“Er,” Mr. Kell said. He took his glasses off and wiped them with a cloth. “You very likely will, at some point, I would expect. But perhaps we could begin just the two of us?”
Kell didn’t care about prewar or postwar, didn’t care about a view. “Although I would prefer,” he said, “not to look directly into other apartments”—and only shrugged when Doug asked about neighborhoods.
“Okay,” Doug said, giving up. He figured he was going to have to take Kell around a little to get some sense of the guy’s taste. “I can show you some places tomorrow, if you have time?”
“That would be splendid,” Kell said, and the next morning he set Doug’s new personal-best record by walking into the first place he was shown, looking around for a total of ten minutes, and coming back to say he’d take it for the asking price.
Not that Doug had a deep aversion to getting paid more for less work, but he felt like he wasn’t doing his job. “Are you sure you don’t want to see anything else?” he said. “Honestly—the ask here is a little high, the place has only been on the market a week.”
“No, I…” Kell said, “I think I would prefer, really, to tie everything up as quickly as possible. The apartment is quite excellent.”
Not a lot of people would have called it that: It was an estate sale, the kitchen and the bathrooms were original, and the late owner had committed crimes against architecture with a pile of ugly built-ins. But nobody could deny it met Kell’s criteria for privacy—three rooms facing into blank walls, another one into a courtyard, and the bedroom had a little slice of a view into Riverside Park. The neighborhood was quiet—the elves at Riverside kept it that way—and it was a condo.
“How soon can we sign a contract?” Kell asked.
“I’ll get your lawyer in touch with the seller’s lawyer,” Doug said, and called Tom to cancel the rest of the viewings, shrugging a little helplessly to himself.
“Wow,” Tom said, when Doug got back into the office.
“Yeah, that was really something,” Doug said. “I think I get bragging rights for easiest commission ever made on this one. How did it go at Tudor City?”
Tom shook his head glumly. The Tudor City apartment was a beautiful place—view of the UN, formal dining room and two bedrooms, renovated kitchen, new subway-tile bathrooms, and priced to move. Unfortunately, it had come on the market as part of a divorce settlement, and before moving out the owners had gotten into a knock- down, drag-out screaming fight that had ended in dueling curses in the living room.
People weren’t even getting to the master suite. They came in, stuck their heads into the big entry closet, walked into the living room, saw the long wall swarming over with huge black bugs, and turned around and went right out. Sometimes they screamed, even though Doug always warned their brokers beforehand. But it was a tough market right now, and no one wanted to give up a chance for a sale.
The potential buyer this afternoon hadn’t screamed: She was a herpetologist, and Tom had really thought that was going to be perfect. He’d pitched it to her as free food supply for her snakes. “But apparently they don’t eat beetles,” he said.
“Well, you win some, you lose some,” Doug said. “Let’s see if we can get the clients to put up the fee for another eradicator. It’s breaking my heart to see that place list for half a million under market.”
The real estate market in Manhattan was always an adventure: everyone wanted to live somewhere in the city. The elves fought tooth and nail with Wall Street wizards over Gramercy Park townhouses and Fifth Avenue co-ops; developers tried to pry brownies out of abandoned industrial buildings in Greenwich Village so they could build loft conversions for rock stars and advertising execs; college students squeezed in four to a one-bedroom with actors and alchemists trying for their big break.
Doug had slogged through the dark days of the early nineties, when there’d been seven years of inventory on the market and nothing selling. The immortals were the worst: unless you had a co-op with a limit on how long you could sublet, good luck getting a rakshasa or a vampire to lower their asking price no matter how bad the market was. It was always, “I’ll hang in there another decade and see how things go.”
Even then, he’d liked the challenge of finding the perfect match of buyer and seller that moved Manhattan real estate, and he liked it a lot more now that he had his own offices tucked into a corner of the Richard Merriman, Inc., corporate headquarters, handling the clients with his own team and farming out the boring overhead to the firm.
Right now, though, it was getting a bit more challenging than he liked. Just last week, a $6-million deal for one of his exclusives—down from an ask of $7.1 million at peak, and happy to get it—had fallen through after an accepted offer. The buyer had lost a quarter of her net worth in the huge Ponzi scheme that had just gotten busted, as though there wasn’t enough bad news out there.
“Oh, it was brilliant,” she’d said grimly, calling to tell him why the deal was off. “They put all these zombie investors on the books, paid them out of our money, then the zombies fell apart and their accounts went to the animators, who turn out to be working for a firm owned by the partners in the fund.”
“Can you get any of the money back?” Doug asked.
“Ask me in five years after I finish paying the lawyers,” she said.
It made every sale twice as important and ten times as fragile. He was a little surprised they’d gotten the vampire from Black Thomas Phillips, actually, even with the two co-op rejections.
Speaking of which, he sat down to make a few phone calls to people he knew with condo exclusives, but before he got the phone off the hook, it was ringing under his hand.
“What the hell kind of crazy buyer are you bringing me?” Rina Lazar said, without so much as a hello. She was the selling broker on the Riverside apartment.
“Oh, boy,” Doug said. “What happened? Did Kell back out?” That would be great; two new records—quickest sale, quickest flameout.
“Ohhh, no,” Rina said. “Backing out, backing out would have been fantastic. He got my sellers’ number, don’t ask me how, called them up and told them, quote, their bleeping apartment was a bleeping pile of bleep, the built- ins were a disgrace, and the place smelled like dead old lady—I am not kidding you here—and nobody in their right mind would pay more than one million for the wreck, take it or leave it, end quote. The daughter just called me up in tears!”
“Oh, my God,” Doug said.
“Plan on sending me a financial sheet on anyone you want to bring to any of my exclusives from now on,” she said, and banged the phone down hard enough to make him wince.
“Oh, dear,” Henry Kell said, when Doug called. “I gather that this means the deal is off…?”
“Uh,
“No, no, I perfectly understand,” Kell said. “I assure you, I had no second thoughts myself. It must have been … he must have had strong feelings on the subject, I can’t think why—”
“Is this your partner we’re talking about?” Doug said. “Mr. Kell, if you aren’t the sole purchaser here—”
“Well, I am, legally speaking,” Kell said. “Only, er, he can make his opinion felt in … in other ways, as you see.”
Doug rubbed his forehead and looked at the balance sheet on the open laptop in front of him, although he really didn’t need to; he could keep track of all the contracts he had out right now in his head. “Mr. Kell, I’m sure we can find a place that will make both of you completely happy,” he said. “But I really am going to need to speak to your partner, too.”
“Oh, dear,” Mr. Kell said.
“Wow, they’re a super-interesting touch; very Kafka-esque,” the art dealer said, considering the bug swarm on the wall.
“It’s definitely a unique feature,” Tom said, trying not to look at the wall too hard himself. The bugs made a low raspy sound climbing over each other, which he could hear even though he’d cracked the windows to let in some of the noise of the First Avenue traffic outside.
The buyer’s broker—she was backed into the far corner of the living room—looked at him with raised eyebrows as her client went to poke around in the kitchen. Tom shrugged at her a little. What was he going to do?
