The Head of the House

by Al Zuckerman

  “No limits?” Linda rose, prowled to the window. “You’re saying, anything we want to do to this man, we can?”

  Leroy marveled. She seemed no more intimidated, awed, than if this were a good-natured game of twenty questions.

  “No, kindt. Limits there always are.” Mr. H. sat back and softly expounded. “Always. True, if you play things smart, you can stretch them, a little or a lot; but still, at some point they’re there, always. If your Zaydeh were here, he’d admit it too; even for his God there are limits.”

  Leroy started to feel an irritation with Mr. H., his rambling, lecturing, and with Linda’s new toughness, just with the idea of her being in on this. He wanted to get the beating around the bush over with, make things move, if he could. “Seems to me, it’s got to boil down to, what’s the worst. …” Jesus, he couldn’t. Linda might be matter-of-fact about zapping Psyllos; but with her right in front of him, the words were sticking in his throat. He sensed too that this might be yet another ploy of Mr. H.’s to distance him from Linda.

  “The worst what, Leroy?” she asked.

  “I never realized, Linda, how much you inhibit me.” His eyes were to the floor, idly observing that the hooked rug was quite dirty.

  Leroy heard a movement, and then felt Mr. H.’s hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s good,” Iz said, “I respect that.”

  Leroy, grateful, choked up.

  Linda looked straight at her father. “You might like to hear our ideas, if we have any. But even more, you’re putting this to us, I have the feeling, because you don’t want to be the only one to take responsibility—for what you’re going to do. Isn’t that too what this is about?”

  “Un hunh, that too, absolutely. You’re grown up, Linda. It’s time already that you know, really know, what you—everybody really—is up against.”

  “Everybody?” She was almost sarcastic.

  He nodded benignly. “People live scared, in terror, most of them. To keep themselves going, they shut their eyes, their thoughts, stop themselves from seeing the sharks swimming all around. And from seeing the not-so-nice things they have to do to keep those sharks’ teeth from biting into them. You kids, it’s better should see, and not be like that.”

  Linda was shaking her head. “I’m beginning to think Leroy may have been right.”

  “Like how?”

  “I don’t know.” She seemed discouraged. “Poppa, the more we talk about this, the less I want to be part of it after all.”

  Her father breathed in and then whispered, “So, go take a walk.”

  Leroy marveled again, this time at Mr. H.’s quick swallowing of—was it anger, or just disappointment?

  “I guess I know what you’ll do to that man—one way or another. So what difference whether or not I listen in on the gory details.”

  “You’re assuming, child. Who said gory? Maybe there’s better ways.”

  “You frighten me, Poppa.”

  “You want to go hide? I already told you, you can.”

  She was perched at the edge of the couch, eyeing the door. Then her posture slumped. “All right.” Her voice had turned strangely hoarse. “I’d like—my preference would be to have him—locked away somewhere, so he couldn’t hurt us any more, or anyone else.”

  “And that would satisfy you.”

  “I don’t know. No. But still, wouldn’t it be enough?”

  “Leroy, how’s that hit you?”

  “Nice,” he said to Linda. “But it’d be ticklish, very risky. He’s tricky, that Greek. So if we were to leave him an opening. …”

  “You mean,” Izzie said very quietly, “like his life?”

  Leroy weighed that. Wasting the man would take away the danger. But was there anything else that would? A jailer sooner or later could be bought off. A stopped heart though, no way anyone could start one of those up again. He looked over at Iz and nodded, reluctantly.

  “Poppa,” Linda burst out, “I can’t take this. Tell us what you’re doing.”

  “I’m listening to you two,” he answered, showing a flicker of a smile, “or trying to.”

  “Let’s be done with this now, please?” she pleaded.

  Hargett screwed up his face, cracked a knuckle, then nodded. “All right.” He spoke softly; Leroy had to strain to hear him. “I want to be satisfied, repayment in full. This man has been making me miserable a long time. So what we do should also go on and on, no?”

  “Then you’re not going to—hurt him?” Linda brightened somewhat with hope.

  “Of course we hurt him, but not his body. It’s his spirit, his pride in himself, that’s where he feels, and where he hurts.”

  So Psyllos would go on living. Mr. H. was not afraid, apparently. Leroy tensely waited for more.

  “See, the damage we give, if it’s going to give pain, really bite, has to be fitted special, exactly to him. You didn’t picture that, either of you. Give it thought.”

  “I hardly know him,” Linda spoke out.

  “But you know about him, plenty.”

  “Sure, that he’s got enormous vaults, piled high with silver bars.”

  “You don’t think that’s important?”

  Leroy had a glimmer of what Mr. H. maybe was getting at. “It’d have something to do with getting a choke on his money, reducing him down to nothing, wouldn’t it?”

  Hargett nodded. “Money’s also what I get excited about. And that’s true, I think, for every guy who makes it big. But with him, it gets pushed farther. It’s the only thing. Not just a passion. A madness.”

  Linda, her face crinkled up, asked, “You’re going to do something to his money?”

  “That’s what he loves and that’s where he would hurt, no?”

  Leroy felt a thrill course through him at the simple beauty of Hargett’s reasoning, and then abruptly he shivered. What if Psyllos, wily as anyone on earth, were to out-maneuver them?

  CHAPTER 9

  Iz had pondered the methods: how to lay on the punishment, how to ravage such multilayered wealth in ways that would appear to be calamities of nature, accidents, normal business reversals, and not suggest, not hint even, of a malevolent design. Surprise meant everything to Hargett. He pleasured himself in imagining confronting a Psyllos reduced to beggary and who perceived his downfall as no more than rotten luck.

  Eliminating physical assets, whether by fire, theft, or any of a hundred ways, would make for some problems certainly, but nothing major. Far tougher to accomplish would be the nosing out, the locating, the pinpointing of the Greek’s far-flung and for the most part invisible resources. That search could turn out to be endless, except for one possible saving grace, an element in Psyllos’s own character: his extreme caution. What was valuable to the man he would do everything to protect. He would have bought insurance, lots of it; and that might be his Achilles’ heel, his own insurance policies.

  No president of any of the Greek’s companies, no one of his M.I.T. summa cum laude assistants would have been allowed even to glimpse the totality of his mazelike affairs. Collectively these men might be able to provide a coherent picture, but trying to talk with them could be disastrous. If even one opened a yap to Psyllos, all Iz’s labors could go kaput. But more accessible and more discreet could be the insurance brokers, or even the insurance companies, and at the very least some of their well placed and poorly paid secretaries and clerks.

  Initially Iz approached a handful of businessmen who were themselves major buyers of insurance: diamond merchants, wine shippers, tanker fleet operators—all men known for their “flexibility” in business matters and for their antipathy toward Psyllos. Iz advanced funds for them to encourage the keepers of certain insurance company files to lend these out for a few days.

  The files duly arrived, but Iz again and again had to report to these new associates, “This stuff is worthless.”

  Each would shrug, “It’s the best I can do. I don’t own any of these companies, you know.”

  He’d be furious,
and depressed. Were they robbing him? Were the bribed clerks all incompetent? Or was the basic idea unsound?

  But that constant refrain, “What can I do if I don’t own the company?” led him to an idea.

  Through his Banque de Génève et d’Outre-Mer, he quietly bought a small but highly reputed British firm specializing in marine and casualty insurance. This company already had a staff of skilled adjusters and investigators who traditionally worked, he’d learned, as part of a pooled information-sharing system with every similar such company in Western Europe and the U.S.

  It took only the suggestion that a purchaser of insurance might be taking out additional policies on assets which already were insured for their full value to engender suspicion among the brother companies and to bring about their fullest cooperation with Iz’s investigators.

  And even then, the process was slow and tedious.

  The investigators, at Iz’s urging, tried working backwards, identifying Psyllos’s pseudonyms from what was known to be his property, and then uncovering more and more property once the myriad pseudonyms became known.

  The photocopies arriving in London soon filled a file cabinet, then a second, then a room whose walls were banked with files. The precise value of many of those papers was a big question mark; since who knew if the face amount of insurance for, say, a certain vault really equalled its contents? But Iz felt he had to assume that the more astronomical policies did point up the key pillars in Psyllos’s serpentine structure.

  Iz yearned to demolish these, and his brain teemed with explosions, sinkings, fires. But what for? He’d gain nothing unless first all the insurance protection could be blotted out. And how could the insurers ever be made to cancel? Even if the companies could be prevailed upon, the policies themselves by and large forbade cancellation.

  But policies all expire—after six months, a year, two; and then if Iz’s people could present evidence—or just hint at it—showing Psyllos’s valuations to be fraudulent or overinflated, or that the Greek might be double-insuring the same assets, the insurers then would refuse to renew, at which point Iz would, if all this worked out, have Psyllos by the balls—providing that Iz could then strike quickly, before the Greek could tie in with another insurer.

  The scheme was far-fetched, full of holes; and yet because Psyllos was spread so thin and his interests were so leveraged, Iz estimated that it could work. Almost weekly the voracious Greek would swallow up new tankers, mines, plantations, like an octopus that fed on businesses. Psyllos also was involved in ever-new borrowings to finance these devourings. His loans were pledged against assets which in turn were cross-collateralized with mortgages, so that a really bad blow, Iz felt sure, would bring the shylocks of the world down on the Greek in an avalanche. And dealing such a blow, Iz reckoned, would be easier than manipulating the insurance.

  He had not anticipated the chumminess of insurance investigators and how decisive a role this personal factor plays in the conduct of their affairs. He’d expected nerve-racking maneuvers for as long as three years before he’d know if this scheme were practicable. Two carefully aimed thrusts within nine months, to his amazement, turned out to be enough. It all happened with a smoothness that Iz had dared hope for only in his dreams.

  Psyllos’s principal corporate persona, World-Wide Metals, was adjudged bankrupt fairly soon after a ship en route from New York to Cherbourg strangely developed leaks and sank in mid-Atlantic. Its cargo was silver bars worth eighty-seven million dollars, a significant but not overwhelming amount to a company as vast as World-Wide, except that title to this bullion (which was the underlying basis for much of New York’s silver futures trading) was not World-Wide’s. The metal was owned by consignors whose contracts stipulated that World-Wide have complete casualty insurance.

  It turned out though that there was none, or none that was valid, because of a typographical error made by a clerk who a month earlier had left the company’s employ and disappeared. Psyllos, caught in a tight money-market, had to scramble for new financing; but sources which in the past he’d routinely been able to count on now failed to return his phone calls. The grace period provided by his attorneys’ stalling ran out, and nine weeks after the sinking, World-Wide’s entire known assets, including the Xanadu and other former Hargett properties, were seized by court officers.

  Less than a month later, the Greek’s personal fortune too was dealt a blow. A fire gutted his Sutton Place townhouse, consuming cash, gems, invaluable old masters, as well as costly modern paintings which the Greek had acquired as speculations. Actual fee title to these things was diffused among his myriad partnerships, trusts, joint ventures and interlocking closed corporations, which in turn had taken out mortgages or loans on virtually every object of value.

  The noteholders, in light of what had just transpired at World-Wide, demanded, screamed for fresh security or their cash. Psyllos, whose art works had been insured by Lloyd’s of London, turned to them for compensation. But it seems that caught up as he had been in the frenzy of World-Wide’s collapse, he inadvertently had let a premium due-date slip by. Lloyds legitimately could disclaim liability, and did.

  The instant this news leaked, which was two days after the fire, the moneylenders swooped down on the Greek like vultures. All over the world everything and anything that belonged to Psyllos or simply appeared to belong to him was seized or at the very least attached with liens. The billionaire was destitute.

  CHAPTER 10

  Evangelidos Psyllos, his back aching a bit because the upholstered chair in his aunts’ bedroom was caved in, shut the door, and for the third or maybe even fourth time took the drawing out of the manilla envelope. The sketch was crude. No shadings, no subtleties. Yet nose, eyes, ears, every feature was there, starkly, eerily precise. The thing made him think suddenly of a police artist’s caricature, the kind done to help identify the lowest scum, a mugger, a rapist. He shuddered. Then he looked again at the primitive portrait. He imagined looking at himself in a mirror and seeing a flesh-and-blood face like it, with the Scotch-Irish small nose, hardly any wrinkles left, eyebrows thinner, even his ears changed. They’d be tucked back in. The pink-skinned little Hollywood surgeon had insisted, of all things, on that. “That’ll alter your recognizability profile,” he’d shaken his pudgy forefinger emphatically, “more than any two other steps.”

  A hideous business, Psyllos decided, but necessary, as necessary now as breathing. As himself, he was paralyzed, could turn nowhere, do no business without some fool slapping a legal paper on him—or worse. For practical purposes, he was a dead man. But with a new face, a different name, he could maybe get into some things, maybe find ways to move again.

  “The treatments will cause you pain,” he heard the doctor’s voice warning him, and he shuddered again, imagining a burning sensation. But he shrugged away this anxiety. What, after all, were surgical lacerations, skin grafts, any of that stuff with anesthesia—compared with the day-after-day agonies that he’d been experiencing? Besides, if the pain really got bad, he could be drugged for as long as it had to last. Women, actresses, put themselves through these treatments, and more than once. So he could too, and soon would. Actually just one more day, and if things went right, he’d be gone from here, looking out at California palm trees.

  His stomach rumbled, came up a little. The spinach pie. It had been years since he’d had a lunch of greasy cold spinach pie. She had to have cast-iron guts, old Katerina. Her food hadn’t changed in forty years. Nor her loyalties. And lucky for him too, that she and Marullio were alive still and reasonably healthy, and happy to take their brother’s son into their shabby walk-up. It was a roof. And a beggar can’t be a chooser. And the most important thing in all the world now was for those vultures out there to believe he really was a beggar, that he no longer had the price of a fleabag hotel room even, that he’d had to come here for a bit of charity.

  Through the open window, he heard a radio blaring from somewhere in the grimy courtyard. A crowd was roaring
with excitement. Above their din, a sportscaster frenziedly was bellowing, “A touchdown! All the way from the thirty yard line, seventy yards, whirling, spinning through half a dozen tacklers. Unbelievable folks, an unbelievable touchdown!”

  Pete suddenly thought of Princeton. It seemed like yesterday, and it had been two years already. Izzie Hargett, his pal and a lotta people’s pal, their little miracle worker too; even the big Sicilians who’d give an inch to no one, the rumor was, got down on their knees to Izzie Brains. Whoever Pete had taken aside and talked to, had told him the same thing: No, not a good idea opening a hotel in Haiti, not without you-know-whose okay. Buying up a race track? Tricky, a little too tricky unless he’s your partner. A new casino in Nevada? If you don’t have him with you all the way, and with a twenty-five percent override, forget it, out of the question, not worth talking about even.

  Pete had stormed and sworn. He wasn’t about to marry himself full time to the Jew, genius or not, which left him one choice. He’d have to get rid of the gangster, which at the time had seemed manageable, but then had proved rough and frightening and impossible. Hargett, without seeming even to try, had been slippery as an eel dipped in oil. Pete recalled all the near-misses, starting with the foul-up outside Palmer Stadium. How ironic that when Izzie did finally go down, he’d given up the ghost all on his own. But it was as though even then Izzie won. Pete had hardly begun to reap the fruits, to gather up the king-of-the-world’s leavings, when a hoodoo or god or the devil’s own luck had smashed down on him, so that Evangelidos Psyllos too ironically would in a sense be gone forever.

  He heard the doorbell buzz, boring through the radio noises and the bedroom’s closed door. He felt uneasy. Why? It was a neighbor woman probably, come to gossip or borrow an egg. He then heard the door shut, almost slam. Odd. A second later, again the buzzing. Then he could hear old Katerina shouting. But what about? Who would be ringing twice like that, some never-give-up salesman? So late on a Saturday afternoon? Or (and this thought worried him) was someone looking for him? No matter. Katerina and Marullio both were solid as rocks. They’d reveal nothing about him to anyone.