'Renting them, you mean.'
'No, sir, leasing them.'
'Well, it all comes out to the same thing in the end. You'll have to get a lot for them.'
'Five thousand.'
'Five thousand is an awful lot of money. At least, out here is. Five thousand a year comes to over four hundred a month and…'
'Not for a year,' corrected Steen. 'For ninety-nine.'
'For what!'
'Ninety-nine. We're leasing at five thousand dollars ninety-nine full years.'
'But, man, you can't do that! Why, that's absolutely crazy! Taxes would eat up…'
'We're not so interested in making money on the houses as we are in creating business for our shopping centre.'
'You mean you have a shopping centre in there, too?'
Steen allowed himself a smile. 'Mr. Jackson, we obtain the property and then we build the wall to have some privacy so there can be no snoopers.'
'Yes, I know,' said Homer. 'It's smart to do it that way. Good publicity. Whets the public's interest. Gives you a chance to have a big unveiling. But that twelve-foot wall…'
'Fourteen, Mr. Jackson.'
'All right, then, fourteen. And it's built of solid stone. I know?I watched them put it up. And no one builds walls of solid stone any more. They just use stone facing. The way you built that wall set you back a hunk…'
'Mr. Jackson, please. We know what we are doing. In this shopping centre, we sell everything from peanuts to Cadillacs. But we need customers. So we build houses for our customers. We desire to create a good stable population of rather well-to-do families.'
Jumping to his feet in exasperation, Homer paced up and down the office. 'But, Mr. Steen, you can't possibly build up enough business at your shopping centre by relying solely on the people in your development. For instance, how many houses have you?'
'Fifty.'
'Fifty families are a mere drop in the bucket for a shopping centre. Even if every one of those fifty families bought all their needs from you?and you can't be sure they will?but if they did, you'd still have little volume. And you won't pick up any outside trade?not behind that wall, you won't.'
He stopped his pacing and went back to his chair. 'I don't know why I'm upset about it,' he told Steen. 'It's no skin off my nose. Yes, I'll handle the development, but I can't handle leasing at my usual five per cent.'
'Oh, I forgot to tell you,' said Steen. 'You keep the entire five thousand.'
Homer gasped like a fish hauled suddenly from water.
'On one condition,' added Steen. 'One has to be so careful. We have a bank, you see. Part of the shopping centre service.'
'A bank,' Homer said feebly.
'Chartered under the state banking regulations.'
'And what has a bank to do with me?'
'You'll take ten per cent,' said Steen. 'The rest will be credited to your account in the Happy Acres Bank. Every time you lease a unit, you get five hundred cash; forty-five hundred goes into your bank account.'
'I don't quite see…'
'There are advantages.'
'Yes, I know,' Homer said. 'It builds up your business. You're out to make that shopping centre go.'
'That might be one factor. Another is that we can't have you getting rich in front of all your friends and neighbours. There'd be too much talk about it and we don't want that kind of publicity. And there are tax advantages as well.'
'Tax advantages?'
'Mr. Jackson, if you lease all fifty houses, you will have earned a quarter million dollars. Have you figured what the income tax might be on a quarter million dollars?'
'It would be quite a lot.'
'It would be a crying shame,' said Steen. 'The bank could be a help.'
'I don't quite see how.'
'You leave that to us. Leave everything to us. You just lease the houses.'
'Mr. Steen, I've been an honest man for years in an occupation where there's opportunity…'
'Honesty, Mr. Jackson. Of course we know you're honest. That's why we came to you. Have you got your car here?'
'It's parked outside.'
'Fine. Mine is at the station getting serviced. Let's drive out and look the houses over.'
The houses were all that anyone could wish. They were planned with practical imagination and built with loving care.
There was, Homer admitted to himself, more honest workmanship in them than he had seen for many years in this era of mass-production building. They had that quiet sense of quality material, of prideful craftsmanship, of solidity, of dignity and tradition that was seldom found any more.
They were well located, all fifty of them, in the wooded hills that stretched back from the lake, and the contractor had not indulged in the ruthless slashing out of trees. Set in natural surroundings with decent amounts of space around them, they stood, each one of them, in comparative privacy.
In the spring, there would be wildflowers, and in the autumn, the woods would flame with colour and there would be birds and squirrels and rabbits. And there was a stretch of white sand beach, the last left on the whole lake.
Homer began mentally to write the ad he'd put in the Sunday paper and found that he looked forward with some anticipation to setting down the words. This was one he could pull out all the stops on, use all the purple prose he wanted.
'I like it, Mr. Steen,' he said. 'I think they won't be too hard to move.'
'That is good,' Steen replied. 'We are prepared to give you an exclusive contract for a period of ten years. Renewable, of course.'
'But why ten years? I can get this tract handled in a year or two, if it goes at all.'
'You are mistaken. The business, I can assure you, will be continuing.'
They stood on the brick walk in front of one of the houses and looked toward the lake. There were two white sails on the water, far toward the other shore, and a rowboat bobbed in the middle distance, with the black smudge of a hunched fisherman squatted in the stern.
Homer shook his head in some bewilderment. 'I don't understand.'
'There'll be some subletting,' Steen told him smoothly.
'When fifty families are involved, there are always some who move.'
'But that's another story. Subletting…'
Steen pulled a paper from his pocket and handed it to Homer. 'Your contract. You'll want to look it over. Look it over closely. You're a cautious man and that's the kind we want.'
Homer drove along the winding, wooded road back to the shopping centre with Steen.
The centre was a lovely place. It stretched along the entire south side of the property, backed by the fourteen-foot wall, and was a shining place of brand-new paint and gleaming glass and metal.
Homer stopped the car to look at it.
'You've got everything,' he said.
'I think we have,' said Steen proudly. 'We've even got our own telephone exchange.'
'Isn't that unusual?'
'Not at all. What we have set up here amounts to a model village, a model living space. We have our own water system and our sewage plant. Why not a telephone exchange?'
Homer let it pass. There was no sense arguing. It all was just this side of crazy, anyhow. No matter how fouled up it was, Steen seemed satisfied.
Maybe, Homer told himself, he knows what he is doing.
