Doug had slogged through the dark days of the early nineties, when there’d been seven years of inventory on the market and nothing selling. The immortals were the worst: unless you had a co-op with a limit on how long you could sublet, good luck getting a rakshasa or a vampire to lower their asking price no matter how bad the market was. It was always, “I’ll hang in there another decade and see how things go.”
Even then, he’d liked the challenge of finding the perfect match of buyer and seller that moved Manhattan real estate, and he liked it a lot more now that he had his own offices tucked into a corner of the Richard Merriman Inc. corporate headquarters, handling the clients with his own team and farming out the boring overhead to the firm.
Right now, though, it was getting a bit more challenging than he liked. Just last week, a $6M deal for one of his exclusives—down from an ask of $7.1M at peak, and happy to get it—had fallen through after an accepted offer. The buyer had lost a quarter of her net worth in the huge Ponzi scheme that had just gotten busted, as though there weren’t enough bad news out there.
“Oh, it was brilliant,” she’d said grimly, calling to tell him why the deal was off. “They put all these zombie investors on the books, paid them out of our money, then the zombies fell apart and their accounts went to the animators, who turn out to be working for a firm owned by the partners in the fund.”
“Can you get any of the money back?” Doug asked.
“Ask me in five years after I finish paying the lawyers,” she said.
It made every sale twice as important and ten times as fragile. He was a little surprised they’d gotten the vampire from Black Thomas Phillips, actually, even with the two co-op rejections.
Speaking of which, he sat down to make a few phone calls to people he knew with condo exclusives, but before he got the phone off the hook, it was ringing under his hand.
“What the hell kind of crazy buyer are you bringing me?” Rina Lazar said, without so much as a hello. She was the selling broker on the Riverside apartment.
“Oh, boy,” Doug said. “What happened? Did Kell back out?” That would be great, two new records: quickest sale, quickest flameout.
“Ohhh, no,” Rina said. “Backing out, backing out would have been fantastic. He got my sellers’ number, don’t ask me how, called them up and told them, quote, their bleeping apartment was a bleeping pile of bleep, the built-ins were a disgrace, and the place smelled like dead old lady—I am not kidding you here—and nobody in their right mind would pay more than one million for the wreck, take it or leave it, end quote. The daughter just called me up in tears!”
“Oh my God,” Doug said.
“Plan on sending me a financial sheet on anyone you want to bring to any of my exclusives from now on,” she said, and banged the phone down hard enough to make him wince.
“Oh, dear,” Henry Kell said, when Doug called. “I gather that this means the deal is off … ?”
“Uh, yeah, the deal is off,” Doug said. “Mr. Kell, maybe I need to explain this, since you’re a first-time buyer. Once you make an offer, you can’t just—”
“No, no, I perfectly understand,” Kell said. “I assure you, I had no second thoughts myself. It must have been—he must have had strong feelings on the subject, I can’t think why—”
“Is this your partner we’re talking about?” Doug said. “Mr. Kell, if you aren’t the sole purchaser here—”
“Well, I am, legally speaking,” Kell said. “Only, er, he can make his opinion felt in, in other ways, as you see.”
Doug rubbed his forehead and looked at the balance sheet on the open laptop in front of him, although he really didn’t need to; he could keep track of all the contracts he had out right now in his head. “Mr. Kell, I’m sure we can find a place that will make both of you completely happy,” he said. “But I really am going to need to speak to your partner, too.”
“Oh dear,” Mr. Kell said.
“Wow, they’re a super-interesting touch, very Kafkaesque,” the art dealer said, considering the bug swarm on the wall.
“It’s definitely a unique feature,” Tom said, trying not to look at the wall too hard himself. The bugs made a low raspy sound climbing over each other, which he could hear even though he’d cracked the windows to let in some of the noise of the First Avenue traffic outside.
The buyer’s broker—she was backed into the far corner of the living room—looked at him with raised eyebrows as her client went to poke around in the kitchen. Tom shrugged at her a little. What was he going to do?
“I do like the details,” the art dealer said, coming back out. “There’s something special in the contradiction between the formal style of the classic six, the stained glass windows and the wood paneling, and the raw brutality of the insect swarm.”
“Oh?” Tom said. “That is—Yes, absolutely. The clients are very negotiable,” he added, with a faint stirring of hope.
The art dealer stood looking around the apartment a little more, and then shook his head. “It’s a really tough call, but I don’t think so. The apartment is great, but, you know, Tudor City. It’s so—stuffy. I just can’t see it. It would be almost like living on the Upper East Side. But tell the sellers I love their style,” he added.
“Why is the maintenance so high?” the vampire said suspiciously, reading the offering sheet for the Battery Park apartment.
“Well,” the selling broker said, and then he admitted that it was a land-lease, meaning the co-op didn’t actually own the ground underneath the building, and also the lease was running out in fifteen years and no one had any idea what the term renewal was going to be. “But we’ve got a brownie super, and there’s a fantastic sundeck on the—” He stopped at the look Jennifer shot him.
Waiting in the lobby as the vampire dispiritedly bundled himself up again, Jennifer said, “I’ve got a few condos lined up that we could take a look at this weekend.”
“I don’t want to live in a condo,” the vampire said, muffled, as he wrapped a scarf around his head. “Those places let anyone in.”
Jennifer opened and shut her mouth. “Okay,” she said, after a moment. “Okay, a co-op it is. You know what, could I maybe get you to send me your last board application?”
“I’ve got the money!” the vampire said, offended, his eyes glowing briefly red from behind the scarf.
“No, I’m sure you do!” Jennifer said, not-fumbling for the little crucifix she’d worn under her blouse. “I don’t even really need the financials, I’m just thinking maybe there’s something we could do to—polish it up a little extra for a board. It might be worth getting an early start on it.”
“Oh,” the vampire said, mollified. “All right, I’ll have my last broker send it to you. I guess it couldn’t hurt.”
Oh, but it could. One of his three personal reference letters was from his mother.
“I thought it was sweet,” the vampire protested. “Shows I haven’t lost touch with my mortal life.”
“She’s ninety-six and lives in Arizona,” Jennifer said. “When was the last time you saw her?”
The vampire looked guilty. “I call every day,” he muttered.
The other two letters were from a pooka—just the kind of guest everyone wanted visiting their neighbor, especially in horse form and snorting flames—and a necromancer.