It was as if he were deliberately tantalizing me. This is the world in which he had grown up, that was clearly a part of the message he was sending; but was he admitting to being a participant in that world or explaining his final rejection of it, by leaving it behind him? Or both? He had participated but now he wanted out and that meant going far away, too far for anyone to come after him. Based on what he had said, there was no way to know for certain. Also, relieved as I was not to be confronted with that feared folder containing evidence of my assignations with his wife, I was happy to receive the Don Corleone story as given, drink one more vodka shot, and withdraw. An old man reminiscing about the past; he wasn’t the first such, nor would he be the last. He was beginning to forget the present—little things, where did he put his keys, appointments, birthdays—but he had people to remind him of most of that, and his memory for the past seemed, if anything, to be growing sharper. I suspected—and hoped—there would be more nighttime sessions like the one just completed. I wanted all his stories—needed them, so that, in the end, I could make him up.
The news of impending fatherhood appeared if anything to comfort Nero, underlining, as he seemed to need to underline, the continuing force of his masculinity. And in business that strength seemed, for a time, undiminished, as the immense work being undertaken on the West Side of Manhattan proved to us all. The huge Hudson Yards redevelopment had been undertaken by the Related Companies L.P. and Goldman Sachs in a joint venture with Oxford Properties Group Inc. It proceeded on the basis of a $475 million construction loan obtained by the Related/Oxford joint venture from “various parties.” I’m pretty close to one hundred percent sure that Nero Golden, under this or that company name, was one of the lenders alongside the big boys, Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital Group and the luxury retailers Coach. His initial investment in the redevelopment of the twenty-six acres had come a number of years earlier, under the EB-5 investment program which allowed immigrants to the United States to invest capital and in return acquire a green card and eventually citizenship. This finally explained to me how Nero and his sons had been able to decamp to America at such short notice and arrive with full rights of work and residence. Subsequently, in the year of Vasilisa’s pregnancy, Golden made a further investment in the form of a mezzanine loan, which was similar to a second mortgage, except that it was secured by the stock of the company that owned the property, as opposed to the real estate. So, theoretically, if the property owner failed to make the interest payments, Nero could have foreclosed on the stock in a matter of a few weeks, and by owning the stock would have gained control of the property. As far as I know, this had not happened. But, leveraged or not leveraged, super-investor or billion-dollar-debtor, he was playing for the highest stakes in the biggest real estate game in town.
The name of the entity making the mezzanine loan was GOVV Holdings. When the Roman emperor Nero died (A.D. 68), ending the reign of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, there followed (A.D. 69) the Year of the Four Emperors, in which Nero’s immediate successor Galba was overthrown by Otho who in turn was toppled by Vitellius who didn’t last long, and was replaced by the man who became the first emperor of the Flavian dynasty: Vespasian. Galba-Otho-Vitellius-Vespasian: G-O-V-V.
When Vasilisa bore Nero a son later that year, he was named Vespasian, as if Nero intuited that the child came from a different bloodline, and would in the end establish a new dynasty of his own.
I said nothing, of course.
WAITING FOR VESPASIAN
It was during the pregnancy of his wife, while he awaited the birth of the little emperor Vespasian, that Nero Golden became obsessed by the penis of Napoleon Bonaparte. This should have been enough of an indication of his deteriorating mental state to send up warning signals, but instead was treated indulgently by the family, like an old man’s amusing hobbyhorse. When he wasn’t preoccupied by business affairs, or by the life burgeoning in Vasilisa’s womb, or by the demands of being the father of his sons, Nero embarked on his pursuit of the French imperial member. Regarding which, the following: After the death of Bonaparte on St. Helena, an autopsy was carried out, during which various organs, including the unimpressive phallus, were removed for reasons now unknown. The little Napoleon eventually came into the hands (I should rephrase that, perhaps) of an Italian priest, and was then sold on, owned for a time by a London bookseller, and making its way across the Atlantic, first to Philadelphia, and next to New York where it was exhibited in 1927 at the Museum of French Arts and described by one newspaper as a “shriveled eel” and by no less an authority than Time magazine as “a maltreated strip of buckskin shoelace.” In 1977 it was bought at auction by the noted urologist John Lattimer as part of his quest to bring dignity to his profession, ownership passing to his daughter after his death along with his other possessions, including Hermann G?ring’s underpants and the bloodstained shirt collar President Lincoln was wearing at Ford’s Theatre. All these memorabilia now resided in Englewood, New Jersey; Napoleon’s organ was wrapped in cloth and kept in a little box with a monogrammed N on the lid, inside a suitcase, in a storage room, and all of this irked Nero, who wanted it to be given the imperial honor it deserved.
“This is what should happen,” he told me. “I will buy the item and we will return it to the people of France and you will make the documentary film, you and your girl. I will personally bring the container to Paris and enter the H?tel des Invalides and approach the sarcophagus of Bonaparte where I will be greeted by high officials of the Republic, maybe even by the president, and I will beg leave to place the container on top of the sarcophagus so that Napoleon can finally be reunited with his lost manhood. I will state in a small oration that I do this as an American, in a kind of repayment for the French gift to America of the Statue of Liberty.”
He wasn’t joking. He managed somehow to acquire the home landline number of the house in Englewood and cold-called Mr. Lattimer’s daughter, who hung up on him. After that he asked his two dragons—Ms. Blather and Mistress Fuss—to try, which they did until they were accused of harassment by the person at the other end of the line. Now he was strongly considering a personal trip to New Jersey, checkbook in hand, to try to close the deal. It took all Vasilisa’s powers of dissuasion to stop him going. “The owner does not want to sell, my dear,” she said. “If you show up she would be within her rights to call the cops.”
“Money talks,” he grumbled. “You can buy a man’s lifelong home in the morning if you offer the right price and get him to move out before lunchtime. You can buy a government if you have sufficient cash. And I can’t buy a one-and-a-half-inch johnson?”
“Give it up,” his wife said. “This isn’t what’s important right now.”