"Richard Paul Russo - Nobodys Fool" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russo Richard Paul)

Security did not stretch very far, and so they rented their
second-floor flats out of necessity, though the rents they received
often did little more than cover the repairs necessitated by the
disintegration of hundred-year-old pipes, the overloading of antiquated
electrical circuits, the falling of tree limbs. To make matters worse,
taxes were skyrocketing, pressured upward by down- state speculators in
real estate, many of whom seemed convinced that Bath and every other
small town in the corridor between New York City and Montreal would
appreciate dramatically during the eighties and nineties. It might not
look it, but Bath had much to recommend it. Not only was the old Sans
Souci, grandly restored, scheduled to reopen next summer, but a huge
tract of boggy land between the village and the interstate was being
considered for development of a theme park called The Ultimate
Escape.

Miss Beryl's son, Clive Jr. " for the last decade the president of the

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North Bath Savings and Loan, was leading a group of local investors to
ensure that the theme park became a reality, and he subscribed
enthusiastically to the view that because land was limited, the future
was limitless. " In twenty years," he was fond of saying, " there's
going to be no such thing as a bad location. " Miss Beryl did not
argue, but neither did she share her son's optimism. To her way of
thinking there would always be bad locations, and unless she was
gravely mistaken Clive Jr. would discover this by investing in them.

Clive Jr. was a cynical optimist. He believed that people went broke
for two reasons: stupidity and small thinking. Stupidity in others was
a good thing, according to Clive Jr. " because there was money to be
made by it.

Other people's financial failures were opportunities, not cause for
alarm.

He liked to analyze failure after the fact, discover its source in
small thinking, limited ambition, penny antes. He prided himself on
having rescued the North Bath Savings and Loan from just such unhealthy
notions. For years that institution had been edging by slender
centimeters toward insolvency, the result of Clive Jr." s predecessor,
a deeply suspicious and pessimistic man from Maine who hated to loan
people money. The fact that people came to him asking for money and
often truly needing it suggested to him the likelihood of their not
being able to repay it. He could see the need in their eyes, and he
couldn't imagine such need going away. He thought the institution's
money was safer in the vault than in their pockets. The man had
actually died in the bank, on a Sunday, seated in his leather chair,
his office door closed, as it always was, as if he suspected he might