Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

She said nothing more, turned briskly, and picked her way along the snowy sidewalk. I turned back to Jay. "That little old lady just shook you down."

Jay watched her go. "I've got to do something for them. But I can't pay off Herschel's whole life. He was just supposed to grade the roadbed, maybe dump some gravel in the holes. I paid him ahead of time, I told him to do it when the weather was warm, because the bulldozer works better then, anyway. I was sure he was done. It wasn't a big job."

"What was he doing too close to the edge?"

"Don't know. I couldn't tell what he was doing because it was all covered with snow. And hell, why was the dozer left in reverse? Don't worry about it, okay? It's my problem."

I was glad to hear this.

Jay asked, "What did you think of Cowles, the guy upstairs?"

"Good guy, I guess."

"You see the family pictures? The first wife was beautiful," he said. "I think he loved her very much."

It was a strangely sympathetic thing for him to say, and we stood there in a sudden, not uncomfortable silence. Men sometimes make friends this way, I think. They decide quickly. Jay gazed into his hands, then looked away. There was something vulnerable and temporary about the moment, and I was attentive to it, for a man, let us agree, is a kind of shelled animal. There is the hardened surface he presents to the world, the face and the words and the behavior, but very often these do not correlate very well with the being inside the shell. By hardened I mean coherent, deflective of attack, and capable of being recognized by others; I don't mean unchangeable- quite the opposite, in fact. But the shell is always there, growing outward from within, flaking and breaking away, and the quivering wet stuff inside remains largely hidden. Appearances are not deceiving so much as incomplete. What you see is what you get, but what you don't see is also what you get. For a moment Jay seemed unshelled, disinterested in protecting himself from my scrutiny or judgment.

"Yeah, I think he was crazy about her," he repeated. "You have one like that, a woman who just haunts you?"

"I was married."

"Yeah?"

"She left."

"You said you had a son."

"Yes. I haven't seen him in-" I couldn't finish the sentence.

Jay opened his mouth but said nothing. In contrast to his behavior thirty minutes earlier, he seemed tired or discouraged, deflated really, and it occurred to me that this was now the third time I'd seen such a cycle in less than a day; the first had been in the Havana Room, when he was up, then outside the steakhouse, when he was down; the second had been while he was recovering the bulldozer, up, and the drive back into the city, down.

"You all right?" I asked.

"Sure." He rose to his feet. "Here." He handed me a slip of paper with an uptown address on it. "This is the place for dinner."

"For what?"

"To meet with this guy for me tonight. Six p.m. The wine guy from Chile."

"What's his name?"

"Marceno, something like that."

"Why can't you do it, anyway?" I asked. "This sounds pretty important."

"I have another engagement."

"More important than this?"

Jay didn't meet my eyes. "Yes, actually."

Maybe I would do it, maybe not. Maybe it would be wise to talk to Allison first. And maybe I wanted to talk with her anyway. I found a cab going uptown, told the driver the address of the steakhouse, slinging it at him through the news radio chatter. He grunted, and clunked the car into drive. Outside, rain began to slather against the windows, a sudden dark wintry emptying of the sky, and I settled back in my seat as lower Manhattan blurred past; it was as if I were taxiing through the torrent of meaningless data from everywhere, able to discern every info-droplet but removed from their collective chill. The thought provoked me to inspect the piece of paper Jay had given me. He'd written the restaurant address in slanting box letters, but this was not what intrigued me. The slip had apparently been torn from some kind of business stationery, for on the reverse was printed SAFETY, RELIABILITY, AND PROMPT DE- What did Jay need or use that was safe, reliable, and required prompt delivery?

Fifteen minutes later I was sitting at Table 17 and looking at the daily soup specials.

Allison came over after I'd been served, carrying her clipboard. "Hey, mister backroom lawyer." She let her finger touch my shoulder and stood close to me. "So, what did you boys do last night?" she asked.

"Didn't Jay call you today?"

"Not yet." She shrugged. "So-?"

"It's his business, actually," I said.

"Come on, you can tell me."

"We went out and looked at his land."

"That's all?"

I lifted my hands. "That's it."

Allison didn't like my terse answer. "When did you get home?"

"He dropped me off at my place close to five," I said. "Now, listen, I want you to sign me up for the Havana Room. Or whatever you do. Get me in there."

She looked around to see that no one was listening. "I will. I told you I will."

"When's the next time?"

"It's irregular. You know that by now."

"Once every week or two, I've noticed."

"Whenever Ha is ready."

"Why does it depend on Ha?"

"Why? Because Ha, unbeknownst to the likes of you, is an artist."

"An artist? Doing what?"

"You'll find out, okay?"

I remembered him unrolling the folded white cloth, the gleaming instrument inside. "By the way, Frank Sinatra never owned this place, not in his name, anyway."

"Oh, I know. Lipper just says that. You looked it up?"

"I did, yes."

"Lipper is one of the great old liars, really."

"You know, he doesn't own the building, either."

"Sure he does," Allison said.

"No, actually, he doesn't."

"He owns the building, Bill. I know it."

"No, it's some public company. I'm sure he has a long-term lease with them."

"So Lipper rents the place?"

"Looks that way."

She sighed. "You know, I've asked him to give me a percentage of the restaurant's profits and he won't. And you know what?" She leaned forward, her teeth tight against her bottom lip. "This is my restaurant. I run it, I make it work. It really is mine, Bill. I possess it, you know? Lipper doesn't do anything. The bookkeeper sends him some papers a few times a month, and he comes in here with his nurse. I'm the one who is killing myself for him."

One of the waiters beckoned her.

"I think we might have a fish problem," she said. "I'll be back."

I watched her go. The question of who owns property is always interesting; here was a situation in which a building had a legal owner, a company, and someone else, Lipper, who claimed to be its public owner, and yet another person, Allison, who claimed to be its moral owner. Things often work this way, though; anyone who has practiced real estate law is soon conveyed into a realm of human affairs where the pressures behind decisions are often enormous, and include death, divorce, illness, stupidity, greed, sexual indiscretion, grief- everything. Whatever is in the human spirit becomes expressed through bricks and mortar, which is also to say there's always a story. I remember in my first year in the practice a short Puerto Rican man came to me. He looked ill used by life, yet had been able to find a decent shirt, though no tie. He'd been shunted off to me by the partners and senior associates as not worth their billable time; I made the same assumption. But within a minute I knew myself to be wrong. He was coming to me, he said, and not a local lawyer in Queens, because he wanted his affairs handled quietly and correctly. He wanted, it remained unsaid, the cultural protection of a midtown law firm loaded with Jews and WASPs. He was dying of prostate cancer and had to proceed expeditiously. He owned three apartment buildings, a car-painting business, a garage, a septic tank-cleaning company on Long Island, a half interest in a gasoline station, and a number of lesser properties. He had come to the United States in 1962 and gotten a job as a union painter. "Three years I was here and then I ask my friend who owns a delicatessen what do you do with your money, and he say I buy bricks. I say why? And he say because bricks, they always grow. Bricks grow. Money, it does not grow like bricks."