46. Kane
KANE
I’m on the Belt when Josef calls.
I take it on speaker.
“Boss.” He gulps. “There was a situation at the bakery.”
I move into the right lane and pull onto the shoulder. Cars go past me. The phone sits in my hand.
“Is she hurt?”
“No. No, she’s fine. She’s inside. Lights are on. I can see her through the back glass right now.”
“Then tell me what happened.”
He explains in a hoarse, halting voice. How a black sedan came around the corner at ten to seven and stopped in front, hazards on.
A man got out of the passenger side and walked down the alley like he was looking for an address.
Josef asked him what he wanted. The man put a gun against Josef’s ribs, under the coat, where nobody on the street would see it, and told him to stand still and keep his hands where they were.
“He didn’t take my piece,” Josef says. “He knew I had it. He just told me not to reach for it.”
“Who was in the car?”
“Osip Vetrov.”
I slump back in my seat with the engine running and the heater blowing on my pale, clammy hands.
“He went in the front,” Josef continues. “The door was locked, but he went right on through, I don’t even know how. He was inside about ten minutes. Then he came out, the driver put him in the car, and the guy with the gun walked backward down the alley to the street and got in and they left.”
“They didn’t touch you?”
“No. He said—” Josef stops. “He said to tell you he had no quarrel with the help.”
I look out at the water on my right, black under the streetlights, and the cranes standing over the terminal further down, and I think about the number of ways I am going to take Osip Vetrov apart.
“You called me right away?”
“Yes, sir. The second the car turned the corner. I wasn’t gonna leave the door.”
“Good.”
“Boss, I’m sorry. I should have—”
“You should have what? Gotten shot in an alley? No.” I wrap my hand around the wheel and squeeze. “You did it right.”
He exhales with pent-up relief. “I don’t know what he said to her. I couldn’t hear anything from the back. I don’t know what he wanted or what she told him.”
“Was she upset when he left?”
“I don’t know. She came out with the trash a couple hours ago and told me to go home. That was before. After he left, she didn’t come out. She’s just been working.”
Working, after the day she’s had. I’m not surprised.
“You want me to go in and talk to her?” asks Josef.
“No. Stay there until the night shift arrives,” I instruct him. “I have a feeling we’ll get answers soon enough.”
As I suspected, the photograph comes the next morning.
Anton brings it to the dining table on a silver tray, which is his way of telling me he doesn’t like it. An unmarked white envelope, hand-delivered to the door by a kid on a bike who was gone before Anton got down the steps.
Inside is one picture, shot from the street through the front glass. Osip Vetrov sitting in one of Lilah’s little café chairs with his hat on the table. Lilah standing a few feet off with her arms folded.
There’s no note. There doesn’t need to be. He took the picture and sent it so I’ll know she heard him out.
I understand implicitly what he wants from me.
He wants me to drive to Sheepshead Bay, stand on her porch, and tell her what happens to people who deal with Osip Vetrov.
He wants me to burn his chop shop and put two of his nephews in the river so he can go to the old men in Brighton and say, Look, look what Semyon’s boy did over a bakery.
Most of all, he wants me to weaponize my leverage and take the building, because the moment I take it from her by force, she becomes his.
She’d sign anything he put in front of her.
She’d sign it in blood. Mine, preferably.
He offers me only choices that prove her right about what I am.
I refuse them all.
Niko comes at ten and sees me staring holes in the photograph on the table.
“Alright,” he says. “What do you wanna do?”
“Call Gershon. Tell him I’m coming at one and to clear his afternoon.”
“Gershon.” He blinks. “Your lawyer? That’s not who I thought you’d say. Are you feeling okay?” He plops down in a seat. “Kane. Vetrov stepped inside her shop. He could’ve hurt her, if he’d wanted to.”
I wave the photograph at him. “I saw.”
“And that’s your answer? Gershon? We’re gonna be lawyerly about this? Why aren’t we ripping his fuckin’ head off?” Niko rubs his hand over his jaw. “Yuri’s got four men waiting in the yard because they figured today’s the day.”
“Send them home.”
He doesn’t move. “You’re really not gonna touch him.”
“Nope.”
“Why the hell not?”
Because if I put a hand on Osip Vetrov now, it becomes about him and me. That leaves Lilah standing in the middle holding the last piece, where she’s been since before she ever knew my name. Caught in the crossfire. Vulnerable.
I’m done keeping her there.
I don’t say all of that to Niko. All I say is, “Call Gershon.”
Gershon Ellis keeps a two-office suite on the ninth floor of a building on Fifty-Third Street. He’s the best in the business. Sharp as a blade at seventy-one and he has never once asked me a question he didn’t need the answer to.
When I finish talking, he takes off his glasses and cleans them on his tie and puts them back on.
“Say it again,” he says. “Slowly. All of it.”
So I do.
Withdraw the enforcement permanently. I don’t want a stay or a forbearance or anything that can be reversed on a whim. Kill it. Kill it all.
Record the release of lien with the city so 4412 Fourth Avenue comes back unencumbered.
Cancel the guaranty. Void, retroactive to the date it was executed, with an acknowledgment on the face of it that the guarantor never signed and never consented.
Draft me a sworn statement, notarized, in my own name, saying that Delilah A. Dorsey did not authorize the loan, did not sign the guaranty, never received a dollar of the proceeds, and that I became aware her signature was not her own and took no steps to correct the record.
Gershon puts his pen down when I finish the second go-around.
“You understand what that document is, right? It’s an admission.
Not criminal on its face, but a decent prosecutor could build a case from it.
A civil lawyer could start a nine-figure conversation.
If she ever wants to come at you, you’re handing her the evidence. ”
“She won’t need to come at me. I’m not going to defend anything.”
He considers that, then picks the pen back up.
Every entity connected to the loan will sign a waiver.
V Haven Holdings first, then Harrow Nine, Terminal Row Realty, Bright Anchor, and the rest of them from Niko’s list, in numbered order.
Ninety-odd companies. Every one of them will waive any claim, present or future, against the property, the owner, the equipment, the business, and the name.
“And the assemblage?” Gershon asks. “Everything you’ve been working toward?”
“Lot 22 comes out of it.”
He sets the pen down again and rubs his temples. “There’s a purchase option,” he says. “There’s a right of first refusal in the side letter. There’s a recorded memorandum that gives you first position on that parcel for eleven more years.”
“Burn it all to a crisp.”
“Kane, have you considered—”
“All of it goes, Gershon,” I interrupt. I stand and gather my belongings. “When you’re done, I want a woman who owns a two-story brick building in Sunset Park to own it free and clear. And I don’t want a damn person on this earth—not even me—to be able to take it from her.”
On Tuesday, I sign for six hours at a conference table with two of Gershon’s associates bringing the pages in stacks and taking them out again.
On Wednesday, the release goes to the register’s office and gets recorded.
Wednesday night, Gershon’s paralegal drives an affidavit out to a notary in Bay Ridge.
Thursday, I call the developer myself.
He’s a greedy man named Fletcher who has been waiting years for the corridor. I tell him the assembly will no longer be complete, and that the block at Forty-Fourth and Fourth has a hole in it that is not for sale and will not become for sale.
He’s stunned at first. Then he talks for a long time. He uses the word “unworkable” repeatedly. He tells me what the number was and what the number is now, which is significantly lower.
“I understand,” I tell him.
Then I hang up.
Friday, Niko finds me at the dining table with the map unrolled and the crystal ashtray holding down the curled corner.
He stands over it. Green from Thirty-Ninth to Forty-Fifth, water on one side and Third Avenue on the other, with one gleaming white square in the middle.
“You know what this is,” he says. “Twenty years we’ve been at this shit, Kane. All the battles we went through… And you just spent five days undoing it with a lawyer and a fax machine. For a square you already had in all but name.”
He waits for me to explain that the sacrifice will bring her back. That would mean I’m still trading—putting something on the table and expecting payment, arranging the pieces so she has to end up beside me.
I’ve done nothing but arrange pieces since Christmas Eve. It’s the only way I know.
Because of me, she lost the last possession nobody gave her.
“If you think this is some grand gesture, it’s not.
It won’t change a damn thing. She’s not coming back because of this.
She may sell that building to Osip Vetrov on Monday and take his money and move to Vermont.
If she does, it’s hers to sell, and she won’t need my permission or my blessing or my signature.
That’s the whole point, Nik. She gets to decide, and I don’t get a vote in it. ”
Niko looks at the map. “What do we do with this, then?”
“We do this.”
I roll the map up and toss it into the crackling fire.
The laminate doesn’t burn like paper. It curls first, blackening at the edges, and then the plastic coating goes up with a chemical hiss that smells like all the sins that went into the making of it.
Third Avenue goes.
The water goes.
Forty-Fourth Street bubbles and lifts off the log in a sheet of ash.
Niko comes and stands next to me with his hands in his pockets. We watch it go like mourners at a funeral.
Twenty years, in twenty seconds.
Ninety-one parcels. Every hand I broke, every envelope I passed, every night I sat in a car outside a warehouse with a folder on my lap waiting for a man to sign. Every shell company Niko incorporated at two in the morning. All of it, shading in green, one square at a time.
The last thing to go is the white one.
It holds out longer than the rest, the way she would. Then the edge catches and Lot 22 goes gold, then orange, then nothing.
“Well,” Niko says finally. “Ma would’ve liked her.”
“Yeah,” I say. “She would have.”