House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  He left the sentence unfinished. Jennie nodded, satisfied with her boss’s probity, and backed out of the room, looking forward to the arrival of the well-known gangster later in the afternoon.

  Chet Fiore stepped off the elevator promptly at two o’clock. He was wearing a light gray Armani suit that followed the lines of his lean, taut form like the sculptured draperies on a statue. He looked like anything but a gangster, and when he gave his name to the receptionist at the front desk, she misunderstood it as Fury and didn’t recognize him. She said that Mr. Blaine’s assistant would be out for him in a minute. It wasn’t much more than that before Blaine’s girl—she said her name was Jennifer—came out to claim him, but even that minute was long enough for him to take in what he could only describe to himself as the grandeur of these offices. He surprised himself, not pleasantly, with random and uninvited thoughts about the shape his own life might have taken if he had made a different set of decisions after his grandfather died. He greeted the girl with a distant and somewhat abstracted smile. “I kind of figured Blaine would have a good-looking assistant,” he said.

  She blushed the way girls do who aren’t used to compliments, and lowered her eyes with a fleeting look of annoyance because she knew it wasn’t true. By the time a girl is sixteen she either knows she’s pretty or knows she’s not. Jennifer had a good body and took care of herself, but she knew that she was plain.

  “Mr. Blaine is having lunch in the Partners Room,” she said.

  “I can wait,” Fiore said.

  There was a kind of boyish deference in the way he said it that took her by surprise. It made her wonder about all the things she had heard about him and read in the papers. The Chet Fiore of her imagination would never say anything like I can wait.

  “He told me to take you up,” she said.

  If the reception area impressed him, the Partners Room filled him with something almost like awe. Not the awe one feels in the presence of castles or cathedrals. This was different. What came into his mind when he stepped into the room was an image from when he was a kid playing ball. There was an Irish kid—he could see that pale, flat face as though it were there in the room with him—and this kid could throw the ball from deep in the hole at short as flat as a bowling ball rolling down the lane, like a missile, no trajectory at all. That was the kind of awe he was feeling now. Here he was, Chet Fiore, reputed to be one of the most powerful men in New York. And maybe he was. Yet this man Blaine, who was nothing really, just one of a thousand bankers, or twenty thousand for all Fiore knew, was having lunch in a room with a fireplace big enough for a man to stand in and the kind of wood paneling on the walls that belonged in a mansion.

  Blaine got to his feet when he saw Jennifer and Chet Fiore crossing the room toward him. He was having lunch with a young guy with bad skin and an expensive-looking suit that still managed to fit him badly. “Chet Fiore, Roger Bogard,” Jeffrey said. “I hope you’re joining us for lunch.”

  The two men shook hands. Bogard had very small hands.

  “A cup of coffee maybe,” Fiore said. He felt awkward about confessing that he had just had breakfast barely an hour ago.

  Bogard remained on his feet and said something about “getting on that research” right away. “Pleasure meeting you, Mr. Fiore,” he said.

  “Don’t let me chase you away,” Fiore said.

  “On the contrary,” Bogard said. “I shouldn’t have been sitting here this long.”

  On the contrary, Fiore thought. He hadn’t known that people actually said things like that. He watched the young man follow Jennifer across the room and then took the chair on Blaine’s right that had been vacant before. Blaine signaled the waiter for coffee, which came immediately.

  Jeffrey, in fact, had drawn out his lunch with Bogard on purpose, because he wanted Fiore to be seen. A few days earlier he had taken the precaution, at the weekly staff meeting, of personally raising the question of the propriety of opening an investment account for Chet Fiore. Did Layne Bentley, he asked, want a person of Fiore’s “background” on its client list? By asking the question, he kept others from asking it. He pointed out that the account would be quite lucrative, and he was sure it would be possible to demand incontrovertible evidence that any funds invested with Layne Bentley came from legitimate sources. The partners, of course, endorsed his thinking.

  Fiore looked around at the other men at other tables. They were all older than Blaine. “This is a hell of a room,” he said.

  “Does it make you nervous?”

  Why did he ask that? Fiore was certain he didn’t look nervous. He surprised himself when he said, “A little maybe. We’re kind of out there in the open. I’m not used to that.”

  Jeffrey smiled at what he took to be a rather surprising naivete on Fiore’s part. “You want to be out there in the open,” he said. “That’s the point.”

  “I suppose,” Fiore conceded.

  Jeffrey got to his feet. “Let’s talk in my office.”

  In the elevator, Jeffrey said, “You’re going to have to get used to a whole new way of thinking. No one who has funds they can spend in public doesn’t spend them. Buy a yacht. A big apartment. A Van Gogh for that matter.”

  Fiore liked the sound of that. A Van Gogh.

  There was a desk at the far end of Blaine’s office with a couple of stuffed chairs facing it, but Jeffrey directed his guest to a couch that looked like it belonged in someone’s living room. Not Blaine’s probably, at least judging from the furniture Fiore had seen in the guy’s country house. This thing was just a sofa, big and comfortable in an old-fashioned way. The girl had followed them in and asked if they wanted anything to drink. Fiore shook his head, declining for both of them. She withdrew without another word, pulling the door closed behind her.

  Jeffrey drew two slender cigars from a wooden humidor on the table next to the couch and offered one to Fiore. “I assume you’re ready to go forward,” he said.

  Fiore reached into his breast pocket and took out an envelope. He drew a paper from the envelope and passed it across to Blaine. “One hundred,” he said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Jeffrey had made up his mind beforehand that if Fiore tried to give him cash, which he was told not to do, or even a check, he wouldn’t accept it. Unless, of course, Fiore could provide rock-solid documentation of the source of the funds it was drawn against. But this wasn’t a check. It was a letter of credit on the letterhead of a commercial mortgage division of the Chase Manhattan Bank.

  Jeffrey looked at it and then up to Fiore, expecting an explanation.

  “I took out a loan. On the restaurant,” Fiore said. “You wanted clean money. It doesn’t get any cleaner than that.”

  “No,” Jeffrey agreed. “It doesn’t.”

  Then he explained what would happen with the money.

  Fiore didn’t listen. Details bored him when they were other people’s business.

  18

  It took only a week for Chet Fiore to double his money.

  Jeffrey could have made it happen even faster but he didn’t want to do anything to call attention to the account, even though he knew the risks were minimal since the amounts involved were so small. But they wouldn’t stay small for long, and it was a good principle to err on the side of caution. Besides, he wanted to keep Fiore’s expectations reasonable. The next few months were going to be like training a puppy, Jeffrey thought, amusing himself with the notion. When you give him a biscuit, it’s not a good idea to let him know you’ve got another one in your other hand and a few more in your pocket. You want him grateful, not distracted.

  Jeffrey had a check drawn in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars payable to the Mid Atlantic Restaurant Association, a nonexistent company that would be created solely for the purpose of receiving and clearing these checks. Its name was similar but not identical to the Atlantic Restaurant Company, the company in whose name Fiore had opened his Layne Bentley account. Gabriel Enriquez taught him how to draw the check t
o one name on the company computer and then alter the name before the check was printed.

  Exactly one week after Fiore opened his investment account, he and Jeffrey met again, this time in a Thai restaurant overlooking the immense central hall of the newly refurbished Grand Central Station. Fiore, who was usually as punctual as a schoolteacher, walked through the dining room twenty minutes late. A glass of Cabernet was waiting at his place, and a platter of hors d’oeuvres gave off the provocative and mysterious scent of lemongrass. Fiore apologized for being late but offered no explanation. Something told Jeffrey that the man had just stepped out of a shower, which could mean either a midmorning love affair or a workout in the gym but in Fiore’s case meant only the former. He had a lean, well-honed body, but he didn’t work at it.

  Jeffrey accepted Fiore’s apology without comment and invited him to help himself to the hors d’oeuvres. At the same time he took an envelope from his breast pocket and removed the Layne Bentley check. He passed it across to Fiore, who looked at it and set it down on the table. “Nice,” he said. “Now what?”

  Jeffrey surprised Fiore by taking the check back and returning it to his pocket, but Fiore realized his mistake at once. Blaine wouldn’t be giving him any money. Fiore had plenty of money but no records of how he got it. Now he had records.

  “Tomorrow,” Blaine said, “you deposit one hundred thousand dollars to the Atlantic account. Your bookkeeper records it as a payment from Layne Bentley. The minute she does that, it’s clean money. And you’ve still got an account with us with a little over a hundred thousand in it.”

  “What happens to the check?” Fiore asked.

  Jeffrey studied him a long time, letting his silence be his answer, letting it draw a straight, crisp line right across the middle of the table between them.

  “Something tells me it doesn’t go to the cowboy,” Fiore said.

  “Let’s keep this simple,” Jeffrey answered. “I don’t ask you where your money comes from, you don’t ask me where this money goes.”

  The original idea, as Jeffrey outlined it to both Bolling and Fiore when the two New Yorkers were in Oklahoma, was that Fiore would be credited with receiving the money while Bolling got the cash. But there was something so decisive and final in the way Blaine slipped the check into his pocket, something so clean and complete in the gesture, that Fiore knew immediately that the rules of the game had changed.

  “Are you telling me he’s out of the picture?” Fiore asked.

  Jeffrey carefully set down his knife and fork and refilled both their wine glasses. “There’s something I want you to think about,” he said. “It’s an old game, a riddle really. It used to show up from time to time in business school textbooks. Feel like playing?”

  Fiore didn’t answer. His eyes remained locked on Jeffrey, waiting.

  “Here’s the situation,” Jeffrey went on. “Imagine ten pirates. They find a treasure chest with a hundred gold coins in it. They’ve got to split it up. Ten apiece seems fair but these men are pirates. They’re not interested in fairness. Each one wants the most he can get. Is there some logic that dictates something other than an even split? Well, let’s see, they say. They come up with a method for deciding what to do. Here’s the method. The biggest, baddest, toughest pirate, the one with seniority, gets to go first. He makes a proposal, any proposal he wants. If he gets at least half the votes, his proposal carries and the treasure is divided up the way he suggests. But, and it’s a big but, if the other pirates vote him down, they throw him over the side and the next guy in line takes a crack at winning the hearts and minds of his colleagues. Got the picture?”

  Fiore nodded but said nothing.

  “Take all the time you need,” Jeffrey said. “You’re the biggest and the baddest of the pirates. What do you suggest we do with the treasure?”

  “And you’re telling me it’s not ten apiece?” Fiore asked rhetorically, like a man talking to himself. There’s always a trick to riddles like this. He knew that much.

  “I’m not telling you anything,” Jeffrey said.

  Fiore didn’t like playing games but he did enjoy watching how they played out. He held up a finger for silence and tried to think it through. But he didn’t even know how to get a handle on a problem like this. After a moment he gave up and shook his head. “I know you’re going to tell me the number one pirate makes out like a bandit. But you’re going to have to tell me how.”

  “Don’t give up so fast. Let’s see if we can work it out,” Jeffrey said. “The trick is to simplify. So let’s start with the simplest case. Let’s say there are only two pirates left. The first eight are already shark food. It’s down to you and me. You’re tougher, so you make the proposal. What will it be? Fifty-fifty? Or do you think you can do better?”

  Fiore swirled the wine in his glass and watched for a moment as the blood-colored liquid caught and twisted the light from the sconces behind him. Then he looked up with a big, boyish grin as the answer came to him. It was like being in school again. “I get a hundred, you get nothing,” he said.

  “Is that reasonable?” Jeffrey asked.

  “There’s only two of us and I only need one vote,” Fiore said. “All for me, nothing for you. All in favor raise your hands.” He raised his hand above his head. “The motion carries.”

  Jeffrey laughed at the demonstration. “Good. Very good,” he said. “Now back up a little. Three pirates and pirate three has to make a proposal. He knows what’s going to happen if he gets thrown overboard because he can figure out what you just figured out. Which is that you get everything and I get nothing. He needs two votes. What does he do?”

  This time Fiore did his thinking out loud. “He’s not going to get my vote no matter what he does, because I get all of it if he gets voted down. But you’d get nothing if it comes down to that, so he offers you one buck and you take it. Ninety-nine for him, one for you, the two of you vote for it and I’m screwed.”

  “All right,” Jeffrey said. “Now you see how it works. You can go back to the sixth pirate and it’s the same principle. Just keep backing up like that and you get to the winning answer, which is ninety-six pieces of gold for the head pirate and one apiece for the four guys he bribes to get him the five votes he needs.”

  “Clever,” Fiore said evenly. It bothered him that he hadn’t been able to work this out without Blaine’s help. “But what’s the point?”

  Jeffrey gestured to the waiter. “My friend and I aren’t having dinner,” he said. “Just the check please.” The waiter hurried off.

  “The point,” Jeffrey said, “is that there aren’t any losers. Five pirates get nothing but they had nothing to start with. Four pirates end up one gold piece ahead, so they’re happy. And the tenth pirate makes out like a pirate. He gets very rich very fast, but nobody’s complaining.”

  “We’re the tenth pirate?” Fiore suggested. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  The waiter returned with the check and Jeffrey signed his name at the bottom of it. “We made a deal with our friend in Oklahoma. The profits go on your books, the losses on his. Except there aren’t any losses when the markets are going up. Investments are coming through all over the place. I cooked the books and he still made money, just not as much as you.”

  “So we are the tenth pirate,” Fiore said, a wide smile cracking his face. It was the first time Jeffrey had seen him smile like that, an expression, not a gesture. Until this moment everything about the man seemed calculated. His smiles, his scowls, his words were all chosen as instruments of control. This smile was different. It came from somewhere inside and had reference only to himself.

  “Actually,” Jeffrey said, with something almost like a laugh, “I think we may be all ten pirates. We may be all the pirates there are.”

  Fiore laughed out loud with the sheer triumph of the moment. He reached out, clasped Jeffrey’s hand, and pumped it effusively, two men closing a deal. And what a deal it was. So simple. Generations of men from Capone through Gotti to F
alcone had looked for this El Dorado and never found it. But here it was, stretched out in front of them like a new continent. He felt as though he were holding a flagstaff in his hand, driving it into the earth. And he could see in Blaine’s eyes and feel in the pressure of the man’s hand that Blaine was feeling exactly the same thing.

  “We did it,” he said. “We really did it.”

  He sounded like a kid.

  After that, they went their separate ways. As he walked under the vaulted, star-studded ceiling of the magnificent terminal, Fiore stopped suddenly. The smile fell off his face and his eyes darkened, lit from inside with their usual fire. Because he realized that if there were only winners and no losers, like Blaine said, and if they didn’t need Clint Bolling anymore, like Blaine said, then Bolling was just a loose end that ought to be tied up.

  Phyllis was on her way to a committee meeting at the Metropolitan Museum, a committee she found herself on without knowing why. It was a wet day and she was dying for a cup of tea, so she ran into the cafeteria, her heels clattering across the tiled floor like dice rolled from a cup. She splashed hot water into a paper cup, threw in a tea bag she took from a little enameled box in her purse, and waved to the black woman at the register. She had no time to stop. She was already late for the meeting.

  “That’s fine, Mrs. Blaine,” the cashier called back. “You take care now.”

  As Phyllis hurried toward the door, she heard her name and turned. It was Sue Tunney, Grace’s mother, and she was getting up from a table where she had been seated by herself, a sketchpad open in front of her. She was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt and looked more like a child her daughter’s age than a woman of Phyllis’s.

  She had never fit in well with the mothers of Jessica’s classmates and consequently received very little sympathy when her husband left her, even though he behaved shamefully, buying a palatial house on Long Island and ostentatiously installing his mistress there without even bothering to separate from his wife. None of the class mothers stood by Sue or called to offer their support. She didn’t belong to their world, which wouldn’t have been a problem in and of itself if only she hadn’t let it be known that she didn’t care to belong to it. Japanese women, Irish women, even native-born Americans of no social distinction at all managed to fit in quite nicely. The doors of the best homes were open to any woman willing to stand patiently in the hall until she was invited in. The only unforgivable sins were smugness and self-sufficiency, the sense that one could walk in without being invited or walk away without being diminished.