Scout’s Honor: Chapter 27

Vive La France

The windowless room was long and narrow, its walnut paneling and group of foxhunting prints suggesting a men’s club rather than a thirty-eighth-floor conference room. The lighting was so low that the wags of Miller, Taylor, and Taylor said it was intended to prevent close readings of documents. At its center was an elliptical conference table surrounded by swiveling brown leather chairs. 

Unnoticed in the corner, a heavy-set woman in a black dress trimmed with a white lace collar and apron tidied the silver coffee and tea service. Earlier, she had set stacks of fresh legal pads and marble holders filled with new No. 2 pencils around the polished table. An annoyed Schuyler Van Linge sat at its head, drumming his long, thin fingers against his chair. He was supposed to be signing a clutch of documents, shaking hands, and getting to his squash match by eleven. No one had said anything about negotiating last-minute items. He’d lingered at a wickedly debauched Halloween party until three the night before and felt cotton-headed, desperate for exercise. 

“Sky?” Perry Whistler, the lawyer, interrupted Van Linge’s pique. “Sky. We need to come to a resolution on this business point. I need your help.” Whistler had charged Van Linge a minor fortune for bringing the transaction—the sale of a stunning pre-war apartment building on Central Park West—thus far. Were the deal to fall apart, he knew Van Linge would be outraged and, worse, unlikely to pay his bill. The lawyer could only hope that the young vice president of duPlessis America Properties would relinquish his company’s ridiculous demand for a last-minute price cut.

“Let’s get on with it, shall we? The dollar amount. How much is it?” demanded Van Linge, frowning at the stacks of documents left to sign before closing. With his height, trim physique, silvery hair, and permanent sneer, Van Linge looked—and acted—the part of a feared CEO. Those with whom he was not well acquainted listened closely when he spoke. 

“Seven hundred fifty thousand dollars, sir,” Austen answered, his first words in some minutes. In marked contrast to his own fidgeting, disheveled lawyer, Austen sat straight, leaning forward from his hips, oblivious, it seemed, to the stakes involved in his eleventh-hour brinksmanship. 

Van Linge peered at the young man across the table as if seeing him for the first time. Trying to recall his name, he grasped why the clever French had sent such a young man to the closing. Because he had no authority, the youth could give away nothing, leaving him to negotiate with a Maginot Line. “What authority do you have this morning, Mr. ah—”

“Austen. To close the deal, sir.” He wore a gray flannel suit, a starched, button-down white shirt and a conservative tie, a particular combination he’d memorized from Parson’s sartorial instructions. 

“Let’s stop this nonsense, here and now,” Van Linge said. “We both know your superiors want this deal closed without delay.” 

“Perhaps, there’s a middle ground,” said Brendan O’Keefe, Austen’s garrulous lawyer.

“No, there’s not. I have my instructions,” said Austen, glaring at his lawyer, recalling Parson’s description of O’Keefe as a brilliant man, but a want-to-be dealmaker who talked too much.

“Can you reach your superiors, Mr. Austen?” Whistler the other lawyer asked. 

“Yes sir, if we hurry. It’s now four-thirty in Paris. The director will be leaving for the weekend any minute.”

“A two hundred fifty thousand dollar credit. That’s it, my final offer. Take it or leave it.” Pointing to a clerk, Van Linge added, “Hand me those documents. I will sign everything now. The French may close with this goodwill gesture or forfeit their million-dollar deposit. C’est la vie.” 

The clerk, actually Whistler’s junior partner, jumped up from his back-row seat, handed Van Linge a six-inch stack, and glanced toward Whistler, wondering if he would correct his client’s legal conclusion about the buyer’s loss of deposit. 

“Thank you, sir,” said Austen. “I understand that’s a very generous offer. May I use that phone in the corner to call?” 

The complaisant title officer suggested to Van Linge that he might consider signing the deed first; the messenger could rush it to the recorder’s office, then stand by and await further instructions. Van Linge signed the deed with élan and attacked his first stack of documents while the others pretended they had tasks apart from eavesdropping on Austen’s conversation. Nodding, they watched him side-eyed as he gestured and listened, then responded with a string of quick yesses and no sirs.

“Yes, sir, I’ve explained that.” Austen had edged as near Van Linge and the lawyers as the phone cord would allow. “I believe him, sir. He says it’s their final offer.” Austen yanked the receiver from his ear as if it were aflame, tinny screams coming from the receiver. The group froze until the Gallic tirade subsided, a long thirty seconds. “I’m sorry, sir. No, I won’t disturb you again. Thank you.” He hung up. “He forgets his English when he’s really mad. Good thing I don’t speak French.”

The senior attorneys had grayed during the shouting, O’Keefe’s queasy stomach tightened as Whistler silently rehearsed a boilerplate speech about the law’s appalling lack of certainty on the subject of retaining deposits. 

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Van Linge, but my director views it as a point of honor. You know the French. They lost their honor on the field of battle, and now they insist on recapturing it over and over in business.”

Van Linge scrutinized the courteous young man who stood at parade rest. He inclined his patrician head and pondered his next move. He knew the money they were haggling over was of little consequence to the family trust because it would first be taxed and then divided among seven already-wealthy beneficiaries, but he feared appearing weak. “Were you in the military, Mr. Austen?”

“Yes, sir. The Marine Corps.”

“You’re looking at a war hero,” Brendan O’Keefe said. Shoer had described Austen to him as a battlefield god. 

“No, I was only following orders. Like I’m doing now.”

Unable to serve because of a back condition that gave him little trouble on the squash court, Van Linge was impressed. “Were you awarded any medals?”

“Sir, please. I’d rather—”

“Tell him about the Bronze Star you got for—”

“Mr. Van Linge, believe me,” said Austen. “I understand your position as completely as I hope you understand my company’s. And please remember this seven-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar credit amounts to a very small, very legitimate price reduction.”

“Young man, my wife’s family is already beside itself over the price I’ve agreed to—they and their so-called advisers ought to manage these damn assets themselves. If we didn’t have a deal, I would take it back to the market for five million more.”

Austen slipped into the adjacent chair and began signing the stacks Van Linge had finished. “I think I’m stuck with the amount, sir. But,” Austen paused, flashing his gap-toothed smile, waiting until all eyes were on him, then a guilty-little-boy look. “I forgot to ask whether the credit had to be in cash.”

“A credit against the note is the same as a cash credit. That’s no compromise,” Whistler said. 

“No, Mr. Whistler,” said Austen, “it is a compromise. Here it is: What if the cash credit is only the two hundred fifty thousand Mr. Van Linge so kindly offered, and the remaining five hundred thousand is credited against our note to the trust? I can explain I thought the note credit was just as good.” He grinned as he continued to sign documents. “Monsieur Director can kick himself for not being here to make sure everything went just right.” 

O’Keefe eyed his adversaries like a dog guarding meat and caught Van Linge’s look as his lawyer nodded toward the door. 

“Excuse us a minute, gentlemen,” Van Linge said, standing, grateful for the opportunity to move. He strode to the door, Whistler and his two adjuncts close behind. 

“Wow. He really sounded angry. Was that DuPlessis himself?” O’Keefe asked, unmindful of the title officer and paralegal across the table. O’Keefe had grown disenchanted with his new client almost overnight, putting up with Austen only because he hoped to be assigned the company’s investment banking work. He resented how Austen called him into deals at the last minute, the way he played lawyer and how he challenged nearly every legal bill. 

“No.” Austen shut his eyes and leaned back in his chair for the first time that morning. He breathed deep and held it for a thirty count. A seven-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar discount turned a great deal into a near brilliant one. He would make many millions converting the stately apartment building into co-ops. Learning business the way he learned to lead in Vietnam—one hill at a time—Austen had grown more battle-hardened with each encounter, learning when to stand his ground, when to retreat… when to say no. And when to bluff.

Moments earlier, Parson Shoer had been trying to explain to a bemused senior partner why he had been bellowing gibberish French over the phone. He should have closed his door, but the San Francisco offices of McCall Sutro were empty when he’d arrived at seven a.m. He chuckled at the thought of the fictitious DuPlessis America Properties—DAP—remembering its wine-stained baptism at the trattoria. As Parson had imagined it, DAP would be the American real estate division of DuPlessis Freres, a family-held French investment bank that guarded its privacy. Since the company existed only in his fancy, he would tout it—and Austen, its American vice president—to his old mentor O’Keefe as known only in the most rarefied circles.

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