Youngblood hawke, p.88
Youngblood Hawke, page 88
"Gus, it's a lie about Scott not having money. Hawke Brothers is the biggest coal mining operation in Letchworth County, it's one of the big ones in eastern Kentucky, and Scott runs it."
Adam blew out a thick cloud of gray smoke from the depths of his lungs. "Well, Arthur, I've found out a good bit about that, checking into your mother's lawsuit. Actually I have a young cousin in Brightstar, a lawyer, who's doing most of the legwork. I'm not sure your mother's prospects are too good, but meantime there's some interesting stuff about Scotty. Your Uncle William left the stock of Hawke Brothers in trust for his children. Scotty represents his wife on the board, he draws a good salary, but the wealth is hers, he can't touch it, and what's more important his creditors can't. I'm sure he's delighted to have that coal property in his wife's name and wouldn't dream of changing it if he could. It's his whole base of operation. He's borrowed freely from Hawke Brothers and drawn a lot of salary over the years, and yet it's invulnerable. His airfield behind the Yalu River, you might say. I gather though—this is Urban Webber again, being very candid, which is sometimes the best smokescreen, but anyway—that there's bad blood between Scott and your cousin Glenn because Scott has borrowed far too much venture capital from Hawke Brothers, and so that tap has been completely shut off."
"What it comes to," Hawke said, "is that I'll have to pay Newton Leffer."
Adam said, "Inside of a great cloud of words, that's the message. With the cheerful postscript that this second mortgage is going to turn out to be very valuable, and Scotty's going to give you a nice bonus in the end for taking on the payment at this somewhat embarrassing turn."
Just then Scotty came into the lobby, followed by the doorman and a bellboy carrying packages with the large ribbony M trademark of the Mehlman department store. Scotty hailed Hawke and Adam with the greatest cheerfulness, and insisted that they come up to his suite for a drink. He was late, he said, because he had been with the Mehlman managers and lawyers until ten minutes ago, hammering out the lease. Everything was in good shape, and they were out of the woods at last. He tipped the doorman a dollar, gave the bellboy who carried up the packages in the elevator another dollar, and told him to bring setups for drinks. "Christ, I'm starving. We talked straight through lunch time," he said. "Those people sent out for some goddamn chicken sandwiches. New York chicken sandwiches, you know, all bread and mayonnaise and a teeny thin something in the middle that could be chicken or a sheet of toilet paper, it's always a good idea to check the chicken for a row of holes in this town. Chicken sandwiches!" He called room service and ordered a lobster cocktail, a filet mignon, ice cream and coffee. Adam and Hawke declined any food and Adam, saying he would have to leave shortly, told Scott of Newton Leffer's angry ultimatum.
Scotty seemed amused. "Good old Newt, he gets real fierce, don't he? He's a good guy and I think he'll give us a little more leeway, it's the only course that makes sense at this point." Whereupon he launched into his account of how the department store lease now stood.
The death of the president of the company remained the one difficulty, because Scott had dealt mainly with him. He was a man who had worked up to the presidency of the firm from floorwalker. The Mehlman family and their Philadelphia attorneys had always disliked him, but had advanced him because of his efficiency; however he had never been more than an employee. Since his death the family had been looking into rumors that he had enriched himself by juggling inventory, by taking bribes from the salesmen of large accounts, and so forth. They had as yet uncovered nothing, but they were reviewing every contract he had been negotiating at the time of his death, including the Paumanok Plaza lease.
"They'll never find anything on old Phil," said Scott. "Phil was a smart fellow and a damn fine administrator. He was in to me for about five thousand, but he wasn't a crook or anything, you just want to take care of a man who brings you a big lease like that. Those are the things I never charge you for, Art, they've got to come out of my own pocket because they can't show in the books, and Christ, they add up. Now in all fairness was I expected to anticipate that the poor sumbitch would drop dead? Newt's being unreasonable."
Scotty added that he had successfully survived a severe cross-examination on the lease by the attorneys. The only remaining snag was that another shopping center near Mineola had been bidding from the start for the big lease; and since "Phil's" death its builders had swarmed in on the attorneys and the Mehlman family, confusing the picture. The verdict of the attorneys at the meeting today had been that the Paumanok lease looked excellent, but they intended to order a whole new comparative analysis of the two centers, and Scotty would hear from them again in about four weeks.
The waiter was wheeling in Hoag's food on a table agleam with silver dish covers on a snowy cloth, brightened by fresh roses in a cut-glass vase. Scotty dropped this catastrophic news with the utmost nonchalance, at the same time lifting a dish cover and exclaiming at the appetizing look of the steak.
Hawke said, "Scott, for God's sake, do you know the implications of this? If Leffer calls the entire note tomorrow can you pay it? I can't. I can't begin to."
Scott sat and fell to with gusto on his lobster cocktail. He said gaily that Newton was just talking, that a sudden call like this was unheard of and would do Leffer no good. Why, they had nothing to fear from the Mineola competition! That center was badly built, badly located, and their terms actually were higher. The Mehlman lease was in the bag. There was just this four-week delay. Then he repeated Urban Webber's picture of his own affairs. "Hell, Art, I'm so cash-poor I'm travelling and living on Ellie's household money right now. These binds come along for any binness man. They temporary and they don't mean nothing." Six months hence, he said, all his jobs would be cleared up except Seven Oaks Farm, and he expected to have nearly a million dollars in cash. That was how it went. He was sure, he said (starting to devour the steak), that Leffer would gladly accept seventy-five thousand tomorrow, and if ole Art would just pay this installment Scott would give him his note for eighty thousand dollars plus six percent interest, payable on the first of January.
Scotty's blandness stupefied Hawke. He was slow to anger, and short of picking Scott up by the collar and punching him all over the luxurious suite, he had no idea how he could break through his good cheer and make this man acknowledge that he was pushing him to the edge of a major financial disaster if not actual bankruptcy.
Adam said harshly, "I've got to go. Scott, will you come with me to see Leffer at five and tell all this to him?"
"Why, sure," Scott said. "Be glad to. I'd like a little snooze first. Been going since dawn."
Adam said, "I'll be here in a cab at half-past four. I strongly advise you not to disappear again. You be in the lobby, waiting for me."
"Course, Gus, sorry I been so rushed. Art, you take my word for it, it's darkest before the dawn and you gonna clear half a million tax paid out of Paumanok Plaza."
Adam said at the door, "You'd better have some convincing explanation for Newton of those separate letters of agreement."
"What explanation?" Scott said. "Now goddamn it, that gets me a little sore, Gus. That's common binness practice! Don't Newton know that a lease next to a Mehlman branch is worth three times an ordinary lease? How does he think I got those high rentals? I be a sumbitch if I ever get into New York financing again. Bunch of nervous old ladies." He spoke these indignant words without heat, chewing on steak all the while.
Adam's hand was on the doorknob. "Scotty, by the way, what was the purpose of the Eleanor Coal Company?"
A large red chunk of steak, travelling on a fork toward Scott's mouth, halted in midair and dripped. Scott looked at Adam with an open countenance and said pleasantly, "The what?"
"The Eleanor Coal Company."
Scott shrugged. "I guess you got me. What's the Eleanor Coal Company?" He ate the piece of steak.
"Well, you know that Mrs. Hawke gave me her Frenchman's Ridge lawsuit to look over."
"Oh, that binness. No. Did she? That's a waste of time, Gus, the court took all of three hours to throw her case out."
"Well, I'm just wondering why you had to set up a separate Delaware corporation to mine that ridge."
"Oh, Jesus, Gus, that was years ago. Who can remember? The whole thing was a big bust, that's all I know. I never can follow Urban Webber's paper shuffling anyway, but you can ask him." He looked at Hawke and grinned. "Christ, I admire your mom, I swear. She never gives up, does she?"
2
Adam said in the elevator, "Ride up with me to my place. We can talk a little more."
"Sure," Hawke said. In all the time he had known Adam he had never visited the lawyer's apartment, and even the disasters crowding on him could not quench his writer's curiosity.
The lawyer sank into a corner of the cab seat, lit his pipe, and went into some kind of trance behind blue wreaths of smoke. "Business—or what our friend calls binness—is a rough game," he said at last, taking a peculiar professorial tone, as though he were facing a class. "Most business men who hold the leading places are like Ross Hodge—cold and tough, and out for their own profit, but honest. That's because fair dealing in the long run tends to pay off. Then there are the crooks, who keep popping up and going to jail. Then there's the twilight area of sharp practice where you find the Hoags and the Givneys. What bothers me is that the twilight zone seems to be broadening lately." He raised his thick eyebrows in a grin at Hawke and said in a drop to a conversational note, "Maybe that's because I've gotten so involved in your affairs, eh?"
Hawke said, "I do seem to have dragged you into a kind of freak show."
Adam said, "I wonder. You won't accept your pleasant fate as a distinguished artist. You keep looking for special deals, clever advantages, and inevitably I suppose you attract the twilight creatures. A first-rate builder doesn't need an author as a partner, and a solid publisher doesn't go about starting phony new houses. I don't say this in reproach, but as some guide to the future." Adam moved forward to the edge of the seat and stared at Hawke rather forbiddingly. "Now Arthur, you once asked me about bankruptcy. When we get home I'm going to give you some stuff to read. Don't get alarmed, I just want you to be a bit more informed in case we have to make some fast moves in the next couple of days. I'm confident we'll get through this knothole without a bankruptcy, if we have any kind of decent luck. You have to be clear, first of all, on the difference between insolvency and bankruptcy. If Newton Leffer calls the whole loan tomorrow and puts the burden on you, there's no doubt you'll be insolvent. You don't have the money, that's all, and you can't raise it right now. Bankruptcy is something else. It's a legal status. Everybody who's in love doesn't necessarily get married, and everybody's who's insolvent doesn't go bankrupt, not by a long shot. There are two main reasons for a bankruptcy—either a man despairs of paying his debts and seeks relief, or his creditors lose confidence in him and force bankruptcy on him. The court takes his affairs out of his hands and divides up all he's got as fairly as possible among the creditors. Bankruptcy washes him clean, so to speak, and he can start over. Hence the twilight types call it taking a bath, and some of them are very blithe about filing voluntary petitions."
Hawke said, "There's no question of my going bankrupt voluntarily. I can earn the money to pay off every debt in sight. I will, whatever happens, and however long it takes me."
Adam nodded, approval glinting in his eyes. "Very good. Very sensible. Setting aside the moral disgrace, if one cares about that, bankruptcy is a scar that never comes off. It marks you as a fool or a shoddy dealer. I'm afraid Mark Twain and Walter Scott—whose cases I've been looking up, by the bye—have to be called fools about money. Both of them fell into unlimited personal liability for large companies with many creditors. You're in nothing like such a pickle. The problem here is convincing one big creditor, Newton Leffer, to give you time to pay in full, if the worst comes to the worst. I'm hopeful we can do that. I'm assuming, Arthur, that I know all your affairs."
While the taxi bounced and groaned along a torn-up section of midtown Broadway, the lawyer asked Hawke a number of questions about his expenditures in recent weeks.
He lived in an old house on a hilly side street between Riverside Drive and Columbia University, in a dark apartment on the ground floor. Two boys in collegiate costume complete to dirty white shoes rose to their feet as Adam led Hawke through the living room. The furniture was exceedingly dowdy and ancient, and all the walls were solid with old books. He took Hawke into a tiny dark room, hardly more than a large closet of books with a desk in it, switched on a bright yellow lamp, and closed the door. The light brought to view a startling life-size oil painting of a beautiful girl in riding clothes, which took up most of one wall.
"Who's that?" Hawke said at once.
"That's Louise. My wife," Adam said. "This is a musty hole of an apartment but I like it. I rented it years ago from the widow of a philosophy professor, furniture, books, housekeeper and all, and it's worked out fine. She lives in Florida on the rent I pay her. Now where's that booklet on bankruptcy? I know it's in here." He stooped and peered around at the shelves.
Hawke was staring at the lovely dead wife of Adam, trying to connect her with the lawyer and this bookish-smelling little room, and finding it hard to do. She was painted in too vivid colors in a poor photographic style; a very tall girl in her twenties, brown-haired, with large brilliant greenish eyes, and a subtle smile. "Are those really law students out there?" he said.
"Second year. Why?"
"They're children, Gus. I'd place them in high school."
Adam said, "A symptom of advancing age, my friend. Ah, here we are." He pulled a thin green paper-backed book from a lower shelf and handed it to Hawke. "Tonight's assignment."
The booklet, the sight of the title, the feel of it in his hands, gave Hawke an unpleasant turn. Insolvency and Bankruptcy, A General Discussion, by Everett A. Wollas. Adam said, "Ev teaches at NYU. It's not very complete, but he writes well and you'll be able to get through it."
"Well, mama always wanted me to study law," Hawke said. "I reckon she wins. But I put up a hell of a fight."
"I'm sure you weren't cut out for the law, Arthur," Adam said, laughing. "Wrong temperament. Anyway there are lots of good lawyers and there's only one Youngblood Hawke. My wife was interested in writing," he added, glancing at the portrait. "She might have done something, too."
"What happened to her, Gus?"
Adam dropped into the chair behind the desk and began emptying his briefcase into the drawers. "Well, strangely enough you see her almost exactly as she looked just before she died. It was a riding accident. She was a fine rider, she'd ridden since childhood, but this horse bolted and fractured her skull against the top beam of the stable door. We think she was dead before she hit the ground."
"Good God," Hawke murmured.
"Yes, it was incredible, the sheer suddenness of it. To tell the truth I don't think I've ever wholly gotten over the surprise, I live in a state of slight shock, and if I've ever seemed absent or remote that's the reason. We'd been married less than two years. You once asked me why I never went into Kentucky politics. I don't think I'd have made a good politician, but in any case I couldn't go back to Louisville after that. When my army service was over I came north quite on purpose." Adam smiled up at Hawke, who stood awkwardly holding the green bankruptcy booklet, glancing from the lawyer to the portrait. "I even took a speech course to smooth out some of the Letchworth, because people here are disinclined to take a Southerner seriously. They think we're cute."
Hawke said, "She was beautiful, Gus."
The lawyer said, "There's no use my telling you how bright she was, too. Jeanie Fry reminds me of her, the tough-minded intelligence plus the honesty and the absence of faking. Not too common among the ladies. Well, so I went into tax law, and then Abe Tulking said I'd enjoy teaching so I tried that, and there's the story. You now know all you need to know to put me into a book, Arthur, if you can ever use such a stodgy character." He stood. "I've got to dispose of these lads and get after Scotty again. I'll talk to you tonight. Do your homework on bankruptcy meantime, but don't fret about it. We're preparing to lick it, that's all."
3
The nursemaid let Hawke into Jeanne's apartment. He could hear Jeanne shouting in her strident key, the register of anger and frustration which she had risen to more than once in arguing with him, "Jim, you eat this soup! It's good and you need it! Eat it, I say! Stop that! Oh, you little fiend!"
He hurried into the kitchen. Jeanne stood glaring at the little fiend, who sat on a high chair in tears, with red soup running down his chin into his bib. She was dabbing at her stained black silk dress. "Hello!" she barked. "This wretched monster knocked the spoon aside with his hand, he's drenched me with this goddamned tomato soup from head to foot!"
"Jeanne, let Elizabeth feed him. Come have a drink."
"Elizabeth can't get anything down him. This child has eaten nothing in a week, Arthur. Jim, what am I going to do with you? You must eat or you'll die! You must eat!"
Jim had grown to have a strong boyish face that yet retained the shape of his mother's, and his eyes were enormous, clever, and very blue. Weeping silently as he was, the face was uncontorted; he was a charming child, though he looked hungry and wan. He now reached out a little paw to her, stained with tomato soup, a plea for forgiveness and comfort from the person he loved, the very one who was harrying him. Jeanne seized the hand and kissed it. "Great disciplinarian I am," she choked.
The Irish maid, looking on restlessly in the doorway said, "Mrs. Fry, he might eat a bit of bacon. It's his favorite. Let me make some."
"Oh, all right!" Jeanne said peevishly. She added to Hawke, "And will you mix about twenty gallons of martinis, please? You know where everything is. I can't entertain a great author for dinner when I'm all splattered with tomato soup."
Later she said, having downed a large martini and poured another, "That was quite a display. Sorry. You've always called me a shrew, so you shouldn't be surprised." They were sitting on the sofa in the L-shaped living and dining room. On the mantelpiece the photograph of Karl, which had always been a trivial detail of the room, now seemed ringed in red neon.
