Never Enough

by Harold Robbins

  “Especially when you don’t have it,” Dave said in a tone that verged on sarcastic.

  Reitsch was not fazed. His reaction suggested that he had heard the same tone before, and likely often.

  “I understand that other banks have turned you down,” said Dave.

  “Without giving me the time of day.”

  “You have to understand that Harcourt Barnham is a conservative bank. We don’t underwrite risky ventures. Some banks do. We don’t.”

  “May I ask you to do me a personal favor, Mr. Shea?”

  “To recommend we approve your application?”

  “No. I ask you to come and see what I am trying to fund. Other banks have turned me down without seeing what I have. I don’t suggest you owe me anything, but I do suggest that somebody should do me the justice of seeing what I am trying to build.”

  “When and where would I see this, Mr. Reitsch?”

  “At your convenience. My shop is in New Rochelle. I will show you something that is worth money.”

  “New Rochelle … ?”

  “It is a quick and easy train ride from Grand Central.”

  Dave nodded. His mind was working. This earnest young man might have something worthwhile. A man did not succeed in business by ignoring his kind.

  “It will have to be in the evening.”

  “That will be fine. My wife will cook dinner.”

  “In which case, maybe my wife will come, too.”

  II

  What Reitsch called his shop was, in fact, a laboratory, occupying the entire living room of an apartment in an old brick building between the railroad tracks and Long Island Sound. The night was frigid, and Dave and Alexandra had to take a cab from the railroad station to the building. Inside, they went up in a creaky elevator and found their way to the apartment.

  “My wife, Sara,” said Reitsch, introducing a woman as nondescript in appearance as he was: chubby, round-faced, wearing a blue dress Dave surmised she had bought at JCPenney. “We are honored to have you here.”

  “We did not know what you might like to drink,” said Sara Reitsch. “Ourselves, we drink only wine, but it is not to everyone’s taste. Not knowing, we bought Scotch. Most people do like that, I believe.”

  “We do like that,” said Alexandra, glancing hard at Dave who would have preferred gin.

  “Your clothes are most beautiful,” said Sara.

  Alexandra was wearing a black wool pantsuit, adorned with a single strand of pearls. She had selected carefully. Dave had advised her that they might be visiting people in straitened circumstances and should not come too expensively dressed, nor yet so inexpensively as to seem condescending.

  The living room was dominated by Reitsch’s equipment. Whatever he was going to present, it was obviously computer-based. His computer was surrounded by three large television screens. While Sara was pouring Scotch and water, he switched on his equipment.

  “Do you, by any chance, fly, Mr. Shea? I mean, have you a pilot’s license?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Then I will show you something that is maybe a little easier to understand—saving the air show for a little later. Will you be so good as to sit down here.”

  Dave sat facing one big color screen, with the two others at angles to his right and left. Abruptly a color image of an expanse of water appeared on the screens. He recognized the shoreline of Staten Island on the left screen, the Brooklyn waterfront on his right, and the Verrazano Narrows dead ahead. The images on the screens changed very slowly, suggesting the view from a ship moving toward the Narrows.

  “You are a harbor pilot guiding a huge supertanker toward a berth in Bayonne,” said Reitsch. “You steer with the computer mouse and control the speed of your engines with the arrows, up and down. The stripe across the bottom of the center screen gives your speed and course, the water depth, the speed and direction of the current, the velocity and direction of the wind. Fancifully, I call this tanker the Exxon Reitsch. All right? You want to go under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge a little right of center. So. Steer.”

  Dave moved the mouse a little to the right. A line on the screen showed the angle of the rudder of his imaginary ship.

  The Exxon Reitsch responded only sluggishly, and Dave increased the angle of the rudder. His imaginary bow shifted right. Shortly the Brooklyn shoreline loomed ahead, coming ever closer. He turned the rudder sharply to the left.

  “You are going to run aground, Mr. Shea.”

  Dave used the down-pointing arrows to reverse engines, but the supertanker moved inexorably toward the Brooklyn docks, until the screen went blank.

  “You have run aground,” said Reitsch. “Well … You were maneuvering a ship displacing half a million tons. It is more than nine hundred feet long and more than a hundred fifty feet wide. This is not a game, Mr. Shea. I have programmed into the system the actual data. When you tried to turn the ship to the right, its huge inertia resisted being turned. So you added more rudder. Then the Exxon Reitsch turned right. When you discovered you had turned too much, you reversed the rudder and the engines. But once again the inertia of so huge a mass of steel and oil kept the ship moving on the course you had given it—and you crashed into the Brooklyn waterfront.”

  Alexandra had been watching from behind. “Impressive,” she said. “A disaster!”

  “Thank you,” said Reitsch. “Now … How do we train pilots to guide huge ships into ports that were never designed for them? Or, to put it another way, how do we design ships that can cope with the navigation requirements of the world’s seaports? Or … how do we train pilots to bring the ships in and out?”

  “I see. By letting them maneuver your electronic ships,” said Alexandra.

  “There is a great deal more to this than what you’ve seen,” said Reitsch. “Currents. Winds. Traffic. And there are scores of ports with differing conditions. Would you like to try again, Mr. Shea?”

  “At the risk of creating a monumental oil spill,” said Dave. “Well … at the risk of making a fool of myself.”

  “You have already learned a little, just a little, about maneuvering a half-million-ton supertanker on one course into New York,” said Reitsch. “Shall we try it again?”

  Dave tried again. This time a small ship crossed his course, and he rammed it.

  “But with time you could handle it,” said Hermann Reitsch. “You can’t practice with a real supertanker. But—”

  “With enough experience on your system,” said Alexandra, “you could maneuver safely.”

  “Exactly. Now let me show you something more. Let me sit down at the controls, Mr. Shea, if you please.”

  This time the screens showed an airport runway. The system provided sound for this—

  “Bonanza seven-five-zero, cleared for a Gamma departure from runway Two-niner. Be aware of Piper twin on approach to Three-six.”

  “Rolling,” said Reitsch. “Piper in sight.”

  On the screens, an airplane hurtled down a runway and lifted off. The Piper appeared on one of the side screens. The Bonanza took to the air, retracted its landing gear—as shown on the stripe at the bottom of the screen—and climbed away from the airport.

  “Contact New York Departure.”

  “Roger, and thank you, sir. Good day.”

  Reitsch looked up at Dave and Alexandra. “The market for that would be immensely greater. We can program departures and arrivals—bad-weather arrivals far more difficult—for any kind of aircraft, for any airport in the world. That one happens to be Teterboro.”

  “Flight training without flying,” said Dave.

  “Exactly. Immeasurably less expensive. And without danger. Of course, the equipment can easily be made more realistic. We can use five screens instead of three, in effect surrounding the pilot with a picture of his environment. Shall we move to the dining table?”

  The round dining table set in the end of the room farthest from the equipment was covered with a white cloth. Candles burned in two candelabr
a. Place settings of white china and heavy silverware faced each chair. The whole effect was modest, yet elegant.

  “Forgive,” said Sara when they were seated. She lowered her head and said a brief prayer in Hebrew. “We keep a kosher home,” she explained.

  “With us, this is necessary,” said Reitsch. “We could never abandon the traditions.”

  “Hermann’s grandfather died at Auschwitz,” said Sara quietly. “His grandmother died at Ravensbruck. She was mauled to death by a Doberman pinscher, goaded to do it by a female guard.”

  “And cousins and others …” said Reitsch. “My parents escaped in 1938. From Austria: Salzburg. There was an organization that rescued children. They were taken to England first, then to Canada, finally to Long Island. I was born in Levittown. My parents had done well. They funded my education at MIT. But that is neither here nor there.”

  “My family came to New York almost three hundred years ago,” said Sara. “I was horrified by the stories of the Holocaust, but I knew no one who suffered in it, until I met Hermann.”

  She served the food. It was a kosher dinner: beef and potatoes and a salad. Sara had been right in suggesting the Sheas would not much like the wine, which was sweetish. They accepted second and third rounds of Scotch and soda.

  “I have begged and borrowed the money—a not inconsiderable sum—to design and build what you have seen,” said Reitsch.

  Dave glanced at Alexandra and saw her interest. “Mr. Reitsch,” he said, “can we speak in confidence?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well … frankly, you are not going about it right. A bank like Harcourt Barnham is not going to lend you money. It is not going to underwrite a stock offering. Bankers don’t have that kind of … imagination. What you need is private investors—individuals who are willing to take a risk on you.”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “Here is where it becomes confidential,” said Dave, speaking to Alexandra and watching for her reaction.

  She nodded.

  “Let us suppose,” said Dave, “that you find the money—make that we find the money—and your enterprise is a hugely profitable success. In that event, my bank will be very upset with me. You came to me with a marvelous business opportunity, and I did not seize it for the bank.”

  “It is what you call a conflict of interests,” said Sara.

  “It is what has been called catch-22,” said Dave. “If I recommend to the bank that we invest in you, and they do, and you fail, then I have led the bank into a big loss. If I recommend that we don’t, and you succeed, then I have lost an opportunity. I come out on the short end of the stick either way.”

  “And the solution to this?” asked Sara.

  “This is what is confidential,” said Alexandra. “We may have resources. We may know where you can get the money. But if we do, Harcourt Barnham must never discover what we did.”

  “You are both involved in this?” Sara asked.

  Alexandra smiled tolerantly. “So. Aren’t you involved in his business?”

  “I am,” said Sara,

  “All right,” said Dave. “I don’t think any financial institution is going to back this program. On the other hand, there may be individual investors with enough imagination to back it. My business will be to find those investors. I can’t promise that I’ll be able to do it, but I am willing to try—on the condition once more that this is to remain absolutely confidential.”

  “Entre nous,” said Sara.

  “Entre nous,” Alexandra agreed. “How much money do you think you will need?”

  “Well …” Reitsch ventured. “I suppose we go for the airport system first. It has many more potential customers.”

  “It has that,” said Dave, “but it also has immensely greater problems. How many airports would you have to program into the system? Would a hundred be enough? Then I heard your controller speak about a Gamma departure. That means, I should think, there must be Alpha and Beta departures and probably several more. Then there are approaches. I know almost nothing about instrument flying, but I understand there are plural approaches to plural runways. You would have to take cameras to every one of those airports and make the videotapes to feed your screens. And you would have to do it for daylight and night, in varying weather conditions. Finally, you have to sell many, many flying schools.”

  “Many problems,” Reitsch agreed.

  “On the other hand, how many seaports would you need to cover? Wouldn’t a dozen make a beginning? And if you could sell a dozen shipping companies … How much money, would make it possible to cover ten or twelve of the world’s busiest seaports?”

  Reitsch shook his head. “Several millions,” he said.

  “Let’s say ten million. We might be able to work a deal.”

  III

  “You have a deal in mind,” said Alexandra on the train back to Manhattan.

  “You better believe it.”

  “Figured. You’re gonna own the thing.”

  “Brüning and Burger are going to own it.”

  “The Reitschs are no fools.”

  “They don’t have to be. The damned thing is worth something. We’ll see to it that they get theirs. And we’ll get ours.”

  IV

  APRIL, 1992

  Little Emily was curious, and her mother had allowed her to see the rings in her nipples—otherwise she would have had to explain why she didn’t let the girl see her breasts anymore.

  Little Emily was awed by the rings and wondered how old she would have to be before she could have any. She was maturing rapidly and already had the earliest beginnings of breasts. She raised again the subject of being painted nude—

  “You said wait. I have waited, and I’d like to have a painting of me, like yours.”

  “What would you do with the painting?” Emily asked her.

  “Hang it in my room.”

  “Would you then have to keep your room locked so Little Cole could not see it?” Emily wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing for her daughter.

  “Well … why not? And, Mother, I’d like to be called something besides ‘Little Emily.’ I mean, I’m a person. I’d like to have my own name.”

  Emily nodded. “Reasonable. So you are now Emily?”

  “No, Mom. The kids at school call me Jenna. You know …Jennings. It’s grown-up, Mom.”

  “Of course.”

  That evening Emily discussed Little Emily—now Jenna—with Cole. “She’s growing up. Too damned fast.”

  “I suppose so. Too damned fast.”

  “They do nowadays, you know. She knows things you and I had no idea of twenty years ago. She asked me about condoms the other day—which she calls cockrubbers. She wants to know how old she has to be before she should start taking The Pill. Cole … the kid’s got tits! They grow up younger now.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Her friends talk about these things. And we don’t have any choice, Cole. We have to discuss these things honestly with her and try not to fill her head with bullshit”.

  “Meaning Judaeo-Christian morality?”

  “Meaning that, exactly.”

  “Well … if she knows why she shouldn’t do certain things and—”

  “Valid reasons,” said Emily. “Not horseshit. They won’t buy it. This generation won’t buy it.”

  Cole shrugged. “Did we, come to think of it?”

  “She wants to be painted nude.”

  “Jesus, where does it stop?”

  “I don’t know.” Emily shrugged.

  V

  Tony DeFelice sat in Cole’s office. He was distraught.

  “Margot’s about to die,” he said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Her father has been arrested. He’s out on bail, but he’s charged with being part of a Mafia conspiracy.”

  “A conspiracy to—?”

  “To control the sale—could you believe this?—of fuckin’ milk! Of milk in the New York market. Margot’s dad
could wind up in a federal slammer for the rest of his life!”

  “What can I do for you, Tony?”

  Tony glanced around. He stood up, stepped to the window, and looked down on the street. “The problem—one part of the problem—is that they’ve got a notorious Mafia lawyer. He … he’ll let Daddy Donofrio go up as a sacrifice, to save bigger guys. I mean, he’s talkin’ right now to the New York DA, trying to cut a deal that lets Margot’s dad and some others go in, so as to save bigger guys.”

  “So what can I do for you?”

  “Let me have an honest lawyer on the case,” said Tony.

  “You don’t mean me.”

  “You’re damned right I mean you!”

  “I don’t try cases anymore, Tony.”

  “Don’t have to. All you have to do is make that goddamned lying New York DA lay off Daddy Donofrio. Hell … Pay him! We can do that. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s been paid. There’s nothing in this world more dangerous than a politically ambitious district attorney.”

  “I agree with that.”

  VI

  A week later Cole sat in the office of Hugo Lyman, the attorney for the several men charged with conspiring to fix the price of milk in the New York metropolitan area.

  “The bottom line,” Lyman said, “is that we want you to stay out of this case. There are delicate negotiations going on, and we can’t have them fucked up.”

  Lyman was an imposing man: bulky, with a bullet head and fierce eyebrows overhanging cold blue eyes. He was wearing a gray pin-striped double-breasted suit.

  “Just who do you represent, Mr. Lyman?”

  “I represent all the indicted men.”

  “Who retained you to represent Louis Donofrio?”

  “The organization,” said Lyman. “There’s an organization involved.”

  “Fine. But I represent Louis Donofrio. So any arrangements negotiated will have to be cleared with me for my client.”

  “I don’t think you understand. Donofrio can’t have his separate personal lawyer. He’s part of a group.”