Chapter 2
Ksenia
Ok. That did not sound good.
Like really, really not good.
Then I saw the water.
A dark stain spreading across the chestnut floorboards of the gallery above, visible through the open stairwell, moving fast enough to track.
“Main valve,” I said to Luis. “Now. Basement, east wall, the one we tagged red last month.”
Luis didn’t ask questions. He dropped his clipboard on the desk and took the stairs two at a time, his boots echoing off the exposed brick.
He was fifty-three, had been superintendent on waterfront conversions for twenty years, and he moved like a man who understood that water in an old building was not a problem you thought about. It was a problem you ran toward.
It was a problem I had to solve. I was acting on my father’s behalf, on my family’s behalf. And with a family like mine, a bratva like mine, problems always had to be solved.
I was already on the stairs behind Luis, pulling my phone out. The building inspector was due in forty-five minutes. I called the electricians first.
“East wing, isolate it. Everything. Breakers, the temporary panel, the whole run. We have water coming through the second floor and I don’t want a single live wire near it.”
“Ksenia, it’s coming down fast — “
“I can see that. Isolate it. I’ll be up in a minute.” My voice, heavily accented, was nonetheless steady. Calm.
I hung up and turned to the two laborers at the ground-floor staging area. They were standing still, watching the water drip through the ceiling seams the way people watch a car accident—fascinated, useless.
“You two. The salvaged doors leaning against the east wall—move them to the west wing corridor. All of them. Now. If that water reaches the acoustical panels we spent three weeks sourcing, I will be explaining it to the client, and I will be explaining it to you.”
They moved.
I took the stairs to the second floor. The gallery ran the length of the building’s east side, a long open space with the original chestnut floorboards we’d spent two months restoring.
Water sheeted across them now, spreading from a point near the north wall where the ceiling had darkened and begun to weep.
The source was above—a corroded pipe in the cavity between the second and third floors, a nineteenth-century coupling that had survived a hundred and thirty-seven winters and chosen this morning to fail.
Luis’s voice came from below. “Valve’s shut! It’s going to keep draining — there’s a section between the valve and the break, maybe forty gallons still in the line.”
Forty gallons. Not good.
The client arrived at eight-twenty. Gerald Huang.
Mid-forties, lean, dressed in the uniform of a man who funded arts projects and wanted people to know it — cashmere coat, clean shoes, a leather portfolio he carried everywhere like a shield.
He came up the stairs and stopped at the gallery entrance.
Water spread toward his shoes. His expression shifted from confusion to anger in the space of one breath.
“What the hell happened?”
“A pipe failed. We’ve shut the main supply. The water you see is residual drainage from the line.”
He looked past me and found Marco. Marco was nineteen. An apprentice from a youth training program Luis had run for years, on site for his third week. He had been sweeping the gallery when the pipe burst. He stood now at the far end with his broom, frozen, water lapping at his boots.
“Was he working on the plumbing?” Gerald asked.
“No.”
“Because if someone — “
“Nobody was working on the plumbing, Gerald. The failure is in a concealed coupling above the third-floor ceiling. Original nineteenth-century hardware. Cast iron, buried behind a lath and plaster partition we haven’t opened yet.
There was no way to identify it, no way to inspect it, and no reason to suspect it until it failed. ”
I kept my voice level. I did not raise it. I did not let my tone suggest that Gerald was being unreasonable, because unreasonable clients became defensive clients, and defensive clients pulled funding.
Marco was watching me. His grip on the broom had turned his knuckles white. I gave him a small nod and a look that said: I’ve got this. Go downstairs. He went.
Gerald stared at the water. “The inspector — “
“Is still coming. We’ll show him the west wing first.”
He opened his mouth. I waited. He closed it. He looked at the ceiling, where the stain had stopped spreading now that the pressure was off.
“Fine,” he said. “But I want a full report.”
“You’ll have it by noon.”
He retreated downstairs. I let out a breath and turned back to the gallery.
That’s when I saw the ceiling.
The plaster above the north wall had been discolored when I came up. Now it was bulging. A slow, visible deformation — the lath behind the plaster absorbing water, swelling, losing cohesion.
The bulge was growing.
I looked at the two laborers, who had returned and were standing in the gallery entrance.
“Der’mo!” I cursed in Russian, and then said, “Out. Everyone out. Now.”
“Ksenia, we almost have the doors — “
“Leave them. Out. Luis — clear the ground floor beneath this section. Move anyone underneath the north wall.”
Luis heard me from the stairwell. I heard his boots change direction, heading down instead of up.
I backed toward the stairs. The plaster made a sound — a low, fibrous groan, the lath separating from the joists above. The bulge deepened. A piece of plaster the size of a dinner plate dropped from the edge and hit the water with a flat splash.
“Move,” I said, and the laborers moved.
We cleared the gallery. We cleared the ground floor beneath.
The ceiling came down at eight-thirty-one.
A section roughly six feet by eight, plaster and lath and old iron pipe fragments, hitting the chestnut floor with a sound that filled the building.
Dust billowed through the stairwell and out the ground-floor entrance.
Water sprayed upward from the broken pipe section, then slowed to a trickle as the last of the standing drain emptied.
Nobody was hurt, thank god.
Luis looked at me. His face was grey with plaster dust. “You saw that coming.”
“The bulge was visible. The lath was saturated.”
“You saw it and you got us out.”
“That’s the job, Luis.”
He shook his head. He didn’t argue. He went to check the pipe fragments and assess what could be salvaged.
I stood in the gallery entrance, ankle-deep in water and opened the calendar on my phone.
I moved the inspector’s walk-through to the west wing.
I rescheduled the east wing electrical test. I sent a message to the salvage supplier asking about replacement lath.
I ordered a wet-vac rental from the equipment yard on Van Brunt Street.
Why was nothing ever easy?
The front door opened behind me. Zoe Kaplan came through it carrying two large coffees and a paper bag. She took three steps inside, stopped, and surveyed the scene — the water, the dust, the hole in the ceiling, me standing in the middle of it with my phone in one hand and my boots soaked through.
She looked at me for a long moment.
“I love this look for you” she said. “Ankle-deep in water, calmly scheduling things? It’s very on-brand.”
“Good morning, Zoe.”
“I brought you a coffee. It’s going to be cold by the time you’re done with whatever this is.”
“I’m done.”
“You’re standing in a puddle.”
I looked down. She was right. I took the coffee she offered, and drank. It was hot and strong.
She held out the bag. “Eat something.”
“I’ll eat in the site office.”
“You’ll eat now.”
I took a bagel. She watched me take a bite. Then she looked up at the hole in the ceiling, the shattered plaster, the exposed joists and the broken pipe still dripping.
She raised her coffee cup in a mock toast and said nothing.
I ate the bagel, put the wrapping in my pocket, and went to find Luis.
By eleven, the building inspector was in the west wing.
His name was Decker. Fiftyish, methodical, the kind of man who brought his own flashlight and a tape measure he’d probably had since the Reagan administration.
He had walked into Harbor House expecting a disaster and found a partially completed restoration with excellent original woodwork, compliant fire exits, and a gallery ceiling that had recently collapsed.
I showed him the good stuff first. The restored windows.
The repointed brick. The new electrical runs, properly permitted, properly inspected at rough-in.
I let Luis walk him through the fire exit modifications, because Luis had done the work and could explain it better than I could, and because Decker respected contractors who knew their own buildings.
Luis explained how the flood had been contained.
He described shutting the main valve, isolating the east wing electrical, and moving salvaged materials.
He did not mention that every one of those decisions had been mine, made in the first thirty seconds, because I had told him not to.
I had told him in the site office while we waited for Decker to arrive, standing in plaster dust with water still dripping through the floor.
Decker signed off on the west wing. The east wing would require a separate inspection once the ceiling was repaired and the pipe replaced, but the project’s funding deadline — the reason I had fought for today’s visit — survived.
The grant required proof of progress by the end of the month.
The west wing was progress. The east wing was a setback, but setbacks were expected in a building a hundred and thirty-seven years old.
Decker left at eleven-fifteen. I walked him to the door, shook his hand, and thanked him for his flexibility. He told me the west wing work was some of the best restoration he’d seen in Red Hook. I said Luis would be pleased to hear that, and I meant it.