'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.'
Now that he was dying, he had to dispose of his properties before his family started to argue over them, which would lead to the erosion of their value. Equally important, he had fathered four children by three women outside his marriage. His wife didn't know of any of the women, and none of the women knew of each other. One of these liaisons, he confessed between coughs, 'back when I was youngyou know, guapo — with good hair,' had been with a Rockette showgirl thirty years prior who had since been married and divorced twice and was living in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn. 'Oh, man,' he smiled, eyes suddenly bright with the memory, 'could that girl fuck. She practically broke my penises.' Another woman had involved a longer relationship. Their child had been born with a heart problem and had to avoid strenuous activity. She'd uncomplainingly taken care of him for fifteen years, my client said. Then he started to cry. 'He never threw a ball, never swam at the beach.' He'd arranged, he said, for a cousin of his to marry the woman and be a father for the boy. Surprisingly, it had worked out. 'That was the best thing I ever do in my life,' he said. He wanted to sell off his properties to provide for his love children. The properties, he thought, might total ten or twelve million dollars. I sat there, a smug twenty-five-year-old who still thought law was what they taught you in law school, and said I'd look into it. Which I did. The properties were
