Michener, James A. (203 page)

When real estate acquaintances in other cities called to ask: 'Did Hurricane Alicia destroy values in Houston?' she felt so defensive about her city that she drafted a thoughtful form letter:

I know you saw the horrendous scenes on television, our beautiful buildings with their windows knocked out like old women with no front teeth. I assure you with my hand on the Bible that only a few buildings were so hit and not one of them suffered any structural damage.

Houston 'is snapped back stronger than before. I am buying and selling as if there had never been a hurricane, for I know that if we survived Alicia, we can survive anything. If you crave action, come aboard.

But it was her third change that represented the most significant modification, because when she moved to The St James she found herself conveniently close to Highway 610, that magic loop which encircled the central Houston she loved. Now, two or three nights a week after dinner when the intolerable traffic abated, she went down to her garage, climbed into her Mercedes, and drove thoughtfully eastward till she hit a ramp leading to 610. There she weaved her way onto the striking thoroughfare, one of the busiest in America, and started the thirty-eight-mile circuit of the city, ticking off her position on an imaginary clock.

Where she entered was nine o'clock, due west. Up where the airport waited, with its enormous flow of plane and auto traffic, was twelve. Three o'clock on the extreme east carried her into the smoke-filled, bustling commercial district that huddled about the Houston Ship Channel with its hundreds of plants affiliated with the oil industry; this area interested her immensely, for in it she saw many prospects for growth. Six o'clock was due south where the immense Medical Center and the handsome Astrodome predominated, and at the end of fifty minutes she was back at Westheimer, taking a last look at the city she had grown to love: What a glorious town! Spires everywhere glinting in the moonlight! God smiled at me when He brought me here. To help build and sell those splendid buildings!

Two nights a week, sometimes three, she made this circuit of her city, checking upon current building, predicting its future growth; sometimes male dinner companions accompanied her: 'Maggie, you mustn't do this alone. Six-ten is a jungle, worst highway in America. You know that during rush hour the police won't even enter it to check on ordinary fender-benders. They got beat up too often by enraged motorists, sometimes shot and killed.' 'But I stay clear during rush hours.'

'And for God's sake, don't drive with your window down.' 'This is my town. I love it and I want to check on it.' One night as she was driving, with her eye to lands outside the circle, a full moon illuminated a section of the city she had never before studied seriously; it stood at ten o'clock, to the northwest, and it comprised about fifteen blocks of housing which could be torn down at no great loss, and she eased into an outer lane so that she could slow down and inspect the place. With imaginary bulldozers and wrecking balls, she leveled the houses, then erected a pair of soaring towers with all attendant shopping areas: Forty-eight floors to each tower, right? Six condominiums per floor? But save the first four levels for office space. We could get five hundred units easily, plus six gorgeous penthouses at $3,500,000 each.

Futura she dubbed her imaginary towers, and now when she circled the city at night she waited breathlessly for the approach of Futura, analyzing it from all angles. In the daytime, after work, she drove through the area and found that seventeen blocks would provide the necessary land area. Then she began to consult secretly with Gabe Klinowitz as to prices in the district, and with his figures in her head she started sketching plans for a major development. When she costed them, as the phrase in her industry went, she found that for $210,000,000 she could probably acquire the land, raze the buildings on it, and erect her twin-towered masterpiece.

As soon as she had a working budget in mind, she realized that there was only one source available to her for such a vast amount, so she flew to Dallas and placed her design before Ransom Rusk, who was recovering nicely from the shocks of the preceding years when he saw his net worth drop by nearly half a billion. He was deeply engaged in the election, sweating over whether or not Reagan would be reelected: 'So many damned blacks and Mexicans registering, a man can't make predictions.' He was also contributing vast sums toward the defeat of eight or nine Democratic senators around the country, because he felt, as he told Maggie: This is one of the crucial elections of our national history. If Reagan's coattails are long enough, we'll even regain control of the House, and then we can turn this sloppy nation around permanently. Reagan, a great patriot in the White House. His nominees filling the Supreme Court. A Republican Congress. And we'll start taking over the state houses.' With each potential triumph he became more excited: 'Maggie, we can put some backbone into this nation. Clean up things in Central America. End the disgrace of public welfare, and see America tall in the saddle again. We'll wipe out the stain of Franklin Roosevelt once and for all.'

As a lifelong Democrat whose parents had come from the working class, she was amused when Rusk fulminated in this way and did not take him seriously, but gradually he said things which astonished her: 'It's criminal for the Democrats to go around making Mexicans register, when they understand none of the issues. The vote should be reserved for the people who own the nation and pay the taxes.'

'Do you mean that?' she had asked, and his thoughtful reply surprised her: 'I calculated the other day that my efforts ensure the employment of nearly four thousand people. Counting four to a family, that's sixteen thousand citizens I support. Am I to be outvoted by two unemployed Mexican hangers-on who can't read English?'

When she pursued the matter, he confessed: 'Yes, I'd like to see

a means test for the vote. Only people who have a real stake in society can know what's best for that society.'

She was not yet ready to accept this new philosophy which was sweeping the nation, but in August when Rusk invited her to join him at the Republican National Convention in Dallas, she had an opportunity to observe him as he moved among people of his own kind, and she was impressed to find that he knew all the leaders and was welcomed in the suites of both President Reagan, delightful man, and Vice-President Bush, a reassuring fellow Texan from Midland. She noticed that Rusk was warmly greeted by the famous clergymen who had swarmed into Dallas to prove that God was a Republican and America a Christian nation.

It was an exciting week, and once when she sat in a privileged seat she felt a surge of pride as she looked down upon the delegates, that endless parade of fine, clean-cut people from all parts of the nation: the bankers, the managers, the store owners, the elderly women with blue-tinted hair. And not too often a black or a Hispanic to confuse the pattern. It was at this euphoric moment that Maggie first began to consider seriously her partner's philosophy that the men who own a nation ought to govern it. The idea was crudely expressed and she knew that if the newspapers got hold of it, they would make sport of Rusk, but it did summarize a fundamental truth about America, and it was worth further study.

On the morning after the convention ended on a note of high triumph, Maggie placed before Rusk the plans for her master development, and was distressed when he seemed to back off, as if the project was too big for him to finance at this time.

'Ransom, are you turning me down?'

'No. But I am turning down Houston. Now is not the time to start new building in that town.'

She gasped, then said defensively: 'I love Houston. It gave me life . . . maturity . . . even happiness of a sort.'

'Time to be realistic. New buildings are standing empty.'

'But, Ransom, I've been mailing brochures assuring real estate customers that Houston is not finished.' She hesitated, looked pleadingly, saw the obdurate scowl, and asked softly: 'Are you suggesting Dallas?'

'I haven't mentioned Dallas. It's overbuilt too.'

'What do you have in mind?'

'Austin.'

She had never contemplated shifting her operations from a city with more than two million to one about one-fifth that size, but Rusk was adamant: 'Houston twenty years ago is Austin today.'

'Can it absorb something like Futura?'

He avoided a direct answer: That's a dreadful name. Sounds like a bath soap.'

'What would you propose?'

'Something classy. English. Like The Bristol or Warwick Towers. But they've been overdone.' Then he snapped his fingers: 'I have it. The Nottingham. Our logo? Robin Hood in outline wearing that crazy peaked hat. We'll make it the most fashionable address in Texas.'

Maggie, trying not to smile at the picture of Ransom Rusk offering himself as a Robin Hood stealing from the poor to aid the rich, kept her mind on the main problem: 'Where do we get the two hundred million?'

Without hesitation he replied: 'West Germany or the Arabs. They're itching to invest in Texas.' And while she waited, he called his bankers in Frankfurt and asked: 'Karl Philip, do your boys still have those funds you talked about last month? Good. I'm putting you down for two hundred and ten million.' There was a pause which Maggie interpreted as shock on the other end, but it was not: 'No, not Houston, it's marking time at present. And not Dallas, either, it's overbuilt. Austin.' Another pause: 'State capital, America's new Silicon Valley, our fastest-growing city. Hotter than an oil-boom town.'

When he hung up he gave Maggie a simple directive: 'Fly right down to Austin, locate the perfect spot, and get someone to buy the real estate in secret.'

With the design for her two luxury towers firmly in mind, she rode to the airport in Rusk's car, which delivered her to the door of the Rusk plane. In less than forty minutes she was landing at the Austin airport, and the next four days were hectic.

In a rented car she explored the unfamiliar beauties of this lovely little city, and by noon she had counted a dozen giant cranes busy at the job of erecting very tall buildings. 'My God,' she cried. 'This really is the new Houston,' and that afternoon she chanced on a young man, Paul Sampson, recently down from Indianapolis, who could have been Todd Morrison in 1969. He had the same brash approach, the same nervous eagerness, the same indication that he was going to be adroit in arranging deals. He worked for a large real estate firm but gave every promise of owning the outfit within two years, and by nightfall he had shown Maggie sixteen sites which could accommodate new buildings.

That night she called Rusk: 'Ransom, real estate is so hot down here that the place simply has to go bust.'

Very quietly he assured her: 'Of course it'll go bust. Everything does sooner or later. Our job is to get in fast and out first.'

'Then you want me to go ahead?'

'With German money, how can we go wrong?'

So early next morning she was at Paul Sampson's office with the kind of proposition cagey operators had brought her husband in the early 1970s: 'Could you quietly assemble about six city blocks for me? Standard commission?'

'I can do anything you require, madam,' he said, and she could see that his palms were sweating. 'Where do you want them? In the heart of the city?'

'Show me the possibilities,' and when he kept stressing an area which she distrusted, she said: 'You own a parcel in there, don't you?' and he protested: 'Look, madam, if you don't trust me, we can't do business,' and she said: 'If you try to sell me that junk you're stuck with, we'll never do business.'

Startled by her shrewd understanding, he stopped trying to peddle his third-rate property and started driving her to the eligible areas, and by the end of the fourth day she had found something farther out than he had expected her to go. It was a grand area west of Route 360 and atop a rise which gave a splendid view of both Lake Travis and the famed hill country.

'Will people buy this far out?' Sampson asked, and she said: 'When they see what we're going to build,' and with that, she gave him a commission to acquire four parcels of about ten acres each, and when the agreement was signed, in great secrecy, he said: 'Can I ask what you're going to build out there?' and she said: 'A hunting range for Robin Hood.'

When she saw the excitement in his eyes and his eagerness to get started, she thought of her former husband, and she wished the young man good luck. She hoped he would handle himself better than Todd had done, but she had a strong premonition that he was going to go the same way, because three weeks later, after he had delivered the forty acres to her at a price that was gratifying, she learned that he had mortgaged himself to the hilt in order to buy for his own account two small choice plots that would dominate any roads into or out of Nottingham.

'You'll do well, Sampson,' she said as she ended negotiations.

'Stay clean,' and he startled her by saying with great assurance:

'Mrs. Morrison, you'll bless the day you met me. That land will

fe be worth millions, because this Austin thing can go on forever.'

That night she flew back to Larkin, and when she informed

i Rusk of her proposed land purchase in Austin, he congratulated

i her. Then, ignoring the two-hundred-million-dollar deal as if it

i were an ordinary day's work, he took his seat before two television

sets as the first Reagan-Mondale debate started.

The next ninety minutes were a nightmare for Ransom, because he had to watch the man who was supposed to save the Republic fumble and stumble and show himself to be uninformed on basic problems. At one point Rusk growled: 'Maggie, how in hell did he ever allow himself to get tangled in a debate? He looks ninety years old.'

But soon his anger was directed at the three newspeople asking the questions: They shouldn't speak to him like that! He's President!' And then, as Maggie had anticipated, his ire fell on Mondale: 'Reagan ought to walk over and belt him in the mouth.' Toward the end, when Reagan confessed 'I'm confused,' Rusk shouted at the television: 'They didn't ask that question fair. They're trying to mix him up.'