She stared at me for a long moment. I thought I might have seen something terribly sad in her face but then was sure I hadn’t because she was too tough to let me see anything she didn’t want me to see. “What I think of you, Victor, is that you’re drunk on this marble conference table and these fine prints of Old Philadelphia and these free Cokes. And that when you sober up, you’re going to be very sorry for all that you did while under the influence.”
She stood and stared down at me. “Morris wants you to call him,” she said coldly before she left, stranding me with the embossed pens and piles of yellow pads and antique prints. I took another sip of soda.
I turned back to the Valley Hunt Estates papers and read again the list of limited partners who had already agreed to buy into the deal. There was an entry that puzzled me, a partnership purchased by one set of initials for the benefit of another. I was still looking it over, trying to figure it all out, when Jack and Simon Bishop came into the room.
“How’s it all looking, Victor?” asked Simon.
“Great,” I said. “There’s only one thing that troubles me.”
“I don’t fancy the numbers in the five-year pro forma, either,” said Jack, holding in his hand the financial projection prepared for the prospectus. “The numbers are too high.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “The numbers look fine.”
“They look smashing to me,” said Simon. “We’ll sell out within a week.”
“And be sued within a year if things don’t work out,” said Jack.
“They’ll work out, Jack,” said Simon. “They always do. But let’s deal with it later. Right now we’re off to dinner. You coming, Victor?”
I looked at them, their round faces as open to me as an invitation, and whatever concerns I might have had disappeared in the warmth of their generosity. “Sure,” I said. “Dinner sounds great.” I followed them into the elevator for the ride to the parking garage and their Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow.
They took me to a fine French restaurant, a small place in a fancy suburb. It was a long drive but Simon told me it would be worth it and it was. The place was full, a mob of swells waiting at the bar, but the man at the door knew the Bishops and led us right to an empty table by a window. They were actually a jolly pair, these Bishops. I had first thought them to be very stiff and very formal, but that was just their surface manner. Underneath they were great fun, full of rollicking appetites and a taste for fine wines. Halfway into our second bottle I excused myself to make a call.
“Victor, is that you, Victor?”
“Yes, Morris. It’s me.”
“You have a cold or something, Victor? You don’t sound yourself.”
“I’m just a little tired, but I wanted to return your call.”
“You must take care of yourself, Victor. That’s number one. What I do when I’m oysgamitched from all the work, I pick up a bottle of Manischewitz that’s good and thick like a medicine, I lie in bed, turn on the news, drink the wine, fall asleep to Peter Jennings, and when I wake up I’m the old Morris. You should try it.”
“What about chicken soup?”
“Forget what they tell you. Chicken soup in bed it creates such a mess, all that splashing. News I have for you, Victor. Mine son, the computer genius, he has a phone right in his computer and he pulls out a register of marinas and starts looking for our man.”
“Any luck?”
“Calm your shpilkehs and let me tell you. So first he looks under the thief’s name. Stocker. Plugs it in, the search takes an hour, more, the cost of the call is so high I don’t want to say it over the phone.”
“We’ll cover it.”
“Of course. I’m in this business to lose money to AT &T? So word finally comes back, no Stocker. So I think that our friend the accountant might not have sold his boat so fast so we looked up The Debit, and sure enough we get the listings of five boats called The Debit. Five accountants with the same idea, a conspiracy of accountants. So we check them all and, what do you know, there is only one thirty-foot sloop. I still couldn’t tell you what a sloop is, but mine son, he says he knows, and The Debit anchored in a marina just south of St. Augustine, Florida, is a thirty-foot sloop. Owned by a man named Cane. So I happen to know that cane in German is stock.”
“You happen to know?”
“I just happen to know, so I think maybe it’s the same man. So I call the marina and they get hold of our Mr. Cane.”
“And it’s him?”
“Accht, let me finish.”
“Morris, you’re a genius.”
“Victor, so you’ve finally caught on. Yes, with all modesty, I confess that I am. But no, Mr. Cane was not Mr. Stocker. He’s Mr. Cane, Nathan Cane, his father was a Cantowitz. He sells real estate and he sold a big house or something so he says he splurges and buys this boat, The Debit.”
“From who?”
“Funny, that’s exactly what I asked. He says he bought it from a Mr. Radbourn, a little pisher, he tells me. All the papers were in order. So I ask him who Radbourn got it from and he looks on the bill of sale and it turns out Mr. Stocker sold it to Mr. Radbourn, and if you ask me, from the description, Mr. Stocker and Mr. Radbourn are one in the same. He transferred it to himself to make it harder to find him.”
“So what we have now, Morris, is the boat but no Stocker.”
“Exactly right. You’re very quick there, Victor.”
“So what do we do?”
“Well, of course, I figure our friend the thief he likes boats too much not to have one, and he has the money, so I figure he bought himself something else, and this time something bigger. A chazer bliebt a chazer, right? So we check the marina records again for a Mr. Radbourn. Gornisht. We check the records for the sale of a boat larger than thirty feet at around the same place and time and you know what we found?”
“What?”
“Hundreds. Too many to check. To check them all would take us six months.”
“So we’re done.”
“Not yet, Victor. We talk again to our friend Mr. Cane, a nice man, really. He promised to set me up with a condo deal if I decide to move south for mine retirement. When it gets colder like it is now I start thinking that maybe shvitzing is not the worst thing in the world. So he seems to remember Mr. Radbourn mentioning something about going across the state and buying something on the west coast of Florida, where he heard prices they might be cheaper.”
“So what does that tell us, Morris?”
“It narrows it down. Our friend Mr. Stocker, I tell you with much confidence, our friend Mr. Stocker is right now, right this instant, in a boat larger than a thirty-foot sloop, living under some other name, docked in a marina somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico.”
When I returned to the table, the Bishops were laughing loudly at something. The laughter died slowly when they saw me. “Who died, Victor?” asked Simon. “You look like the plague.”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”
My veal was on the table now, three delicate medallions in a light lemon sauce. I finished the wine in my glass and Jack quickly filled it again. For a moment I felt a slight sense of disappointment. I had almost believed that the strange and mystical Morris Kapustin could do anything he put his mind to, and his finding Stocker would have opened a different door for me, more difficult yes, confrontational yes, but also less reliant on the them that had always disappointed me before. It had been a nice belief, Morris as savior, warming in its way, like a Jimmy Stewart movie, but Stocker was lost somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico and that door was closed and I was here at this prime table in this exclusive restaurant with two of the richest men in the city buying me dinner. The future was shaping up with great clarity. I would settle out Saltz and follow along sheepishly in United States v. Moore and Concannon. I would avoid all bullets aimed at rear windows of imported cars. I would placate the paranoid Norvel Goodwin and the suspicious Chuckie Lamb with my inactivity. I would keep screwing Veronica in secret and write my opinion letters for Valley Hunt Estates and collect my fat fees and step into my future and all would be right with the world.