Page 437 - WhyAsInY

WitHout reCourse: Harvey, tHe real estate laWyer
in Queens known as Le Havre. Le Havre was about to be sold and, when the sale closed, Carl would be receiving a check for $250,000 for his efforts. My job? Merely to go to the closing, introduce myself, get a bank check made payable to Carl, and deliver a receipt, which, to save me some trouble, Flora had already prepared and Carl had already signed. The closing, Flora said, was scheduled for 9:00 the next morning, but no need to rush. If I were to drop in at about 11:00, that would be early enough, but closings take time; it should take an hour or so.
Accordingly, carrying the one-page release that was the only docu- ment in an oversize leather briefcase that my parents had proudly bestowed on me three years before, and wearing a three-piece suit (what else does one wear to a closing?), I straightened my tie and was led into a conference room on, I believe, the twentieth floor of 666 Fifth Avenue. That room, unlike the one-door windowless real estate closing rooms to which I had become accustomed (barely large enough to accommodate two lawyers, two married couples, the title closer, and, maybe, someone from the bank), seemed to stretch for seventy-five feet. It had two doors, maybe ten large windows, and about eighteen men, more than half of whom were in their shirtsleeves, seated in clumps at the table.
There was only one woman (this was happening in 1972). She was stationed near one of the doors and seemed to come and go, responding to some invisible force, and always with the greatest of authority. After she would disappear for a while, she would return with a stack of papers. She would then place those papers on a side table, pick up a similar-size stack of papers from a corner of the conference table, rip that old stack in half with an impressive flourish, place the now-severed remains in a wastepaper basket that was already brimming over with torn paper, and move the new papers from the side table to the conference table, there to remain until they would meet their fate and be replaced in similar, unexplained fashion. Lots of other people were also coming and going, or just milling about, it seemed to me, and there were styrene coffee cups, cans of Coke (not Diet Coke), papers, folders, pads, pens, pencils, and staplers all over the place. Even I, a rookie, knew that this transac- tion was not going to close in an hour.
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