Maloney and Stein agreed. Stein, Gelb, Hector amp; Wills could meet the payment schedule. True, this kind of money was certainly not chicken feed or chump change, but the discomfort of paying it could be managed in-house. Obstacles could be overcome. Besides, it was a matter of life or death. Theirs.
It was then they finally came to themselves. Both men had been astonished at the amount Leonard demanded: $123 million from Stein and $36 million from Maloney. Stein, in addition to the shock of his own amount, had been just as surprised and displeased with what he considered a low number for Tom Maloney. A careful review of the supporting data made Nathan more angry. He became both bitter and nasty. Walter sat there while the two went at each other, wondering why they would talk this way in front of him. True, he was familiar with the details of their contention, but still he was puzzled at their willingness to forego privacy. He had no way of knowing, of course, that Dr. Ganga Roy had encountered the same feeling in circumstances that were only slightly different.
“That’s bullshit,” Nathan said. “Thirty-six is a bullshit number.”
“Are you serious?” Tom Maloney was shaken at the obvious inability of Nathan Stein to grasp what was happening. “We’re being wiped out, Nathan. There’s nothing left. You know-your money or your life-and you’re more concerned with my number than your own? Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“I see what he did,” ranted Stein. “He’s left out everything in your wife’s name. But not with mine!”
“Nathan, you don’t have anything in your wife’s name. You have assets jointly owned-you and her-but there’s nothing of any value in her name only, is there?”
Nathan knew the score. He was just pissed. “Nothing worth anything,” he said.
Leonard Martin had been very picky. He’d examined the voluminous data Carter Lawrence gave him and pegged each man’s net worth, leaving out noncash assets held jointly. For stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and other financial instruments easily converted to cash, he’d figured the share for each man separate and apart from their wives, children, grandchildren, or any other partners. For real estate and other hard assets Stein and Maloney owned with others, Leonard assessed the value of their share. He required that the partner or partners in each deal buy out Stein or Maloney, and that the proceeds from such a buyout were included in the final figure for each man. Three to four years allowed more than enough time to make all these arrangements without damage to the equity position that would remain for Stein and Maloney’s surviving cohorts. Leonard did not hold wives, relatives, or even business partners liable for the sins of Nathan Stein and Tom Maloney.
Nathan had always treated his wife with total disregard for her financial independence. She had come to their marriage with some money, her family was not poor. Over the years, he figured, she’d probably made some small investments he was unaware of, but he’d never given her anything except some jewelry. How much could that be? A half a million? A million at most. He really had no idea. He was the same with his children. Christ, he thought, they all had unlimited expense accounts. He never inhibited their spending, but they were always spending his money. He had never been one to share anything. Now, Leonard Martin meant to break him, leave him without any safety net of family assets. Nathan was furious, yet even while considering the very real possibility that he would be wiped out, he could not bring himself to regret not having given his wife or children anything of value. It was his money, goddamnit! And now this motherfucking sonofabitch was going to take it away. He wanted to scream. He wanted to yell it: “No! No! No! I won’t do it, you fucking prick!”
Tom Maloney didn’t have Nathan Stein’s kind of money to begin with, nor did he share his temperament and general outlook on life. He’d also spent his a little differently. The departure of the first Mrs. Maloney had cost him a small fortune, his attitude at the time worsened by the knowledge that she meant to marry a man worth zillions immediately after the divorce. The second Mrs. Maloney paid a heavy price for that mistake. She signed an ironclad prenup. However, over the years, she cajoled, convinced, and insisted that he put some things in her name. He did, time and time again, thus she skirted not only the letter, but the spirit of her limitation. As he mulled over the demands Leonard Martin was making on him, Tom was relieved to think his wife had, on her own, something in the neighborhood of five to ten million. No matter what his tormenter took, that was a substantial fallback position. He gave only passing notice to the fact that his wife was in Switzerland. He dismissed all thoughts she might not return. Besides, unlike Nathan, who had unwavering faith in the invulnerability of the ruling class, Tom Maloney always felt, somewhere in the back of his mind, that a day like this might come. Tom realized the thirty-six million was everything he had-everything except a certain thirty million sitting in a bank on Grand Cayman Island. Nothing in the Caymans showed up anywhere on Leonard Martin’s list of assets. Why should it? “Rainy day money,” he thought, “and it was already coming down in buckets.” Sure he would be wiped out. Maybe-oh, what the hell, there was a good chance-his wife might never come back. But he had his own safety net. For a moment he saw himself lying on the beach in Costa Rica, a pina colada next to him. In this fantasy, the beach boy was Nathan Stein. Tom visualized the thirty-six million gone. Everything he had, everything except…
He smiled to himself. Outsmart them. That’s what he’d done again. His parents, the nuns at school, the wives and all the jackoffs and miserable sonsofbitches he’d done business with. Now he’d outsmarted Leonard Martin too. Fuck him!
Walter smelled wood burning and felt obligated to warn his clients. The look in Stein’s and Maloney’s faces said they were thinking how they could get out of this one. Leonard Martin was not a man to fuck with. Couldn’t they see that? “My god,” thought Walter, “have they forgotten?” Christopher Hopman’s body cut in two? Billy MacNeal being fished out of his bloody pool? Pat Grath flat on his back, his eyes still wide open? Floyd Ochs’s head floating down the Hiawassee River? Louise Hollingsworth gutted like a wild animal? Wesley Pitts’s perfect body slumped to the ground with three holes neatly grouped in his chest? He said, “Whatever you’re thinking, it won’t work. You’re limited to the five hundred dollars a week. Spend any more than that, you might as well blow your own brains out.” Nathan looked at him as if he’d forgotten Walter was there, seeing him for the first time. Fear was written all over his face. It seemed to envelop him, seizing control of his entire body. He trembled, which was all that kept him from collapsing on the floor. Could Nathan Stein-not a man like Nathan Stein, but Stein himself-could he survive the fall? Pu Yi came to mind. Walter had seen the movie The Last Emperor. The story of a man whose past haunted his future, whose personal history forced his life in a direction beyond his control, fascinated him. He studied the boy-king, the last emperor of China. Born in 1906, an Emperor at age three, deposed and restored, used and manipulated, Pu Yi lived in unparalleled grandeur, in splendid isolation-literally in the Forbidden City-an absolute monarch, served at his whimsy. After World War II, he spent six years in the Soviet Union living under a rather luxurious house arrest. However, in 1950 he was returned to China and imprisoned for nine years at hard labor. Released in 1959, Pu Yi spent the rest of his days working as a gardener at the Institute of Botany. He married a member of the Chinese Communist Party and died in obscurity in 1967. What sort of man could endure that? Nathan Stein? For a moment Walter felt sorry for the little sack of shit-for a moment. “I’d rather be dead,” Stein was mumbling.
Maloney turned toward Walter. He looked almost happy. It was a look Walter hadn’t seen since Vietnam, a battlefield euphoria that affected some men just before they died. But they were in the penthouse of the Waldorf Astoria, not the jungles of Southeast Asia. Maloney was alive and kicking, not about to die, and Walter knew it. He had something up his sleeve. Walter couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there.
Atlanta
In 1968 Ralph Nader assembled a team of dedicated, intelligent, and vigorous young people with an aim to investigate the Federal Trade Commission. These were true believers, children come of age in the sixties. They believed their government could be made answerable to the informed will of the people. They believed disclosure of wrongdoing and malfeasance would mean an end to both. It was a time when such things could be believed. Three years earlier he came to prominence with a book called Unsafe At Any Speed, detailing the deadly deficiencies of the Chevrolet Corvair. Corporate colossus General Motors fought back, thinking they could manhandle Nader, push him around, discredit him, consign him to the margins reserved for civic-minded nutcases. He sued, and funded his consumer-based operations with the GM money he won. So it was that America’s largest corporation unwillingly financed the start of the most effective consumer movement in the history of the United States. A year later, in the summer of 1969, Nader’s group was so well known that more than thirty thousand people applied for two hundred unpaid internships. William Greider, a columnist at the Washington Post, tagged them “ Nader’s Raiders.”
Isobel saw the parallels between Nader and The Center for Consumer Concerns. Certainly they shared a
