Before Kristin was back with our iced tea, Mick had emerged from the office in back, a paper bag in hand. “I had the devil’s own time finding a bag to put this in,” he said, “as if it would have been a hardship to tuck it under your arm and carry it unwrapped through the streets. We’ve no place for it in the house, and himself made the mistake of admiring it.”
I knew what it was before Elaine got it out of the bag, a 9x12 framed Irish landscape.
“It’s Conor Pass in the Dingle peninsula,” Kristin said. “It really looks like that, too. I think it’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.”
“It’s a hand-colored steel engraving,” Elaine said. “There was no color printing at the time, so there were people who added color one at a time by hand. There’s a lost art for you, but then so’s steel engraving.”
“The few arts not yet lost,” Mick said, “have their heads on the chopping block, waiting for technology to lop them off.” His hand moved first to the bottle, then to the water pitcher, then back to the bottle; he picked it up and poured a small measure of good Cork whiskey into his glass.
“Quite the affair last night,” he said.
“I was going to ask.”
“Oh, it was a right hooley. They paid their twenty dollars at the door and for that they got to drink until the well ran dry. ’Twas for the help, you know. I had four men working, and they got to divide just over eight thousand dollars.”
“Not bad for a night’s work.”
“Well, it was a long night, and that crowd kept them hopping. But they had their tips on top of that, and the tips are decent when the drinks are free.” He’d had his glass in his hand, and now he took the smallest sip from it. “I stood at the door taking the money, and being asked the same fucking questions all night long. ‘Wasn’t it terrible that the greedy landlord sold the building out from under me?’”
Kristin laid a hand on his arm. “When all along,” she said, “the man himself was the greedy landlord.”
“I was the best landlord that ever lived,” he said. “Three floors above me packed full with rent-controlled tenants, and the heat bill for the building was higher than its rent roll, and I never even bothered putting in for what rent increases the law allowed me.”
“A saint,” Elaine said.
“I was that. If the Creator were half the landlord I was, Adam and Eve would never have left Eden. My lot would be late with the rent, they might not pay for months on end, and I gave them no trouble. If there’s one thing that’ll save me a bit of time in Purgatory, it’s how I treated my tenants. And then, as a final sweetener, I gave each of them fifty thousand dollars to move.”
I said that was generous.
“I could well afford it. Don’t ask what Rosenstein got them to pay for the building.”
“I won’t.”
“I’ll tell you anyway. Twenty-one million dollars.”
“A nice round sum.”
“The sum,” he said, “was to be twenty million, which is rounder if not so nice, and then Rosenstein went back to them and said his client was fond of the old English system, and preferred guineas to pounds. Are you familiar with guineas?”
“You don’t mean Italians.”
“A guinea was a gold coin,” he said, “back when they had such an article, and it was the nearest thing to a pound sterling, but with twenty-one shillings instead of twenty. So a price in guineas is five percent higher than the same in pounds. I suspect the notion died out when decimal currency came in, but there was a time when your carriage trade liked prices in guineas. Rosenstein told me he didn’t really expect this to work, but that it wouldn’t be outrageous enough to kill the deal altogether, and we could always back off and take the twenty. But they paid us in guineas after all.”
“And that small lagniappe paid off your tenants.”
“It did.” He put his glass down. “You’d have thought they’d won the Powerball, and in a sense they had. Of course there was one wee fucker, fourth floor rear on the left, who thought there might be a toy or two left in Santa’s sack. ‘Oh, I don’t know, Mr. Ballou, and where am I gonna move to, and how’ll I find something decent that I can afford, and all the expenses of relocation.’”
I could see the shadow of a smile on Kristin’s face.
“I looked at him,” Mick said, “and did I settle a hand on his shoulder? No, I don’t believe I did. I just held him with my eyes, and I lowered my voice, and I said I knew he’d be able to move, and move quickly, as it would be unsafe for him and his loved ones to be in the presence of men whose job it was to knock things down and blow them up. And in the end his was the first apartment vacated. Can you imagine?”
Kristin clasped her hands, looking like Lois Lane. “My hero,” she said.
It’s not impossible to take me by surprise, but I can’t think of anything that did so more utterly than Mick’s announcement of his upcoming marriage to Kristin. It was at Grogan’s that I learned of it, after some preliminary speculation on what happens after you die. I’d been bracing myself for bad news when he asked me to be his best man.
Elaine swears she saw it coming, and can’t imagine how I didn’t.
Kristin came into our lives when her parents left theirs, the victims of a particularly horrible home invasion. The madman who orchestrated it wasn’t finished; he wanted her and the house and the money, and it didn’t stop him when I spiked his first try. He came back a few years later, and didn’t miss by much.
I got Mick to baby-sit her, confident that no one would get past him. They sat in the kitchen of her brownstone. They drank coffee and played cribbage. I suppose they talked, though I couldn’t guess what they talked about.
That’s the same house in which she discovered her parents’ bodies. She went on living there, because she is far tougher at the core than you’d think, and she lives there now as my friend’s wife, and if they’re as unlikely a couple as Beauty and the Beast, you lose sight of the disparity after a few minutes in their company. He’s a big man, hard and forbidding as an Easter Island monolith, and she looks to be a frail and slender slip of a girl. He’s forty years her senior. She’s a child of privilege, while he’s a Hell’s Kitchen hoodlum who’s killed grown men with his hands.
And she settles her hand on his arm, and beams while he tells his stories.
There was a silence, with an unasked question hovering. Elaine broke the one and asked the other. Did he regret the sale?
“No,” he said, and shook his head. “Why should I? I could run it a thousand years and not take twenty million dollars out of it. And if it’s a neighborhood institution, and enough people felt they had to say so last night, well, it’s one the neighborhood’s well off without.”
“There’s history here,” I said.
“There is, and most of it misfortunate. Crimes planned, oaths sworn and broken. You were here on the worst night of all.”
“I was remembering it just now.”
“How could you not? Two men in the doorway, spraying bullets as if they were watering the flowers. One tosses a bomb, and I can see the arc of it now, and the flash before the sound of it, like lightning before thunder.”
The room went still again, until Mick got to his feet. “We need music,” he announced. “They were supposed to come this afternoon for the Wurlitzer, the truck from St. Vincent de Paul. The creature’s not old enough to be valuable or new enough to be truly useful, but they said they’d find a home for it. If they get here tomorrow or Monday they’re welcome to it, assuming I’m here to let them in. On Tuesday the building changes hands, and what’s in it belongs to the new owner, and most likely goes into a landfill along with the bricks and floorboards. You haven’t any use for it, have you? Or a two-ton Mosler safe? I didn’t think so. What would you like to hear?”