The Job by Douglas Kennedy Page A

and eighteen dollars. Ouch.
    “You guys can do the next one,” I said, tossing my American Express card down on the little tray and praying hard that it would be accepted (I’d gotten a letter from AMEX earlier in the week, all but threatening me with grievous bodily harm if I didn’t pay up my overdue bill).
    “I must say,” Geena said, “for once, all the hype was true. Those ri sotto cakes were truly amazing.”
    “And at least they didn’t charge us for the high celeb quotient,” Lizzie added.
    “Speaking of which,” Ian said, “look who’s walking in right now.”
    Along with everyone else in the main dining room, we all briefly craned our heads to watch the entrance of an exceptionally tall, powerfully built man in his early fifties. Everything about him exuded authoritative ease. At six foot four, he towered over the room. There was not an ounce of flab on his domineering frame. His face was Derma-tanned. His suit and shirt looked Savile Row. His blue gray eyes were clear and hard. But what really struck me were his hands. They were as immense as bear paws. The grab-all hands of a grab-all man.
    “Well, well,” Ian said, “the Great Motivator arrives.”
    The Great Motivator. Better known as Jack Ballantine. If you’ve been alive and cognizant for the past twenty years, you’ve undoubtedly read all about the Jack Ballantine story. How he grew up as a steelworker’s son in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, discovered a talent for football in high school, won a full scholarship to Michigan State, became the most renowned college quarterback of the mid-sixties, then led the Dallas Cowboys to three Super Bowl victories during his high-profile professional career.
    Jack Ballantine wasn’t just an ace quarterback, however. He was also a glitz-freak, someone who drove 150 miles per hour in the fast lane. During his decade with the Cowboys, he cultivated a reputation as a full-fledged convert to the Playboy worldview. A string of Ferraris. A string of Hollywood actress girlfriends. A string of designer bachelor pads in New York, the Hollywood Hills, Vail, and Dallas. And a propensity for trouble-for picking fights in bars, punching out nosy journalists, and allegedly hanging out with guys whose names were well known to federal law enforcement agencies.
    Everyone expected Ballantine to end up as an archetypal screwed-up jock, someone who, upon retiring from the NFL, would blow most of his fortune on nose candy, rapacious women, and bad investments. Instead, he surprised the world by moving to New York in 1975 and becoming a self-styled real-estate developer. The cynics laughed-and predicted he’d be in bankruptcy court within twelve months. But Ballantine turned out to be a shrewd businessman. Starting with a series of small property acquisitions in the outer boroughs, he gradually moved into the Manhattan marketplace, cutting a series of big-news deals in the early ’80s that guaranteed him a multimillionaire lifestyle and the status of a player.
    But Ballantine being Ballantine, he wasn’t satisfied with the humdrum role of multimillionaire developer. Rather, he had to transform himself into the Master Builder-Mr. High-rise, who, during the height of Reaganomics, imprinted his very own stamp on the Manhattan citvscaDe. Bie buildiners. Bier deals. Two heavilv publicized marriages. Two heavily publicized divorces. A man who sold himself to the public as the great entrepreneurial patriot of his time: Capitalism’s Great Quarterback.
    Of course, there were endless rumors that much of Ballantine’s empire was built on sand-that he was constantly on the brink of financial collapse. Just as there were loud whispers that he played fast and loose in business-that he was a man with a flexible set of scruples.
    Then, in 1991, it finally all went wrong. A casino deal in Atlantic City fell apart. A huge high-rise development in Battery Park City spiraled way over budget. Ballantine’s corporate cash flow dried up. He was