The Deed (7 page)

Amanda smiled wanly. “You’re kind of a class clown, huh?”

Wounded slightly, he shrugged. “I thought you knew aaaaall about me.”

She shook her head. “I know almost nothing about you.”

“Well, in that case…why
are
we here, exactly? If you don’t mind my being blunt. But you did say it was a long story.”

Amanda leaned toward him, taking a deep breath as she gathered her weight on her elbows and pressed her palms together, interlacing long musician’s fingers as she flashed him a conspiratorial grin. “I’m here to unravel an ancient mystery,” she said at last, not quite under her breath. Her eyes sparkled with electric excitement.

“You sound like Leonard Nimoy,” he said, to break the spell. He turned to check on the waitress, simultaneously reaching for his wallet. “I’m thinking we should run a tab, right?” he queried, seeing the waitress returning.

“
Oh,
yeah,” Amanda confirmed with a nod. “You’re going nowhere, buddy.”

“I hardly know where to begin,” Amanda confessed after a preliminary sip. “You’d think that after all this time I’d have it written out on three-by-five cards.”

“Who the hell
are
you?” he asked gently, with a shrug. “That seems like a good place to start.”

But she continued to trace her own path. “I think I’ll begin with the story,” she replied, “and then tell you where you fit in, and why I’ve been trying to find you. And then everything will become clear, I promise.” She gave him a reassuring smile.

I’m thinking flake,
said Jason to himself.
I turned her down at an eighth-grade dance, and she’s been tracking me ever since. In her studio apartment is a shrine to me: candles, yearbook pictures, a lock of my hair. And all over the walls is scribbled, over and over again, a thousand times: “‘Sorry, I don’t dance to Foreigner. Sorry, I don’t dance to Foreigner.’”

Amanda stared at him blankly, maybe confused by the sudden wary look in his eyes, maybe running her fingers over a ten-inch steak knife strapped to her thigh. Her question, when it surfaced at last, took Jason completely unawares.

“How much do you know about the European settlement of this country?” she asked simply.

Jason blinked. “Excuse me?”

“You know, when the—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he interjected, then shrugged. “All right, it’s your game. Let’s see,” he began. “‘In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.’ Except the Vikings were here first, I seem to recall.”

“That’s right.”

“And this is all going to make sense?”

She nodded sincerely. “Yes, yes. I promise.”

“There was Columbus,” Jason continued, “who I believe actually went to the Caribbean first, and then Florida, and then later there were the Pilgrims, fleeing England, I guess…for religious reasons, who came over on the
Mayflower
and landed at Plymouth Rock.”

He looked up, trying to gauge her intentions, but as Amanda only nodded expectantly, there seemed nothing to do but continue. “The Pilgrims set up colonies in New England, where a lot of them died of beriberi and syphillis and tomahawks. If the revisionist historians haven’t decided that that was all bullshit.”

“Very good,” she said. “There were a lot of settlers, though, who weren’t English. French, Swedish…Dutch.”

“That sounds familiar.” Jason nodded. “I think I vaguely remember my grandmother trying to drill that into my young skull.” He added, “Her husband was Dutch. That whole side of my family is Dutch.”

Amanda nodded and continued. “The Spanish had St. Augustine, in Florida, and the English set up a colony in Virginia, at Jamestown, which you may have heard in your history class was wiped out. Cholera. The Pilgrims up in Rhode Island made a better go of it. But it was the Dutch who were the first to really grasp the…
earning
potential of the new land. They were traders—they didn’t care so much about establishing colonies. What
they
saw in the New World was a bottomless supply of goods, with no one to keep them from it but essentially unarmed indigenous people. In 1621, the Dutch West India Company was chartered, with the express purpose of looting the New World of furs, gold, and whatever else of value could be carted back to Europe.”

“Whatever they could keep the pirates from getting,” Jason suggested.

“Well…that really became more of a problem later on,” said Amanda. “Anyway, England’s star was only just beginning to ascend, and at this point, Holland’s power on the sea was still more or less uncontested. They were able to thwart French efforts to establish colonies in Maine and Maryland, and eventually laid claim to the entire North American coast from Newfoundland to the Chesapeake Bay.”

“
Jeopardy
scout,” said Jason.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re a
Jeopardy
scout,” said Jason. “Or a grad student.”

Amanda raised an eyebrow. “NYU law,” she acknowledged.

Jason raised an eyebrow at this. “They teach you this in law school?”

“No, no,” she replied, shocked, shaking her head. “
God,
no. Law school is dull—deathly, deathly dull. This is all independent research.” She staved off his next question with a wave of her hand. “Wait—let me do this in order, or I’ll never get through it all. You just nod and drink your beer.”

He nodded, and took a sip.
The wench grows bold.
Confidence held an almost narcotic attraction for Jason, and though he still burned with curiosity as to where this could possibly be heading, he was more than content to drink deeply as she boldly held forth on whatever she damn well pleased.

And for the next twenty minutes or so, he let her guide him back through the earliest days of New York history. How Henry Hudson, an Englishman working for the Dutch government, had been charting the Delaware Bay in 1610, heading north along the coast, looking for the Northwest Passage to India, apparently a sort of Holy Grail for navigators at the time.

“When Hudson reached the northeast corner of what we now call New Jersey,” said Amanda, “he came upon this enormous bay. To the left there was a mighty river cascading out of the woods, jumping with fish. And to the right—or, more precisely, sort of dead ahead—there lay a beautiful, pristine little island, covered with deep forest. Manhattan. It was in the fall, so all the colors would have been out. Must have been an unbelievable sight. So guess which one he chose to explore?”

“The Hudson River. I mean, the river.”

“Exactly,” she said. “You
are
paying attention. Hudson was a sailor, after all, and who can blame him? But he always remembered the island fondly; in his diaries, he actually describes it as being an ideal spot for a trading post. He was right, of course. Unfortunately, two years later, he was dead.”

“Natural causes?”

“Not exactly,” said Amanda with a wry smile. “He was set adrift by his own men—in Hudson Bay, between Canada and Greenland. But his dream was eventually realized. The Dutch established settlements all over the mouth of his river, and in 1626, the Dutch West India Company, through their colonial governor Peter Minuit, bought the island of Manhattan from its native inhabitants.”

“Now, that I remember,” said Jason. “For thirty pieces of silver, or something.”

“Well, that’s Judas Iscariot.” Amanda smiled.

“Right,” said Jason, nodding. “How ugly American of me.”
Here I am,
he thought,
just sitting in a bar, getting a history lesson from a hot chick.
Concentration was proving more difficult than he’d hoped; this felt tantalizingly like a dating scenario, yet the one-sided conversation yielded little opportunity for him to dazzle her with his wit and charm.

Amanda kept up the brisk pace. “They also didn’t buy Manhattan with a trunkful of junk jewelry, as a lot of history books have it,” she asserted. “It was quality Dutch merchandise—tools, clothing, knives—worth about sixty guilders at the time. It’s historically translated as about twenty-four dollars, though with inflation it should be up to a couple of hundred bucks by now.”

“Still, the deal of the century.”

She nodded. “No question. The deal of four centuries.”

“Crazy Injun Joe: His prices are in-
sane!
” said Jason in an extravagant TV voice, hands outstretched to suggest the extent of Injun Joe’s insanity.

She smiled thinly. “Yes, now pay attention, please. So
anyway,
the Dutch bought the island from the natives, a tribe called the Manahatas—that’s where the island gets its name—and they set up a fort and a major trading post at the south end of the island. What’s now the Wall Street area.”

“That’s kind of funny,” Jason interjected.

Amanda glanced quickly both ways as if to see if anyone else was laughing. “Why is that funny?”

“Just the idea that Wall Street used to be a trading post,” he replied. “It’s what it is today, too, if you think about it.”

Amanda shrugged. “Sure, but there’s nothing ironic about that—it never stopped being a trading post.”

While Jason mulled this over, she stole the opportunity to sip her beer. “Anyway,” she continued, “the Manahatas, like many other Native Americans, were a primitive, migratory people with no real idea of ‘property.’ They’ve sold the island to the Dutch, but they aren’t even sure what that means. So they take all their new stuff back to their huts and continue to inhabit the island, which is technically no longer their own. Essentially, they just move north, off the beach.”

“Makes sense,” said Jason. “The housing’s better north of Fourteenth Street anyway.”

“But the point is, they don’t really know what they’ve done; they aren’t culturally capable of figuring out what’s happened to them.” She paused, as if to let this take effect, and Jason realized with a start that Amanda was Indian. Or part Indian, he amended, as her hazy, exotic looks began at last to resolve in his mind into distinct features: high-swept cheekbones, a generous mouth with an upper lip that curled smileward with every few dozen words, as if endlessly amused by some running in-joke playing hide-and-seek beneath the surface of her commentary. Her skin tone was on the olive side, and her hair had a defining wave that didn’t fit the native stereotype, but the context made the conclusion inescapable. Still, it seemed the wrong time to bring it up, and Jason tried quickly to recall the conversation.

“So the natives were taken advantage of,” Jason summarized.

Amanda nodded. “They were a Stone Age culture dragged to the bargaining table of colonial Europe. It was much, much easier than taking candy from a baby.”

He concentrated on drinking as she went on; he was clearly going to have to focus on buzz management this evening. For her part, Amanda slid her thumb up around and around the rim of her beer mug as if trying to coax out a resonant hum, as she described New York’s subsequent history. By the 1650s, the Dutch were hopelessly overextended, and starting to lose it. The Portuguese had driven them out of Brazil; the French had retaken Quebec; and in 1664, the English had counterclaimed the territory from Delaware to Connecticut, including Dutch New Amsterdam, a.k.a. Manhattan. Ultimately the island was surrendered by its one-legged governor, Peter Stuyvesant, much against his wishes. He’d declared his willingness to fight the entire English army himself if he had to, until all his men called his bluff by defecting.

Tempting though it was to construe the girl’s excited energy state as an unquenchable jones for his man flesh, there was no point in deluding himself. It was becoming disturbingly clear to Jason that Amanda had no carnal interest in him whatsoever. Oh, he amused her in a general sort of way; they seemed to get along well conversationally. But he’d seen all kinds of romantic prospects melt away over the years…it was the curse of the comic, and he knew the signs too well. And while the raw fact of her platonic disinterest didn’t dissuade him from persevering, it was more than a little disheartening.

“And now,” said Amanda, leaning back dramatically, “we’re at the turning point. Everything I’ve told you so far is history; you could find it in a hundred textbooks. I did,” she added parenthetically. “But
now
we dive into uncharted waters. Some of what I’m about to tell you is only conjecture; some of it is surely not quite right. But taken all together, there is truth to it.”