14. Kane
KANE
The map is four feet by six feet and takes up the whole dining table.
I had it printed a decade ago from a survey plat, then had it laminated so I could mark it up and wipe it clean as things progressed. It depicts every parcel between Thirty-Ninth and Forty-Fifth, from Third Avenue down to the water, along with lot lines, lot numbers, and square footage.
All told, it’s ninety-one parcels.
Ninety of them are shaded in.
I prefer to do the shading myself. Green marker, corner to corner, the day the deed transfers and not one fucking millisecond before.
It’s a stupid little ritual and I’ve never explained it to anybody, including my brother, who is standing across the table from me right now with a plate of cold chicken in one hand, eating over the map like an animal.
“You’re getting grease on Forty-First Street,” I tell him.
“Eh, don’t get your panties in a twist. Forty-First Street is already yours.” Niko licks his thumb. “It can handle a little smudge.”
We’re at my brownstone on the Upper West Side. It’s the 28th of December, four in the afternoon, and the weather outside is absolute shit. My mother would have called it a good day to stay in and cook. To be fair, she said that about most days.
I’ve had the map out for two hours. I keep looking at the same place.
It lies dead center, one parcel from the corner of Forty-Fourth and Fourth. Lot 22. Twenty-four hundred square feet of building on a thirty-one-hundred-square-foot lot, two stories, brick.
White.
Unshaded.
An ugly gap in what should otherwise be a sea of perfectly shaded green.
“I got a call this morning,” I say. “Delilah Dorsey spent Monday morning in a law office downtown. In and out in thirty-five minutes.”
Niko sets his plate down on the water. “You’re having her tailed?”
“I put a man on my collateral, yes. It’s called protecting investments.”
“We’ll circle back to your flagrant abuse of that terminology,” he decides. “Thirty-five minutes. That’s not that long.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Divorce lawyer?”
“Jack of all trades. Family law, matrimonial, some landlord-tenant. Storefront practice.”
“Then it’s the divorce.”
“Probably.”
“But you don’t think so?”
I plant my hands on the edge of the table and gaze out at the map of Brooklyn. “I think she’s had a long weekend to wonder if she can wriggle out of the trap I’ve put her in.”
Niko chews as he thinks. He’s got our father’s jaw and our mother’s hands, though he was too young when we lost them to remember either one in that much detail.
“So let her wriggle,” Niko suggests. “Who cares? There’s nothing to find. The note’s good. The pledge is good.”
“The signature isn’t hers, dumbass.”
“That’s her and her husband’s problem, not ours.
” He points his fork at the white square.
“Besides, she doesn’t have enough time or resources to give us any trouble.
January 15th comes, we swoop in to enforce, and bada bing, bada boom, the building’s yours.
You color it in with your little marker and we all go get a drink. ”
I scowl at my brother. “It isn’t that simple.”
“Says who? It is exactly that simple! Do you need reminding of how this whole thing went?” He drops into a nearby stool.
“Eighteen months ago, you sent me running on a wild goose chase until at fucking last, we found the exact way in. This shit-for-brains gambling addict in debt up to his eyeballs just so happens to be married to the owner of the last parcel you need? I worked a miracle for you, bro! And then you did the rest of it. You approached. He signed. Just like we knew he would, he defaulted before the first payment came due. It’s the best work you’ve ever done. ”
I grit my teeth. “I’m aware of what I did, Niko.”
“Then why are you throwing such a hissy fit now that we’re almost done?”
I don’t answer him.
But ignoring Niko has never been an effective way to get rid of him. He’s stubborn like that.
“Okay,” he says eventually. “Let me ask it another way. Why don’t you just let the loan enforce? It’s quite literally the easiest thing in the world. Do nothing and in three weeks, you win.”
I shake my head. “You’re not thinking this through.”
Niko eyes me like I’ve lost my mind. Shit, maybe I have.
Some of my reasons for today’s foul mood have nothing to do with deeds or parcel ownership or signatures that may or may not be forged.
Some of them have everything to do with a flour handprint on an apron straining across the most perfect hips I’ve ever seen.
But there are still some practical things in play. Legal ramifications.
“Just because the lawyer she ran to is a fool doesn’t mean fools can’t win in court. If she shows up in front of a sympathetic judge with the plethora of evidence she showed in that slideshow, then she might get a judgement in her favor. A freeze, an injunction, a wrench in my plans.”
“A pain in your ass, you mean,” says Niko.
I nod. “Exactly. And a year of waiting around while this bullshit crawls through the judicial system is a year that my enemies can use to nibble away at the edges of this territory. I don’t have any intention of giving them that chance.”
“Hm,” he says. “Shit. I didn’t think of that.”
We brood for a quiet few minutes, contemplating the map.
“Okay,” he says after a while. “The best thing to do is look at this with fresh eyes. Explain this whole thing to me like I’m an idiot.”
“That’s how I always explain things to you,” I drawl.
He scowls and punches me in the shoulder. “Alright, asshole. Humor me. Pretend I don’t know anything about this plan and walk me through it.”
I don’t have any better ideas right now. So, with a deep breath, I launch into the story of how I came to own this massive chunk of Brooklyn waterfront real estate.
“Twenty years ago, this was nothing. Warehouses with holes in the roofs. Truck yards. Half of it was empty and the other half was full of businesses that were about to die. You could buy a building down here for the price of a car.”
“Yeah. It was a ghost town, right?”
“Right. Nobody wanted it. The city didn’t want it. So I started buying.”
“With what money?”
“Whatever I had. Then whatever the Bratva made. Then loans against the ones I already owned.” I move my finger down the map, block by block.
“I never bought two on the same street in the same year. I never bought under my own name. Every parcel on here went to a different LLC with a different address and a different signature on the paperwork. V Haven was only one of them.”
Niko taps a finger against his lips. “Why bother? You’ve got no problem letting people know who you are.”
“Because the second a seller figures out that one man is buying up a whole corridor, the price goes up. People think they can play hardball with me. One stubborn old woman can cost me eight figures.” I rap a fist on the laminate.
“So I was patient. It’s taken half my life, but we’ve almost acquired all of it.
Nobody’s put it together yet, but by the time they do, it won’t matter. ”
“And now, the city wants it.”
“Exactly. The terminal’s coming back. There’s ferry money, a rezoning study, some hotshot developer in Manhattan who has been trying to get somebody on the phone about this corridor for years.
” I straighten up. “He’s got big plans. He thinks that, if he can get the whole stretch from Third down to the water, he can knock it flat and put up whatever he wants. ”
“Which means it’s worth more all together than it is in pieces.”
“Yes. Ten times over.” I look at the white square, one parcel off the corner of Forty-Fourth and Fourth. “But it isn’t whole. There’s a bakery sitting in the middle of it.”
Niko leans over the map and studies the gap like it might have changed since the last time he looked at it.
“A few billion for this stretch is a lot of money,” he whistles.
“That’s not the point.”
He does a double-take. “Since when?”
I roll the marker back and forth under two fingers. “I made a promise about this corridor a long time ago. At our mother’s grave. That’s all you need to know about it.”
He waits for more, but he won’t be getting any tonight. I’m not in a nostalgic mood.
“Okay,” he says finally, returning to munch on his chicken. “Then buy the damn bakery off her. Wave a number at her that no baker in Brooklyn could say no to.”
“She won’t sell.”
“Everybody sells when the price is right.”
“She gave her dying father’s check back,” I say. “She won’t sell.”
Niko’s grin fades a little. He hears the snag, because he’s not stupid. “You really think she’ll stand her ground?”
I think back on Lilah’s fire. The stubborn clench of her jaw.
“Yeah,” I mutter. “I do.”
I’ve known men who would have their own mother’s teeth out for a fraction of what her father offered her. This woman looked at it and said no thank you, because, like me, she’d figured out young that anything she was handed could be taken away again.
The only thing that can’t be taken is the thing nobody gave you. The shit you earn yourself.
Niko grabs his plate and stands. “Well, then I think you go back to Plan A. Wait her out. Three weeks, and you can color in your last precious square.”
Niko takes his plate to the kitchen. I hear the tap run, then the clink of his cutlery in the sink.
I stay where I am with my hands on the edge of the table.
Plan A. Wait her out.
It’d be easy. But I haven’t built a career and an empire on the back of “easy.”
Niko is pushing for the simple route because he doesn’t have the full set of information. He doesn’t know what the corridor is. Money? A few billion dollars? A handshake with some fawning developer, and then we ride off into the sunset, richer than we ever dreamed of being?
Fuck that. I don’t give a damn about money.
Or power, or importance, or any of that shit.
No.
I care because this was her neighborhood.