business.”
“I can only tell you what I know. Tip of the iceberg.”
Over the next half hour Kay covered not only Carl’s business and its strange corporate structure, but his strange family as well.
His father, Joe Spalter, had inherited a real estate holding company from
his
father. Spalter Realty ended up owning a huge chunk of upstate New York’s inventory of rental properties, including half the apartment houses in Long Falls—all of this by the time that Joe, close to death, transferred the company to his two sons, Carl and Jonah.
Carl took after Joe, had his ambition and money-hunger, squared. Jonah took after his mother, Mary, an aggressive pursuer of many hopeless causes. Jonah was a utopian dreamer, a charismatic New Age spiritualist. As Kay put it, “Carl wanted to own the world, and Jonah wanted to save it.”
The way their father saw it, Carl had what it took to “go all the way”—to be the richest man in America, or maybe the world. The problem was, Carl was as uncontrolled as he was ruthless. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to get what he wanted. As a child he’d once set fire to a neighbor’s dog as a distraction so he could steal a video game. And that wasn’t a one-time instance of craziness. Things like that happened regularly.
Joe, as ruthless as he was himself, saw this trait as a potential problem—not that he cared about setting fire to dogs or about stealing. It was the lack of
prudence
, the lack of an appropriate risk-reward calculus, that bothered him. His ultimate solution was to bind Carl and Jonah together in the family business. Jonah was supposed to be a moderating influence, a source of the caution that Carl lacked.
The vehicle for this supposedly beneficial combining of their personalities was an unbreakable legal agreement that they both signed when Joe handed the corporation over to them. All of its provisions were designed to ensure that no business could be done, no decisions taken, and no changes made to the corporation without Carl and Jonah’s
joint
approval.
But Joe’s fantasy of merging the opposite inclinations of his sons into a single force for success was never realized. All that came of it was conflict, the stagnation of Spalter Realty, and an ever-growing animosity between the brothers. It pushed Carl in the direction of politics as an alternate route to power and money, with backdoor help fromorganized crime, while it pushed Jonah in the direction of religion and the establishment of his grand venture, the Cyberspace Cathedral, with backdoor help from his mother, whom Joe had left exceedingly well-off. The mother at whose funeral Carl was fatally wounded.
When Kay finally concluded her recounting of the Spalter family saga, Gurney was the first to speak. “So Carl’s Anticrime Party and his ‘Scum of the Earth’ speeches about smashing organized crime in New York were nothing but—”
She finished his thought. “A lie, a disguise. For a politician secretly in bed with the mob, what better cover could you have than an image as the state’s most aggressive crime fighter?”
Gurney nodded, trying to let the twisty soap opera narrative sink in. “So your theory is that Carl eventually had some kind of falling-out with this Angel character? And that’s the reason he was killed?”
“Angel was always the most dangerous player in the room. Carl wouldn’t have been the first or even the tenth of Angel’s business associates to end up dead. There’s a saying in certain circles that the Greek only puts two offers on the negotiating table: ‘Do it my way. Or I blow your fucking head off.’ I’d bet anything that there was something Carl refused to do Donny’s way. And he did end up getting his head blown off, didn’t he?”
Gurney didn’t answer. He was trying to figure out who the hell this brutally unsentimental woman really was.
“By the way,” she added, “you ought to look at some pictures of Carl taken before this thing
“I can only tell you what I know. Tip of the iceberg.”
Over the next half hour Kay covered not only Carl’s business and its strange corporate structure, but his strange family as well.
His father, Joe Spalter, had inherited a real estate holding company from
his
father. Spalter Realty ended up owning a huge chunk of upstate New York’s inventory of rental properties, including half the apartment houses in Long Falls—all of this by the time that Joe, close to death, transferred the company to his two sons, Carl and Jonah.
Carl took after Joe, had his ambition and money-hunger, squared. Jonah took after his mother, Mary, an aggressive pursuer of many hopeless causes. Jonah was a utopian dreamer, a charismatic New Age spiritualist. As Kay put it, “Carl wanted to own the world, and Jonah wanted to save it.”
The way their father saw it, Carl had what it took to “go all the way”—to be the richest man in America, or maybe the world. The problem was, Carl was as uncontrolled as he was ruthless. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to get what he wanted. As a child he’d once set fire to a neighbor’s dog as a distraction so he could steal a video game. And that wasn’t a one-time instance of craziness. Things like that happened regularly.
Joe, as ruthless as he was himself, saw this trait as a potential problem—not that he cared about setting fire to dogs or about stealing. It was the lack of
prudence
, the lack of an appropriate risk-reward calculus, that bothered him. His ultimate solution was to bind Carl and Jonah together in the family business. Jonah was supposed to be a moderating influence, a source of the caution that Carl lacked.
The vehicle for this supposedly beneficial combining of their personalities was an unbreakable legal agreement that they both signed when Joe handed the corporation over to them. All of its provisions were designed to ensure that no business could be done, no decisions taken, and no changes made to the corporation without Carl and Jonah’s
joint
approval.
But Joe’s fantasy of merging the opposite inclinations of his sons into a single force for success was never realized. All that came of it was conflict, the stagnation of Spalter Realty, and an ever-growing animosity between the brothers. It pushed Carl in the direction of politics as an alternate route to power and money, with backdoor help fromorganized crime, while it pushed Jonah in the direction of religion and the establishment of his grand venture, the Cyberspace Cathedral, with backdoor help from his mother, whom Joe had left exceedingly well-off. The mother at whose funeral Carl was fatally wounded.
When Kay finally concluded her recounting of the Spalter family saga, Gurney was the first to speak. “So Carl’s Anticrime Party and his ‘Scum of the Earth’ speeches about smashing organized crime in New York were nothing but—”
She finished his thought. “A lie, a disguise. For a politician secretly in bed with the mob, what better cover could you have than an image as the state’s most aggressive crime fighter?”
Gurney nodded, trying to let the twisty soap opera narrative sink in. “So your theory is that Carl eventually had some kind of falling-out with this Angel character? And that’s the reason he was killed?”
“Angel was always the most dangerous player in the room. Carl wouldn’t have been the first or even the tenth of Angel’s business associates to end up dead. There’s a saying in certain circles that the Greek only puts two offers on the negotiating table: ‘Do it my way. Or I blow your fucking head off.’ I’d bet anything that there was something Carl refused to do Donny’s way. And he did end up getting his head blown off, didn’t he?”
Gurney didn’t answer. He was trying to figure out who the hell this brutally unsentimental woman really was.
“By the way,” she added, “you ought to look at some pictures of Carl taken before this thing
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