The Deed (8 page)

“Sounds like a good time to break for more drinks,” Jason decided, flashing a peace sign to a nearby waitress. “Oh, wait—” he said, turning back to the table. “You wanted a rum and Coke, or something.”

“Oh, please, I don’t care,” replied Amanda, opening her purse and withdrawing a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “What’s your time frame like?”

“I’m definitely a night owl,” he assured her. It wasn’t precisely true, but he
had
optimistically blocked out the entire evening, as was his habit on those rare occasions when he had actual formal dates. “What about you—you live in the city?”

“Upper East Side,” she replied. “I can just catch a cab back whenever.” She pulled two cigarettes from the pack, and before he could decline, broke one of them in two and dropped it into the ashtray, then nonchalantly placed the other between her lips. Following his intrigued gaze, she lifted the pack:
Want one?

“I’m on the Upper West,” said Jason, refusing the cigarette with a shake of his head, wondering what sort of ritual he’d just witnessed. “Eighty-first and Amsterdam. We’re ten minutes from my apartment.”

“Good,” she said, lighting the spared cigarette, “because we’re only about halfway done.”

Holy shit.
“Listen, Amanda,” Jason began, wincing slightly. “Don’t take this the wrong way, I’m having a good time. But where’s this all going?”

Amanda frowned in real surprise. “I’m not boring you, am I?” she asked, as if fascinated by the notion.

Jason shook his head. “No, no, that’s not it. It’s just that…well, none of this seems to have anything to do with
me.
”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know, I get carried away. You’ve been very patient with me; I appreciate it. But I really do find this story fascinating, personally, so it’s hard for me to—”

“I do, too,” said Jason. “Really. I mean, I’m not a history guy, but I’m definitely intrigued. I just need…a context. The ‘Why me?’”

“It’s coming,” Amanda promised. “Or rather, that
was
the context. The
story,
the reason I asked you here, is coming right up.”

“Okay,” he said warily.

“I promise,” she said sincerely, crossing her heart with one index finger, giving him an excuse to steal a glance at her grapefruit breasts. The waitress clunked the drinks on the table with one hand and scribbled a few digits on their bill.

Amanda watched her leave as if waiting for her to drop out of range. “Okay, you ready?” she said.

“Let’s do it.”

Amanda took a deep drag, then sneered at the cigarette and abandoned it on the edge of the ashtray, where it began slowly cremating itself, thin soul departing in a long gray wisp. Turning her head, she exhaled away from him. “Here’s where the story takes…sort of a mythic turn,” she asserted. “Most schoolkids learn about Peter Minuit and the Manhattan sale from that famous painting by, um, someone or other. It shows the Dutch traders shaking hands with the about-to-be-defrauded savages, as they were known.”

“The natives,” Jason suggested.

“Yes, the Manahatas. As I said, that was in 1626. And by the 1660s, Stuyvesant had surrendered the town to the British, and the Dutch occupation was done. New Amsterdam became New York, the city we all know and love today.”

Jason tried to come up with a quick caustic remark, but couldn’t formulate it in time.

“Now, Jason,” Amanda continued quickly, as if to forestall any further interruption, “what would you say if I told you that I believe that storied sale never in fact took place? Or that, if it did, it was rescinded not long after our little painting?”

Now we’re getting somewhere,
thought Jason as he considered this. “I could believe that,” he decided. “It wouldn’t be the first time history’s lied to us; Randy Johnson couldn’t throw a silver dollar across the Potomac, for example.”

“I have reason to believe that there was a mysterious benefactor,” Amanda said. “A Dutch settler who was very, very close to the Manahatas, probably lived among them. He may even have been married to one. Somehow, this man came into legal possession of the island, and agreed to hold it in perpetuity for the Manahata people, who clearly had no business transacting for themselves.”

She had paused again, expectantly, but Jason only shrugged in confusion. “Okay…,” he said simply.

“There was a document,” she went on, “or a deed—some sort of bill of sale—that established this guy’s ownership of the island, and all it entails, devolving it on his heirs in perpetuity. Essentially, giving him and his descendants clear title to the land forever,” she paraphrased. “But, again, he was to hold it for the Manahata people. This may be explicit in the document, or it may not.”

“I’m guessing we’re deep in conjectureland now, right?” said Jason.

But Amanda was shaking her head slowly. “No. Jason, the document
exists.
Now. Today.”

This genuinely surprised him. “You’ve seen it?”

“Well, no,” she conceded. “Not yet.”

“Well, if you’re right, that’s amazing,” he acknowledged, taking a slug of beer. “That’s got Discovery Channel written all over it.”

“No, no; you’re missing the point,” she complained, putting her hands to both temples as if preparing to communicate the point telepathically. “I’m not talking about a historical curiosity; I’m talking about a valid deed to property.”

“What, to Manhattan?” he said incredulously. “This guy’s been dead for how long?”

“I told you, the deed confers the land on all his heirs, in perpetuity.”

A perceptible shift in Amanda’s tone brought his attention into sudden sharp focus: She was quietly assertive now, her eyes ablaze with passion, and suddenly he had it.

“And I’m the heir,” he said. “The great-great-great et cetera grandkid.”

Amanda smiled and sat back in a sort of ecstasy of relief. “Bingo,” she confirmed.

“You seem awfully sure,” he said suspiciously, eyes narrowing.

“Yes,” she replied, nodding soberly. “I am. I can’t prove it yet, but yes, I’m quite sure.”

“But come on, Amanda,” he said. “You’re a law student. You have to know a document like that would never be enforceable. Not after four hundred years, or whatever. There must be half a million landowners in this city.”

“You’re
wrong,
you’re wrong,” she insisted, shaking her head violently. “Why do you think they run title searches every time anyone transacts property anywhere? Why do you think they have title insurance in the first place? The courts at every level, including the Supreme Court, have
always
upheld prior titled ownership.
Always.
And there’s no statute of limitation, either. Old wills, old deeds, et cetera are sufficient evidence to oust long-established residents. If someone can firmly establish prior title, they own the land, free and clear. It really is just that simple.”

Jason suddenly remembered his beer and took a long, hard swallow. He needed time, needed to drag himself out of the conversation and steady his whirling thoughts. But Amanda had no patience for him.

“In 1972,” she continued breathlessly, “the Supreme Court overturned an 1892 act that had opened up the Klamath River reservation to white settlement, and restored it to the aboriginal Indians. In 1991, in Connecticut, local tribes successfully sued the state and won a significant plot of land, including part of downtown freaking Hartford, that had been unlawfully settled.” She paused, waiting for input that wasn’t coming. “I go on like this for days when nobody stops me.”

They stared at each other across the table for what seemed like minutes, not speaking. Her dark eyes kept him riveted; the rest of the bar had long ago faded into peripheral darkness. Apparently, fate had fiendishly decided to present Amanda to him as some vague agent of mystery: not the Lady, but the tiger. He clasped his hands together as part of a monumental effort to focus, but Amanda grabbed his hands between hers and pulled him forward, into the table. Their faces were now inches apart, and Jason felt a physical rush. The din of the crowd swelled hotly around his ears, closed his throat.

“This is
real,
Jason,” she said quietly, without blinking. “
You’re
the descendant…it’s your deed.”

She released his hands and clasped her own together as she sat back in the seat, touching her forefingers to her lips as if in prayer.

“Your island.”

Casually spreading the blinds with two fingers, Ronnie Dovatelli peered out his conference-room window and watched a golden retriever relieve itself on a fire hydrant across the street, two stories below.
There truly is nothing new under the sun,
he mused, thoughtfully swirling the surface of his hot chocolate, where slowly deliquescing puffs of foam, tattered remnants of a once-formidable armada of mini-marshmallows, dispersed their essence in coiled white streaks. No coffee since the goddamned ulcer, of course, not without a Maalox chaser; this humiliating child’s drink was the most caustic thing his jittery stomach walls could handle. Not that anyone in the organization dared to meet his eye and make that particular observation.

The pooch wagged his tail as he delivered his pungent critique, the inverted triangle of a red bandanna swinging loosely from his fat neck. Ronnie let the slats of the blinds spring back into place and reluctantly allowed the animated voice of his excitable son-in-law to drift back into his awareness.

Vince Furnio, dapper in off-the-rack Armani, stood with hands on hips, sandwiched comfortably between a project easel (currently featuring a pie chart under the heading “Kids Today”) and a projector painting a PowerPoint presentation on the far wall. Around the overlarge table, backed up nearly to the walls on all sides, lounged a dozen or so business-men and one woman, all casual in attire and attitude, none paying particularly close attention to the demonstration that was, as anybody could have guessed, entirely too good for the room.

“So I’m seventeen,” Vince was saying. “I want to participate in mobsta culture, but I don’t wanna actually get arrested, or shot, or otherwise screw up my happy little suburban life.” He punctuated his speech with smoothly interpolated hand motions, wrists locked as if in handcuffs, a pair of thumb-cocked finger pistols. “I wanna be a Soprano, not a Gambino.”

Again with the frickin’ Sopranos,
thought Dovatelli, and the bile churned merrily up the back of his throat.
Bane of my existence.
Kids coming up now didn’t want to hear word one about spreadsheets or management; you could practically hear them turning the music up in their heads. All they wanted was to whack somebody. It was a full-time job just keeping them off each other’s throats. No one coming up through the ranks understood that this was a business; if you didn’t let ’em carry a gun, they’d drift away, and if you did, you had to watch ’em slip their hands into their pants to finger it constantly, rubbing it like a goddamn rabbit’s foot. When his generation handed over the wheel…and it wouldn’t be long…the violence unleashed in the East was going to be a thing to behold.

He cast his eye over to Gina, his poor only child, Vince’s bride of almost a year. Dovatelli watched his daughter trying vainly to spin a pencil on her finger, staring in cross-eyed frustration at the stick through lashes gummy with mascara, her awkwardly masculine features framed with a dated Jackie O. bob. Gina had come up snake eyes in the genetic crap-shoot, winning Dovatelli’s looks and his wife’s simpleton brain (God rest her soul). It wasn’t hard to see what Vince, the clumsy little machinator, saw in her; his cockiness since marrying Gina made it clear he believed he’d now simply inherit the business from the old man, like an heirloom watch or a blood disorder. What she saw in him, who knew? Maybe just an option.
Sorry, kid.

A glance around his circle of listless pencil pushers reminded Dovatelli that he wasn’t exactly flush with options himself. Maybe he
would
hand the reins to Vince; the only other candidate, obviously, was Freddie Marone. A hulking giant with dark eyes and a bodybuilder’s tight-lipped smile, Freddie was Dovatelli’s second-in-command, and privy to virtually all the company secrets. Nobody would question his succession…still, his thirst for the dark side of the business scared Dovatelli not a little. He’d watched Freddie position a crying businessman in his office doorway and slam a steel door on an exposed leg hard enough to break it, then shift the man, quivering and screaming and pleading, and break the same leg in another spot. That terrible cracking sound, the stench of the piss…and the whole time Freddie’s whistling some goofy song, like a goddamn coal miner on his way back up to the sun.

No question, the man had an inner psychopath patiently chewing its way out. Oh, the chicks loved him; he was a big motherfucking teddy bear, and it chilled Dovatelli’s blood to see him laughing with some cooing waitress or back-talking stripper, because he’d seen Freddie smile that same broad, farmboy grin while airing out the back of someone’s skull, or knotting a chain around some degenerate’s throat.

“There is a vast commercial opportunity here,” Vince continued, still tirelessly gesticulating, trying to haul in the crowd with outstretched fingers. “The kids are looking for”—here he trailed off briefly, snapping his fingers twice—“cultural inspiration. And this is a vacuum we can fill. Gentlemen, we are in a position to provide no-risk entrée into the mobsta class, to merchandise where no one else dares to set foot.”

“Why d’ya keep sayin’ ‘gentlemen’?” Gina whispered, for the second time.

“Gina, enough already,” said Freddie, from across the table.

She stared at him, mouth half open in disbelief at his audacity.

Vince ran a hand through his oiled black hair and flashed his wife a tense smile:
Okay, honey, now hush, okay?
He reached down by his feet and produced an overstuffed briefcase that he laid gently on the table, spinning it around so the latch faced him before looking up to address the table again.

Dramatically pushing back the sleeves of his jacket, Vince slowly, as if defusing a bomb, unclasped the case and raised the lid. “Pass these out, sweetheart,” he said to Gina, handing her a stack of laminated pages. “Feast your eyes, gentlemen, on the wave of the future.” He paused to wink conspiratorially at Dovatelli.

Wearily, the old man took the proffered page and glanced down at an elegantly designed menu. Under an Italian flag shot up with holes, it read, “Mobstateria: Park It Here If You Know What’s Good For You.”

Look at this shit,
thought Dovatelli, closing his eyes.
My heart is breaking.
There was no denying it anymore; his sixty-plus years had finally started to catch up with him. He was fighting a losing battle just to hold on to his little legacy, the dwindling chunk of territory that remained of his grandfather’s once-rambling extralegal empire, and increasingly the temptation was just to swim upstream to Florida and leave it all behind. Dovatelli rubbed his stomach gently and thought:
I do not want to die here.

“Corleone Cannelloni. Osso Buco Rico,” Vince rattled off proudly. “I’m talkin’ a whole chain of theme restaurants. The waiters are wiseguys. ‘Order the special or else,’ that kind of thing.”

“‘One Pullet in the Chamber’?” read Freddie incredulously. “You kiddin’ with this crap?”

“It’s chicken potpie,” said Vince defensively. “The chamber’s the—”

“Shut up, both of you,” said Dovatelli, instantly silencing the room’s chatter. “A chain of theme restaurants, Vin? That’s your big idea?”

A crestfallen Vincent simply sat and stared at the still-yawning briefcase.

“Vin, even people who know how to run restaurants, which we are demonstrably
not,
can’t turn a profit,” he continued. “We might as well get a contract to build space shuttles.”

Somebody snickered at this, and Dovatelli came down hard. “You shut the fuck up.” He began slowly circling the table. “In case nobody’s noticed, we’re getting beat to
shit
out there in the street.” He trailed off and glanced out the window, trying consciously to steady his nerves. “Come on, guys. What we need is some real, new business. High margin, low risk, low cost of entry…real cash-flow operations. Not this pie-in-the-sky shit.”

“I got just the thing, Ronnie,” said Freddie. Vince looked up at this, flashing his rival a wounded look.

“Oh, yeah? And what’s that?” wondered Dovatelli, exasperation lingering in his voice.

“A
casino,
” said Freddie, leaning forward in his seat and smiling darkly, thick black eyebrows coming together like long-lost twins. “Fifty million or more a year, when it’s up and running,” he predicted.

“Forget it,” said Dovatelli, shaking his head. “Too much risk. Every time you get busted, you lose thirty grand in equipment. But that’s more along the lines of—”

But Freddie was shaking his head. “Ronnie, excuse me a second here, but…I’m talking about a
legal
casino. On an Indian reservation.” He looked around the table, meeting only blank stares. “Like Foxwoods.”

Vince fake-coughed to insinuate himself into the dialogue. “There’s just one slight problem, Freddie,” he said with a smirk, extending his hands out to encompass the table. “You see any redskins?”

Dismissing him with a contemptuous sideways glance, Freddie focused instead on Ronnie and leaned into the table again. “There’s tribes right there on Long Island dreamin’ of Vegas, just waitin’ for someone to organize ’em. We got the construction, the landscapers, the union guys, all the equipment. I know a guy who makes the goddamn
tables.
We set ’em up, run the whole operation behind the books, and hand ’em a piece. It’s a goddamn money tree.”

The silence that followed fed Freddie’s confidence; the familiar goofy smile spread across his face. “Ronnie,
think
about it,” he said in summary. “A casino that’s a stop on the goddamn Long Island Railroad. We could turn Foxwood into a fuckin’
ghost
town.”

Vince rolled his eyes at this, but no one was watching him; even the rays of the sun streaming through the blinds behind Dovatelli seemed focused on the old boss. For a long moment he held his silence, contemplating some obscure koan of commerce. Eleven Rolex fakes and one Chanel Le Temps ticked into the vacuum.

At last, Dovatelli spoke. “I’m listening,” he said.

Vince squeezed his eyes shut in chained fury, feeling the first pangs of gastric acid eating into the walls of his stomach.

MADISON AVENUE
, 9:25
A.M.

“Sorry I’m late,” Jason said, cringing outside Halloran’s office door.

“Oh, please,” said his boss, ushering him inside with a sweep of his cigarette. “Don’t get all craven on me now. Come in, come in.”

Halloran clicked the door shut behind him as Jason slipped into the room, puzzled and wary. The terse Post-it note (“Jason—See me now. H.”) was ominous; in interoffice communication, brevity is the soul of danger. Now, facing a desktop uncharacteristically littered with scribbled notes and Rolodex cards, Jason felt completely at sea, and several moments passed before he realized that his boss was still behind him, lurking in the doorway.

Jason turned to find Halloran leaning back against the door, cigarette held thoughtfully to his lips. On catching Jason’s eye, he took a mighty drag and reversed the butt in his hand, staring at the glowing tip as if considering whether or not to stub it into his own nose. As his boss seemed inclined to keep that post, Jason swiveled the visitor’s chair in front of the desk and sat down to face him.

“I’m out, apparently,” Halloran told the cigarette.

Jason frowned, not comprehending, and the meaning slowly dawned on him. “You’re
kidding,
” he exclaimed.

“No, I am not,” replied Halloran. “I don’t even see the funny part.”

“What happened?” said Jason, remembering with a bit of horror Nivens’ and Walters’ earlier, dismissed prediction of his boss’s demise.

Halloran frowned and shrugged with forced nonchalance, pacing off half the room’s perimeter before seating himself behind his desk. “It’s a pretty standard bit of merger financing,” he explained. “Sort of a shorthand attempt to help amortize the cost of overleveraging. They’ve given me a month, but I think I’m just gonna take it in vacation days. None of this is public yet, of course.”

Wracked with guilt, his pulse racing with the double agent’s fear of discovery, Jason was having difficulty digesting this new information. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said, shaking his head. “Overleveraging? What am I missing?”

Halloran looked at Jason with concern as he stubbed the butt into the open smokeless ashtray. “I thought we agreed you were going to start reading the paper in the morning.”

“Pete, I just walked in.”

“The Disney deal went through,” said Halloran. “Sixty-five dollars a share. It’s worth maybe half of that, of course…so they’re trimming the soft white underbelly.” He picked up a business card from a stack, studied it, relegated it back to the pile. “Isn’t it funny how it’s always the middle kids who get shafted?”

For a half hour or so, they sat and talked about details of the changeover, and then about nothing at all, while Halloran chain-smoked and Jason’s mind roiled and rattled. What had begun so awkwardly quickly became a surreally calm conversation between two people who were suddenly peers. Jason wondered if they’d remain any kind of friends without the glue of their working relationship and the daily contact; he doubted it. But the magnitude of Halloran’s misfortune loomed as an operatic backdrop, rendering the pleasantries downright silly in contrast.