Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

Priced to Sell BY NAOMI NOVIK

Naomi Novik was born in New York in 1973, a first-generation American, and raised on Polish fairy tales, Baba Yaga, and Tolkien. She studied English literature at Brown University and did graduate work in computer science at Columbia University before leaving to participate in the design and development of the computer game Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide.

Her first novel, His Majesty’s Dragon, was published in 2006, along with Throne of Jade and Black Powder War, and has been translated into twenty-three languages. She has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. The fourth volume of the Temeraire series, Empire of Ivory, published in September 2007, was a New York Times bestseller.

She lives in New York City with her husband and eight computers.

“I’m over getting offended,” the vampire said despondently. “I just want to stop wasting my time. If the board isn’t going to let me in, I don’t care how much they smile and how polite they are. I’d rather they just tell me up front there’s no chance.”

“I know, it’s terrible,” Jennifer said. No co-op board was going to say anything like that, of course; it was asking for a Fair Housing lawsuit. “Have you thought about a townhouse?”

“Yeah, sure, because of course I’ve got a trust fund built on long-term compound interest,” he said bitterly. “I’m only fifty-four.”

He didn’t look a day over twenty-five, with that stylish look vampires got if they didn’t feed that often—pale and glamorous and hungry—staring into his Starbucks like it was nowhere near what he actually wanted. Jennifer wasn’t too surprised he was getting turned down. Right now she was feeling pretty excellent about the garlic salt she’d put on the quick slice of pizza that had been lunch.

“Well,” Jennifer said, “maybe a property in Brooklyn?”

“Brooklyn?” the vampire said, like she’d suggested a beach vacation in Florida.

It took him five minutes wrapping up to leave the café: coat, gloves, hat, veil, scarf, and a cape over all that; Jennifer was so not envying him the rush-hour subway ride home on the Lexington Avenue line.

She walked the five blocks uptown and poked her head into Doug’s office to report. The vampire had been bounced over to their team from a broker at Black Thomas Phillips, with blessings, after getting rejected by a second co-op board.

“Try him on some of the new condo developments, where the developer is still controlling the building,” Doug said. “What’s his budget?”

“A million two,” Jennifer said.

“And he wants a three bedroom?” Doug said. She winced and nodded. “Not a chance. Show him some convertible twos and see if the amenities make him happy.”

“I was thinking maybe if we could shake something loose in the Victorian, on Seventy-sixth?” she said. “I could send around postcards to the current owners.”

“Keep it in your back pocket, but I wouldn’t start there,” Doug said. “The board there won’t mind he’s a vampire, but they’ll mind that he’s less than a hundred years old.”

Tom knocked on the door and looked in. “Doug, sorry to interrupt, but you’ve got that two-fifteen with the new client at their place on Thirty-second and First.”

Doug didn’t really know the building; it was a rental, and not a good one: near the Midtown Tunnel traffic, no views, and only an aggressive goblin minding the door, who scowled when Doug asked for 6B. “Six B?”

“Yes?” Doug said.

“You … friend?” the goblin asked, even more suspiciously.

“He’s expecting me,” Doug said diplomatically: Some tenants didn’t want their landlord knowing they were apartment hunting.

Unbelievably, the goblin went ahead and poked a foot at the watchcat sleeping under the front hall table. It raised its head and sniffed at Doug and said in a disgruntled voice, “What do you want from me, it’s just a real estate broker.”

“Broker?” the goblin said, brightening. “Broker, huh? He moving?”

“You’d have to ask him,” Doug said, but that wasn’t a good sign. Bad landlord references could sink a board application quicker than vampirism. He was starting to get doubts about the client anyway. Anyone who really had a $3-million budget, living here?

The IKEA furniture filling the apartment didn’t give him a lot of added confidence, but the client said, “Oh, it’s … it’s in a trust fund,” blinking at him myopically from behind small, thick-glassed, round John Lennon specs. Henry Kell didn’t seem like a candidate to piss off goblins: He was a skinny five foot six and talked softly enough that Doug had to lean forward to hear him. “I don’t like to spend it, and … and I don’t have very many needs, you know. Only … well … I think it would be best if, if we had our own property, and I think he’s come around to the notion.”

“Okay, so we’re looking for a place for you and your … partner?” Doug said. “Should I meet him, too?”

“Er,” Mr. Kell said. He took his glasses off and wiped them with a cloth. “You very likely will, at some point, I would expect. But perhaps we could begin just the two of us?”

Kell didn’t care about prewar or postwar, didn’t care about a view. “Although I would prefer,” he said, “not to look directly into other apartments”—and only shrugged when Doug asked about neighborhoods.

“Okay,” Doug said, giving up. He figured he was going to have to take Kell around a little to get some sense of the guy’s taste. “I can show you some places tomorrow, if you have time?”

“That would be splendid,” Kell said, and the next morning he set Doug’s new personal-best record by walking into the first place he was shown, looking around for a total of ten minutes, and coming back to say he’d take it for the asking price.

Not that Doug had a deep aversion to getting paid more for less work, but he felt like he wasn’t doing his job. “Are you sure you don’t want to see anything else?” he said. “Honestly—the ask here is a little high, the place has only been on the market a week.”

“No, I…” Kell said, “I think I would prefer, really, to tie everything up as quickly as possible. The apartment is quite excellent.”

Not a lot of people would have called it that: It was an estate sale, the kitchen and the bathrooms were original, and the late owner had committed crimes against architecture with a pile of ugly built-ins. But nobody could deny it met Kell’s criteria for privacy—three rooms facing into blank walls, another one into a courtyard, and the bedroom had a little slice of a view into Riverside Park. The neighborhood was quiet—the elves at Riverside kept it that way—and it was a condo.

“How soon can we sign a contract?” Kell asked.

“I’ll get your lawyer in touch with the seller’s lawyer,” Doug said, and called Tom to cancel the rest of the viewings, shrugging a little helplessly to himself.

“Wow,” Tom said, when Doug got back into the office.

“Yeah, that was really something,” Doug said. “I think I get bragging rights for easiest commission ever made on this one. How did it go at Tudor City?”

Tom shook his head glumly. The Tudor City apartment was a beautiful place—view of the UN, formal dining room and two bedrooms, renovated kitchen, new subway-tile bathrooms, and priced to move. Unfortunately, it had come on the market as part of a divorce settlement, and before moving out the owners had gotten into a knock-down, drag-out screaming fight that had ended in dueling curses in the living room.

People weren’t even getting to the master suite. They came in, stuck their heads into the big entry closet, walked into the living room, saw the long wall swarming over with huge black bugs, and turned around and went right out. Sometimes they screamed, even though Doug always warned their brokers beforehand. But it was a tough market right now, and no one wanted to give up a chance for a sale.

The potential buyer this afternoon hadn’t screamed: She was a herpetologist, and Tom had really thought that was going to be perfect. He’d pitched it to her as free food supply for her snakes. “But apparently they don’t eat beetles,” he said.

“Well, you win some, you lose some,” Doug said. “Let’s see if we can get the clients to put up the fee for another eradicator. It’s breaking my heart to see that place list for half a million under market.”

The real estate market in Manhattan was always an adventure: everyone wanted to live somewhere in the city. The elves fought tooth and nail with Wall Street wizards over Gramercy Park townhouses and Fifth Avenue co-ops; developers tried to pry brownies out of abandoned industrial buildings in Greenwich Village so they could build loft conversions for rock stars and advertising execs; college students squeezed in four to a one-bedroom with actors and alchemists trying for their big break.

Doug had slogged through the dark days of the early nineties, when there’d been seven years of inventory on the market and nothing selling. The immortals were the worst: unless you had a co-op with a limit on how long you could sublet, good luck getting a rakshasa or a vampire to lower their asking price no matter how bad the market was. It was always, “I’ll hang in there another decade and see how things go.”

Even then, he’d liked the challenge of finding the perfect match of buyer and seller that moved Manhattan real estate, and he liked it a lot more now that he had his own offices tucked into a corner of the Richard Merriman, Inc., corporate headquarters, handling the clients with his own team and farming out the boring overhead to the firm.

Right now, though, it was getting a bit more challenging than he liked. Just last week, a $6-million deal for one of his exclusives—down from an ask of $7.1 million at peak, and happy to get it—had fallen through after an accepted offer. The buyer had lost a quarter of her net worth in the huge Ponzi scheme that had just gotten busted, as though there wasn’t enough bad news out there.

“Oh, it was brilliant,” she’d said grimly, calling to tell him why the deal was off. “They put all these zombie investors on the books, paid them out of our money, then the zombies fell apart and their accounts went to the animators, who turn out to be working for a firm owned by the partners in the fund.”

“Can you get any of the money back?” Doug asked.

“Ask me in five years after I finish paying the lawyers,” she said.

It made every sale twice as important and ten times as fragile. He was a little surprised they’d gotten the vampire from Black Thomas Phillips, actually, even with the two co-op rejections.

Speaking of which, he sat down to make a few phone calls to people he knew with condo exclusives, but before he got the phone off the hook, it was ringing under his hand.

“What the hell kind of crazy buyer are you bringing me?” Rina Lazar said, without so much as a hello. She was the selling broker on the Riverside apartment.

“Oh, boy,” Doug said. “What happened? Did Kell back out?” That would be great; two new records—quickest sale, quickest flameout.

“Ohhh, no,” Rina said. “Backing out, backing out would have been fantastic. He got my sellers’ number, don’t ask me how, called them up and told them, quote, their bleeping apartment was a bleeping pile of bleep, the built-ins were a disgrace, and the place smelled like dead old lady—I am not kidding you here—and nobody in their right mind would pay more than one million for the wreck, take it or leave it, end quote. The daughter just called me up in tears!”

“Oh, my God,” Doug said.

“Plan on sending me a financial sheet on anyone you want to bring to any of my exclusives from now on,” she said, and banged the phone down hard enough to make him wince.

“Oh, dear,” Henry Kell said, when Doug called. “I gather that this means the deal is off…?”

“Uh, yeah, the deal is off,” Doug said. “Mr. Kell, maybe I need to explain this, since you’re a first-time buyer. Once you make an offer, you can’t just—”

“No, no, I perfectly understand,” Kell said. “I assure you, I had no second thoughts myself. It must have been … he must have had strong feelings on the subject, I can’t think why—”

“Is this your partner we’re talking about?” Doug said. “Mr. Kell, if you aren’t the sole purchaser here—”

“Well, I am, legally speaking,” Kell said. “Only, er, he can make his opinion felt in … in other ways, as you see.”

Doug rubbed his forehead and looked at the balance sheet on the open laptop in front of him, although he really didn’t need to; he could keep track of all the contracts he had out right now in his head. “Mr. Kell, I’m sure we can find a place that will make both of you completely happy,” he said. “But I really am going to need to speak to your partner, too.”

“Oh, dear,” Mr. Kell said.

“Wow, they’re a super-interesting touch; very Kafka-esque,” the art dealer said, considering the bug swarm on the wall.

“It’s definitely a unique feature,” Tom said, trying not to look at the wall too hard himself. The bugs made a low raspy sound climbing over each other, which he could hear even though he’d cracked the windows to let in some of the noise of the First Avenue traffic outside.

The buyer’s broker—she was backed into the far corner of the living room—looked at him with raised eyebrows as her client went to poke around in the kitchen. Tom shrugged at her a little. What was he going to do?

“I do like the details,” the art dealer said, coming back out. “There’s something special in the contradiction between the formal style of the classic six, the stained-glass windows and the wood paneling, and the raw brutality of the insect swarm.”

“Oh?” Tom said. “That is—yes, absolutely. The clients are very negotiable,” he added, with a faint stirring of hope.

The art dealer stood looking around the apartment a little more, and then shook his head. “It’s a really tough call, but I don’t think so. The apartment is great, but, you know, Tudor City. It’s so … stuffy. I just can’t see it. It would be almost like living on the Upper East Side. But tell the sellers I love their style,” he added.

“Why is the maintenance so high?” the vampire said suspiciously, reading the offering sheet for the Battery Park apartment.

“Well,” the selling broker said, and then he admitted that it was a land-lease, meaning the co-op didn’t actually own the ground underneath the building, and also the lease was running out in fifteen years and no one had any idea what the term renewal was going to be. “But we’ve got a brownie super, and there’s a fantastic sundeck on the—” He stopped at the look Jennifer shot him.

Waiting in the lobby as the vampire dispiritedly bundled himself up again, Jennifer said, “I’ve got a few condos lined up that we could take a look at this weekend.”

“I don’t want to live in a condo,” the vampire said, muffled, as he wrapped a scarf around his head. “Those places let anyone in.”

Jennifer opened and shut her mouth. “Okay,” she said, after a moment. “Okay, a co-op it is. You know what—could I maybe get you to send me your last board application?”

“I’ve got the money!” the vampire said, offended, his eyes glowing briefly red from behind the scarf.

“No, I’m sure you do!” Jennifer said, not fumbling for the little crucifix she’d worn under her blouse. “I don’t even really need the financials; I’m just thinking maybe there’s something we could do to … polish it up a little extra for a board. It might be worth getting an early start on it.”

“Oh,” the vampire said, mollified. “All right; I’ll have my last broker send it to you. I guess it couldn’t hurt.”

Oh, but it could. One of his three personal reference letters was from his mother.

“I thought it was sweet,” the vampire protested. “Shows I haven’t lost touch with my mortal life.”

“She’s ninety-six and lives in Arizona,” Jennifer said. “When was the last time you saw her?”

The vampire looked guilty. “I call every day,” he muttered.

The other two letters were from a pooka—just the kind of guest everyone wanted visiting their neighbor, especially in horse form and snorting flames—and a necromancer.

“But she’s in-house at Goldman Sachs, with the lost-wealth research division,” the vampire said.

“Okay, see, that’s excellent,” Jennifer said. “Let’s maybe ask her to revise this letter to focus on that, and let’s just skip mentioning the necromancer part. Now, about the pooka—”

“He’s a biotech entrepreneur!” the vampire said.

“Let’s see if there’s someone else we can get, okay?” Jennifer said.

The goblin doorman let Doug up without any hassle this time, even doing a good goblin impression of beaming. It took some effort not to glare at him. No wonder he was so happy Kell and his partner were looking for a new place, if the other guy was some kind of nut.

Kell was in the apartment alone, looking even smaller and hunched in a large shapeless sweater, and he twisted his hands anxiously as he let Doug in. “I suppose,” he said, “I suppose there’s no way to reopen the deal? I’d be willing to pay more—”

“Not a chance,” Doug said. “Mr. Kell, I don’t think you get it. If you or your partner does something, uh, unusual, you look unreliable, and that scares sellers. Closing can take two or three months. Even if you pay more, it’s not worth having a sale fall through at the last second.”

“Oh,” Kell said, dismally.

“Honestly, the solution here is to find a place that your partner will be happy with, too,” Doug said. “Is he here? I really do need to meet him.”

Kell sighed and said, “Just a moment.” He went to a cabinet and opened it and took out a bottle of whiskey and a glass. He brought them over to the table and poured a glass.

Doug had seen a lot weirder things than a client needing a drink, but it did take him by surprise when Kell slid the glass over to him instead of downing it. “Thanks, but—”

“No,” Kell said. “You’ll want it in a moment.”

Doug started to ask, except Kell wasn’t talking anymore. He’d fallen back onto the couch, and he was doubled over with his face in his hands, and something weird was happening to him. He seemed to be … growing.

“Uh,” Doug said, and then Kell lifted his face out of his hands, and it wasn’t Kell anymore. The eyes were the same color but bloodshot and wider apart in a broader face, with a flattened nose and a jaw that looked like it had been carved out of rock. His neck was thickening even while Doug watched.

“Well, fucking finally,” not-Kell said, straightening up even more. The couch creaked under him. “So you’re the broker who took him to that shithole?”

Doug paused and said, “And you’re…?”

Not-Kell was coughing a little bit, thumping himself on the chest as he finished growing. He would have made about two of Kell with some leftovers. He belched loudly and bared his teeth in what you could’ve called a grin, if by grin you meant a mouth full of more shining white teeth than anybody should’ve had. “Call me Hyde.”

“Okay,” Doug said, after a second. “So that would make him…”

Hyde snorted. “I know. He changed the name when he moved here. Fucking pathetic.” He pointed to the drink. “Are you going to have that?”

Doug looked at the glass, then slid it back across the table. “So, Mr. Hyde,” he said, “can you tell me what you’re looking for in an apartment?”

The eradicator stepped back from the wall of bugs and shook his head slowly and lugubriously.

“Really? Nothing?” Tom said, heart sinking.

“Sorry,” the eradicator said. “These people, they lived here like twenty years or something. They put down roots. This,” he waved a hand at the bugs, “this goes way, way down. I could charge you ten grand and strip off the top layers of the curse, wipe the bugs out, but they’d be back in two months. Might be even worse—millipedes or something. I hate those things.” The eradicator shuddered his shoulders up and down expressively. “Anyway, you’re not getting this out for good until you rip down the whole building.”

He stopped and thought about it, and after a moment added, “Or you could get the two sellers back in and get them to make up. That can clear stuff like this up sometimes.”

Tom looked at him. “The sellers’ divorce took two years to finish, and they’re still in court on some issues.”

The eradicator shrugged. “Do they want to sell their apartment or not?”

Tom sighed. Then he paused and said, “So, wait, if you tried to take off the whole curse, the bugs might get worse?”

“Right,” the eradicator said.

“If you didn’t try that,” Tom said, “could you maybe … do something else with them?”

“What did you have in mind?” the eradicator asked.

The vampire’s application was still pretty disheartening, especially when Jennifer compared it to the one she was putting the final touches on that afternoon. She didn’t like to jinx things, but kitsune or not, it was pretty much guaranteed Mei Shinagawa would be a shoo-in at the no-dogs-allowed Berkeley. Six letters of reference, terrific financials, and she’d even tucked in tiny origami cranes to be included with the copies of the application, one for each of the board members. The vampire’s 2008 tax return, on the other hand, had a suspicious reddish-brown stain on the front.

To make the day complete, after she’d gotten off the phone with the vampire, Jennifer’s phone went off with another all-caps CALL ME!! text message from one of their former buyers, a lawyer who’d bought into the top-drawer Oryx co-op for the panoramic views from the twenty-fourth-floor apartment. Now those were about to go away, thanks to a new development, and she was having fits.

“If the Landmarks Commission has approved the renovation, and there’s nothing in the zoning to stop it…” Jennifer said apologetically. She felt bad, but what could you do? That was Manhattan: you put one building up, somebody else put a bigger one up next door.

“My view was supposed to be protected!” Angela said. “It faces onto a freaking landmarked church!”

“I’m sorry. They’re going to preserve the exterior shell and put up a new building on the inside, mimicking the facade and carvings all the way up,” Jennifer said. “We could look for a new place for you, if you want?”

“How can I afford a new place with this millstone around my neck? Who is going to pay two million for a one bedroom with a view of a brick wall accessorized by carvings of smiley angels or whatever these guys are putting on their monstrosity?” Angela said. “No one, that’s who! Oh, my god, why did I buy at peak? I knew better!”

Of course, she hadn’t known better; nobody knew better; that was why it was peak. Jennifer said some comforting things with half a mind while she collated pages of the kitsune’s application, and got off the phone; then she stopped and picked the phone up again and called back. “Angela? Can you get a picture of the facade and e-mail it to me?”

“Granite countertops!” Hyde said. “I want some granite fucking countertops. None of this cheap Formica shit.”

“Okay,” Doug said, adding that to the list under high ceilings, Sub-Zero fridge, central AC, and hardwood floors. The list was getting pretty long. “Any particular neighborhoods?”

“That’s another thing, I want someplace where there’s a little goddamn fucking life, you understand me?” Hyde said. “I mean, what the hell was he thinking, Riverside Park. Yeah, because I want to live next to a bunch of elves singing ‘Kumbaya’ to the sun every morning. Not unless I get to pick ’em off with a shotgun.”

“That wouldn’t be such a great idea,” Doug said.

“Fun, though,” Hyde said, sort of wistfully.

“So,” Doug said, getting off that subject, “can you tell me anything about what your, er … what Mr. Kell wants? He hasn’t been all that clear—”

“That asshole just wants to crawl under a rock and read books,” Hyde said. “Look at this—” He pointed to the particleboard bookshelves, sagging with hardbacks. “All this IKEA crap everywhere—Jesus. And this is a dream compared to what he had in here before those. Purple fucking built-ins! I had to take a sledgehammer to the whole pile of shit.”

He glared at the bookshelves and then abruptly heaved himself up off the whimpering couch and headed for them with his fists clenching and unclenching, like he couldn’t handle looking at them a second longer.

“So, you know,” Doug said hastily, “I do have a place I’d like you to take a look at…”

Hyde paused before reaching the bookcases, distracted. “Yeah? What the hell, let’s go now.”

“I don’t know if I can reach the broker—” Doug started.

“We can look at the outside,” Hyde said.

The vampire called her up less than a minute after Jennifer forwarded on the e-mail. “What the hell was that!” he yelled. “I almost dropped my iPhone in the gutter!”

“Really?” Jennifer said. “So—that actually hurt?”

“It was a picture of five million crosses!”

“Fantastic,” Jennifer said. “Can you meet me at Seventy-fifth and Third in half an hour?”

Getting Hyde into a taxi involved waiting fifteen minutes for one of the minivan ones to come by empty, but Doug was just fine with that: He spent the time frantically texting back and forth with Tom to get the selling broker down to the apartment in time to meet them. He didn’t completely trust Hyde not to just knock down the front door and go inside, otherwise.

He got a call back from the broker while they were heading downtown. “I just want to make sure you realize—” the guy said.

“Yes, I know,” Doug said. “It’s completely mint inside, though, right?”

“Oh, absolutely,” the broker said. “Architect-designed gut renovation.”

They got out in front of Marble Cemetery. One of the wispy, sad-eyed apparitions paused by the iron railing to watch as Hyde climbed out of the cab, which almost bounced as he finally stepped out. It looked up at him. Hyde glared down at it. “You want something, Casper?” he said. The apparition prudently whisked away.

“So Bowery is two blocks that way, and the Hells Angels club is on the next street over,” Doug said, leading the way to the townhouse next door.

“Looks small,” Hyde said, and he did have to duck his head to get through the front door, but inside the ceilings were ten feet. He stamped his foot experimentally. “What is this stuff?”

“Brazilian hardwood,” the selling broker said faintly, staring up at Hyde with rabbit-wide eyes.

“Maybe let’s take a look at the kitchen,” Doug said encouragingly. “Do you have an offering sheet?”

“Uh, yeah,” the broker said, still staring as he backed up slowly. “Right … this way…”

“All right, now this is fucking something,” Hyde said approvingly, coming into the kitchen. There was a long magnetic strip mounted on the wall with five or so chef’s knives stuck onto it. He picked off a cleaver and tossed it casually in his hand as the broker edged around him, pointing out the Miele appliances.

“And granite countertops, as requested,” Doug added.

“Let’s see the bathroom,” Hyde said. He didn’t leave the cleaver behind.

The master bath on the second floor had a big soaking tub and another small apparition hanging around outside the window, staring in with miserable empty eyes that spoke of endless despair and horrors beyond the grave. “Get lost,” Hyde told it, and it disappeared.

“So, the uh, the third-floor ceilings,” the broker said, stumbling over his words as they came out back to the staircase, “—a little lower, I’m not sure—”

“Maybe we could have Mr. Kell take a look?” Doug suggested to Hyde. “Assuming that you like the place so far.”

Hyde looked around and said, “Yeah, this is decent. But make sure that asshole doesn’t try to negotiate.” He gave his toothy grin to the selling broker, who shrank away. “I’ll handle that part.”

“Sure,” Doug said, and Hyde’s smile and shoulders curled in on themselves, and Kell was there, wobbling a little in his suddenly too-large clothing.

He looked around uncertainly and said, “I … I’m not sure. The front windows, on the street—anyone could see inside—”

“Why don’t we go upstairs?” Doug said, shepherding him onto the third floor.

Kell paused about halfway up, as the built-in bookcases came into view, before continuing up. “Well, those are nice,” he said.

“And the windows look on the cemetery back here,” Doug said. “Of course, I realize it’s a little inconvenient,” he added, and Kell looked at him. “Since Mr. Hyde won’t be able to get up to this floor.”

“Oh,” Kell said. “Oh.”

Doug shook the selling broker’s hand as they left the house. “Will you be around later?” he said.

“Um,” the broker said, “could you … maybe not give my number to…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Doug said. “I’ll handle going between.”

The other broker looked relieved. “The seller is totally negotiable,” he added, throwing a look at the cemetery. A gardener was busy nearby, spraying a thin, clutching, revenant hand that was struggling out of an old grave.

“Who is the seller?” Doug asked, watching.

“Investment banker,” the broker said.

Doug dropped Kell off and took the cab the rest of the way back to the office. Tom had just gotten back, beaming, with celebratory lattes. “What’s this for?” Doug said.

“We need to order new photos for Tudor City,” Tom said, and showed them the little video clip off his camera phone. Doug squinted at it. The wall was still moving, but—

“Are those butterflies?” Jennifer said.

“Twenty-three varieties, some of them endangered,” Tom said. “I used the catalog from the exhibit at the Museum of Natural History.”

“Wow,” Doug said. “Tom, this doesn’t call for new photos; this calls for a relisting.”

They clinked latte cups, then Jennifer shrugged into her coat. “I have to get to Hunter College. Community Board Eight is having a review meeting for a proposed new building next to the Oryx.”

“Is Angela still yelling at you about that?” Doug said. “You want me to talk to her? We told her before she bought, there’s pretty much no such thing as a protected view.”

“No worries,” Jennifer said. “We’re getting a Fair Housing protest in. There’s a sponsor apartment on the thirteenth floor that would be facing the new development; they’re selling it to the vampire. They’ll have to keep the new building below that height.”

She stopped short with her hand on the door, though, as a thundering knock hit, and then another. She glanced back at Doug and Tom, then shrugged and pulled it open.

A giant horse was standing outside in the hall gazing down at them, nostrils flaring, a thin trail of smoke rising from them. Glowing red flames shone in its eyes. There was a dent in the office door where it had knocked with a front hoof. People were sticking their heads out of other offices down the hall to watch.

“Hi,” the pooka said. “Marvin said you could help me.”

“Marvin?” Tom said, under his breath.

“The vampire,” Jennifer said.

The pooka nodded, mane flopping. “I’m looking for an apartment.”

They all stood and considered. Jennifer suggested after a moment, “Maybe a ground-floor unit?”

Tom said, “Or a place with a good freight elevator? There’s the Atlantica.…”

Doug eyed the hooves. Parquet and hardwood were definitely out. Marble tile, maybe. He looked up at the pooka. “So, tell me, how do you feel about Trump buildings?”