Devil You Know

by Bagshawe, Louise

  “Own your own piece of the American dream. Condominiums in easy reach of the city. Security, doorman, brand-new kitchens. Huge 1 Bdrms—marble lobby, mint. Hurry, won’t last.”

  Rose added the number of George Benham’s office. She put the ads in the Times, the News, the Post, and the Village Voice.

  She didn’t have to wait long.

  “Miss Fiorello.” George Benham’s voice was the whine that she remembered. “You’re going to have to get me a new line. This one is ringing all day with Rego Park applicants … I can’t do any other business.”

  “As of now, George, you don’t have any other business. Do you?”

  Rose waited while the answer came tremulously down the line. “I—I guess not, Miss Fiorello.”

  “Tell the applicants there’ll be a show apartment ready in two weeks. Get their details and run credit checks. I want pre-approved buyers only.”

  “Yes, Miss Fiorello.”

  “And it’s not going to be called the Rego Park,” Rose said on impulse. “I’m changing the name…”

  Fiorello. Little Flower.

  “Call it the Flower of Queens Apartments.”

  “Flower of Queens. Yes, ma’am.”

  Rose scribbled a note to herself. The next morning she called the architect. A new detail was added into the building; a rose, picked out in red marble, was worked into the stone above the entranceway.

  Her signature.

  *

  Rose heard no more from Jacob Rothstein. Thank heavens, right? She was relieved about it.

  She went out to visit her parents in the comfortable house she had bought for them. Daniella was older, stooped; her hair was silvered all the way through. Her father was lumbering around the house.

  “I get bad gout.” He kissed her. “Great to see you, honey.”

  Rose was shocked; she didn’t go home enough. She determined to get them a maid, and a home nurse for her father.

  “So, how you been doing? Got yourself a nice young man?”

  Daniella Fiorello put an extra dollop of penne vodka on Rose’s plate. Her baby was skin and bones, even if she did look good.

  “No, but I got myself a hotel.” Rose was all excited; it tugged at Paul’s heart. His little girl had always been that way, so full of enthusiasm for life.

  “You got a job in the hotel business?”

  He tried to hide his disappointment. He had thought, after the scholarship and all, that Rose could do a little better than that.

  “No, Daddy. I bought a hotel. I own it.”

  “A hotel? I don’t understand.”

  “Mom, I sold what I own, I bought a place out in Rego Park, and I traded it all in for a hotel.”

  “Rego Park’s a bad area,” said Daniella faintly.

  “I’ll take you out to see the show apartments next month. People are already calling up. You’re gonna love them.”

  *

  Rose kept her word. As soon as the first apartments were done, she had her parents picked up in a limousine and taken out to the site.

  “Look. This is the gatehouse, see? Everybody will have to give their name. I’m putting on a twenty-four-hour guard, and this fence. It’s twelve feet high. Total security. Do you like the rose, Daddy? I’m calling it the Flower of Queens. After our name. Your name.” She was thrilled, full of life, animated and happy. Daniella didn’t dare ask her daughter if she had found a man to share it with. “Come through here, come through—”

  “Morning, Miss Fiorello,” the foreman said.

  Paul blinked. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The man treated his daughter with such deference, even though she was still half a kid.

  “Hi,” Rose said, paying no attention. “See? All the condos will be like this … the new tiles, the new stove and refrigerator, everything brand new, almost perfect, fitted carpet, and the maintenance is really low…”

  “The mortgage on this place must be huge.”

  “It is.” Rose laughed at the look on her father’s face. “Oh, don’t worry, Dad. I got the whole place half sold already, and it won’t be finished for months. I bet you I can have it one hundred percent sold by the day the workers are done.”

  He believed her.

  “I’m so proud of you, honey.”

  “I did it all for you, Dad,” she said.

  Her father kissed her and hugged her and Rose felt a pure happiness that had not come over her for years.

  *

  She treated her parents to dinner at Bernie’s Steakhouse, her father’s old haunt. Rose wanted it to be Lutece or the River Café, but she knew her folks would hate those fancy places. Paul Fiorello’s idea of luxury was a big steak cooked just right. Her parents wanted to go over just how far she’d come. Rose let them talk. When her cab dropped them home, she had the feeling it had all been worth it.

  She was woken from her sleep at 3 A.M.

  Her mother was crying so hard Rose could hardly make out the words, but she didn’t really need to. She just knew. And it blew her world into pieces.

  Her father had had a heart attack. He was dead.

  *

  For the first time in years, Rose completely neglected her work. She moved in with her mother for a whole month, enough time to get her settled, get her over the initial shock of grief.

  “He had a great life, Mom.”

  Rose said it automatically. She hoped things like this would comfort her mother more than they comforted her, which was not at all.

  “Oh, he did, he did. He was so proud of you. You were the apple of his eye. Bored everyone stupid about you.”

  “I hope he liked this house.”

  “He adored it.” Daniella sighed heavily.

  “What’s wrong, Mom? What is it?” Rose rushed to her mother, but she waved her off.

  “Oh, hell, it’s nothing. Just that—”

  “Go on.”

  “He was so fond of that stupid deli. I wish he’d never lost that deli.” And Rose’s hands curled into fists, which she did not let her mother see.

  *

  Rose arranged for her mother’s sister to come up from Florida to live with her. Once that was all settled, she went back to George Benham’s office. He fell over himself in his eagerness to greet her. To kiss my ass, Rose thought.

  “The Flower of Queens is all sold up. We have a waiting list. Maybe I should put up the prices…”

  “No,” Rose said. “They get exactly what they paid for.”

  “You’ve made a hell of a lot of money. Two million dollars. Two million! I can hardly believe it.”

  “Two million’s nothing. I want to buy a skyscraper.”

  Benham laughed. Rose regarded him with icy fury. “Do that again, George, and you’re fired.”

  “I—I’m sorry, Miss Fiorello. It’s just that the property market is in a bit of a slump, tenants are hard to get … banks don’t like to lend…”

  “I know that,” Rose said. She thought of Rothstein Realty and their tenants. “It’s a perfect time to invest, George. You think I should buy when the market is hot, and sell when it’s weak?”

  “No, but—”

  “There are no buts. Get me a building. Something owned by a motivated seller.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Benham said eagerly.

  *

  He came back to her within a week with a selection of properties.

  “Overpriced.

  “Too many violations. I don’t want the city down my back for ten years.

  “Too small.”

  Benham turned away, fearful he had disappointed his boss.

  “What’s this one? I like this one.”

  Rose had pulled out a picture of a rather seedy-looking skyscraper, sixty stories high, made of brick, and overlooking the river.

  “That’s on the wrong side of Manhattan, in Alphabet City.”

  “Close to transport?”

  Benham nodded. “Right by the subway.”

  “And the seller?”

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p; “He’s in trouble, but you know, this a commercial property, and it’s a broken-down dump … the banks hate the area, because it’s not the nicest. You’ll find it very hard to get a note.”

  “Hard doesn’t matter,” Rose said. “The only thing that matters is impossible. Which this isn’t. Get me in to see the seller.”

  She had that glazed look in her eyes. Benham dived for his files. He didn’t know what she was thinking and didn’t care to find out.

  Rose wasn’t seeing the seedy skyscraper. She was seeing the first nail in Rothstein Realty’s coffin. Time to send those boys a message.

  She was going to say it with Flowers.

  Forty-Six

  “Here it is.” Poppy opened the door. “Home sweet home.”

  Dani looked the space over. “Yeah, it’s great.”

  Dani West was her new assistant. She was thirty-one and tired of her dead-end job at RCA, typing for promotion grunts. They called it “Record Cemetery of America” because it had no acts.

  When she had read the small-print ad in Billboard asking for an assistant in a management start-up, Dani hadn’t really been interested. At least RCA paid benefits. But then she’d seen that it was for Opium Management. And she had jumped.

  *

  There were ten other girls in Poppy Allen’s living room when Dani turned up to apply, and Dani asked, flat out, when her turn came, how many Poppy had seen.

  “Would you believe? Over twenty,” the younger girl said.

  “Yes, I would believe it. But you shouldn’t hire them. You should hire me.”

  Poppy Allen had leaned back in her rattan armchair and smiled slightly. She had a magnetism about her. Dani began to understand just why Poppy was the flavor of the month, mentioned in HITS magazine’s gossip column every week, and why she was already looking after three hot acts.

  Travis Jackson. A bona fide star, Travis’s first, hastily recorded album had gone gold, then platinum. Screaming girls all over the country attested to his New Country idol status.

  Matrix and Wrecking Ball. Two heavy metal groups, “hair bands” as they called them—longhaired boys with a taste for spandex, girls, and making money. Both had been poached by Poppy from previous management, and she had already booked them on bigger tours and supervised new videos that were getting play on MTV. Both bands loved their young, hot-chick manager, who was as hard and canny as any grizzled old veteran.

  To Dani, Poppy was a rising star herself. The public had its idols: Def Leppard, Guns N’ Roses, Madonna, New Kids on the Block. You name it. But the record business had its own stars. Giants, moguls who wheeled and dealed and controlled millions of dollars, the fate of labels, of stadiums, of radio networks. Dani’s heroes weren’t Michael Jackson or Prince; they were David Geffen, Mutt Lange, Quincy Jones, Peter Mensch, Cliff Burnstein, Bill Graham, and Michael Krebs. Women to look up to were in short supply. Who was there, really? Lisa Anderson in London? Sharon Osbourne? Rowena Gordon at Musica Records, for sure.

  And Poppy Allen? Well, not yet. One star and two hot newcomers didn’t make her Q-Prime. But Poppy was making waves.

  Dani was tired of going nowhere fast. She wanted to make waves too.

  “And why should I hire you, exactly?” Poppy Allen asked her.

  Fuck it, Dani thought.

  “Because I have experience. Eight years of it. Because I’m so bored and frustrated at RCA that I’m ripping my hair out. Because I want to work, and most of them just want to get to meet Travis Jackson so they can fuck him.” Her interviewer grinned. “And because I’m not someone who’s gonna be jealous of you because you’re twenty-three and skinny as hell and you’re making it. I’m not gonna give you a hard time when you ask me to get you coffee. And because I want to impress you so you promote me.”

  “The job doesn’t pay that much,” Poppy Allen said.

  “I don’t give a shit,” Dani said, adding hastily, “Ms. Allen.”

  Poppy looked at the other woman. She was dumpy, wearing way too much black, and she had glasses with hip black frames, kind of a New York vibe, and she was older than the other candidates by a lot.

  “You’re hired,” she said.

  *

  Dani was intense. And that was what Poppy was looking for.

  Right now, however, she knew Dani was faking it. Her fixed smile as she looked around Opium’s new home masked a kind of horrified glare. Poppy smiled.

  “You’re thinking it’s not very fancy.”

  “Fancy? I’ve seen fancier crack dens,” Dani said. “Man! Are you shitting me?”

  They were standing in a former warehouse in a back street off Vine. The place had huge, grimy windows festooned with spiders’ webs, a couple of abandoned orange crates used for packing, cigarette butts and broken glass on the gloomy floor, and a rank smell of old stale sweat and urine.

  “Who the fuck is the landlord?” Dani demanded. “You should sue, Ms. Allen.”

  “It’s Poppy. You always swear like that?”

  “Army brat,” Dani said succinctly.

  Poppy liked her more and more. “Do me a favor. Just don’t say ‘fuck’ when record company presidents call up. They’re old fat farts and we don’t wanna be responsible for any heart attacks.”

  “You got it, Ms. Allen. But you really need to cancel this lease.”

  “It’s Poppy, and there is no lease.”

  “We’re going to run the office month to month?”

  “No. There’s no lease because there’s no landlord. I own the joint. Got it for sixty thousand bucks.”

  “Wow.”

  Poppy looked at her assistant, who seemed to be literally biting her cheeks in order to keep silent.

  “You have to be polite to the record company, not to me. What were you thinking?”

  “That you only paid fifty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety dollars too much.”

  Poppy laughed.

  “Listen, lesson one, OK? The first rule of being in business is to keep the costs down. Hire only the staff you need, and limit expenses. Especially management. Now I own the building, there’s not going to be a rent, except what I charge myself for the tax deduction. And this place is going to be the fanciest joint in L.A. when we’re done.” She grabbed Dani’s plump shoulders and gestured. “Big windows, once we’ve cleaned them. Lots of light. Lots of space, too. Ample electrical points, and there’s a bathroom over there, shower and everything. We’ll buy some lamps, some couches and desks from a discounter’s … you’ll see, it’ll be awesome.”

  “But there’re only two of us,” Dani protested.

  “Right now there’s only two of us.” Poppy winked. “Wait and see. This is gonna be huge.”

  Dani believed her.

  “Here.” Poppy tossed her the phone. “First job: call an industrial cleaner and get them over here. This place stinks.”

  *

  It took two weeks for them to get Opium Management the way they wanted it. But when they were finished, it was spectacular. The whole building was painted a dark red, and on the black door they hand-painted a giant poppy, hot-looking, with its cluster of dark seeds at the center. The warehouse was disinfected and swept, and Poppy laid cheap, functional linoleum over the ground, but it was chocolate-brown, and it looked kind of designer under their cream-colored furniture. Poppy invested about fifteen thousand more to bring the building up to date; it wiped out her early commissions from Travis’s first tour, but so what? She got cheap partitions of glass, telephones, two fax machines, computers, everything. Cream couches with chocolate brown throws and a modern kitchenette completed the place.

  Dani loved it. “It looks like that apartment on The Real World. But it’s still too big.”

  Poppy winked. “Nope. I rented half the space out already, to an indie production company and a fashion designer. We’re gonna give the Opium Building a reputation. Hot and happening. Like the company.”

  Dani wanted to scoff. The Opium Building! Poppy Allen was an egomaniac!

 
; But a little voice inside her head told her that this wasn’t true; that Poppy was a genius.

  She was awfully glad to have this job.

  *

  Dani found her first month at Opium indescribably thrilling. Poppy’s energy was contagious. She worked so hard and so passionately, it was tiring just watching her.

  Poppy was working the phones every day. Dani’s call sheet looked like it belonged to President Bush. There were record companies, tour promoters, press guys, radio, TV, MTV, Nashville, you name it. She also took calls from wives, mistresses, and groupies.

  “Kind of sleazy, isn’t it?”

  “Just remember, we’re not here to run our acts’ personal lives. Their morality is their business.” Poppy shook her head. “Just deliver the messages. Look, Dani. I’m a woman, and these boys are all … well … boys. Last thing they want is me spoiling the party.”

  Dani got the message. Travis, Matrix, and Wrecking Ball got theirs.

  They started out with Travis’s platinum album hanging in pride of place in Poppy’s office. By the end of the month, Travis had three more, Matrix’s gold record had turned platinum, and Poppy even hung Wrecking Ball’s first silver disc up over Dani’s kidney-shaped desk.

  “That should be in your office,” Dani said.

  Poppy shook her head. “You’re part of this now.” She grabbed the copy of Billboard that lay open by Dani’s phone and flicked to the Hot 200, picking up a pencil.

  “Exactly what are you looking for?” Dani asked.

  “Targets,” Poppy said. “Targets.”

  Forty-Seven

  “Any messages?”

  Poppy stood in front of the receptionist at the Four Seasons, New Orleans, and swayed gently, like a willow sapling in a strong wind. She was running on bare fumes; her gas had drained out about six hours ago.

  It was the penultimate stop on the Travis Jackson tour. They had called it “Bluejeans Bluegrass,” and every stop had been a sellout. Poppy had had to deal with more problems than Napoleon on his march into the Russian winter. There was an ineffective tour manager, a girl, whom she’d fired and who was now threatening to sue for sexism; there were two paternity suits from sweet young things not famed for the strength of their knicker elastic, as the English longhairs used to say; there were promoters who tried to rip her off, thinking she was as green as they came; there were predatory scouts from the really big agencies, offering her protégé the moon; there were even roadies who demanded she blow them to stay backstage, because they were local help who thought she was just another eager groupie. That was right before they got fired, but it still left Poppy feeling weakened.