relocation.’”

I could see the shadow of a smile on Kristin’s face.

“I looked at him,” Mick said, “and did I settle a hand on his shoulder? No, I don’t believe I did. I just held him with my eyes, and I lowered my voice, and I said I knew he’d be able to move, and move quickly, as it would be unsafe for him and his loved ones to be in the presence of men whose job it was to knock things down and blow them up. And in the end his was the first apartment vacated. Can you imagine?”