In no time Martha Croker had emerged from one of the rooms off to the side. She was wearing a long-sleeved navy blouse and a tan gabardine skirt. She struck Peepgass as a little heavy, but her legs weren’t bad at all—and this place was lavish beyond anything he had imagined. On the other hand, he also happened to know her age all too well: fifty-three.

  “Good morning, Mr. Peepgass.”

  “Good morning, Martha, and please—make it Ray!”

  They shook hands, and Martha Croker said, “I’m sorry I had to make this so early—would you like some coffee?”

  “No—actually, to tell you the truth, some coffee would be great!”

  So she sent the maid off for some coffee and led Peepgass into some sort of den or library. It wasn’t a big room, but every square inch of it looked as if it cost more than the sum total of Peepgass’s possessions in Collier Hills. The Oriental rug … the antique secretary at which she seemed to have been working … the fabric on the walls … the bookshelves … the chintz-covered easy chairs … and, above all, a charming bay that was set off from the rest of the room by a parabolic wooden arch and a sumptuous display of Victorian moldings that surrounded the bay’s three big windows … In the bay was a round rosewood Regency table with a pair of upholstered Regency dining chairs pulled up to it.

  “Let’s sit by the window,” said Martha Croker. “It’s a nice place to have coffee.”

  And, sure enough, it was. The windows looked out on a small formal garden, bursting with statice, delphinium, and peonies that seemed to have been created especially for the view from this one room. An ancient gardener, a black man, was down on his knees doing something with a trowel. He wore old-fashioned puttees, an article of dress Peepgass had never seen before, except in pictures of the World War I military. At the perimeter of the garden was a dense semicircle of boxwood bushes, mature ones, waist-high and grown together and immaculately clipped until they looked like a single fat green wall. Beyond the boxwood was an immense lawn, partly in open sunlight, partly in the shade of huge old trees, and everywhere bordered by carefully groomed shrubbery and beds of flowers.

  Peepgass gazed out the window and, without turning toward her, said, “It’s absolutely beautiful, Martha.” Something told him to tuck in as many Marthas as he could.

  “It’s a lovely time of year for gardens,” said Martha. “I can’t take any credit for it.” She motioned toward the old gardener. “Franklin does it all.”

  Mr. Ray Peepgass of PlannersBanc’s little Marthas were somehow so casual and intimate … pleasantly so. She gazed at Mr. Peepgass while he gazed out the window. He was nice-looking, handsome even, but in a rather soft way, with a lineless, boyish face, perhaps a bit too boyish—how old was he, anyway? A full head of sandy hair, but with traces of gray … bright blue eyes, but his eyelids drooped at the outer corners … the beginnings of a double chin … all of which gave her hope that he might be closer to fifty than to forty … clothes a bit the worse for wear … an appalling necktie with an explosive burst of colors that had nothing to do with his shirt or his suit … a small faint patch of beard stubble below the joint of his jaw, which his razor had missed … all of which perhaps indicated he didn’t have a wife to monitor such things … not a strong man, obviously … drunk the other night when she first met him … but friendly and warm, and he had remembered her name … and friendly and warm this morning, whatever he had come over for … all of which flashed through the Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas of her brain in a matter of seconds—far faster than it would take to say it out loud … She was now happy she had chosen to wear what she had on … the dark blouse that minimized her heaviness through the shoulders and back … the tight gabardine skirt that brought out her best feature, which was her legs … the tan pumps with black caps that more or less matched the skirt and the blouse … semi-high heels, just high enough to bring out the excellent contours of her calves … and her makeup, almost as carefully done as it had been for the opening at the High, although she had gone far easier on the mascara … and her heavy gold chain-link choker, which helped cover up the lines in her neck.

  “Did you have to drive far to get here?” she asked Mr. Ray Peepgass, which really meant: “Where do you live, and is there a wife there?”

  “Not very far, really,” said Peepgass. “I live in Buckhead, too, but there’s Buckhead—” He paused and chuckled and made a little gesture out the window. “And there’s Buckhead. I have an apartment in Collier Hills. I used to have a house in Snellville before my wife and I separated.” He had a vague awareness, which he couldn’t have explained, of wanting Martha Croker to be apprised of that fact. “To tell you the truth, it’s a lot easier to drive here from Collier Hills at this time of the morning than it is to drive down Peachtree Street to PlannersBanc.”

  Martha said, “Well, I’m sorry I had to make it so early. This is just one of those days.”

  Which really meant: one of those days when I have a 10:30 appointment at DefinitionAmerica for Mustafa Gunt’s class.

  “Not at all!” said Peepgass. “This is actually a perfect time for me.”

  Except that I’m so damned hungry, he thought. For an instant he wondered if he might possibly suggest that perhaps her maid might be good enough to whip up some pancakes or waffles for him—but only for an instant. Out loud: “I hope I haven’t made all this—the purpose of my visit, I mean—sound mysterious or anything. It’s just that I’m afraid I’m going a little out-of-bounds with what I want to talk to you about—” He paused, lifted his eyebrows, opened his eyes wide, and gave her a vulnerable smile. “So anytime, if you want me to shut up and forget about it, just say so, and I won’t proceed any further.”

  “Well—now you do make it sound mysterious,” said Martha.

  Peepgass gave a shrug, also of the vulnerable sort. “You remember when I saw you at the museum the other night, I told you I had been thinking about you that day, or I think that’s what I said. Anyway, that’s quite true. The only thing I’m not sure about is how much of all this it’s appropriate for me to tell you, since it’s the bank’s business, but it’s even more critically your business, it seems to me.”

  Martha smiled patiently. “What is?”

  Peepgass put on a dead-serious look. “I’m not sure whether or not you know about the jam Charlie—your … former husband—has gotten himself into.”

  “No, I don’t,” said Martha.

  “The bank would probably take a dim view of my telling you this, but to all intents and purposes, Charlie Croker is bankrupt.”

  “Bankrupt?”

  “Yes,” said Peepgass. “The only question that remains is how hard a line PlannersBanc wants to take. He owes us approximately half a billion dollars and several other banks and two insurance companies another $285 million. Of the total, he’s guaranteed $160 million personally. He’s already hopelessly in arrears on interest payments, never mind principal.”

  “What happened to ‘non-recourse loans only’?” One of Charlie’s cardinal principles, from the very beginning, had been that a developer should never accept a loan for which he was personally responsible. The bank’s only recourse should be the assets of the corporation.

  “Charlie was determined to build Croker Concourse, no matter what, and now he’s paying the price. He spent eight million dollars—of our money—putting in an astronomical light show at the top of the tower, which nobody wants to look at at lunch in the first place. Now … why am I telling you all this? Because we’ve begun workout proceedings in his case—do you remember ‘workout proceedings’?”

  “I remember Charlie involved in a workout back in the seventies.”

  “Well, he’s in the workout of all workouts right now, believe me. Which means that we’re going through his finances with a fine-tooth comb. In the course of it I’ve seen the terms of his divorce settlement with you. So I’ve seen the dollar amount he’s supposed to give you each month, and I can only assume it’s a significant part of your income. Forgive me if I’m way off base or out of line.”

  Subdued: “No …”

  “Well—what I see happening is that the approximately seven million dollars a year Charlie takes as a dividend out of the Croker Global Corporation is no longer gonna be there. We’ve already seized his Gulfstream Five, and we’re probably going to go after Turpmtine next. And there’s no way his creditors are going to let him take seven million dollars a year out of this drowning corporation of his.”

  “Good Lord,” said Martha. She seemed genuinely shocked by the whole business. “If he loses Turpmtine, he’ll absolutely die.”

  “If I may be frank about it,” said Peepgass, “I don’t particularly care what happens to Charlie and Charlie’s plantation. My concern is the effect all this might have on you. I thought that at the very least you ought to know about it, even though, as I say, I don’t know what my own superiors would think of my coming here and telling you all this. What worries me—or what you might want to think about—is that Charlie is going to be lucky if he takes $300,000 a year out of Croker Global, much less the $600,000 a year he’s supposed to give you under the terms of the settlement—and if he keeps on with the hardnose, uncooperative attitude he’s been giving us so far, he could wind up with nothing. Every single asset he possesses, right down to his cuff links, if he wears cuff links—I don’t recall—everything he’s got is on the line. I just thought somebody ought to give you at least the rough outlines of what’s been happening.”

  Martha Croker didn’t say anything at first. Peepgass studied her face. She must have been a very pretty woman back when Croker married her. She was a very handsome woman even now. But the lines in her face had begun to creep down over her jawline, the better to hook up with the lines in her neck. And yet what a chain of gold there was around that neck! He wondered if it was real gold. Well, why shouldn’t it be? The lawn, the gardens, the gardener in puttees were all real.

  Just then the black maid, Carmen, arrived with a tray, a silver tray with gadrooned edges, upon which were not only an ornately wrought little silver coffeepot with an eccentric ivory handle (Peepgass had never heard of Georg Jensen silverware) and two sets of outsized bone-china coffee cups and saucers (the saucers had handles designed in flamboyant swoops) and a silver sugar bowl and creamer that matched the coffeepot (viscerally he could sense how much the sugar bowl, a mere sugar bowl, must have cost, which was in fact $1,250) but also a silver bread gondola from which, beneath a covering of damask napkin, came the most delicious aroma of hot bread—or was it possibly cake?—an aroma that proceeded straight from Peepgass’s nose to the aching, starving void in his stomach, exciting that organ in a delirious way. He wanted to reach out and pull back the damask napkin and—get at it! But he restrained himself. Meantime, the maid poured the coffee. Another ecstatically rich aroma!

  Martha Croker said, “Thank you, Carmen!”—adding the sort of warm smile that, as Peepgass had already observed, Southern women used to show their guests how considerate they were of their help.

  Then she folded back the damask napkin on the bread gondola—and there they were: thick, rich, cake-like slices of a sort of bread Peepgass had never seen before.

  “Please—have some Sally Lunn, Ray.”

  Ray she had called him! Out loud: “Sally Lunn?”

  “It’s a Virginia recipe,” said Martha. “No one I know has ever made it any better than Carmen”—this loud enough for Carmen, who was heading out of the room, to hear. “I’m not even going to tell you what’s in it. I think it’s wonderful with damson preserves.” She motioned toward the little crock on the table.

  Peepgass didn’t have to be told twice. He took a thick slice of the bread, which was still warm to the touch, and spread on some margarine and the preserves, which had tart pieces of plum skin that gave it a wonderful tactile quality, and took a big bite. It was … wonderful! marvelous! the answer to a forty-six-year-old bachelor’s prayer!

  “Great coffee, too!” exclaimed Mr. Ray Peepgass.

  “I’m so glad you like it,” said Martha. “I get it from Louisiana. It’s called Café du Monde. It’s made with chicory.”

  “Chicory … hmmmmmm. Well, it’s great!” The rich warmth of the coffee, the richness of the bread, the ambrosial sweetness of the preserves, the translucence of the bone china, the sheer conspicuous cost of the silverware, which, he now realized, featured tiny, exquisitely wrought little bunches of silver grapes, the intricacy of the crocheted place mats, which were obviously handmade, the patterns of sharp angles and ogee curves in the woodwork around the windows, the view beyond, the formal garden created solely for those who sat in this bay, the ancient gardener kneeling in the dirt in his puttees to maintain this perfect little vista—the luxury of it all coursed through Peepgass’s central nervous system as a sensation, a visceral feeling that played upon a man’s sixth sense, his sense of well-being.

  “Anyway,” said Peepgass, “I just thought somebody should let you know what’s going on, since it seems to me your exposure in this mess Charlie has made of things is in a way as great as ours.” The old boy also gave you $10 million in cash and securities, thought Peepgass, and why wouldn’t you want to roll the dice with a couple million and join the syndicate? But he wouldn’t get into all that right now.

  “Well, this is all certainly news to me,” said Martha. “You know, I ran into Charlie the other night at the museum. He certainly didn’t seem to be in a bad way. He was the same old Charlie.”

  “Then all I can tell you is that he’s a good actor,” said Peepgass. “In fact, he comes under the heading of Too Much. Did you know he bought an entire table for that dinner? Twenty thousand dollars? Of our money? Believe me, that did not go unnoticed at PlannersBanc. That’s so typical of the way he refuses to be impressed by the seriousness of the situation he’s in. Even after we arrest his Gulfstream Five, he doesn’t seem to get it.”

  “Arrested?”

  “That’s the technical term for seizing a piece of collateral like that. We took it right in front of him, out at PDK. He was right there and yelling about the painting on the bulkhead, the one by N. C. Wyeth.”

  “Oh my God,” said Martha Croker, “you mean Jim Bowie on His Deathbed?”

  “That’s it, yeah.”

  “The two things Charlie loves most in this world are Turpmtine and that painting.”

  “And he still doesn’t get it. There he was at the Lapeth show acting as if nothing has changed. The fact is, for him … everything has changed.”

  Martha’s face grew hot and reddened … Charlie in the atrium of the High Museum … Charlie preening about with his boy with breasts, captivating the very people she had spent $20,000 on to bring to the show … To Peepgass she said, “Charlie went through a bad time in the mid-seventies. At one point he was paying back creditors twenty cents on the dollar, and they were happy to get it—and somehow he managed to pull out of the situation. I think he thinks he’s immune.” In her mind she could hear Charlie saying, “Hey, gal! Heh yew dewin’?”

  Peepgass said, “If he thinks he’s immune, then he’s in for a big shock. We’ve offered him a very good deal, but I don’t think he understands that.” He paused and looked straight into Martha Croker’s eyes and said, “What I’m about to tell you is strictly entre nous. Okay? If Arthur Lomprey”—Martha could see his hateful hunched-over form—“knew I was over here telling you all this, I don’t know what he would say, but something tells me it wouldn’t be good. But—I’ve gone this far, so I might as well tell you. We’ve told Charlie he can keep his house on Blackland Road, Turpmtine, and his beloved N. C. Wyeth painting if he’ll hand over the deeds to the Phoenix Center, the MossCo Tower, the TransEx Palladium, and Croker Concourse.”

  “Hand over the deeds?”

  “It’s called ‘deed in lieu of foreclosure.’ In effect, he just gives us the properties. That way he spares himself the humiliation of foreclosure proceedings and all the publicity that would generate, and he keeps his home, the plantation, and the painting.”

  “What does he say to that?” asked Martha. “I hope you realize that he’s almost as fanatical about Croker Concourse as he is about Turpmtine and Jim Bowie on His Deathbed.”

  “Oh, he’s got his back up,” said Peepgass. “He as much as dared us to try to come after Turpmtine. He’s gonna have a big surprise coming.”

  But Martha was still thinking about Croker Concourse. The very name set off a feeling in her, for it was when Charlie was in the thick of the Croker Concourse project that he had met Serena. She no longer had to articulate the thought in her mind to feel the pain and humiliation. She merely had to hear the name, and the feeling—which was in fact worse than pain and humiliation—which, at bottom, was shame—swept over her in a scalding wave.

  “What’s the big thing about Croker Concourse, the fact that he has his name on it?”

  “Partly that,” said Martha, “but mainly because he’s always thought it was so clever, so shrewd, the way he put the deal together. People don’t think of Charlie as clever and shrewd, they think of him more as a force of nature, but in this case he pulled off something very clever. Not very admirable, if you want my opinion, but very clever.”

  “Oh?” said Peepgass. “What was that?”

  “Do you remember the racial protests in Cherokee County, the demonstrations and all that business? It made the national news on television for a couple of nights, do you remember?”

  “Ummm … yeah.”

  “That was all Charlie.” Martha Croker had a tired smile.

  “Whattaya mean, ‘all Charlie’?”

  “Charlie orchestrated the whole thing!”

  “Aw, come on,” said Peepgass. “Charlie Croker? Orchestrated a demonstration against Redneck racism? That’s a little hard to believe.”

  “I know,” said Martha. “That’s one reason it worked so well. What happened was, Charlie had the theory that the next big growth in Atlanta was going to take place in the outer perimeter, the rural counties north of the city, places like Gwinnett County, Forsyth, Bartow, Cherokee. So Charlie goes out to Cherokee County, which was all trees and pastures, and he thinks he’s going to buy 150 acres or whatnot for a song, except that he finds out people thought of all this before he did, and the land costs a fortune because it’s already investor land.”