The Hazards of Good Fortune

by Seth Greenland

  “We ain’t boys,” Dag said. “You bush league, man. Rinky-dink.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Get your ass outta my house.”

  “C’mon, D’Angelo—”

  “I’m done with you, man.”

  Once more, Jamal thought about making a case to Dag, but he would not debase himself. He was aware of the value Dag placed on comportment. He was not going to point out everything they had accomplished, all of the money they had made together. When the agent turned toward his biggest client, now former client, he humbly lowered his eyes.

  “Thank you for letting me represent you,” Jamal said.

  “I gotta get mine,” Dag explained.

  Jamal left and Dag was alone in the kitchen. He thought about joining the entourage in the TV room. Maybe smoking a little weed and playing NBA 2K would get his mind off the situation. But he quickly dismissed the thought when he realized hanging out with Trey, Babatunde, and Lourawls would only remind him of his obligations. His obligations! Damn, he spent a lot of money. And his earning window, if Jamal’s report was anywhere near correct, appeared to be closing. Best-case scenario he could play another five or six years. Then what? He saw the kinds of penny-ante products ex-players were asked to endorse. Stain removers and cockroach traps. The big payday? Forget that. You grabbed the main chance by the neck, and if you still had game, you wrung every dollar out of it. He knew he was worth a max deal and he suspected the owner agreed with him.

  Owner. Dag didn’t like that word. In the sphere of Ameri­can race relations, its connotations were unavoidable. During union negotiations with the league, there was always one player that would refer to the NBA as a “plantation,” but Dag refused to countenance that interpretation. No one got millions of dollars to endorse sneakers on any plantation he knew. Still, it chafed him that the ownership class appeared to be a photographic negative of the league itself. He was aware that it was beyond his ability to alleviate centuries of systematized inequality single-handedly. But getting a max deal from Jay Gladstone was something else. That he could do.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In the winter of 1911, a young Russian immigrant named Yacov Glatstein arrived in London with a few coins in his tattered pocket. With the stroke of an official’s pen, he became Jacob Gladstone. Soon he discovered that to be a Jew in England was not something to which a sensible person would aspire and a year later sailed for America, bearing only the clothes he wore and his shiny new name. In New York, the industrious greenhorn found work with a cousin who was a plumber on the Lower East Side. He married a young factory worker named Ida Abramovitch, fathered two sons and a daughter, and less than a decade later had his own successful plumbing business with other workmen in his employ and jobs in all five boroughs. When the exultant racket of the 1920s flung the entire city skyward and all new construction required sinks, tubs, toilets, showers, pipes, and drains, Jacob was ready. In the years after World War II, Gladstone Plumbing was one of the most successful outfits in the city, designing and fitting the innards of addresses where the brash century’s Anglo-Saxon elite turned the taps with unsoiled fingers.

  Jacob’s sons, Bernard (who acquired the nickname Bingo as a student at James Monroe High School) and Jerome (always called Jerry), enlisted in the armed forces, served, respectively, in Europe and the Pacific, and, upon their discharges, followed their father into the business where they contributed to its continued growth. Bingo married Helen and begat Jay and Beatrice. Jerry’s contribution to the legacy consisted of his wife, the former Estelle Schatz, and their children, Franklin and Deborah (now married to a radiologist and living in Chicago).

  Bingo and Jerry worked like camels, pooled their money, and bought their first apartment building in the Bronx in the late fifties. In the sixties, they started developing real estate— the brothers had a preternatural ability to intuit what marginal neighborhoods would cycle back from the near-doom of white flight to the advent of gentrification—and a decade later were among the wealthiest real estate families in New York City.

  More than merely capitalists, the Gladstones were civic-minded boosters lavishly donating to public projects around the city, a fountain at Lincoln Center, a copse of birch trees in Central Park, grace notes that belied their aggressive business practices. In the dire, arson-scarred 1970s, the Gladstones were among the real estate dynasties that, by agreeing to pay six hundred million dollars in property taxes a year ahead of time, helped save the metropolis from—FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD screamed the infamous Daily News headline—bankruptcy. In Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, Gladstone Properties built middle-class housing under the Mitchell-Lama plan. They were not known for their aesthetic aspirations: “Whatever its blocky design and red-brick facades might lack in poetry,” a prominent architecture critic wrote, “the Gladstone brothers more than compensate for in welcome efficiency.” Years later, the Wall Street Journal quoted Bingo: “We gave the people what they wanted at a price they could afford. We took them out of public housing, out of ghettos. And I put our name on it. Our first big project, my brother wanted to call it Windsor Court. I said, ‘What are we, English?’”

  Jay idolized his late father, but where Bingo blustered, his son was smooth. Bingo ordered, Jay cajoled. The Bronx and World War II formed Bingo, who never lost his New York accent. Jay was a creature of Westchester County and the Ivy League, and when he spoke, it was impossible to discern his birthplace. He could raise his voice but preferred to whisper. And where Bingo was intuitive, a believer in gut instincts, Jay preferred to talk things over. Of all the highly competent, well-remunerated people who worked for the Gladstone Group, the one whose guidance Jay consistently sought was his sister Beatrice, known to everyone as Bebe.

  If you were to ask Jay what Bebe’s finest qualities were, he would say her keenness of insight and her loyalty. What Jay could not say, because it would reflect a degree of psychological insight he did not possess, was that Bebe, while capable, assertive, and accomplished, was also skillful enough to let her older brother shine.

  “This isn’t going to fly,” she said. Her voice was like the lower register of an oboe, clear and penetrating.

  Jay was seated on a sofa in his sister’s large office on the 44th floor of the steel and glass tower on Park Avenue just north of Grand Central Station built by their father and uncle in the 1980s. She was opposite him in a pearl gray chair. The siblings usually checked in with each other in person several times throughout the day. Bebe had redone the space in the mid-century modern style popularized by a current television drama. Several framed and matted photographs of Palm Springs, California, taken by Julius Shulman, were arranged on one wall. The wall opposite featured a geometric painting by Piet Mondrian, one of two recently purchased by Bebe in an auction at Sotheby’s (the other hung in her East 73rd Street duplex). On the teardrop shaped coffee table, a small Henry Moore sculpture commanded attention. Three years younger than Jay, Bebe’s attractive face was tanned from a recent European ski vacation. Through diet and thrice-weekly workouts with a trainer, she retained a youthful physique. Her hair was dyed honey blonde and fell loosely to the shoulders of her cream-colored pullover. She wore matching wool drill trousers, ankle high black boots of the softest leather. Her jewelry—earrings, a bracelet—was straightforward and stylish. There was a folder on her lap and she had just finished scanning the contents.

  “What do I tell Franklin?” Jay asked although he knew the answer.

  “He needs to present more thorough documentation.”

  “You don’t think he could be stealing?”

  “I hope not,” Bebe said. A graduate of Smith, she served on the boards of several cultural institutions (generously funded by the Gladstone Family Foundation, of which she was the president), where she was known for her ability to understand spreadsheets and budgets.

  “Do you want me to talk to him with you?”

  “He’ll
think we’re ganging up and then he’ll tell Ari and Ezra to join the meeting.”

  “We don’t want the twins,” Bebe said.

  They no longer bothered to roll their eyes when either invoked the names of Franklin’s twin sons. Because the young men were Gladstones, Jay and Bebe tolerated their presence in the family business, but Ari and Ezra did not yet warrant respect. It was unspoken between Jay and Bebe that neither believed this was a remote possibility. The mention of his young cousins sent Jay’s mind reeling back to the previous evening and the malevolent twins he encountered on the deserted concourse of the arena. He wondered if their appearance portended some incipient nastiness—their materialization seemingly out of nowhere had been strange—but quickly dismissed the idea. He considered relating what had happened to Bebe but repressed any further thought on the subject. Instead, he told her about the invitation he had received from the president of Tate College.

  His sister was impressed. “And what are you going to tell the graduates?”

  “I’m going to talk about the joys of working with relatives.”

  Bebe’s laugh filled the room.

  The last Gladstone project built in New York City was a residential rental building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan nearly ten years earlier, while Bingo and Jerry were still nominally running the business. It was a reliable moneymaker for the family, but like much of what Jay’s father and uncle had done, architecturally undistinguished. Jay wanted to leave his mark on the portfolio and his imprint on the metropolis, so he was in the process of arranging to purchase the city land on which a Brooklyn branch library currently stood. On that parcel, he intended to build the tallest structure in Brooklyn, one that would redraw the skyline, now a feast of rectilinear tedium. To that end, he had retained the world-renowned architect Renzo Piano, and his design for the Sapphire was, in Jay’s view, nothing short of a tone poem composed of steel and glass. The gently curving structure—to Jay it suggested the hip of a female athlete, forceful, tensile, a hint of motion—didn’t contain a single straight line and rose to just over a thousand feet, nearly doubling the height of Brooklyn’s next tallest building. The Sapphire would be to the Brooklyn skyline what the Empire State Building has been to Manhattan’s; the signature, the flourish. When illuminated, it would blaze like a monumental gemstone. Let the other developers erect their boring modernist boxes. Jay would bring the soul. As for the library that he planned to demolish, he intended to replace it with a more modest, mostly subterranean, state-of-the-art version.

  Sipping a double espresso, Jay stood in his large office admiring Renzo Piano’s scale model. Rendered in paper, wood, and titanium, the Brancusi-like sweep had been difficult to fabricate. Three feet tall, it rested on a table surrounded by a mock-up of the projected landscaping. On the wall behind the model hung the architectural drawings. Jay had thought the plans would only be there temporarily, but it had been over a year since he had pinned them up. In the many fights with local groups who viewed the project with everything from suspicion to outright contempt, gazing at them on his office wall every day was a constant reminder to remain steadfast. Jay’s vision would be forty-two stories when complete. The plan he intended to submit to the city was for a building of only forty stories, the zoning limit for the area. He did not want to apply for a waiver and was willing to gamble that the city did not want to spend years in expensive litigation over an edifice that would be the envy of the world.

  Jay finished the espresso and placed the cup on the coffee table next to a transparent case that held a scuffed baseball. He opened the case, removed the ball, and felt the rough red stitching with his fingers. It was a souvenir from his Little League team in 1967, when he was twelve. They were called the Gas House Gang, after the mighty St. Louis Cardinal teams of the 1940s, and Bingo was the coach. The players had all signed the ball, their decades-old signatures now faded. For years Bingo had kept the memento on his desk. It was a talisman, an object of connection, and although Jay was not superstitious, he would occasionally touch it for luck.

  While some builders slap their names in huge gold letters on everything, trumpeting their importance directly into the world’s collective ear, Jay preferred to operate in a less brazen mode and this was reflected in his office décor. Thick solid mahogany moldings, raised paneled walls, and fluted pilasters with a hand-rubbed “French polish” finish. The Carpathian walnut burled desk. The leather and antique brass nail head Chesterfield couch and matching overstuffed guest chairs. The sculptural bronze and smoked glass coffee table that lay on the antique hand-dyed Indian print rug.

  The traditional design of the office contrasted with Renzo Piano’s thrilling display, and Jay applauded the difference. The tedious boxes that currently comprised the Brooklyn skyline would, in their aggressive tepidness, serve as a neutral background against which Jay’s dynamic slash of steel and glass would instantly draw the eye. The bold strokes of this building might not have been in keeping with his more low-key modus operandi, but he had his reasons for undertaking something so striking. The Sapphire would be the first New York City project he was going to build out of Bingo’s long shadow, and, if it went well, it might also be his last.

  Like many individuals of his great station, Jay saw a larger role for himself in the world than that afforded him by the real estate business and professional sports. Civic life had long drawn his interest, and he had donated bountiful sums of money to the Democratic Party. Particularly unstinting when Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he developed a friendly relationship with the magnetic senator, even playing golf with him on Martha’s Vineyard two years earlier in a foursome that included the U.S. Trade Representative, and former NBA great Charles Barkley. Through appropriate channels Jay conveyed that, in the event of Obama’s re-election, he would like to be appointed the ambassador to Germany. Until his dying day, his father refused to contribute a dime to the German economy. When his friends purchased Mercedes, Bingo stuck resolutely to Cadillacs. He could never forgive. Jay’s ambassadorship would be Bingo’s revenge. To this end, he had been meeting with a German language tutor. Recently, he had stood in front of his bathroom mirror and intoned: Als Botschafter, begrube ich Sie auf die US-Botschaft un jetzt bitte kussen sie meinen Judischen kiester. Which translated to: As the ambassador, I welcome you to the American embassy, and now you may kiss my Jewish ass.

  That morning Jay went over cash flow reports. He met with the chief investment officer about a deal they were considering to build a mixed use high rise in Boston. The property manager briefed him on the situation with the union leader he was to meet with later in the day. When that meeting ended, Jay thought he might walk down the hall and talk to his cousin Franklin. He preferred to deal with things obliquely, and because he was not sure how obliquely he could accuse someone of embezzlement, he continued to put it off.

  At lunchtime, Jay met with his trainer, a young Israeli woman, at the executive gym two floors below his office. It was a well-designed space equipped with state-of-the-art strength training equipment, cardio machines, and ceiling-mounted television monitors always tuned to news or financial channels. He stretched and lifted, grunting and sweating through his routine. Several other Gladstone Group executives were exercising, engrossed by whatever played in their headphones. Gym etiquette required that they not address the boss unless he spoke to them first. On this day, Jay was not interested in conversation. He finished the workout, toweled off, and thanked his trainer.

  In the sauna, his thoughts jumped from Franklin to Nicole and her declaration about having a baby, to the Sapphire and the pride he would feel upon its completion, to his basketball team and what he would do if they failed to qualify for the playoffs. Losing was not in his nature. He ate a tuna sandwich at his desk as he drafted a letter to the NBA commissioner regarding the possibility of shortening the season. There had been too many injuries recently, and Jay believed fewer games would result in less wear and tear on his
guys. It was important to him that he be perceived by the players in the league as one of their advocates.

  When he left the office at the end of the day, he still had not spoken with Franklin.

  Jay and Boris sipped club sodas with lemon and bitters in the bar of the 21 Club. It was late afternoon, and they were talking about the Sapphire. Three Chinese businessmen sat at a corner table conversing in Mandarin. Jay was a popular figure in the building industry, as well regarded by the unions as anyone in his position could be. For this reason, he was asked from time to time by his colleagues to engage in back-channel communications during contentious negotiations.

  A white man in his forties arrived at the table. The dark suit he wore could barely contain his impressive musculature. A thick head of hair was moussed and he wore an ID bracelet. Boris stood to shake his hand. Jay remained seated. The man shook Jay’s hand first, and Jay introduced Boris.

  Gus Breeze registered the name Reznikov. “Any relation?”

  “His son,” Boris said.

  Breeze shrugged. Marat Reznikov had been the subject of an article in New York several years earlier. It had been years since Jay had spent time with him but he enjoyed seeing the reaction his name produced. To invoke it casually was not to overtly threaten, merely to inform. But the leader of the Service Employees International Union did not seem worried.

  A waiter appeared, and Breeze ordered a beer.

  The union contract was up, and it appeared that a labor action was imminent. If there were a strike, Jay knew it would inconvenience thousands of his tenants. Breeze told Jay that if all the union demands were not met, a strike would be unavoidable.

  The beer arrived and when the waiter tried to pour it into a glass Breeze waved him away and performed the task himself. He took a sip, then put the glass down on the table. Instead of speaking, he exhaled slowly through his lips like a tire losing air.