Mr Vogel had red hair, two grandchildren, and a cane, which he used for slapping on his desk when something wasn’t to his liking. A lot of things weren’t to his liking. Besides that, he’d told me more about his life in the half hour since we’d met than my own father had told me in twenty years.
I was actually in a meeting with Mr Vogel, but that meeting had to be interrupted for a minute, because he had to call the police. Just before, he’d said, ‘You should’ve seen me fifteen years ago, I was such a depressed old dog.’
There was not much left of that depressed old dog. On the contrary, Mr Vogel was the picture of liveliness. He was working five phones at once; he was also working two secretaries, and he paced his office incessantly, even when he was in a meeting with you. He even had time to orchestrate when his employees were allowed to go to the bathroom. He was the only one who had the key to the bathroom, and he kept careful track of how much time everyone spent there.
‘Just hold it in,’ I’d already heard him call out twice. ‘Just hold it in. You have to learn that in this business.’ Mr Vogel was a late bloomer in his career. And it was too late, perhaps, because in addition to his career and his business, he was gripped by a paranoia that now controlled his life. Of course he was also controlled by his two grandsons from his second and third marriages, but that was only on the weekends.
Even then he had a hard time trying not to think about how everything he’d built up would be taken away from him. An understandable concern, but just as with death, it might be better not to think about it all the time.
Right at that moment, Mr Vogel was shouting, ‘Get out, get out or I’ll kill somebody.’ The person who was supposed to get out didn’t pay much attention to this. I had never seen two real-estate agents go at each other, but in Mr Vogel’s office this apparently was not unusual. I later heard that Mr Vogel was in the habit of poking you in the stomach with his cane, driving you out of the office that way.
He didn’t want it to come to that in my presence, I think, so he called the police.
‘There’s an intruder here,’ he said.
The intruder was sitting next to me, also calling the police on the other line to report physical abuse. He was a tiny little man, balding, with a few tufts of black hair left, who slapped his forehead every now and then, pointing at Mr Vogel. When they had both persuaded the police to come, the little man whispered to me, ‘Don’t do business with him, he belongs in a nut house.’
The police must’ve gotten pretty confused by the two calls, because when they arrived, there were six of them. And once they were there, they didn’t want to leave. Neither did the little bald man. Mr Vogel was getting more and more excited, but that didn’t impress the police. I - and the whole staff along with me - was afraid it would lead to a heart attack. They were running around with glasses of water, which Mr Vogel would knock out of their hands as if it were a perfectly natural thing to do.
The police announced that they were ready to start lis tening to both parties, and that this could take a while.
They wanted me as a witness, but I kept repeating that I didn’t know anything about it. How the police ultimately got out of there I’ll never know, because Mr Vogel’s youngest assistant, Noah, took me away.
In a bar across from the office we had a couple of beers at Mr Vogel’s expense and Noah said, ‘It’s a great business, but you have to know when to quit.’
‘That goes for any business,’ I said.
When, two hours later, we went upstairs again, Mr Vogel had undergone a complete transformation. Sometimes you sleep with someone and the next day she acts like nothing happened. That’s what Mr Vogel did. He was in an excellent mood when he greeted us and even hugged me like a prodigal son. He was about to make a few thousand dollars on me, which might explain his strange behaviour. But maybe he’d developed a sincere affection for me.
‘I do hope we haven’t given you a bad impression of our business,’ Mr Vogel said.
‘Not at all.’
I signed the lease. There wasn’t much time to read the contracts, but I could trust Mr Vogel. There was nothing but a few pieces of broken glass in the corner to remind me of the event of an hour ago.
As I got up Mr Vogel said, ‘Would you like to come and work here?’ I didn’t say anything, but Vogel laughed and grabbed my hand.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s an eight-day course to get your license. And if you promise to come and work here I’ll be your sponsor.’
I still didn’t say anything.
‘I can see you’ve got it in you,’ Vogel said triumphantly. ‘And a few extra bucks wouldn’t be bad either, right?’
‘I’ll think it over,’ I promised. Maybe this was why I’d come to New York. To become a real-estate agent.
‘You’ve got talent,’ Vogel called after me. ‘I recognise talent.’
I remember hearing those words before. When I stepped out of the elevator I saw the little bald man. Apparently, he’d been waiting for me.
‘I have something to tell you,’ he said. ‘I’m sure it will interest you.’
