The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [81]
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