by Andrew Case
Here at DIMAC, Leonard just wanted to get his papers and get out. He didn’t need to talk to Schaeffer about anything. He just had to get the human resources people to run his social into the system, hit print, and give him what came out. In city government, that would ordinarily take about forty minutes. Leonard walked up to the reception desk, where the civilians filing complaints and the city employees waiting for interviews get filtered into their separate waiting rooms. He didn’t know the man at the window. They changed pretty often.
“I’m Leonard Mitchell. I used to work here. I just need to duck into HR for a minute.”
If it had been someone he’d known, he could have nodded past, but this guy made him sign in, show an ID, go through the whole routine. Leonard could play patient with the best of them. He had spent over a decade in these halls and knew that rushing a municipal administrator is a good way to get stuck where you are for hours. He complied, got his pass, and hurried into the office.
Head down, hoping not to be seen by his former employees and most of all not by the new commissioner, Leonard ducked left and trekked to the end of a long hallway. He turned the corner and saw a familiar face.
“Carol.”
Well past pension age herself, Carol looked up from the game of solitaire she was playing on her computer. At DIMAC, employees are not given desktop Internet access. They haven’t been since the last mayor walked past someone who was reading the news at his desk and had him fired. So the bureaucrats with little to do pass their time with antique hobbies. Minesweeper. Solitaire. Some of them don’t even turn their computer on and just spend most of their day surfing the web on their cell phones.
“Hi, Leonard.” A faraway voice. A woman who had ground her life into a thin meaningless powder alone at this desk, doing nothing for years.
“Carol. I’m leaving city government. I’m leaving the Parks Department. Can you run my pension papers so I can take them over to DCAS?”
The Department of Citywide Administrative Services. It would be his last stop before seeing Mulino. The city agency whose job it is to be the bureaucracy for all the other city agencies. Payrolls, report printing, water, sewer, power, contracts with outside vendors, technical support, all of it went through DCAS. Every year Leonard had drafted a request for sixty thousand dollars—out of a city budget of eighty billion—to get digital voice recorders instead of the 1970s cassette players that his investigators used. And every year DCAS had said no.
“Sure, Leonard. I’ll start that up.” Carol clicked at her computer. She was going to finish her solitaire game first, it seemed. Leonard stepped inside the doorway. The room had no windows, no other cubicles, no place to sit. Carol was the lonely little HR department in a lonely little corner of the government. Leonard leaned against the wall while Carol tried to play a red eight on a red nine.
“Leonard. They told me you’d dropped by.”
And with that, his plans had been foiled. Barry Schaeffer, his lion’s mane of white hair tousled almost down to his shoulders and his suit softer and more luxurious than any that a city employee would normally wear, was holding out a stout red hand for Leonard to shake. Leonard was in no position to turn him down.
“Hello, Commissioner.”
“So you came by to learn how to do things right around here? Figure out what it was that kept you down all those years?”
“I’m getting my papers printed. I’m leaving city government.”
“You won’t get the actual pension for almost ten years.”
“I know how it all works, thanks.” Leonard didn’t care much to be lectured on the subtleties of his pension by Barry Schaeffer, who lived on the sixty-third floor of a skyscraper on Fifth Avenue, and owned houses on Nantucket and in Vail. As Leonard looked at Schaeffer in person, the Commissioner looked older and fatter than he always appeared from a distance. Sort of like your uncle dressed up for a wedding before he’s plowed into the Scotch. But you can see it coming.
“Carol, you mind giving us a few minutes?”
“Sure, Commissioner.”
Leonard chimed in. “I really needed to get this done as soon as I can.”
“She can finish when she comes back. I’d really like to talk to you.”
There was nothing to say. Leonard looked at the floor as Carol slunk out. Schaeffer closed the door, boxing them in to what wasn’t much more than a very bright closet.
“Look, Leonard.”
“Commissioner. I don’t want to hear about everything I did wrong. I’m out. You can run this place like you want.”
Schaeffer cocked his head. He looked softer all of a sudden. He wasn’t playing the tough hero any more. Now he was your uncle at bedtime, when you were a kid, that time you stayed with them for the summer and got talked to about breaking the neighbor’s window with the baseball. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Leonard. You got a raw deal. Everyone knows that.”
“I’m not looking for any sympathy.”
“I’m not offering. I just wanted to thank you. You had to take the hit for what happened. Someone had to take the hit a little. There were people that died. But you did good work. We appreciate that.”
Leonard nodded. “So what is with all the press conferences? Why are you in the papers every two weeks telling people how incompetent we were?”
“People like to be told stories, Leonard. When I was a trial lawyer, that’s all I did was tell people stories. There is a kind of filter you can use in a swimming pool drain that costs fifteen cents. And a little girl died because that filter wasn’t on a drain and her bathing suit got caught in it. And I told the story about how cheap that company was that they didn’t spend fifteen cents on that filter, and it cost them millions of dollars. Of course I didn’t tell the story of how that company offers the filter, but when the girl’s parents bought the pool they didn’t want the deluxe drainage system. It’s not my job to tell the whole story. I just tell one part of it.”
“But it isn’t true.”
“Of course it’s true. It might not be complete. But it’s true. We are arresting cops. We are arresting motormen. We got a corrections officer. If the DA can’t convict them, that’s not my problem. This crane that came down in Brooklyn, we’re going to lock up the building inspector.”
Leonard could see Schaeffer watching him. He had caught something in Leonard’s expression. Leonard had flinched at the mention of the crane. The wide red face looked down into Leonard’s. “What?”
“The crane didn’t fall because it hadn’t been inspected. The crane was fine.”
“That may be true. But the inspector didn’t inspect it. So we have a culprit.”
“What if you have more than a culprit, Barry? What about when you have a conspiracy? When you have what I had?”
Schaeffer smiled. “Of course. That’s the whole truth, isn’t it? We keep the lid from blowing off, Leonard. That’s all. The truth is, you need a little misconduct and corruption to keep the city running. We’ll arrest a cop when there is cell phone video showing him roughing up someone in Manhattan. But we can’t make the police department tell its officers to stop roughing up any kids anywhere. There are Columbia professors gladly sending their fifty dollars a year to the ACLU, happy to point fingers at whatever cop they think ought to get arrested this week. But if every cop thought he could lose his job for throwing anyone against the wall, they would stop doing it. And if no one ever got thrown up against the wall, no one would be afraid. And pretty soon, someone who isn’t afraid would like the look of that professor’s laptop as it’s hanging out of his satchel. And after that your professor is voting Republican.
“We can’t stop everything. We are in the business of making people believe that everything is okay. Because if we actually tried to go after it all at once—well, we’d end up out of a job, or in jail. Wouldn’t we?”
Leonard looked up at the broad, bright face of hypocrisy. Don’t try too hard, Schaeffer was saying. Don’t go chasing the real demons, hunting down the true
conspiracies. Because then you’ll end up broke and beaten and imprisoned. Just like Leonard Mitchell had been. Schaeffer opened the door and nodded.
“All I wanted to say was thank you. For all that you did. It really meant a lot to us.”
And with that, he was gone. Leonard looked out into the hallway. Carol was nowhere to be found. Leonard leaned his head against the wall and waited for her to come back and print a piece of paper that would help him see a little bit of money in about ten years’ time.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Eleanor Hill knew who it was when she heard the footsteps. Anyone else would have been stopped at security downstairs. Anyone else and she would have been called and notified. But the security desk on the ground floor knew that there was one person you did not ask for identification. Ditto with the person at the upstairs kiosk, or the few employees who buzzed about on a Monday morning after a busy working weekend. Eleanor knew the purpose was to surprise her, to keep her on her toes. No matter how much authority you accumulate, no matter how many successes you pile one atop the other, no matter how much money you make, there are some people who will always tower over you. There are some people who will never allow you to feel superior, but the very fact that the visit was unannounced meant it could be only one person. Eleanor Hill looked up from her paperwork at the broad man silhouetted against the bright skyline of a newborn city.
“Hello, Dad.”
McArthur Hill took two steps forward, away from the window. A gentleman of the last generation, his hat was already off, and his bright pate reflected the overhead lights as he stepped out of the glow from outside. “Eleanor.”
She stacked the papers and put them to the side. “Please have a seat.” She didn’t stand up herself. Maybe he would see this as a slight. Eleanor had been slighted enough by him over the years. He could swallow his chivalry for half an hour, at least. Her father folded his overcoat and draped it over one chair, set his hat down on it, and settled into the other.
She looked down at him from her raised desk and spoke. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stay after the service. Sundays are busy in this business.”
“Of course.”
Was she supposed to acknowledge that he had been trashing her in front of his congregation? Half of the members of the community board that stalled her projects, and almost all of the demonstrators, went to his church. He had not been subtle. It was the usual routine; she was a landlord, and to McArthur Hill’s congregation, landlords were the villains. She had dared to succeed, to build a business, to make money.
“Was there something in particular today?”
He shuffled in the chair. She would make him bring up the sermon, make him ask her if she had understood. It would be a blow to his ego to think that he had not been clear. “I came to talk to you about the police officers who came to my church.”
“I took care of that. I spoke to them. There was a death on a construction site on Thursday. They are trying to figure out why it happened. They saw that you were an owner and they wanted to talk. They were only doing their jobs.”
“Police officers only doing their jobs have caused my congregation no end of trouble over the years, Eleanor. I have been on too many marches against police officers just doing their jobs to take that as an excuse.”
“I spoke to them. They won’t bother you. They probably spent the weekend getting chewed out by a lieutenant.” No need to mention that she had just seen the two officers at the hospital, guarding the chief suspect in the murder. She had pretended not to recognize them. Maybe they were dumb enough to think she actually hadn’t.
Her father shook his head. “I’m sorry. But that’s not good enough for me anymore. I don’t know why it is that your business seems to attract attention. But I’m not interested in being a part of it anymore.”
This was another subtle dig. Last summer her father had been more upset than anyone when they found out about the employee, about everything that had gone wrong. A few hundred thousand dollars out the door, and if you tell the police about it, then that makes your business look weak and unsecure. If you sue the employee, that puts it in the press. So you do what you can to keep it quiet, and you suffer the loss on your own.
The lawyers had assured her that the best play was to call it an employment dispute. And hopefully she wouldn’t have to worry about employment disputes any more. After all, Leonard Mitchell was stuck with her; it wasn’t as though he could go back to city government if things went sour.
But when you run a business and someone steals a quarter of a million dollars, at the very least you have to issue a statement to the investors—her father and three others. The lawyers had told her that disclosure was the best option, and she had bit her lip and clenched her fists and gone through with it. Even as she promised they had taken care of the problem. Promised they had cleaned house. They had a carefully worded report from the lawyers telling them that there was no cause to alert the regulatory authorities. But she couldn’t keep the news from the passive investors, and that had meant that she couldn’t keep the news from her father.
“Are you here to offer a word of sympathy? About the worker who died?” She motioned to the papers she had stacked aside when he came in. “What I’m working on here are his funeral arrangements. I was going to ask if you’d host the service but he lived on Long Island.”
“He has his own people.”
“And the police officers have left you alone, Dad, but they haven’t left me alone. They haven’t stopped asking whether we had some arrangement with the Department of Buildings or whether we had the proper safety protocols in place or if maybe something even worse is going on around here.”
“And that’s why you have insurance.”
He was right about that last part. She had tendered the claim. She shuddered to think about the blow to the rates—they were high enough already—but it was the right thing to do. The police, after all, were investigating an accident. The word had leaked about the building inspector but that only confirmed that the crane had been faulty and had broken and Eleanor didn’t have to worry about anything more serious than that.
Because she couldn’t take another scare. You start to run a business, you hire people that you know and trust off the bat, but once you have ten, fifty, two hundred employees, you end up hiring strangers. And when you hire strangers, you just never know. As she had learned. She hoped, looking back into her father’s unforgiving stare, that Leonard Mitchell would work out. He had seemed soft enough, desperate enough for the money that he would put up with anything. He had made it through a pretty rough day no worse the wear. After the last one, trust would be long in coming, but maybe he was a step in the right direction. Maybe a few weeks from now she could even tell him why it was so important to right the ship.
Eleanor had been up late working all weekend, and here was something more being asked of her. “So you want out.”
“You have done very well, Eleanor. I was happy to help you when you started. And I appreciate that you gave me a stake. Some people think their parents are just giving them money as an early inheritance. But I don’t want a stake in what you do anymore. I don’t want to worry about what I’m involved with. I don’t know who will be knocking on my door the next time.”
So it was about what had happened. About the theft. Deep down, she couldn’t blame him. How was he to believe for certain that it would never happen again? He was gracious enough not to mention it. But it also meant that she couldn’t change his mind.
“It’s going to take a little time. To get the paperwork in order. To figure out the value, to raise the money. Everything is in the buildings. We don’t have 20 percent of this company lying around just to hand out.”
He had brought a briefcase. He reached into it and tugged out a packet of about twenty pages. Eleanor recognized it. The operating agreement they had put together about ten years ago. With her father and the three others. The lawyers had been telling her it was time to revise it. Now it was t
oo late.
“I looked through this. It says a shareholder wishing to transfer his shares to the corporation may do so upon thirty days’ notice. The value is to be calculated as five years trailing EBITDA. That won’t take too much time. This is your thirty days’ notice.”
That was the thing about her father. He could preach to the poor; he could understand them and tend to them and offer them comfort. But he understood the ways of the rich as well. No one had to spell out Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization to him. And no one had to tell him that in a big leveraged real estate company, Interest and Amortization would be very high. So if you calculate the earnings before you take them out, the company will seem like it is worth a lot more than it is.
She was going to need to get a loan. Float a bond, find another investor maybe. Whatever number the accountant came back with when she phoned him with this request was going to be huge. The company was doing fine, but couldn’t just cough up three or five million dollars at the drop of a hat. And the latest project was stalled. The towers along Empire had just been squashed by the community board. Or if not squashed, at least delayed. If that one had been going forward she could have wrestled the money up somehow. Now she’d have to look to other alternatives. And her father wasn’t going to make it easy on her.
But buying him out would make some things easy on her. She wouldn’t have to get his signature on the annual unanimous consent filed in lieu of a board meeting. She wouldn’t have to listen to him chide her even as she mailed him a monthly check. And she could have the satisfaction of knowing that however he invested his windfall, he wouldn’t make it work for him the way it would have if it stayed with her. If he poured it into the church, he could save on the taxes anyway.