The Havana Room

Four

Herewith, an abbreviated history of Manhattan real estate: a mountain range of stone, ancient as the moon; twelve thousand years of pulverizing glaciers, which, receding as recorded time began, left behind an island of bedrock buried over with gravel and sand, as well as a wide river flowing into a protected bay; unbroken expanses of oak, maple, elm, and chestnut; infinities of oysters, clams, fish, deer, beaver, rabbit, and fox; Algonquin Indians and their leafy footpaths; Henrik Hudson and the Dutch East India Company; Peter Stuyvesant and his bowerie; improvements in the construction of sailing vessels; King Charles II and his kid brother, the Duke of York; the 1720 riot by black slaves, which accelerated the segregation of their housing; the 1763 Treaty of Paris, in which all of North America was ceded to England; the adoption of the largest Algonquin trail as a "broad way" north and south; a lovely buttonwood tree on Wall Street under which men in beaver hats traded securities; Robert Fulton and his spluttering steamboat, which improved trade upriver; the great fire of 1835, which destroyed the business district; the Erie Canal, which connected Manhattan to the continental interior and allowed immeasurable amounts of lumber, rye whiskey, livestock, and farm produce to float downstream into the digestive maw of the new city; further extension of Broadway up the length of the island; the potato famine of 1846, which flooded the city with cheap Irish labor; the failed Revolution of 1848, which flooded the city with cheap German labor; the shantytowns in the center of the island, which contained such pestilence, crime, and shocking immorality that the city fathers decided to clear the land for a central park; the willingness to fill in coves along the banks of the Hudson River with oyster shells, bottles, dead horses, cannonballs, leather shoes, and anything else; the Civil War, which made merchants rich; improvements in the manufacture of iron; Cornelius Vanderbilt and his Pennsylvania Railroad; the aforementioned purity and ample supply of the watershed north of the city, which could support a mighty population; the construction of great docks along both sides of the island; the discovery of oil in western Pennsylvania; banker J. P. Morgan and his enormous, florid nose, so ugly it scared people who might otherwise have opposed him; Thomas Edison's 1878 invention of the lightbulb, which became instantly irresistible and led to the wiring of the city; the conversion of trains from steam to electric; the Lower East Side's houses of prostitution, which ignited the sexual appetites of innumerable young men; "Boss" Tweed, who, although he stole $160 million, accelerated the naturalization of aliens, including hundreds of thousands of Italians and Jews from Eastern Europe, many of whom crowded into the Lower East Side and frequented the houses of prostitution; the invention of the electrified elevated train to move these masses; the booming stock market; the documentation, by photographer Jacob Riis, of the Lower East Side's pestilence, crime, and shocking immorality; the arrival of "patent" medicines, often little more than opium and so pleasurable that their customers forgot they were dying of dysentery; the stock market crash of 1894; the obsolescence of the wooden sailing ship; the development of cast-iron architecture; improvements in the refining of crude oil; the invention of the internal combustion engine; the new and irresistible telephone, which led to the wiring of the city; improvements in the manufacture of structural steel; World War I, which flooded the city with cheap black labor from the South and made merchants rich; the destruction of Europe; the new and irresistible radio; the obsolescence of the horse; the rise of Harlem as the center of black culture, much of it from the South; Prohibition and the appearance of speakeasies; the presence or absence of bedrock upon which high office buildings might now be erected; the booming stock market; the commodification of a certain well-dollared, ironic smugness, which supported various purveyors of this consciousness, among them dozens of celebrated bars, hotels, and clubs; the smoky burlesque theaters, which ignited the sexual appetites of innumerable young men; the new and irresistible ocean liners; the stock market crash of 1929; the Great Depression, during which time the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Waldorf-Astoria, and Rockefeller Center were completed; the new and irresistible moving pictures; World War II, which made merchants rich; the conversion of the old Times Square burlesque theaters to movie houses; the 1943 riots by blacks in Harlem; the destruction of Europe; the building of the United Nations complex, which introduced the glass-curtain-walled skyscraper to the city; rising Puerto Rican immigration, much of which packed into the Lower East Side as Jews and Italians left; improvements in the refining of crude oil to create a new product called "jet" fuel; the new and irresistible television; the falling cost of domestic airplane travel; the 1960s riots by blacks in Harlem; the booming stock market; the construction of the American interstate highway system, which helped the trucking industry; the bankruptcy of railroads and the 1966 demolition of the old Pennsylvania Station (looming, neoclassically magnificent, civitas captured in stone), prompting a storm of protest; the arrival of heroin, so pleasurable that addicts would commit daily felonies to support their habits; the conversion of Times Square movie houses to porno theaters, which ignited the sexual appetites of innumerable young men; the collapse and removal of the rotting, obsolete docks on both sides of the island; white flight out of the city; the depressed stock market; the erection of the 110-floor twin towers of the World Trade Center; the suburbs as haven; the Stonewall riots by gay men in the Village; the suburbs as wasteland; the arrival of high-quality cocaine, so pleasurable that people did not mind burning holes inside their heads with it; the booming stock market; population explosions in Haiti, India, and Pakistan; the falling cost of international travel by jumbo jet; the arrival of crack cocaine, so pleasurable it could make men suck happily on the leg of a chair; the dissolution of the USSR; white flight back into the city for the purposes of real estate speculation and convivial association; the soaring, gaudily crenellated edifice of Donald Trump's ego; the stock market crash of 1987; the obsolescence of ocean liners; the 1994 riot by blacks in Howard Beach; the shantytowns in Tompkins Square Park, which contained such pestilence, crime, and shocking immorality that the city fathers decided to clear the land; the commodification of a certain well-dollared, ironic smugness, which supported various purveyors of this consciousness, among them dozens of celebrated bars, hotels, and clubs; a post-Communist wave of stamping, ginseng-chewing Chinese immigration; the new popularity of the Internet, which led to the wiring of the city and ignited the sexual appetites of innumerable young men; the conversion of Times Square porno theaters to tourist hotels; the booming stock market, borne aloft by the Internet; coffee bars filled with people discussing the Internet and the stock market; the postmillenial stock market implosion; and, of course, the crashing of two jumbo jets into the World Trade Center towers, which- some would say- marked the true beginning of the twenty-first century.

Hidden within this metamorphosis has always been the legal antwork of individual humans and corporations, repeatedly buying, selling, leasing, mortgaging, and reparceling every square inch of the island, and even the rights to the smoggy air above it, in greedy pursuit of their own interests. And although the particulars of that greed- the piled and papered secrets of who owns the island's thirty or forty thousand buildings and how much they paid for them- would seem almost infinite, nearly all are contained within just one place: Room 205, Surro-gate Court, 31 Chambers Street, in lower Manhattan.

And that was where I stood the next morning, outside the court under a threatening sky, stamping my feet and nibbling from a warm bag of caramel peanuts bought from a vendor. The building, erected in 1901, was a magnificent beaux arts pile, with giant bronze Puritans guarding its doors. I'd slept poorly, almost not at all, and when the gray light of day crept down the airshaft next to my window, I'd jolted awake, hoping that the events of the previous night might somehow be remembered as benign. Many mornings I woke in my grimy cell on Thirty-sixth Street hoping in the half-second blink to consciousness that I might discover that I was still living in my eight-room apartment on the Upper East Side, with Timothy asleep in his pajamas and Judith involved in her coffee rituals, available for a cottony, dorsal grope in the kitchen, but on this morning a simple return to my lonely, cracked-plaster innocence of the day before would have filled me with relief, even a kind of refracted happiness.

No such luck. The vision of Herschel's frozen, snow-covered grimace- conjurable and godlike as an Easter Island totem- had chased me along Broadway's snowy, shadowed facades as I'd walked the long blocks toward Chambers Street. You don't move dead bodies, I cursed myself, not in the middle of the night when no one's looking. White lawyers, especially, even ones down on their luck, don't move dead black bodies, no matter how plausible the explanation. And then lie to the cops about it. I could only hope that a few days would go by, Poppy and Jay would smooth over any questions from Herschel's family, the man would be buried in peace, and that would be that. If Jay was smart, he'd pay for the funeral.

And if I was smart, I'd have nothing further to do with him, no matter what Allison might say or promise. The problem was that my name had been hijacked onto his documents of sale, forever and ever, and even as his quickie, one-night-stand lawyer, I was obliged, if only to myself, to see that the deal was sound. Having had no opportunity to examine the documents beforehand, and given the dubious activities of the previous night, I wanted a look at the recorded deeds of the building at 162 Reade Street. The word "recorded" is the key term. A deed has to be executed, tendered, and received, but it's not official until recorded. Only then is the pile of bricks, the box of timbers, possessed. The change in ownership of any property is mysterious, when you think about it; the tangible thing remains unaltered but the description of it, the name attached to it, changes in an instant. Three hundred years ago, under English common law, the sale of real estate used to be marked by the snapping of a stick, which symbolized the specificity and permanence of the moment.

Now the courthouse's brass doors opened and I followed the others up the steps. I'd been to the building years ago, and the place hadn't changed much. Inside, past the posted notices for sheriff's auctions of confiscated cars, you skate across yellowy marbled floors to wide staircases that convey you magnificently into the various rooms of the city's Department of Finance. Here the illusion of grandeur abruptly ceases. Room 205, where paint hangs from the ceiling like peeling sycamore bark, is divided into a records section and an area where those records may be examined on microfiche readers. The room is frequented by two distinct populations: lawyers in good suits and everyone else; the everyone else generally look like drug addicts, drunks, felons, and crazies- the usual shank-shovers and shape-shifters. Derelict as they appear, though, these men and women play a crucial role in the economic life of the city; they are the freelance deed-pullers who work for the title companies and law firms. They know each other in a friendly fuck-you sort of way, and compete for use of the microfiche readers, the computer-record generators, and the attention of the garrulous Russian man who dispenses the microfiche cassettes that are so valuable. (That the definitive records of private property ownership in the capital of global commerce are overseen by a man who grew up under Soviet Communism goes unnoted.) The process is this: You submit the address to the clerk. He gives you the building's block and lot numbers, which are then fed into computers in the adjacent room, which in turn produce mortgage and deed record numbers and their respective microfiche reel and page numbers. This information is resubmitted to the clerk with a small voucher (purchased in the cashier's office down the hall from middle-aged black women discussing their love lives on the taxpayers' time) and the clerk returns a microfiche cassette, which may then be examined, page by blurring page. All help is given grudgingly, and you are under suspicion of stupidity, by definition.

The arcana of the tax stamps on the documents is never explained, but if you know what to look for, which I did, then a wealth of information reveals itself, not least of which is the ever-rocketing value of Manhattan real estate. From the ancient annum of 1697 until April 1983, the great city of New York imposed a real estate transfer tax of $1.10 per thousand dollars of assessed value. In 1983, owing to the booming value of condominiums, the city raised the transfer tax to $4 per thousand of assessed value, which is where it stands today and probably far into the future. Thus could I calculate that 162 Reade Street, the building Jay Rainey had purchased by exchange the night before in the Havana Room, had a value of $9,000 in 1912, $56,000 in 1946, $112,000 in 1964, $212,000 in 1967, $402,000 in 1972, $875,000 in 1988, $1.5 million in 1996, and $2.2 million in 1998, this last the sum paid by an entity calling itself Bongo Partners. Voodoo LLC, the company listed as the owner on the contract for sale the night before, was not on the deed history.

I sat awhile, as irritated as I was confused, and not unaware of the tentacle of legal abstraction quietly encircling my leg. Of course there was a problem with the deed. Why would it be simple or easy? This was a real estate transaction that had started in a steakhouse and ended up with a dead guy on a bulldozer! So screw you, Bill Wyeth! You blew it! So far as the city of New York was concerned, Bongo Partners was- today, right now- the owner of record of 162 Reade Street. If Voodoo LLC was not the legitimate seller, then Jay might have traded his precious oceanfront acreage for nothing- might have been defrauded. And if this was the case, then Jay could easily sue me for malpractice! The title man was supposed to make sure the title was clear, that the property was in fact owned by Voodoo LLC. In the hurry of events I hadn't asked him any questions. Why hadn't he told us that Bongo Partners were the owners of record? I could invent several explanatory scenarios, none of which was reassuring. The irreverence of the names of both corporations was probably connected, of course. Voodoo drums, bongo drums- something like that. I was not free of Jay Rainey, not yet anyway. I copied the records and slipped them into my briefcase.

I was on my way out when I remembered Lipper's claim that his steakhouse had once been owned by Frank Sinatra. Maybe that was true, which would be a smile, as they say, and so, in a mood for distraction, I pulled the deed on the restaurant's West Thirty-third Street address. The provenance of the property constituted a pocket history of New York; as two unimproved lots it had originally been owned by the First Presbyterian Church; fifteen years later the first and narrower lot was sold still unimproved to the Pennsylvania Railroad, which, having train tracks all over that part of town, erected a "below-grade iron-ribbed train shed" on the western edge of the property; this long, narrow rectangle, I realized, constituted the footprint of the Havana Room, and explained why its elevation was so different from that of the steakhouse's first floor. Then, in 1845, the larger lot was sold by the church to an Englishman, who built the first version of the restaurant, a "steaks and ale house," in 1847. He bought the train shed in 1851 and, it appeared, remodeled and connected the structure to his existing building. The merged property changed hands several times in the period 1877-79, perhaps because of the crash that occurred that year, and was merged with an adjacent brownstone to the east in 1921, as the twenties roared and people ate out, and sold again. The transfer tax indicated an enormous leap in value, which suggested to me that three buildings had successfully been remodeled into one and enjoyed great popularity. But not for long; the restaurant had been seized by the city for unpaid taxes during the Depression, then sold soon after. The configuration of the lot had been stable since then and the owners changed once a decade or so from the thirties until the sixties, the restaurant business being as difficult then as it is today, and then settled into a long continuous ownership by an evolving entity: from 1972 until 1984, City Partners, Ltd.; from 1984 until 1988, City Partners from 1988 to the present, City Partners Real Estate Investment Trust- a publicly traded real estate holding company. The ownership of the restaurant could not be more generic, more hohum. Frank Sinatra, the mobster-hangin', whore-bangin', egomaniacal crooner, was nowhere to be found on record. More surprising, neither was Old Man Lipper.

But who owned the steakhouse wasn't my concern. I needed to find Jay and tell him about Bongo Partners and his maybe-rotten deed.

His building in TriBeCa wasn't far from City Hall, a crosstown walk of five minutes, so I set out, finding no comfort in the honk-and-go of Broadway. It was just another wintry Thursday. The snow from the night before was already filthy, and the sky looked like rain. Which would melt not only the snow in the city but all the snow out on Jay's farm. Our tire tracks and footprints from the night before would be lost. But maybe that meant that any bulldozer tracks in the soil would be revealed- the earlier record of Herschel's activity the day before. Was that good? Would it corroborate Poppy's description of events? Something was bothering me about that description, I realized. What was it? Go back to what you were taught, I thought. Which was this: one of the summers I was in law school, I worked in the Brooklyn D.A.'s office, and there was an older career prosecutor named Coover who refused promotion to management and instead- in addition to ruining his teeth by chewing on plastic coffee swizzle sticks- simply banged out one conviction after another. He was a quiet legend. He'd seen any number of slick law students come and go- mostly go, on to lucrative corporate jobs- and wasn't much impressed. I was no exception, nor should I have been, flummoxed as I was trying to square the rules of evidence with the jargon of police write-ups. But early in my time, Coover had seen me puzzling over a simple arrest report for a misdemeanor drug charge and muttered as he passed by, "Worship Chronos, kid." I puzzled over the statement until I remembered that Chronos was the god of time, which led me to understand the invincible truth of simple chronology. I never forgot the lesson, and here it was, essential to understanding what had happened the day before.

But I had already turned the corner to Reade Street and needed now to follow the street numbers. There was number 162, set in a row of similar buildings, with high windows fronting the street, architecturally utilitarian but elegant in its simplicity and impressive in its size. The windows were double-paned and glazed, the facade cleaned and re-pointed, the enclosed foyer up to date, the brasswork polished. I cupped my hand against the glass of the lobby. Men have gotten very comfortable owning such structures, and I could see Jay desiring this building, knowing that it would provide him a steady stream of rental income for the rest of his life, if he so wished. Across the street stood a nearly finished apartment house, a straggler from the recent boom. Around the corner hunched the kind of bar where European tourists hoping to ogle movie stars rub shoulders with fluffed-up girls from Jersey hoping to be ogled as movie stars.

"Bill!" came a voice. "You beat me to it!"

I turned to see Jay pull up in his truck. He hopped out, dressed in a fine suit and blue tie, shaved and shined, ready for business, a big and bouncy man who looked nothing like the stooped wretch I'd seen only seven hours before. Here was the man I'd first met in the Havana Room, large and confident. He looked up and stretched out his arms. "Well, this is it! And the check is in the bank, man."

I let him shake my hand but warned, "We need to talk."

His smile froze. "Sure, I know we do, but first, c'mon, we'll have a look."

He pulled out the key ring he'd received from Gerzon the night before and opened the main door. The foyer was dusty and someone had shoved a thick wad of takeout menus through the mail slot. He moved toward the wide staircase that led to the first floor.

"Wait a minute, Jay," I began, putting a hand on the shoulder of his overcoat. "What happened after we left? Did Herschel's body get found? Did the police deal with it?"

He turned. "I called Poppy this morning- he said the ambulance guys came and declared Herschel dead. They had a little trouble getting him off the tractor." He winced appreciatively. "Had to use an air blower."

"Then?"

"He got taken to Riverhead Hospital and his body was going to be picked up this afternoon. I sent flowers to the family this morning. There's a big funeral home in downtown Riverhead, handles a lot of the black funerals."

I watched Jay's face for worry. He seemed untroubled. Then again, he might be an adept liar. "You know, Poppy said he noticed Herschel out there at ten at night."

"Yes?"

"Kind of weird to be out there on a bulldozer, in the cold."

Jay shrugged. "He was running late."

I was figuring this out as I spoke. "Poppy also said he saw the bulldozer."

"So?"

"At ten at night? A half mile or more away?"

"The bulldozer has lights, good ones."

"But if the dozer had gone over the cliff, how did Poppy see it from the road?"

Jay stared at me. "You got me on that."

"In fact, remember he said something like if Herschel had been working there during the day, then his body had been out there about eight hours. He said that."

"He did?"

"That means Poppy didn't see him working in the night."

Jay held up his hands. "Poppy's always gotten stuff screwed up, Bill. He got hit in the head by a sledgehammer when he was a kid. Never finished fourth grade."

I wasn't convinced. "You notice that Herschel wasn't wearing any socks?"

"No."

"Makes you sort of wonder what a guy is doing working out in the cold on a bulldozer with no socks," I said.

"He was a pretty tough old guy."

Tough old guys usually keep their feet warm, in my experience, but I didn't press it. "This whole deal is fucked up," I muttered. "From top to bottom. I help you with a real estate transaction and end up moving a dead black guy? Your dead black guy, okay? That pisses me off, Jay." A fleck of my spit hit his face. "Then the police find us? I don't like it."

Jay held up his hands. "I didn't know Herschel had gone off the edge. Poppy's note didn't say that, right? I know you're worried about it. Don't be. It's fine. Poppy worked it out. He told me this morning. He's known Herschel's family a long time."

"What was going on out there, anyway?"

He nodded, anticipating the question. "I asked Herschel to do some grading for me a week ago. The road was all washed out, and we had a lot of gravel on the other side of the property. He and his family rent an old house on the adjacent property. I still have some trucks and that bulldozer in the barn there."

"What about the police?"

"I called them this morning," Jay said. "I've known these guys my whole life. It's all right. Herschel obviously had a heart attack."

"Why is it obvious?"

"He's sitting there, dead on the tractor. Not a scratch on him. Long history of heart trouble, pericarditis, pulmonary edema. Working in the cold often gives-"

I didn't want to hear a lot of medical jargon from a layman. "Did they ask you why you were out there on the same night that Herschel died?"

"Yeah, they did."

"What did you say?"

"I told them I'd just finished the deal and I wanted to be sure some grading had gotten done."

"Which is pretty close to the truth."

"The first part of that is the truth, Bill. What else could it be? Herschel didn't do his grading on time and then was in a hurry to get started before the snow came too heavy, and then went out there in the cold on the bulldozer and had a goddamn fucking heart attack."

"And if they come to me with the same question?"

Here Jay's face went slack and he stared through me, eyes seemingly focused on his own imaginings. He was, I felt, reminding himself of an idea or belief. "I doubt they'll ask you," he said.

I went on to the question of the deed. "I checked on the records of the building and I think you've got a problem."

"You do, huh?" Jay scooped up the menus and dropped them into the trash. "I don't."

"Voodoo LLC is not the current listed owner of the building."

"Oh, hell, I know that, guy," Jay answered as he examined the building directory. "It's not so complicated. It's just paperwork. You didn't need to check on that." He turned toward me. "But I do need you to talk to a guy for me tonight, actually."

"Jay, did you hear me? I don't think you own this building."

"Of course I own this building!" He jabbed his fist against the staircase's newel post, making it shudder.

"You better explain."

But that held no interest for him- he was already on his way up the stairs, making them creak under his weight. "It's a corporate shell thing, Bill, no big deal. They do this all the time." His voice bounced off the pressed-tin ceiling high above us. "Really. You should know that, a guy with your experience. I do want you to talk to this other guy this evening, though, be my lawyer again, hold his hand, whatever. Go have dinner with him."

"Forget it."

"What?"

"I'm out." I turned to go. And I should have gone, too, right then, should have stamped my way back down to the snowy sidewalk and not stopped until I had crossed back into some safer country of probability, but Jay came after me and pulled a slip of paper from his breast pocket.

"This is for last night, for the whole deal."

"I never gave you a fee."

"I estimated."

It was a check for twenty-five thousand dollars. Very generous. Too generous, in fact. Shut-your-mouth money. I handed the check back. "I don't want it. I want out."

"All right," he nodded. "Fine."

"But what do I have to do to understand, legally, what happened last night? It seems the title man didn't-"

"Just go have dinner with this guy for me tonight, and everything will be explained."

"Who is it?"

"The seller."

"The guy who owned this building?"

"Yeah."

"So also the guy who now owns your old farm."

"Right."

"Why are you set to have dinner?"

"We weren't. He called me half an hour ago, said he had to hand over a couple more papers. Insisted. I just deposited his check, so I want to be polite. I didn't tell him I couldn't make it. Tonight is impossible for me. You can ask him whatever you want about the paperwork, Bill. He'll explain. Okay?"

"Just have dinner with him?"

"Yeah. Ask him anything."

I shrugged. That was enough for Jay. He stood up. "Let me at least show you the place. We can start in the basement."

And so we did, then worked our way up. "It's got eight office spaces. I've got several leases to renegotiate and you can help me with that, if you're interested," Jay said.

"Nope."

"All right. Anyway, it's a good location. People like the funky downtown locations. Good restaurants nearby, art galleries." He pointed to a line of ancient screw holes that ran up the center of the wide stairs. They'd been sanded over and filled in with wood putty. "See that?" he said. "There used to be a long metal slide that went down the middle."

"For finished goods."

"Right. In the nineteenth century, beaver hats, then chairs. In the early twentieth, it was baseball gloves for a while."

Now the building housed companies that manipulated symbols.

We knocked on the door of one small company named RetroTech, and a young Indian man opened it.

"Is Mr. Cowles around?" Jay asked.

"He's on the phone," said the man, his accent British.

"My name's Jay Rainey. I'm the new owner. This is Bill Wyeth, my lawyer. Thought I'd introduce myself."

He showed us in. It was a small but obviously prosperous operation. Green carpeting, brass desk lamps, oak filing cabinets, major league coffee machine. Information dripped brightly down a handful of screens.

"You did a nice job designing it," said Jay, looking around.

"We like it, thank you."

"Mr. Cowles free?"

"I'll check."

He disappeared down a hallway and a moment later returned, followed by a large, well-dressed man who looked like he might have played a little rugby twenty years earlier. "Hello, hello," came a booming British voice. "David Cowles." His eyes passed me and landed on Jay. "You must be the new owner?"

Both men appeared surprised by the other's size. They shook hands.

"Glad to meet you," said Jay. "You have a great shop."

"We try, yes," said Cowles.

"What do you do?" I asked.

"Oh, a little of this and a lot of that." Cowles smiled at this oblique answer. "Basically, we build proprietary financial software, we do a little momentum trading in securities, we play the field, we try to jump on and off the train at the right time."

"Been here long?" asked Jay.

"Little more than a year."

"Moved from London?"

"Yes, in fact." Cowles looked at Jay. "You've checked on us, it would seem?"

"Nope," said Jay agreeably, "just a hunch."

"Want to have a look around?"

"Sure. I did see the office once, with the seller," said Jay. "But I don't think you were here."

The tour took a few minutes. Behind a desk of family photos, Cowles's office had a good view to the west, filled with the irregular brick buildings of the neighborhood, stovepipes poking over slanting rooftops.

"Reminds me a little of London," Cowles laughed. "Just a little, just enough to miss it."

I noticed chewed pen tops on the desk, several calculators, stacks of newspaper clippings, an ashtray filled with butts. Cowles was a worrier, a figurer, and a smoker.

"You've got, what, a year left on your lease?" asked Jay.

"Indeed. It's been a good location for us. Even in this economy, we're growing."

"You want more space in the building?"

"I don't know." Cowles smiled at me. "Let's see how accommodating my landlord is."

"The adjacent offices are empty."

"I know."

"Though I have one possible tenant."

"Better fire away then," said Cowles. "We have enough room here."

Jay studied Cowles's office wall. "You might hear a bit of construction."

"A lot of noise?"

"Some noise. I can ask them to minimize it, work on the weekends."

"We'll appreciate that."

"Not to worry," said Jay. He pointed at the photos. "Nice family."

"Yes… thank you," said Cowles, and his eyes fell upon them. There was a shot of a darling girl with dark hair sitting with a baby boy. And separate photos of two women, one older, the other younger and blonde, each posed with Cowles himself. "I know that's odd," he said, seeing me frown. "I lost my first wife some years ago." He picked up the photo of the older woman. "She's- she was my daughter's mum, and so I feel it's all right to keep her picture." His grief was still on his face. "I remarried as soon as I could, for my daughter, really." He turned to me. "You have kids?"

"Yes, well- yes, I do," I stammered, feeling clubbed in the head. "A son."

We stood there awkwardly for a moment, three men hanging in separate cocoons of thought.

"All right then," announced Cowles. "I need to get to work."

"Did you ever meet the previous owners?" I asked. "They had kind of a funny name?"

"You mean Bongo Partners," said Cowles. "Oh sure. Bunch of fish-and-chippers, too. They set up their New York City leases in their London office. Helps with the dollars and pounds thing. Decent enough chaps, didn't rob me too badly."

I was about to ask if he knew of Voodoo LLC but we heard a loud banging at the door downstairs.

"Maybe someone forgot his key," said Jay. "Better go look."

We said goodbye to Cowles, and I followed Jay down the wide stairs. At the bottom we could see a figure outside in the winter suna short black woman of about sixty in a sensible coat, gloves, and red woolen cap.

"Hell's bells," Jay muttered. He opened the door. "Mrs. Jones? You came all the way into the city?"

"Yes, Jay Rainey, I did."

He held the door open for her. "You want to come in?"

She frowned at him and didn't step inside.

"How did you-"

"Poppy told me you might be here, so I kept banging."

"You try the buzzer?"

"Didn't see no buzzer."

"You want to come in where it's warm?"

"No, I don't. I'm going to say my piece and then be done. I don't need much of your time where that is concerned, Jay Rainey, not much time at all."

So we stepped outside into the cold.

"This is my lawyer, Bill Wyeth."

The old woman nodded at me, but it was a disgusted and wary nod, too. "All right then. You've got your lawyer with you. You expecting me?"

"No," said Jay. "Why?"

"Funny, 'cause you got a lawyer with you."

"We were just looking at the building," I said.

"You knowed I was coming?" she demanded. "Poppy tell you?"

Jay shook his head. "What can I do for you, Mrs. Jones? I'm sorry about Herschel. I sent some-"

She waved her hand in his face bitterly. "Jay Rainey, don't start all that with me. I come down here to tell you that you got to do something."

"Like what?"

"Something for the family." Her eyes, yellowed and old, didn't blink. "Herschel, he work for your family almost forty years."

"I know that," said Jay.

"He kept that farm going all those years things was so bad for your family and when your daddy get sick and then after he die! You was gone most of that time, you don't know how it was."

"Yes."

"So now you got to do something."

"You mean money."

"That's what I mean, yes. I mean money! Herschel was all we had." She looked disapprovingly at me, a stranger hearing her business. "You know my boys, the two of them, Robert and Tyree, they settled now with families, they the ones who worked with Herschel, but you don't know Tommy and his cousin Harold."

Jay was silent.

"They upset."

"Okay-" Jay glanced at me, trying to sound reasonable.

"I said they upset and that ain't good!" Mrs. Jones stamped her foot. "They call me this morning and they say they hear about it from Tyree's wife, who say some kind of foolishness about her husband's daddy being left way out there frozen and all, and they pretty angry about that! Something about how the ambulance man had to blow hot air all over him to get him out of that tractor seat." She lifted her chin defiantly at Jay. "That's disrespectful, see, that's saying the man was dying and no one helped him! He was sitting there calling out to heaven in the cold and no one in this world knew nothing! No one cared he was dying alone, dying with no comfort! He dying of his bad heart right there, so bad he couldn't move! Tyree's wife told them all that. She was angry and she was crying and she was mad. Yes, she was! And it made them mad, too, yes, it did. I ain't going to lie about that, not where that is concerned, no I ain't. Them boys is dangerous, Jay Rainey, and they got a reason to be mad, is all I'm saying. Nobody was thinking about him, nobody was worrying about some old black man! Just assuming Herschel was always going to do what he was told no matter how cold it be outside! And your father, he never pay Herschel his Social Security. That's why he still working! And that's why he end up dead! Seventy-three-year-old man have no business being out there in that kind of cold, and the family- we is upset! You hearing me? We is upset! Now Harold, you know he always look up to Herschel. And now Harold, he gotten big, he got some kind of club or something here in the city, he got all kinds of money, and people working for him, and you don't want to cross that boy. He heard about this and I know he ain't happy. That boy has some kind of temper! The things he done, hoo! Don't get me started on that! He come out of prison five years ago and I suspect it was hi s fault, too. I don't like to think about what gets in his mind. Uh-uh, no! That boy is dangerous, I always said." She tightened her lips, and her cheap theatrics were both utterly obvious and entirely convincing.

"Now then," she went on, sensing her advantage, "you was good to Herschel, Jay Rainey, so I think I owe you a warning in that respect." She waited to see if he understood. Then she addressed me, as if I were implicated, too. "I mean, I can't control them boys. They ain't boys no more, neither. I lost them when they was fourteen or fifteen. They men now. They live here in the city most times." She looked away a moment. I wondered if she might be glancing down the street. "Harold, they say he was lucky to get the time he did, that he beat a man so bad he-"

"Please tell them we'll work out a fair settlement," said Jay.

"Huh. They want one hundred thousand dollars."

"That's a lot of money, Mrs. Jones."

She looked at me, eyes dark. "So, Mr. Wyeth, tell him."

I glanced at Jay. "Tell him what?"

"Tell him it ain't a lot of money. Even a old woman know that! Lots of other things cost more. Lots of problems cost more."

"Mrs. Jones," Jay said. "Herschel had a terrible heart. How many heart attacks did he already have? Four? I drove him to the hospital once myself. I paid for his doctor, I don't know how many times."

She pressed her mouth tight and shook her head. "You also asked him to go out there in the cold, do that farmwork."

"I asked him a week earlier, when it was still plenty warm," answered Jay, his voice tight. "It was maybe four hours of work. I guess he put it off and then the weather got cold."

She was already shaking her head. "Naw, he was out there five or six days before. He was finished, because Herschel was making applesauce that day. He go picking up the grass apples in November and put them in the cellar and he always start making his sauce after the fieldwork done for the winter. That Herschel, see, I know him my whole life. I know the man. He had habits. He was done in the field! He had five bushels of apples on the kitchen counter in the morning, he had his paring knife and board, he turned on the sports, he wasn't planning on doing no bulldozing in no snowstorm."

Jay shook his head, ready to disagree. "But I guess he wasn't through, not if he was on the bulldozer. I hadn't been out there in a week or-"

"I talked to him about that!" Mrs. Jones shrieked. "He said you kept calling him and saying it was important it get done by such and such a time, and he was sick one of those days and he took himself out there anyway, even though I told him he was sick. But that was almost a week ago, Jay Rainey! He was all done with his work! Yesterday he wash his apples and then go down in the cellar and say I need me some more jars and then he goes out driving and then the next thing I know he ain't coming home. And it gets later and later and we is worried sick! Then we get a call at four in the morning that he's dead! On a bulldozer! I don't know why he was out there. But the way I look at it, if he was on that thing, he was working for you."

"But if he'd already-" Jay began, then stopped, knowing he was arguing against the memory of a dead man. "All that's done. We'll find an acceptable settlement."

It was a standoff. "Mrs. Jones," I asked, "just out of curiosity, what game was on the TV? The Knicks?"

She looked at Jay. "You better get yourself a new lawyer."

"What? Why?"

"He's putting things in my mouth."

"What?"

"Herschel always watching that Tiger Woods hit the ball far."

One of the winter golf tournaments, in the early rounds. "I see my mistake."

"You do?"

"I thought this was happening at night," I said.

"Herschel ain't going out to bulldoze at night! You think he's crazy? This was after lunch." Mrs. Jones looked from Jay to me and back again in frustration. "Why we talking about this? I'm going tell those boys you said you'd pay the family that money, Jay Rainey. I'm going tell them you said you was happy to pay it! I'm going tell them you thought that was a good number, that was a fair number! How you feel real bad about Herschel. Yes, that's what I'm do! They expecting a call this morning. They watching closely! They know this is your new building, 'cause I told them. Poppy told me the number and I told them. So you see? I'm going tell them you said you'd pay! I think they'll take it. But I can't be sure. I can't control them boys no more, Jay Rainey. They wild now! They go around with their girls and cars and whatnot, it's out of my hands." She rebuttoned the top button of her coat and yanked her gloves tight. "I'll be going, then."

She said nothing more, turned briskly, and picked her way along the snowy sidewalk. I turned back to Jay. "That little old lady just shook you down."

Jay watched her go. "I've got to do something for them. But I can't pay off Herschel's whole life. He was just supposed to grade the roadbed, maybe dump some gravel in the holes. I paid him ahead of time, I told him to do it when the weather was warm, because the bulldozer works better then, anyway. I was sure he was done. It wasn't a big job."

"What was he doing too close to the edge?"

"Don't know. I couldn't tell what he was doing because it was all covered with snow. And hell, why was the dozer left in reverse? Don't worry about it, okay? It's my problem."

I was glad to hear this.

Jay asked, "What did you think of Cowles, the guy upstairs?"

"Good guy, I guess."

"You see the family pictures? The first wife was beautiful," he said. "I think he loved her very much."

It was a strangely sympathetic thing for him to say, and we stood there in a sudden, not uncomfortable silence. Men sometimes make friends this way, I think. They decide quickly. Jay gazed into his hands, then looked away. There was something vulnerable and temporary about the moment, and I was attentive to it, for a man, let us agree, is a kind of shelled animal. There is the hardened surface he presents to the world, the face and the words and the behavior, but very often these do not correlate very well with the being inside the shell. By hardened I mean coherent, deflective of attack, and capable of being recognized by others; I don't mean unchangeable- quite the opposite, in fact. But the shell is always there, growing outward from within, flaking and breaking away, and the quivering wet stuff inside remains largely hidden. Appearances are not deceiving so much as incomplete. What you see is what you get, but what you don't see is also what you get. For a moment Jay seemed unshelled, disinterested in protecting himself from my scrutiny or judgment.

"Yeah, I think he was crazy about her," he repeated. "You have one like that, a woman who just haunts you?"

"I was married."

"Yeah?"

"She left."

"You said you had a son."

"Yes. I haven't seen him in-" I couldn't finish the sentence.

Jay opened his mouth but said nothing. In contrast to his behavior thirty minutes earlier, he seemed tired or discouraged, deflated really, and it occurred to me that this was now the third time I'd seen such a cycle in less than a day; the first had been in the Havana Room, when he was up, then outside the steakhouse, when he was down; the second had been while he was recovering the bulldozer, up, and the drive back into the city, down.

"You all right?" I asked.

"Sure." He rose to his feet. "Here." He handed me a slip of paper with an uptown address on it. "This is the place for dinner."

"For what?"

"To meet with this guy for me tonight. Six p.m. The wine guy from Chile."

"What's his name?"

"Marceno, something like that."

"Why can't you do it, anyway?" I asked. "This sounds pretty important."

"I have another engagement."

"More important than this?"

Jay didn't meet my eyes. "Yes, actually."

Maybe I would do it, maybe not. Maybe it would be wise to talk to Allison first. And maybe I wanted to talk with her anyway. I found a cab going uptown, told the driver the address of the steakhouse, slinging it at him through the news radio chatter. He grunted, and clunked the car into drive. Outside, rain began to slather against the windows, a sudden dark wintry emptying of the sky, and I settled back in my seat as lower Manhattan blurred past; it was as if I were taxiing through the torrent of meaningless data from everywhere, able to discern every info-droplet but removed from their collective chill. The thought provoked me to inspect the piece of paper Jay had given me. He'd written the restaurant address in slanting box letters, but this was not what intrigued me. The slip had apparently been torn from some kind of business stationery, for on the reverse was printed SAFETY, RELIABILITY, AND PROMPT DE- What did Jay need or use that was safe, reliable, and required prompt delivery?

Fifteen minutes later I was sitting at Table 17 and looking at the daily soup specials.

Allison came over after I'd been served, carrying her clipboard. "Hey, mister backroom lawyer." She let her finger touch my shoulder and stood close to me. "So, what did you boys do last night?" she asked.

"Didn't Jay call you today?"

"Not yet." She shrugged. "So-?"

"It's his business, actually," I said.

"Come on, you can tell me."

"We went out and looked at his land."

"That's all?"

I lifted my hands. "That's it."

Allison didn't like my terse answer. "When did you get home?"

"He dropped me off at my place close to five," I said. "Now, listen, I want you to sign me up for the Havana Room. Or whatever you do. Get me in there."

She looked around to see that no one was listening. "I will. I told you I will."

"When's the next time?"

"It's irregular. You know that by now."

"Once every week or two, I've noticed."

"Whenever Ha is ready."

"Why does it depend on Ha?"

"Why? Because Ha, unbeknownst to the likes of you, is an artist."

"An artist? Doing what?"

"You'll find out, okay?"

I remembered him unrolling the folded white cloth, the gleaming instrument inside. "By the way, Frank Sinatra never owned this place, not in his name, anyway."

"Oh, I know. Lipper just says that. You looked it up?"

"I did, yes."

"Lipper is one of the great old liars, really."

"You know, he doesn't own the building, either."

"Sure he does," Allison said.

"No, actually, he doesn't."

"He owns the building, Bill. I know it."

"No, it's some public company. I'm sure he has a long-term lease with them."

"So Lipper rents the place?"

"Looks that way."

She sighed. "You know, I've asked him to give me a percentage of the restaurant's profits and he won't. And you know what?" She leaned forward, her teeth tight against her bottom lip. "This is my restaurant. I run it, I make it work. It really is mine, Bill. I possess it, you know? Lipper doesn't do anything. The bookkeeper sends him some papers a few times a month, and he comes in here with his nurse. I'm the one who is killing myself for him."

One of the waiters beckoned her.

"I think we might have a fish problem," she said. "I'll be back."

I watched her go. The question of who owns property is always interesting; here was a situation in which a building had a legal owner, a company, and someone else, Lipper, who claimed to be its public owner, and yet another person, Allison, who claimed to be its moral owner. Things often work this way, though; anyone who has practiced real estate law is soon conveyed into a realm of human affairs where the pressures behind decisions are often enormous, and include death, divorce, illness, stupidity, greed, sexual indiscretion, grief- everything. Whatever is in the human spirit becomes expressed through bricks and mortar, which is also to say there's always a story. I remember in my first year in the practice a short Puerto Rican man came to me. He looked ill used by life, yet had been able to find a decent shirt, though no tie. He'd been shunted off to me by the partners and senior associates as not worth their billable time; I made the same assumption. But within a minute I knew myself to be wrong. He was coming to me, he said, and not a local lawyer in Queens, because he wanted his affairs handled quietly and correctly. He wanted, it remained unsaid, the cultural protection of a midtown law firm loaded with Jews and WASPs. He was dying of prostate cancer and had to proceed expeditiously. He owned three apartment buildings, a car-painting business, a garage, a septic tank-cleaning company on Long Island, a half interest in a gasoline station, and a number of lesser properties. He had come to the United States in 1962 and gotten a job as a union painter. "Three years I was here and then I ask my friend who owns a delicatessen what do you do with your money, and he say I buy bricks. I say why? And he say because bricks, they always grow. Bricks grow. Money, it does not grow like bricks."

Now that he was dying, he had to dispose of his properties before his family started to argue over them, which would lead to the erosion of their value. Equally important, he had fathered four children by three women outside his marriage. His wife didn't know of any of the women, and none of the women knew of each other. One of these liaisons, he confessed between coughs, "back when I was youngyou know, guapo — with good hair," had been with a Rockette showgirl thirty years prior who had since been married and divorced twice and was living in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn. "Oh, man," he smiled, eyes suddenly bright with the memory, "could that girl fuck. She practically broke my penises." Another woman had involved a longer relationship. Their child had been born with a heart problem and had to avoid strenuous activity. She'd uncomplainingly taken care of him for fifteen years, my client said. Then he started to cry. "He never threw a ball, never swam at the beach." He'd arranged, he said, for a cousin of his to marry the woman and be a father for the boy. Surprisingly, it had worked out. "That was the best thing I ever do in my life," he said. He wanted to sell off his properties to provide for his love children. The properties, he thought, might total ten or twelve million dollars. I sat there, a smug twenty-five-year-old who still thought law was what they taught you in law school, and said I'd look into it. Which I did. The properties were worth nineteen million dollars, and my client died two weeks after the papers were finished. He signed them while on a respirator and between morphine doses.

Or there was the case of the billionaire real estate developer who bought one of the fancy old hotels near the Public Library and spent $116 million rehabilitating it so that he could wheel his mother inside and tell her that it belonged to him. His whole career, successful as it was, had been to prove himself to his mother. All this was conveyed to me by his statuesque wife, on a party boat cruising Long Island Sound. Her breasts were perfect nose-cones of flesh yet suspiciously real-looking, too. She was his third wife, and she knew she had a couple of years to go before she was traded in. I saw in her a good but weak person whose beauty had been debilitating, for it had attracted only men who wished to conquer her. Finishing her drink, she suddenly tossed her ice and lime wedge into the ocean, then the glass too, and turned to me, face beautiful, eyes bitter, and said, "All because of his mother, whom he hates!" I'd just nodded. "Why doesn't he want some children?" she asked. "That's all I want." She was removed and replaced within a year, and when the hotel's renovation was complete, I attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony and noticed- how could I not- that the developer's mother was asleep in her padded armchair, mouth open, dentures dry in the air, cane nestled between her bony knees.

Now Allison came back to me, her hips swaying. "Fish," she said. "You'd think they'd be easy! Somebody catches them, somebody buys them, somebody cooks them." She slumped in the chair. "Maybe Ha should look at them for me."

"Why should Ha look at the fish?"

"He knows a lot about them."

But this wasn't of interest; I was worried about the night before. "Allison, what else can you tell me about Jay? Where does he work, that kind of thing?"

She took a breath, let it out. "I don't know where he works."

"He's never discussed it?"

"I think he said he was in the construction business."

"When you call him, during the day, where do you call?"

She smiled a sick little smile. "I don't call."

"You don't call him?"

"No. Isn't that funny?"

"He calls you?"

"Yes."

"Have you ever seen his place?"

"No."

"Do you know where he lives?"

"No."

"You have any number for him?"

"No."

"No?"

"It's embarrassing. He won't give it to me."

"No home phone?"

"No."

"No cell phone, or business phone? I'm pretty sure he has a cell phone."

Allison doodled on the edge of her clipboard. "I worry that he doesn't really like me, sometimes."

"Why? Just because he won't tell you anything about himself? You search on the Internet?"

"Of course. Nothing."

"He just calls you up and tells you to meet him?"

"Basically."

"What happened to all your tough single New York woman survival rules?"

"I forgot them."

"What do you two do? I'm trying to get a bead on this guy."

"He calls me here. We meet at my place."

"And then?"

"Well, you know."

"Just tell me."

"Usually we you know, we have fun, and then I make him a bite to eat."

"So this is not at night?"

She wasn't expecting the question. "Not usually."

"When?"

"When it's slow here in the afternoon, maybe three or four."

"You ever go out to dinner?"

"Not much," she admitted. "He says he wants to see me in my apartment."

"And you put up with this because-"

Here Allison bit her lip and looked down and then found a cigarette in her bag. I'd pushed pretty hard. But I pushed some more. "The visits don't last long, do they? I mean, maybe an hour or two."

"Yeah," she said. "So?"

"That's not that long for a date, a romantic arrangement."

"You're telling me?"

"Does he begin with a lot of energy and then end up very tired?"

"Yes! That kind of happened last-" She didn't finish. Instead she looked up at a heavy man in a white uniform who had barged into the room.

It was the restaurant's chef. "I canna have this!" he called. "Again the swordfish!"

"You want me to look?" Allison asked.

"It is garbage! A direct insult! He is not wholesaler, he is a crook! He is saying, Eat my shit, take my delicious shit and press it through your teeth! That is what he is saying!" He turned and left.

Allison stood. "You want to see what I have to deal with today?"

I followed her through the swinging door with the little window and past long preparation tables and swinging steel pots. A Mexican man was hosing down the floor. The chef waited for us, a headless fish three feet long resting on a wet drainboard in front of him. I would have said it was a yellowfin tuna. Someone had started to clean it.

"I will not eat shit!" the chef sputtered. "Look!"

The fish had been slit down the middle and he lifted up one half of the pink meat to reveal a milky, pencil-thick tube that snaked through the flesh. It looked about two feet long and recoiled wetly when touched.

"Yeah, okay," said Allison. "I'll call him." She looked at me. "I have to deal with this."

"Worms! Parasites!" cried the chef as I turned to leave. "I canna have them! No worms!" He took his cleaver and hacked the fish. We stepped back. "No- no worms!" He chopped at the red flesh, pulverizing it. "Get- your- fucking- fish- man- to- deliv- er- fish!"

Among Manhattan's many improbable rooms is what appears from inside to be a Kashmiri houseboat floating fifteen stories above Central Park South. Filled with pillows and fabrics and statues of Ganesh, the room is a mogul's private love-chamber in the sky, every surface decorated, sitar music drifting in and out of consciousness. From this view, the park is a great dark lake, with the taxi headlights tunneling crosstown beneath the trees like miniature submarines bound for the lighted apartment buildings on the far shore. The room's many candles flicker in the windows, creating the odd sense of muted explosions over the park.

The room is in fact a small restaurant, only two tables deep, and it was here that I sat in my one good suit, fondling an ornate brass spoon, waiting for Marceno, the new owner of Jay Rainey's family farm. Across the table, saying nothing, sat a dark-eyed woman with a very small nose, pinched perfect by a surgeon, perfect and pointed and small. The nose accentuated the woman's beautiful and enormous mouth, a mouth that promised everything, promised itself as a cave of pleasure that would accept the most torrid urgencies, if only the mouth's owner were made comfortable. I had tried very hard not to look at the mouth as the woman introduced herself as Miss Allana, Mr. Marceno's New York associate. The name sounded like one of those soothingly synthetic names of cars or pharmaceuticals. Miss Allana spoke with a crisp South American accent and did not, I understood, see any reason to make further chitchat, instead sitting and staring into some imagined faraway place where- maid service includedlow-rent mouth-oglers like myself were not admitted.

"Ah, Mr. Rainey," came a voice behind me, and it was Marceno himself, a small man with a tanned face and dark eyebrows. As confident as he was rich, I thought. He set down his briefcase and shook my hand.

"I'm afraid that I'm not Jay Rainey," I said, then introduced myself.

Mr. Marceno smiled poisonously, dabbed his fingertips together. "Then you are the man who cost me so much money last night?"

I could see that the sum was a trifle to him. "Yes."

He waggled his eyebrows at Miss Allana, then returned his attention to me. "Perhaps I should have hired you instead of Mr. Gerzon."

"I was just trying to protect the interests of my client."

"Of course. And why is your client not coming?"

"He had a sudden interruption."

"I see." He nodded again at the woman. Her disinterest in the conversation was painfully erotic. "Yes, this can happen, yes. I am glad he sent his representative. Do you like the view, Miss Allana?"

This seemed some sort of romantic code, for she nodded and the mouth smiled the slow, wet orifice-dilation of a sea creature that senses nourishment might be near.

"Here is our problem, Mr. Wy-eth," began Marceno after we ordered dinner. "We bought the land that Mr. Rainey sold."

"Well, he mostly swapped his land for your building."

"Let me put it another way. The new owner of his land is a company called Voodoo LLC, yes? Very humorous, Voodoo."

"Right."

"We bought Voodoo LLC."

"When?"

"Prior to the exchange of the land."

"Was the exchange one of the conditions of your purchase of Voodoo?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you wait until the exchange was complete?"

"It was not necessary. We knew the exchange would take place."

I nodded. "So you bought the shell corporation that subsequently swapped its office building for a piece of land?"

"Yes."

I still didn't get it. "What do you know about Bongo Partners, which happens to be the listed owner of the Reade Street property?"

Marceno leaned back. "It is not so complicated. Bongo owned the office building. They deeded the building into a new corporate entity called Voodoo. This happened only three days ago."

"Which is why the deed change hasn't yet shown up downtown in the records."

"Right. I see you checked."

And I could see that he was being patient with me, that he had other matters to discuss. "Let me be sure that I have it right. Bongo Partners, formed by a bunch of British investors, starts out owning the Reade Street property. It's a regular commercial property investment. They deed it into a new corporate ownership called Voodoo, then sell Voodoo to your company. Then Voodoo, which you now own, swaps the building for an eighty-six-acre farm on the North Fork of Long Island."

"Yes."

"Pretty ridiculous, isn't it?"

"Why?"

"Why didn't you buy the land outright from Jay?"

Marceno smiled with odd sadism and somehow I knew he thought me the fool. "Because, Mr. Wy-eth, your client would not sell it."

"I don't understand."

"He would not sell his land, he would only exchange it for that building."

I wanted to look at the woman's mouth but it would have distracted me.

"He wouldn't take dollars for the land?"

"No, he had to have the building."

" That building in particular?"

"Yes. I frankly do not understand why he did the deal. The building is, well, just a little brick box. The land is forever. Grapevines are forever, Mr. Wy-eth. But then again, I am biased." He looked at Miss Allana. "I am a romantic, it is my flaw."

She smiled and looked away.

"There was probably some tax benefit," I thought aloud. "If he sold the land first, he would have triggered a capital gains tax-"

"We looked into that," interrupted Marceno. "We figured that. We were even willing to make some kind of compensation for that."

"What was the order of events?"

"Pardon me?"

"Who found whom first?"

"We were looking to buy acreage," answered Marceno. "We found Mr. Rainey's land. Then our sales agent told us the land was not for sale, not exactly. That Mr. Rainey would only swap it for a certain building. This was very unusual. We were told to approach the owner of the building, which was, as you have determined, Bongo Partners. Of course they had never heard of us or of Mr. Rainey. They were amused. They might have been thinking about selling the building. So, okay, they were willing to sell. Our lawyers advised that they deed it into a new corporation that we would buy. There are certain tax advantages for us that way, as well as liability protections. So we did that as fast as we could. We bought Voodoo contingent on our ability to swap the building for the land. It went through fine."

"There was a hard-ass deadline for this deal."

"We ordered Mr. Gerzon to get this deal finished, I will admit that. I don't know how he dealt with Mr. Rainey."

Gerzon's pressure on Jay, in other words, had been real. "Why the big rush?"

"Because we are very anxious to develop that property, Mr. Wy-eth. Every day counts when you plant grapes."

"Do you have copies of these contracts?"

He reached in his briefcase, flipped me a small stack of documents. "It's all there. Ownership of the Reade Street building passed from Bongo to Voodoo, then a day later to Mr. Rainey."

"All this crazy legal paperwork because Rainey had to own that one particular building?"

"Yes." And then, perhaps seeing my pensiveness, Marceno said, "Now that I have given you an explanation, perhaps you can give me one. But first, let me tell you a little about my family, Mr. Wy-eth. We have been in the wine business for almost two hundred years. We are located in the Llano del Maipo region, near Santiago. We have a very good Cabernet Sauvignon, the Pinot Noir, and the Merlot. We are starting the Syrah, which you would call Shiraz. This is what we do. We practice controlled vineyard management. Extensive pruning to curb vigor." He looked at Miss Allana. She smiled again and looked away. "We want concentration of the fruit. We are careful about how we treat the land and the people. We are very careful with herbicides and pesticides. We are very lucky. In Chile we do not have the phylloxera epidemic. We can use French vines on French roots. Not French vines grafted onto American roots, like you have in California. We have been very successful. But we would like to branch out a bit. My family has maintained several apartments in Manhattan for decades now, it is a city that we love. And now we find the North Fork of Long Island very intriguing. We have started to hear that some very fine Merlots are coming along. The bottles are expensive, but the market is catching up."

"What do you mean?"

"It's still expensive to make wine there, yes. The land costs are high, the vines need three or four years before they can produce, another ten before they produce good wine. In the great historical regions of wine-making, the cost of the land, as well as of the vines, is more or less sunk. All of it was paid for so long ago that it's no longer a cost factor. Same thing happened in Napa and Sonoma. The land is paid for, the vines are in. As you know, great wine is in the grapes. And before that it is in the soil. There is only so much we can do in the winery. So then, where was I?"

"You love to come to New York City," prompted Miss Allana, her voice throaty and moist. "You love to be here."

"Yes. That is right. And I come and am hearing about the North Fork vineyards and naturally I am curious and ask my driver to take me out there and see the land and I come back with mud all over my shoes and maps and-!" He tempered himself. "It is spectacular. It is a special gift we are only just starting to understand. And the farm that we have just purchased or exchanged with Mr. Rainey is excellent, too. The location is very good because we find that, yes, on a statistical basis, there are about four more degree days, four more days of warm weather, in the fall than there are even fifteen miles to the east. This is important to get the grapes ready for harvest. Every extra degree day decreases our risk, increases our potential yield before the first frost. And there are about two inches more rain. Forty-four inches a year instead of forty-two. To make a truly great Merlot, you do not irrigate. You drop your extra fruit and then use what is left. It takes self-discipline. But that is how the French have done it for a thousand years. It is against the law to irrigate grapes in Bordeaux, did you know that?"

He waited for an answer. "Uh, no," I said.

"We looked at all the weather data, too. Only five days a year above ninety degrees Fahrenheit and less than one day per year below zero degrees, on a historical basis. No prolonged heat, no deep freezes that kill the roots. This is very good!" He nodded in excitement. "And the soil data is good. The soil is loam- porous, sandy, and friable. Very, very good. Some of the best in the world for growing grapes, did you know that? We have a soil laboratory in Chile, with eight thousand soil samples. Our soil is volcanic, very different. But we study all soil. We had our agronomist look at the site, and we did our own gradient calculations, yes? If the slope of the land is more than eleven degrees, we find that the water vapor lingers in the low areas and we don't get the drying of the leaves that we like. We can get fungus, we get terrible black rot. So grade of land is very important. We examined the whole area, Mr. Wy-eth. We looked at nine different large properties. Frankly there was one that we liked a little more but a French company bought it before we could. But Mr. Rainey's property was larger and slightly cheaper by the acre and so we decided to acquire his. Our broker, she let us know about it."

"Hallock Properties?" I asked, remembering the sign on the field.

"Yes." Marceno looked at Miss Allana, then smiled at me.

I realized I'd just made a mistake.

But he continued. "When we buy acreage, we like to enter the community on very good terms- that makes sense, yes? We want the local people to be glad that we came. We try to build relationships, we try to have people feel good that the Marceno family has arrived. After all, we hire local labor, rely on local merchants. We need goodwill."

"Sounds reasonable."

He leaned forward. "It is reasonable. It is also reasonable to suppose, Mr. Wy-eth, that when we buy a piece of land, yes, we expect that what we see is what we get."

I said nothing, thinking, of course, of Herschel atop the bulldozer.

"Do you understand me?"

"So what did you see?"

"We saw a lovely piece of farmland with good drainage fronting Long Island Sound, the kind of place where you could put in a wonderful winery and have a tasting center looking out over the ocean."

"Isn't that what you got?"

"We don't know what we got, Mr. Wy-eth. We did soil tests, but those are random. Yesterday after we signed the copies of the contract to buy Voodoo LLC, but before Mr. Gerzon finalized the deal last night, we took a drive out to look at the land. Somebody had been out there with a bulldozer."

"A bulldozer?"

"Yes, moving topsoil around. It looked to me like he was filling in a low area but it was starting to snow. I couldn't quite tell. But I could see the bulldozer tracks."

"This was yesterday?"

"I told you, yesterday afternoon, Wednesday."

Yes, in the daylight, which matched what Mrs. Jones had said. "What time?"

Marceno twisted his head. "Midafternoon, just after four o'clock. This wasn't just a few tracks, Mr. Wy-eth. I myself worked a bulldozer on our family vineyard when I was young. Someone had spent hours moving the soil around."

The chronology wasn't quite clear, but it sounded as if Herschel had already gone over the cliff when Marceno had inspected the land. Marceno hadn't actually seen a bulldozer.

"Mr. Wy-eth, I know what goes on in an agricultural operation. Soil gets moved around, holes get dug, this kind of thing. But this land had been undisturbed for a while. I myself had been over that property by foot six times already. And then, the day we are finishing the deal, I see bulldozer tracks everywhere. What does this mean, I think. Why are they moving earth? What are they hiding from us?"

I didn't have an answer for him, of course, but it occurred to me then that whoever had moved the soil around might have timed his activity in respect not only to the falling darkness but also to the coming snowstorm. If he- Herschel, it seemed- had begun at, say, 1 p.m., and the snow had started to fall at 3 p.m., with darkness descending about ninety minutes after that, then the discoverability of the bulldozer work prior to the deal being done that night was shrinkingly brief. "What happened then?" I said vaguely.

"It was getting dark and our driver said a bad storm of snow was coming and perhaps we should try to get back to the city soon." He looked at the woman and said something in Spanish quickly. She blushed and turned away, her lips pressed together in amusement. I got part of it. Something along the lines of, When I'm done with this gringo idiot you and I will… "So I did not get enough time to look around."

Right. He did not get enough time to see Herschel dead and frozen forty feet down the sea cliff.

"Why didn't you stop the deal if you had a question about the land?"

"I tried to call your client, but he was unresponsive. I called the real estate agent and she said if we stopped the deal, then another buyer was ready to step in. I didn't want to risk that. So I let the deal go ahead." He stared at me without blinking, his mouth sucked small with fury. "This morning my foreman tells me he finds new tracks and also potatoes in the snow. I am thinking I did not see potatoes in the snow yesterday afternoon, and they are in the snow the next morning?"

I was close to urinating in my pants, but instead I quietly bit the tip of my tongue, as hard as I could stand it.

"I would like to know what is being covered up, Mr. Wy-eth! I would like Jay Rainey to tell us! He knows the land. He grew up on it. It's eighty-six acres, Mr. Wy-eth. Not so big. But we could spend a very long time and lots of money trying to find out. The snow will be gone soon, maybe tomorrow. We want to know what we are dealing with here. Underground gasoline tanks? Buried herbicide? I know that the potato farmers used arsenic for many years and that many of the old barns still have bags and bags of it. It could be many things. Water moves under the ground. Sideways, up and down. I am worried about planting vines and in three years the roots find some kind of poison. The vines die, maybe. Or, worse than that, we find herbicide in our wine, we find trace elements. We use Roundup, this is very good stuff, breaks down to water. We like that. But other farmers in the past used very bad stuff. You can get terrible things in the wine. You have to tear out vines, Mr. Wy-eth! A terrible thing. Expensive, and very painful. So we are careful. We are thorough."

"Yes."

"It looks to me like the bulldozer was trying to add some soil over about a two-acre area, okay? The till depth to establish the vines is twenty-four inches, in your measurements. This is standard out there and is well known. Deeper than potatoes. I suspect, yes, that he was trying to be sure our tillers did not hit anything. You see, when the ground freezes and thaws, things come up. But if you add soil on top of them, they might stay hidden longer. We want to know what the problem is, Mr. Wy-eth. We want to take care of the problem in such a way that it doesn't attract the interest of the local residents. The environmental officials, okay? I have heard that when the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation gets involved, the delays are usually measured in years. Years! I am sure you understand that we do not want the publicity of our arrival in any way damaged by bad news, Mr. Wy-eth."

"I'll have to talk to my client."

"Yes. You see, we have to get moving on the construction of our vineyard. We have financing lined up, we have a planting schedule, we are about to build the first two barns. We have to get the land ready. The vines get planted in May, but there's a lot to do before that. The land has to be tilled and raked, graded and fertilized, thousands of posts put in. For the variety we wish to grow, we have a two-week window to plant the vines, so that the roots go deep enough to take the summer heat- otherwise we wait another year, Mr. Wy-eth. So we need Mr. Rainey's help soon, very soon."

"I will talk with him."

"We would like him to take us to the place on the land and tell us just what exactly we may find under the soil. I want him to point to a spot in the ground and say dig here and you will find whatever it is that he is hiding from me. We do not want to plant vines and then find out we have to tear them out."

"That's reasonable." I bit my roll, but it might as well have been my fist.

"We know a lot about Mr. Rainey already, we know he grew up there. I have tried to call him, I have been goddamn fucking polite."

I didn't doubt this.

"I would like an answer in one day, please."

"I'll see what I can do."

"Yes," he said. "Or you will see what we can do." He pulled something from his breast pocket. "Here," he said. "I believe this is yours."

He handed me the same old business card I'd given the cop the night before.

"That is yours, no?"

Yes. The lettering, so neat and formal, the name and address, my name, my title, all my old phone numbers, four of them and e-mail, all the signifiers of a former life. The sight of the card made me sick. I'd handed it to the policeman late the night before, a hundred miles away, and here it was again? How? Marceno, like any good businessman, might already have an understanding with the local police department, may even have asked them to keep an eye out for trespassers, and when called and told about the interaction, had one of his minions drive out to retrieve the card.

"I have something else for you, Mr. Wy-eth."

"Yes?"

He looked at Miss Allana. She reached down to her feet- slowly, keeping her back straight and legs crossed- and retrieved a large purse, from which she pulled a legal-size manila envelope. Marceno took the envelope, opened it, and slid out two documents. Even across the table I could tell it was a lawsuit.

"Please deliver this to Jay Rainey." He handed me one of the documents. "And this copy- this copy is for you."

I skipped my eyes over the first page. I was named as a defendant.

"Wait-"

"If he gives us a good answer, we will tear it up."

"Listen, I'm not-"

"You were Mr. Rainey's legal representation in his deal with Voodoo LLC."

"But I'm not involved in-"

"And according to the local police, you accompanied Mr. Rainey out to the land last night. Trespassing, I should add."

Marceno stood, as did Miss Allana, and they left without further word. He was going to take her to a hotel or apartment and spend some time with her beautiful sea-creature mouth and I was going to spend some time with a lawsuit. A great steaming plate of tandori chicken landed in front of me, but I slid it aside and lifted the first page of the document. There it was, Jay and I both named as defendants, allegations of fraud, misconduct, misrepresentation, and whatever else they could dream up, the amount being sought nothing less than ten million dollars. Some junior associate at a third-string law firm had pumped out the language. It's easy; you get an old suit, change the names and addresses, doctor up the wording. It was just a bluff, a device meant to get one's attention. Yes, meant to make the acid creep up your throat, meant to remind you that mistakes are costly and dread very cheap indeed. But even such trumped-up attacks have a way of quietly sucking the sauce out of people; they are expensive to win and disastrous to lose, they become part of your psychic history, they snap your life onto a grid of legal filings and motions and court calendars. But worse than that, I feared the unknown connection between Herschel, his frozen eyes lifted to a dark heaven, and Marceno's orderly wrath. Old black farmhands with sixty years' experience don't end up on bulldozers in the middle of a snowstorm without their socks on.

Was the next part luck? Not quite. Mostly a guess as I stood out on the street, wind against my cheeks, angry with Jay and a little scared, the lawsuit rolled thick as a magazine and jammed in my pocket. It was, after all, a Thursday night in February, and Jay had circled all the Thursday night games on the girls' basketball schedule I'd found in his car the night before. Plus, he'd said that very afternoon that he had an important appointment in the evening. No, it wasn't much of a deduction, but still it took me a while. I flagged down a cab near the Plaza Hotel. The school was only twenty blocks away, and I knew it well, for it was one that Timothy might have gone to when he'd gotten older.

The school's gym stood around the corner from its main entrance and I could hear the cheers roaring out of the high, lighted windows. I stepped past the guard without making eye contact, walked down a corridor of pewter trophies, many of them fifty or eighty years old, and into a small, old-time gym. It was packed with parents. They looked tired and quite prosperous, many of them clearly on the way home from the office, dragging briefcases, caught in the whirling time-squeeze of parenthood and work. These were people with jobs and marriages and lunches scheduled months into the future; I used to be one of them and I hunched a bit, as much out of shame as from the worry I might see someone I knew. You never can tell whom you're going to run into in these places and it was quite possible I'd encounter fathers or mothers of Timothy's old friends, or even people who knew Wilson Doan. This thought nearly made me turn around, and I was glad to be dressed in a suit, as if that might protect me from something.

The home team was losing by nine points. I found a seat in the bleachers. Time was running out- eight minutes left in the fourth quarter. The girls on the court were sweaty and red-faced and excited; most of them had breasts or the beginning of breasts and they fussed with their hair and uniforms, but by the standards of the world, they were children. I scanned the crowd for Jay, and after a minute spotted him on the far side of the gym, in the section reserved for rooters from the other school. He sat on the top bleacher next to the wall, bent over.

Something in me recoiled. Perhaps it was the avid lean of Jay's big body. He was peering intently through a small pair of binoculars, but not, it seemed, following the game. The ball was passing back and forth in front of him, the girls shrieking, the coach hollering directions. But the binoculars didn't move. Then he put them down and opened a small notebook. He scrawled a few sentences, presumably in the same slanting block letters he'd written on the back of the slip of stationery, closed his eyes, and then wrote a little more. I was watching an act of worship. He folded the notebook into his breast pocket and lifted the binoculars again.

I considered going over to Jay, but realized I might learn more if I watched him from across the court. Maybe he knew one of the girls on the court. Maybe he was a sexual predator stalking one of them. Maybe Allison would be interested to know. The game progressed. The gym was warm and I loosened my coat. The visiting team looked like it would win by about a dozen points. The coach hollered, the crowd cheered. One of the home-team girls fouled out.

"Substitution," called the announcer, a nasally teenage boy in a coat and tie. "Coming in, number five, Sally Cowles."

A girl stepped forward from the scorer's table and ran onto the court to a smattering of polite applause. She was tallish and leggy and a little awkward in her baggy jersey and shorts, but she took her position on the floor quickly. Cowles, Sally Cowles. This had to be the daughter of the Englishman we'd met that morning, no? I had not seen the photo on Cowles's desk well enough to make the match. She looked about fourteen, still very much a girl, breasts not yet developed, her body more up and down than curving. But her large eyes and well-formed face promised beauty. I glanced back at Jay. Now his binoculars followed the action of the game, the action of the girl, I should say, and on the occasion when play stopped at the end of the court near him, when Sally Cowles stood just thirty feet or so from him, her face sweaty and eyes alert, knees bent and waiting for the referee to whistle play to begin, Jay Rainey lowered his binoculars and stared at her.

I glanced from one to the other, trying to understand their connection, but then someone behind me was calling my name. I turned fearfully, and there was Dan Tuthill five bleacher rows up, good old Dan Tuthill, looking a little grayer, and a lot heavier, firing me a big wave. He said something to his wife next to him, then began stepping down the bleachers, his enormous stomach tented in a green sport short.

"Jeez, Bill, you look great!" he said when he reached me, breathing like the wealthy fat man he was. "I told Mindy, I think that's got to be Bill Wyeth, can't believe it, just great to see you."

We shook hands with the old conspiratorial intimacy. "You here to see your daughter?" I asked.

"Yeah, she made a layup in the second quarter. Total luck it went in. You?"

"I'm here, well, to meet a client."

He nodded, perhaps impressed. "Anyone I know?"

"Probably not."

He knew I wouldn't tell him.

"How's it going at the firm?" I asked him.

"Ah, don't ask." His face sagged in pain. I'd always liked this about Dan; his emotions were right there for you to see, up or down. "I mean, I'll tell you, but Christ! Nobody knows where the power is anymore. All the young guys are pissed off at the old guys for sucking up all the bonus money. I qualify as an old guy now. The really old guys are nervous. They fired two lawyers last week and two more quit. It's a fucking nightmare, Bill. The executive committee is a snake pit."

"I thought you were on that committee now," I said, glancing to see that Jay was still in his seat.

"I used to be." He shrugged at the unstoppable flow of time. "Listen, it's good to see you, Bill. See that you're out there, in circulation." He gave me a little affectionate slug in the arm. "You look good, you look trim. Been working out?"

I laughed. "I eat mostly steak."

"I've heard about that diet, I should try it. All protein or something… You know, Bill, I'm still sorry about- all that stuff that happened…"

"Yeah," I said.

"Did you land anywhere, pardon the expression?"

"I landed hard, Dan. Let's put it that way."

"But it looks like you've got a little work?" he asked gently.

"I could always use more."

He stared at me, wheels clicking in his head. I remembered the look. Dan liked deals, he liked speed, he liked action. "We should have lunch." His voice was thoughtful. "We could talk about some things, you know?"

"Name the time, guy."

He pulled an electronic device out of his pocket. "I always say I better not drop this thing…" He pushed a button, studied the tiny screen. "Day after tomorrow? One? Harvard Club?"

"You got it."

"I'm really glad to see you. Frankly, there's a lot going on- I can't discuss it here, but we'll kick it around, okay?" He shook my hand as if it was he who needed me, and returned to his wife. I didn't know what to make of the interaction except that it had been surprisingly pleasant and confirmed that you should always keep a decent suit around. I could still fit in. In fact, the parents around me didn't give me a second look at all; I was just another fortyish guy in a tie. It felt good, it felt possible.

Then I turned back to look for Jay. He was gone.

But perhaps I could follow him. I bounced down the bleacher steps, making my apologies, and hurried out to the street, hoping to see his large frame ahead of me. I took a chance and walked east toward Lexington Avenue, past the lighted windows of other people's lives.

That was when I felt a hand slide into my armpit.

A hoarse voice: "Easy."

Two tall, well-dressed white guys walked on either side of me.

"Take the wallet," I said. "Just leave me the ID, okay?"

"Relax."

"I don't care about the credit cards, just-"

"Hey, re- lax."

They were hustling me toward a double-parked limo. A third man jumped out and opened the back doors.

"Look, I talked with Marceno earlier! I have the lawsuit in my pocket right here, I understand the situation, I know he's serious."

One of the men shrugged at the other. "Not a clue."

A taxi went by, not stopping. They hustled me inside the limo, sat on either side of me. The seat was soft and I sank backward comfortably. Both men sank down next to me as well.

The one on my right said, "Let's go," and the car started to move.

"H.J. said he'd call when."

We were cruising downtown. "Who is H.J.?" I asked.

"He's the gentleman who keeps us in his admirable employ."

The accent was Irish, I guessed. "Hey guys, come on."

"Just taking orders."

"I think you got the wrong man."

The man on my right whispered something under his breath, and instead of shooting me in the head, right there in the car, a mess for someone to clean up, he leaned forward and turned on the television in the console in front of us. It was CNN and we watched a terse summary of the situation in the Middle East.

"They got it wrong, Denny," announced the man on my left. "They left out the part about who really owns the bloody oil."

"My cousin from over here was in the second Gulf War, you know."

"Guys, come on," I tried again. "This is the wrong-"

"He kill anybody? Any wee action with the ragheads?"

"He killed forty-one, by his count," said the one named Denny. "Also he shot at some Iraqi trucks, blew them to shite with a grenade launcher."

"Look, you guys aren't looking for me, you're probably looking for-"

"There's a fellow in Queens who sells those things."

"Get out."

"Swear to it. Eight thousand dollars."

Colin Harrison

The Havana Room

The man on my left nodded. "We could go there now, after we deal with Andrew Wyeth here."

"Bill Wyeth, not Andrew Wyeth."

"He's the great painter, the artist, right?"

"Yes, American archetypes, Maine, all that. Bit of the stony coast and the sea."

"But a great American nonetheless."

"In a manner of speaking, I suppose."

"Hello Billy, are you a great American as well?"

Thugs living a thuggish dream. Yet they seemed to bear me no particular ill will, so I remained quiet. The car cut west on Twenty-third Street, nosed onto the West Side Highway going south, where they turned off the television, and rode it down the tip of Manhattan, around Battery Park, then north up the east side of the island on the FDR, slow in the traffic, then around the top of the island on the Harlem River Drive, then south down the West Side.

"How long are we to do this?" Denny asked.

"However long H.J. says."

"I'll need a bog."

"There's a McDonald's at Thirty-fourth and Ninth."

A few minutes later we pulled in. One by one they went to use the bathroom.

"You?"

I shook my head. Too scared.

We circled the island one more time, and by then, almost midnight, the men were bored.

"Fucking H.J., man."

"This is the job. When you're for hire, this is the job."

"You guys bribable?" I asked. "You can take me to a cash machine, clean out my account, let me walk away with a little pocket money, go buy myself a drink."

The man on my left laughed. "You're all right."

Then a cell phone in the car rang and the three men straightened up. The man on my left answered.

"Okay," he said, lowering his voice, "we'll be right there."

We rolled into the West Twenties, not so far from where I lived. The limo eased along the curb and I was escorted up the steps of an old factory building. The men kept close to me now, urging me along, one tight hand under my arm. I thought about running, knew it would be futile. We approached an unmarked black metal door.

"This is where we get off," one of the men said.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"The likes of us are not welcome in there." He looked at me, eyes mirthful. "Not that you will find us complaining, though."

The door opened. Four black guys in good suits stepped out. I was passed to their firm control. The door shut quickly behind me. Inside I heard rap music pounding, and it became louder as I was hurried through a dark hallway constructed of painted plywood. We passed several young black girls giggling outside a door marked PRIVATE and I knew that the sight of a middle-aged white man there was shocking to them, anomalous, as impossible as a reindeer. Next the hallway became tinted with red lights, the smell of pot lingering. We passed a stairwell where two black men were casually beating a third. They turned in surprise when they saw us.

"Chill," murmured one of my escorts.

"He's a cop?"

They pushed me along, up a set of stairs. At the landing we came upon a crowd of black teenagers watching a pit bull hanging three feet in the air from a thick, knotted rope. The dog had the rope in his jaws.

"Yo," said one of my escorts. "How long?"

"Nine minutes."

The dog's eyeballs rolled around and he shook his head savagely, a froth at the edges of his teeth.

"What's the record?"

"Twenty-six."

We climbed another flight of stairs, passing promotional fliers, pictures of rap artists, and framed album covers. A large black woman in gold lame and sunglasses passed. "Hi baby," she murmured. We came to a glass door with HANDJOB PRODUCTIONS stenciled on it.

"Inside, yo."

Inside was a small office with a black glass window overlooking the club's dance floor. The men followed me, pulling the door shut behind them. To one side lay a panel of unused mixing equipment, turntables and tape decks, and to the other sat an enormously fat black man in a red silken robe and security headset. He had on gold sunglasses, the lenses coated with some sort of shimmery hologramic stuff. His chair was elevated so that he had a bird's-eye view of the dance floor. Next to him stood a two-hundred-gallon oil can with a slit in the lid. Around us, and up through the floor, came the heavy thud of the bass. Occasionally a scream of excitement. Below on the floor, hundreds of bodies moved in an undulant mass, spotlights strobing crazily across them as a rap group spun through its stylized, chain-swinging, crotch-grabbing moves.

"Yo, H.J., this is the dude."

H.J. pointed at a chair for me to sit and waved away the other guys.

"We'll be right outside, bro."

He didn't bother to look at me. Instead he watched the dance floor for a few minutes and talked into his headset. "See what them niggas is doin' over by the red couch." He leaned forward, watching. "No, the dude in the green- yeah, him. He bitin' my style. Tell that nigga I'm in his mind. All right… be cool. Yo, Antwawn? Antwawn, I want that box up here right now. Bring it up."

"Hey," I said. "You want to tell me why I'm here?"

"Don't talk when a man is doin' his business," came the response. "Antwawn, I want to see yo ass in like-" He turned around. "What'd you call me? You call me 'Hey'?"

"I asked you why you had me here."

A giant smile under the sunglasses. "White man, you got an improper education. My name is H.J."

"Pleased to meet you," I said. "Now tell me why I'm here."

The door opened. A young man with dreadlocks and a tattoo of Daffy Duck on his arm carried in a lockbox. This, presumably, was Antwawn. He looked at me. "Who that?"

H.J. ignored the question. "Open it."

Antwawn unlocked the box and tilted it toward H.J. Even from where I sat I could see it was full of cash. "Okay?"

H.J. opened the box, removed a short stack of bills that he put in his pocket, then took a roll of masking tape and wrapped the box about five times. "That's enough," he told himself. He signed his name over the tape with a thick felt marker. "Put it in the safe."

Antwawn knelt under the console, opened a door, placed the box inside, closed the safe.

Down on the dance floor they were screaming. "How many girls you got out there?" H.J. asked.

"Nineteen, plus Serena at the register."

"You got LaQueen on tonight?"

"Yeah." Antwawn smiled. "You want her?"

"Tell her come up here, show me somethin'."

As Antwawn left, another man in a velveteen shirt came in. He had a bad scar across one forearm. He looked at us. "Who this white dude?"

"He just visiting. Let's see it."

The man with the scar pulled out a small silver pistol.

"Good. He fight at all?"

"Not really, boss."

H.J. dropped the gun into the slit in the oil can. He pulled a fistful of bills out of his red robe, gave it to the man. "Here." They tapped their fists together and the man with the scar left.

Now he turned to me. "You work for that Jay Rainey?"

"No."

"That's bullshit."

I shrugged.

"My aunt say she talked with you today."

"With Rainey, mostly. I just happened to be there."

"What she want?"

"Money."

"That's right. But she made one mistake."

"What?"

"She got the number wrong."

I said nothing.

"I said she got the number wrong, she got it too low."

"I heard you."

"You disrespectin' my people?" he asked, lights strobing behind his head.

"No."

"You hate black people?"

"No."

"You think they should stay poor and get AIDS and shit?"

"No."

"You think black people stupid?"

"No."

"I think you do. I think you got ideas about black people."

"I'm sure you've got a few ideas about white people."

"You hate the black man."

"No."

"You hate his superiority."

"No."

"You hate his sexual prowess."

"No."

"You hate everything about him."

"You hate white people?" I asked.

He breathed through his nose. "Yes."

"You hate the white man?"

"Yes, indeed I do."

A girl poked her head inside. Her lips were the color of taxis. She was wearing high heels, a thong, and a fringed top. All the color of taxis.

"Come here, LaQueen."

"Oh, I know what you want," she said in a high, happy voice that suggested little pills that gave people high, happy voices. She saw me. "Who this?"

"He just some white dude who don't know what the fuck he doin'."

"You want some fun?"

"Come here. Like my daddy used to say, girl, you look better than a government check."

She glanced at me playfully. "Don't look, mister."

I looked. She knelt down between his huge jellied thighs, spread the red robe. But all I could see was the lovely dark violin of her back, her ankles together, heels sticking out.

"Slow, baby." Then he lifted her face off of him. "You love that thing, don't you? You love my monster."

"I do, baby."

"Say it, say I love your monster."

"I love it, H.J. You my diesel nigga."

He pressed her head back onto him. Then he looked up to address me, over her bobbing head. "My auntie tells me you- you sent my Uncle Herschel out into cold weather and he had- a heart attack. Everybody who know Uncle Herschel know he got a bad heart."

"I don't know what happened to him. He was working for Jay Rainey."

H.J.'s feet were tapping a kind of slow rhythm. I saw a gun strapped to his ankle. "You're takin'- money from him, it's the- same thing."

"That's not exactly what-"

H.J. looked at me, showed his gold teeth. "You want my blow job?"

"No thanks," I said, coolly as I could.

" 'Cause you lookin' like- like it looks good to you. I seen your eyes." He glanced at the girl's head. "Looks tasty."

"No thanks," I said.

"What- something wrong with my woman?"

"No," I said.

"Not good enough for you?"

"I didn't say that."

"Maybe she too black for you."

"No."

"See, the white man like you, he scared of the black woman. And the white woman, she want the black man. And the black woman, she ain't interested in the white man. They all want the black man, see. Same for the Chinese and the Spanish. Once they go black they never go back!" He let his hand fall on the girl's head, rubbed it, and smiled at me hatefully. "Maybe you need to learn to appreciate. You know, I ask LaQueen-she'll do you, after me. She may not want to but she will. Ain't that right, baby?"

She nodded, made a humming, filled-mouth affirmative.

"So then you could see for- yourself, boy."

I said nothing. We were living in different movies, both terrifying. H.J. whispered to the girl, "LaQueen, go easy there." He lifted his freaky sunglasses up to his forehead and stared at me with oddly small and sensitive eyes set on his large cheeks. "My auntie, she say they found Herschel's ass out on the bulldozer, frozen. Frozen! How you let a black man freeze, boy? That don't go down, you know what I'm sayin'? Something wrong in all this, and we gonna find that Poppy or Popeye or whatever the fuck he called!" He reached down to his ankle and pulled out his gun, pointed it at me. "That make a man feel murderous! White man never pay Uncle Herschel shit! He work that land for somethin' like thirty years, never saw nothin'!" He let his hand rest on LaQueen's shoulder, holding the tempo. "I want repairation! You got to pay the repairations! We heard that land got sold for fourteen million dollars!"

"You heard wrong."

"Shut up! I want three hundred-"

"You're talking to the wrong guy."

"— thousand dollars. Don't think so, Mr. Wyeth. I think we got exactly the right muthafucka! We watchin' you, we know where you hang out, we know where this guy Rainey's new building is. We got it covered, boy."

Some of this was bluffing, I hoped. "You've got to take all this to Rainey," I said.

He moaned and rolled his head and looked upward in anticipation. "Go, LaQueen, do it, sista!" The girl was working harder, faster. "Give me the booty!" he screamed. He pushed the girl deeply onto himself, holding her head all the way down with both of his hands, making her feet kick a bit in gagging panic, the gun next to her ear, his knees shaking with the pleasure, and when the moment came, he lifted the gun over his head triumphantly-"Oh, you fucka!" he screamed- and fired into the ceiling, then again. I flinched. "Oh, sista!" he cried, collapsing backward and pushing the girl away to reveal a giant wet black penis that leapt from between his thighs. He tipped his head forward, inspected himself, then looked up at me looking at him, at it. The girl lay her head on his thigh, licked his softening size with obligatory reverence, her eyes on mine, coldly dismissive. The room smelled burnt. H.J. grabbed his security headset. "Antwawn, come up here and get this white boy outta my face." He aimed the gun at me. "You get me my money," he said, stroking the girl's head as she sucked him in and out. "Lawyer-man, you get me that goddamn fuckin' money or I'm goin' find you and fuck up whatever shit ain't already in your pants."