But it was time to face my financial woes. I’d let the bank stew long enough. I believed there was another way to handle my predicament and remembered Frank’s comment. I didn’t have the answer yet, though.
My attorney was the call from D.C. and I called him next.
“Marco, not getting much cooperation from Frank. Is he on an extended vacation? Seems like he took his whole office staff with him.”
Great. So much for simply fading into the woodwork.
“He’s on a temporary assignment,” I lied. “What can I help you with?”
“I’m being pressured for financials for the Trident Towers. You remember, we had that subpoena we had to produce documents? I’ve asked three times for a performa P&L from his office and I get crickets. You wouldn’t have that kind of information with you, I take it?”
“You know I don’t.”
“Well, they shut down the office in Bellaire because there was a shortfall for payroll. Looks really bad when that happens. I thought you were tending to that with the transfers so this didn’t have to happen. It’s bad press.”
“Have Celia in the HR department issue a memo about bonuses coming before Halloween, just in time for the holidays. An extra bonus for all their hard work and to thank them for their patience. And get them back to work.”
“Yes, yes, we can do that, but we don’t want to run afoul with Florida or Federal employment law. They’ll have to be paid first.”
“That’s going to be my next call. Don’t worry about it. All but on its way.”
“Nevermind the damage control. What I want to know is how did it happen?”
“I had a loan called.”
“How much are we talking?”
“Ninety million.”
His whistle was long and loud. “Are we solvent?”
“Of course we are, Bob. I could sell a couple of airplanes and raise the cash, given enough time.”
“So where’s the hole in the piggybank?”
“Guess. Where is it always? She got to somebody and it started a domino effect.”
Rebecca had intimidated the staff at the interior design group’s office so much that one time she had overspent funds to redecorate our new build-out in Manhattan, a state of the art center with an interactive display showing all the hot spots in the world today, and how one thing always leads to another. It was a brilliant idea, showing how something that happens in Africa could affect the price of water in the SanJoaquin Valley for pear and prune farmers. Nothing was ever as simple as it was laid out in the large metropolitan newspapers. Stuff was always brewing just below the surface—stuff the general public and half our government didn’t know about. But I did. I tracked these every day.
But even though it was a brilliant success and widely acclaimed as a masterpiece lobby, she spent twice as much as she was authorized. She had them all shaking in their boots, intimidated to the point of trying to hide that big goose egg under fear of being fired, until one of the junior clerks manned up and came to me, spilling the beans. He was the only one in that design department to keep his job.
That was the beginning of having my eyes opened to what she was doing. It was like Chinese torture—holding them open with toothpicks. We had the longest and loudest argument of our marriage. In the process, she destroyed a whole package of carefully wrapped paintings I’d just purchased, adding to my extensive collection. I retaliated by grabbing her box of jewelry and throwing it off the balcony where it fell into the pool and marble surround at the Ritz in Paris, the place we were staying.
She became caustic and bitter and we never made up. We fucked like dogs in heat, occasionally and rarely, but we never made up.
We never will.
Her new tactic of tying up my assets, putting holds on funds already approved for different projects, which, at the front end anyway, usually meant paying the visionaries to get the ball rolling on a new project, was what she was doing since the divorce. I couldn’t figure out why she still would have such a hardon for me. She got nearly everything she’d wanted in the settlement.
But there was one thing she didn’t like hearing and my attorney rammed it hard into her and was unrelenting. She had the clause he’d made up stricken from the settlement agreement. The language required that she distance herself from me, my companies and my employees for the rest of her natural life. If there ever was any doubt, I was severing all ties to her, that clause was living proof I was as serious as a heart attack. She was to go away and never grace my doorway again. I’d paid a lot of money to make sure she would do that.
It took months, and even though she refused to sign it, we still left it in the agreement because I wanted it there, lined it out in red, and both of us eventually initialed it so we could be done.
But that’s exactly what she was refusing to do. She was determined to continue to ruin me further by these antics and little surprises I had to juggle to fix. She would never give me my freedom as long as she was alive. And since I wasn’t flush with cash like I was used to be, and wasn’t the jerk I could have been, she remained alive and able to walk the planet nearly unimpeded, spending my money to take away even more of mine. The lockdowns were having a debilitating effect on doing just every day, routine stuff.
“I know you’ve
