The Best Revenge (6 page)

In my circles, people don't call each other liars except behind the other person's back.

Ben, I never lied to his father. Pay attention. Don't lie. Use your brain.

“What my accountant tells me,” Manucci went on, “is that in your business you're the general partner and the investors are limited partners, and when all the money's in, the partnership is allowed to start spending it and not before. He tells me this play of yours been in rehearsal for six weeks, you're headed out of town for bookings, and the partnership is a long way from closing. Is that true?”

I nodded.

“Who's been shelling out for the actors?”

“I have.”

“Personally?”

“That's the only kind of money I've got.”

“What about the set, isn't that expensive?”

“In this case, yes,” I said.

“And it's built?”

“It had to be.”

“Who paid for it?”

“I haven't yet.”

“You're going to get the set builder mad if you don't pay.”

I nodded, trying to smile.

“In fact,” Manucci said, “I had a little talk with your set builder before you came. He says he's going to close you down out of town unless he gets paid.”

“He'll get paid.”

“Out of what? You've raised only twenty percent of the money you need and no more's coming in.”

“Twenty-two percent,” I said, hopeless. He'd researched everything.

I stood up so his eyes would have to follow me as I paced.

I said, “Mr. Manucci, you know I'm here to discuss an investment
from you that would enable the show to go forward on schedule, but I have to be sure…the money is clean. I don't mean to pry—”

“You're prying,” he cut me off. His face was chiseled stone. Then the muscles in his cheeks relaxed. I'd have hired him as a character actor in a flash.

“I don't know what you know about me, Mr. Riller. I'm going to tell you. When you sit down.”

I retreated to my place on the sofa opposite him.

“When you pick a play, Mr. Riller, it's got to meet your standards, right?”

I nodded.

“Would you have produced
Let My People Come
,
one of those things?”

“No.”

“It's got to be something you want to be associated with, right? Right,” he said. “I don't do narcotics because I don't want to be associated with something that hurts a lot of people I don't want to hurt. You understand?”

I nodded.

“There's nothing I do that would foul up kids,” he said. “Besides, the hard stuff is dangerous for guys who run it because the cops've got a rod up their ass about narcotics. You know why?”

I didn't.

“Because they're jealous. You'd be too if you were a cop. You make thirty something a year after a long haul, and some low-level dealer's making that much a week? A cop does his twenty years, what kind of a civilian job does he get? Directing traffic to a teller's window in some bank? A drug dealer, if he doesn't get caught, he's got a lifetime career. The cops hate dealers for the same reason a lot of people hate Jews, pure jealousy. I don't want to get in the middle of that kind of psychology. Have a cigar?”

From the desk he brought over a box of Macanudo coronas.

“Only after dinner,” I said, waving the box away. Ezra, offered the box as an afterthought, took one.

“Take another one for later,” Manucci said, clipping off the end of Ezra's cigar.

“Can we get back to the business at hand?” I said.

Manucci's face froze. He'd offered the cigars. He liked telling me about his business. I'd made a crack about the source of his money, and that opened him up, and now I'd shut him up.

“Mr. Riller,” he said, “the business at hand was your needing four hundred plus. I was explaining to you that every bill that crosses my desk is as clean as your wife's face. I don't think you want to listen, you just want to talk. You think you're up on a stage or something? You think you're in charge of this conversation? I'll tell you something, Riller, you aren't in charge of anything anymore.”

My pride forced me to my feet.

“You going somewhere?”

How repair this? I looked at Ezra.

Manucci said, “If you're going, take your babysitter with you.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Ezra said.

I walked the rest of the way to the door as if I were underwater in a diver's heavy helmet.

Ezra came after me. “Ben,” he said, “wait a minute.” And in a whisper, “What'll you tell Sam Glenn?”

I needed to loosen my tie, undo the top button of my shirt so I could breathe.

Manucci's voice caught me. “Hey Riller,” he said, “this is a business discussion, isn't it?”

4

Nick Manucci

Sure
everybody said
my old man was terrific,
did they ever ask my mother or me for a reference?

With Mama he never went off the wall because she was going to be the mother of his bambinos, right? His fun was other women. With her he was like she was some religious figure who lived in the house. He gave orders to her just like he did to the priest.

Nice man. You think that body spiked on the iron fence flew there? You crossed Aldo Manucci and you crossed the River Styx at the same time.

In high school, come my senior year I had to talk college to him. You needed college for anything, right?

That terrific man didn't ask for a discussion with me about my life, he had it all figured out. “I want you go first class, Harvard, Yale, something like that. You become bigshot for big company, General Electric, General Motors, something like that.”

Finished?

“Papa, with respect,” I said. “I don't want to be part of General nobody. I want to be on my own like you.”

“Maybe you don't have brains to be on your own. Maybe you not smart enough to go Harvard Yale.”

“If you wanted me to be like you,” I said, “why didn't you marry a woman as smart as you?”

“I married your mother!” he shouted.

“My brain is half yours. Maybe it's her half that isn't good enough!”

The old lion smacked my face so hard the mark stayed for three days.

*

I
hung
in
my
room like it was a cave, the shade down, the ceiling light off. I pissed in my baseball trophy so I wouldn't have to go down the hall to the toilet except when they were asleep.

I kept the door locked. I wouldn't let him come into the room even when he said through the door that if I apologized he'd make peace.

On the third day I let my mother in.

She stood there, holding her arms out to me. Not a word.

She held me tight against her breasts, patted my head, humming some Italian song from long ago.

It was like dope.

Then she said, “Nicko, he tell me what you say. I forgave you, Nicko. Now you forgive him.”

*

That old moneylender
sure knew how to put a proposition to your head. Pick any college. Major in anything. He'd
lend
me the money. But if I went to a college he approved of and majored in business, the money wouldn't be a loan, it'd be a gift.

I didn't want to come out of school owing him anything.

The only business school in the area I could get into was NYU, where I learned all the rules my old man violated. They taught us never confuse employees with people. My father confused them all the time. Also, some borrower give him a story, he'd give the borrower two, three more days. Soft! If one of his collectors goofed, he'd give him a warning before firing him, a waste of time. NYU taught us time was your asset, the more successful you were the bigger that asset. My old man wasted time listening to people's stories that didn't have anything to do with how much they could pay back. He was like a country grocery store, that's why he never made it out of Little Italy.

My father's way was horse-and-buggyville, getting hooked by customers' stories, meeting their families, that shit. My business was to
sell money. The guys who borrow big from banks use the phone. The guys who borrow from me, they're not thinking about buying a car if they find the right model. They have a hard-on for money that won't let them think of anything else and it won't go away unless they get it. The little guy's got a MasterCard, he's borrowing every time he uses his plastic, he doesn't have to ask. The man who comes into my office couldn't make it if he had a hundred Visas in his pocket. He knows how much he needs. He can't walk to another showroom. It's a dangerous business. If a starving man walks into a supermarket, he'll steal. In this supermarket the goods aren't lying around on shelves. People starving for money can get crazy. Guys who put out oil rig fires, they get paid a lot, don't they? Guys like me put out a businessman's fire. When one of them welshes and you go to get your money and he puts his hands around your throat, he forgets it's business, he thinks he has a right to kill you. Which is why I frame deals so the guy knows I've got his short hairs, so he won't be tempted to welsh, or to get rough. My customers don't have a list of approved suppliers. It's either me or the mob, and who wouldn't rather deal with me?

*

When that
Ivy
League
putz
Riller and his nothing lawyer headed for the door, they were doing what a lot of them do, pretending to be heading somewhere when they had nowhere to go except back to me. I could see his lawyer stirring the sawdust in his brain.

Riller turned around as if I had him on a string. “Mr. Manucci,” he said to me, “you're right, this is a business discussion. The real negotiator in the family is my wife.”

“Oh? What does she do?”

I looked at Mr. No-Guts. I figured his wife for one of those Greta Garbo types that tries to make you feel you're part of the wallpaper. I'd have guessed she's an actress who gets her jobs through Mr. Big, then puts her ass out for him to kiss.

“She's a literary agent,” Riller said. “She negotiates hard bargains every day.”

I'd give her something hard to bargain for.

He said, “I'd like you to meet my wife sometime.”

“It would be my pleasure,” I said.

Riller reminds me of Boxhead Armitage, dean of admissions, the supersnob who needed to replace eight grand he'd slipped out of the college treasury, one bill at a time, for a necessity. Necessity my ass,
Boxhead spent all the dough on his new wife, a people-in-the-street-stopper. He brought her around to prove it to me. She looked like Princess Grace, and I treated her, putting a chair under her ass when she sat down, lighting her cigarette, all that. Boxhead was fucking stupid about the way he fixed the books. An audit team was on the way in. His collateral wasn't worth filing a UCC form for. I tried sending him away, but he pulled me aside and said as part of the deal would I like to spend a weekend with his Princess Grace? You'd never catch an Italian doing what these boxheads do. If these guys need dough bad enough, they let a stranger play with their best toy. If my father'd owed five million to Mussolini he wouldn't have let him play with home goods for one second even if one feel wiped out the debt. The only guy I ever personally took care of was the one who picked Mary for a pigeon and made the mistake of boasting about it.

When Armitage repeated the offer, I looked over at Miss Clean pretending she's paying attention to
New York
magazine. A weekend's too long for any broad, I told Boxhead, one evening's okay, and since he needed the cash immediately, how about today as watching her goods got my motor running.

Afterward, while I was driving her home, I knew why she'd agreed. It takes savvy to get one of those iceboxes warmed up. On her back that lady was no Princess Grace, she was a hollerer. I let her take the envelope with the cash to him. I made sure she knew it wasn't pay. It was a loan at ten percent a week. Maybe her Dean boy could get a loan from his rich mother he'd avoided seeing since he married Princess Grace. Mama Armitage, the way he described her, was supposed to be class. Maybe she saw through Princess Grace. As this princess was getting out of my car I thought of something. “Honey,” I said, “any week you bring the interest, you don't have to make a payment on principal. If your husband makes the drop, I want ten percent of the principal, suit yourself.”

You see how easy it is to keep a beautiful relationship going? I saw them together only once more, when Boxhead came to tell me that though he'd put the money back they'd traced what they called the defalcation and asked him to resign. He had to get a job in some other city, and there was still fifteen hundred on my books. At the outset I had told him one condition was no skipping town, not even the appearance of skipping town, or the whole loan comes due and payable immediately, and I had a surefire method of finding anybody anywhere.
Boxhead didn't know what to do, right?