Читать книгу The Three of U.S.: A New Life in New York - Peter Godwin - Страница 28

… Though it is only 10 a.m. here, it is already 4 p.m. in London and I am in the office on deadline for a feature about Robert Downey Junior’s persistent drug problem. I am distracted, however, by the frantic pitching coming through the thin wall. It is Ted, the elderly real estate agent in the next-door office, talking on the phone to a client.

‘I’m going to have to push you, Frank, I’m sorry but I gotta know today,’ I hear him say. ‘Frank, if I could give you more time, then believe me I would. Believe me, I’ve been fighting for you, Frank, I’ve been fighting very hard. And I don’t mind tellin’ ya, they don’t call me the Rocky-of-Real-Estate for nothing. Are you in with me, Frank? Do we have a deal here? I don’t mind telling ya, ya won’t regret it.’

Until two years ago the Guardian office in New York was staffed with thirteen people selling subscriptions for the Guardian Weekly edition. Then the paper’s accountants in London caught up with this forgotten enclave and made them all redundant, shifting operations to Canada to cut costs. But they were unable to shift the unexpired Manhattan lease, and so for a while I worked in an eerily deserted office. Now the paper has managed to rent the remaining space to a trio of elderly real estate agents. They arrived one Monday morning with several boxes stuffed full of executive toys.

Ted is the most avuncular of the three. He has decorated his office with framed copies of the most lucrative deals he has closed over the last forty years. These are, I suppose, the real estate equivalent of Pulitzer prizes, though the small print makes them almost impossible to read. His favourite is prominently displayed on a separate music stand by his door.

‘This’, he told me, shortly after his arrival, pointing proudly to the cream paper filled with minute print, ‘is for a helicopter landing pad I sold on top of the fourteenth tallest building in the city. And I tell ya, it was a lucky deal, lucky for me anyways!

‘A month after I signed the contract, I’ll be damned if a helicopter didn’t topple off the edge of the Pan Am building, killing everyone aboard and some more underneath. After that, all helicopters were banned from taking off or landing on buildings across the city.’ He gives a rueful laugh. ‘Lucky for me, right? But God, was the guy who bought the landing pad from me pissed!’

In between the contracts he has slipped in the odd family photograph of a wife and scowling son, somewhere in his late teens, with a backwards baseball cap on his crown. In each of the photos he is also wearing Tommy Hilfiger jeans, with the crotch nestling between his knees, a trend, Ted explains, inspired by maximum-security prisoners whose trousers are always loose because they are not allowed belts.

The pride of Ted’s executive toy chest is his wave machine. This is a glass box, a yard long by a foot high, filled with a viscous aquamarine oil. When switched on it simulates the ocean, only in slow motion. ‘Very soothing,’ nods Ted. One day, he says, he is planning to surprise me by changing the colour of the oil.

‘I’ll do it,’ he threatens. ‘Just see if I don’t, I promise you, one day you’ll walk in and I’ll have changed it to purple!’

Under his desk he also keeps a wooden rod with an iron hoop, which looks like a metal detector.

‘This is my “Bullshit Detector”,’ he announced within an hour of his arrival, waving it at me and making a high-pitched beeping noise. Whenever a client says something he doesn’t agree with, he reaches for it, sweeps it towards them and starts up his high-pitched beeping.