The Deed (22 page)

“That’s easy,” said Jason. “They ran out of room. This place is packed.”

“But some of these graves are from the 1800s,” Amanda replied. “Remember that one we just found on the outside, Mary Elizabeth…1720 or so? How come she didn’t make the cut while there was still space?”

Jason shrugged. “Maybe the fence went up later.”

“I thought of that,” confessed Amanda, looking around as if trying to get her bearings. “But look.” She high-stepped through the grass to one side of the hedge wall and squatted down between a gravestone and the hedge itself, peeling back some twisted boughs to peer through the fence. “Through there.”

Jason followed her eye and saw, through the fence, Mary Elizabeth’s grave, just two feet or so on the other side of the fence. “Yeah, it’s right here,” he acknowledged. “You’re thinking if the fence went up later, why would they leave her outside.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Curious…”

Two hours later they returned triumphantly to the car, clutching her sketchpad and his film canisters, suffused with good fortune. All told, they’d photographed and cataloged nearly sixty Hansvoort grave markers—thirty-nine of them of the older variety with the abandoned double-
a
spelling.

“Shit,” said Jason, frowning and examining the front of the camera.

“What’s wrong?”

He shook his head, disgusted. “You never took the damn lens cap off.”

“I’ve got half a mind to leave you here, funny boy.”

The sunset was in full swing as their car descended the low hill and began retracing the winding country roads back to the highway, but Jason’s mind couldn’t rest in peace. It had taken him no small effort to shake the self-pity and redefine himself as a man with virtually no family, to accord himself a hero for making it on his own. Now, all too suddenly, generation after generation of hoary old ancestors crowded in on all sides, clutching at him from beyond the grave. He was a son again, and a grandson, and so on…his dead were
grounding
him, somehow, against his will.

Amanda was a raging crackhead of restless energy, and he tried not to let this sober line of thought kill the joy of the moment. Nevertheless, when she enthused about what a chunk they’d taken out of the task, he reminded her of all they had left to do: The earliest Haansvoort birthdate they’d found was something like 1660, and they only ran to the mid-1800s, leaving daunting gaps on both ends. And there was still the matter of finding the deed itself, which they were of course no closer to than before.

“I’m not being pessimistic,” he said in self-defense, “just trying to be practical.”

“See?” she said, amused. “Progress.”

“Well, I guess I’ll head up, then,” he announced as she pulled alongside his apartment, and Amanda nodded in profile, looking sexy as hell with her eyes flashing in the dark and a conversational smile still lingering on her glossy lips.

Without pausing to think, Jason arched his body across the seat and engaged her in a masterful kiss. He caught her right in the sweet spot, that warm, taut triangle right in the corner of the mouth, and the effect was electric, a perfect mesh, warm and soft, and ever so slightly pneumatic, and he knew by the way she kissed him back that she had been falling for him after all, that his charm had not failed him. Which meant there was something else, some barrier to be addressed later…but no matter, not yet. There was no sound or motion to disturb the moment, just the perfect heat of her flesh on his face. And then they separated, opening eyes and wordlessly untangling fingers that had somehow gotten entwined.

“O-kay…gotta go,” said Amanda too quickly.

“Let’s hang out.”

She frowned. “I would definitely like to. Unfortunately…oh, man…tonight I have a, kind of a prior commitment.”

Jason nodded and waited politely, but the confession was over. “Okay, well…,” he began with forced awkwardness, “call me at work tomorrow,” he suggested. “Want me to get that film developed? There’s a place right by my—”

“No, I can—” she began quickly, then stopped and blushed when she saw his smile. “You know I’d only have to call you every ten minutes to see if you’d done it yet.”

“Yes, I know.”

He lingered on the walk after her car had pulled out of sight, watching her go, tracking the car as far as he could.

CARROLL GARDENS
,
BROOKLYN
, 10:30
P.M.

“If the guy you’re dealing with is not the owner of the land, then you’re talking to the wrong guy—it’s that simple,” said Dovatelli.

But Freddie shook his head. “It ain’t like that, Ron. I’m telling you, this guy’s the chief, and they have a perpetual lease on the property. Yes, they gotta kick back part of the profits to the Lenapes, but it all comes out of their half of the sandwich.” He plowed another impossible forkful of ziti into his maw.

A broad smile settled across Dovatelli’s face, and he took a sip of the wine. “Well, maybe you got something after all,” he said. “Pass me that bread.”

The four of them—Dovatelli, Freddie, Vinnie, and Gina—sat around a small table at Leone’s, a dimly lit, white-linen Sicilian restaurant on Court Street. Dovatelli’s darling daughter was pretending to pay attention, but couldn’t keep her eyes off the next table over, swarming with a pack of noisy kids making a hell of a mess. Vinnie was just eating, not that it ever put any weight on him.

A grandkid or two would be a kick,
Dovatelli thought, looking at Vinnie and wondering if the little bookworm had it in him.

“Details,” he said, motioning for Freddie to go on.

Freddie shrugged his big shoulders, poured the last of his Peroni into the glass. “I took Carmen and little Frank out to the reservation and we went over the numbers. It’s gonna happen.”

“You sign him?”

“Not yet,” said Freddie. “There’s one small holdup—the guy’s wife is balking. And there’s a couple of percentages to work out here and there…usual shit. We’re meeting with a few of the—”

“His
wife?
Gimme a break with that shit,” Dovatelli interrupted. He watched Gina smile at a little boy making a goofy face at her from the other table. “Fuck’s his wife got to do with it?”

“Nothing to worry about,” assured Freddie. “Just a minor pussy-control issue. Sorry,” he added insincerely, nodding to Gina.

“Maybe we should talk to one of the other tribes out there,” Vinnie piped up. “Sort of a backup in case this falls through.”

Freddie shot him a malicious stare. “Enough from you.”

“All right, shut up,” said Dovatelli, peeved. “Freddie, please explain why the wife is a problem.”

“She’s not.”

“You brought it up.”

Freddie wagged a half meatball on a fork back and forth. “Well…this Indian likes his booze. Two hours in the bar and he started spilling some shit. She don’t want the casino. He says she’s got some kind of…well, some kind of treasure map.”

Dovatelli snorted. “Get the fuck out of here.”

“I’m just telling you what he said,” Freddie replied defensively. “She’s got some old map that leads to a fuck of a lot of money.”

“So she’s like a lady pirate,” ventured Vinnie mirthfully, trying to catch the wave of his father-in-law’s skepticism.

“You disrespecting me, you little shit?” said Freddie.

“That’s
enough,
” Dovatelli barked. “Freddie,” the old man continued, “skip the bullshit. What does this guy want to close the deal?”

“He don’t want nothing,” said Freddie. “Like I said, the casino’s not a problem. I think she gets a vote or something…might have to find a way to lean on her. Maybe she’s afraid we’ll dig it up if we build there. I know it sounds crazy, but this guy’s awfully damn sure they’re sitting on a
shitload
of buried treasure.”

Or just a shit load,
thought Dovatelli, glancing over at Vinnie, in an all-too familiar pout. Christ. He’d give half his money to see his spineless son-in-law haul off and clock his tormentor just once. Freddie would kill him, of course, which would hurt his daughter in the short run, but might not be such a bad thing over the long haul.

“All right, whatever,” he said dismissively. “Are you telling me you wanna strong-arm this guy’s squaw?”

Freddie drank his beer slowly, pacing himself. “I’m just telling you what I heard,” he replied. “Maybe there’s nothing there…maybe something. I’ll smoke it out.”
What I should have done,
he was thinking,
is shut my trap, get the map, kill the bitch myself, and cut all you stupid fucks out of the deal. How’s your pasta?
He smiled for the table and sucked down the rest of his beer.
Still not a bad plan at all, when you think about it.

It seemed pretty clear to Freddie which way the wind was blowing. Dovatelli had one foot out the door already, and the clock was ticking.
Sorry, old-timer,
he thought, gazing across the table at the once-formidable don crumbling into a dusty old man right before his eyes.
But if you think I put in the hours so I can kiss Vinnie’s ass after you bug out, you’re all in for one big motherfuckin’ surprise.

Jason squeezed through the subway turnstiles just in time to miss the number 9 train. The steel doors slid shut, but the train hesitated at the platform, mired in some sort of mechanical uncertainty, and so he hustled to claim a spot within pouncing reach in case the doors relented and slid open again. He felt no need to rush. It was a Monday, and there was nothing waiting for him down in Midtown but the first day of Diana’s sure-to-be-hellish new regime. But missing the train meant losing in the very first challenge of the day.

The transit gods, pleased with Jason’s token sacrifice, spread the doors halfway open one final time. Not one to waste a boon, Jason wedged briefcase and ass into the gap and popped painlessly inside, and the train, satisfied, creaked into motion.

Forcing himself to don work clothes had been a real trial this morning. If he’d been ambivalent about his job before, today it filled him with nothing but dread.
I actually hate going to work, now,
he realized.
It’s come to this.

As the train rocketed through its dark tunnel, a peripheral awareness of something amiss came into focus, and he saw with some curiosity that several passengers were watching something at one end of the car. Triangulating their gazes, he saw a bit of motion in a small pile of wretched refuse beneath one of the seats. He stepped a few feet closer to satisfy his curiosity.

A single plump, juicy green grape was rolling around between a candy wrapper and a broken wedge of Styrofoam cup. As the train’s acceleration breached some last restraining coefficient of friction, the grape rolled up and over the wrapper and took off on a jaunty, end-over-end race toward the back of the car—free at last. Jason grinned at the heroic little struggle, wondering how long it’d been amusing the passengers. Almost immediately, the train began to slow for the 72nd Street station, and the grape was forced into wobbly retreat.

Why do people stay at jobs they hate?
he wondered. It can’t really be fear; even in a crappy economy, there’s always
something
out there for anyone with half an education and a dash of Puritan work ethic. Maybe a hundred years ago it made sense, when unemployment translated into actual hunger. But now? How could anybody keep going back to the actuary office, knowing that a block or two away somebody was testing video games? The doors whooshed closed, ushering in a moment of reverent silence.

“Come on, fella,” said a dreadlocked passenger in a heavy Jamaican accent. “Ya con make it.”

The train lurched into motion, and once more the grape, compelled by physics, resumed its eccentric rush to freedom, hopping and rolling in an eerily anthropomorphic way, picking up speed. Jason grinned as it passed him; it was impossible to avoid imagining the grape as a conscious agent. By now enough of a critical mass was watching to keep the train car spellbound; tennis shoes and Bruno Maglis stepped out of the way when the grape’s meandering brought it too close. Passing the midpoint of the train for the first time, the grape wavered, between the doors, as the train settled into a constant speed.

“I think he’s trying to get off,” Jason suggested.

The deceleration at the 59th Street station had just begun when the grape, launching into its longest return trip yet, improbably broadsided one of the floor-to-ceiling support poles at the car’s center, dispersing its energy in a profitless spin a few feet away from the doors as the train slowed to a stop. “Yes!” cheered someone at the end of the train.

“He’s gonna make it!” said Jason, jubilant.

The doors slid open, and at the head of the surging crowd, a steel-jawed corporate type, folded-back newspaper in hand, swept grandly into the car, his left shoe squashing the grape like a grape into the floor of the train. Within moments, the tiny green pancake of flesh had been shredded by a stampede of other soles.

“It’s a tough town, dey say,” said the Jamaican.

“Oh,
fuck,
” said Jason, leaping up and lunging, too late, for the closing doors.

MADISON AVENUE
, 9:45
A.M.

“I’m not angry, Jason,” said Diana icily, from behind her desk, not even trying to make it believable.

The receptionist had warned Jason that he was a wanted man, and the terse note on his computer—“Jason—see me immediately. Diana”—had confirmed it. He’d been prepared to be admonished for being tardy, but not with this goofy degree of gravity. He watched, horrified, as his new boss painstakingly applied a shocking-red nail polish, bristling her fingers with bright power, like a cat preening its claws.

“Um…good,” he said noncommitally.
You see, there was this grape…
He shifted in the unforgivingly stiff chair.

Behind her desk, Diana was laboriously painting a dangling thumb, a gladiator’s death sentence. Taking a long breath, she let it out in a clownishly serious sigh. “I’m not mad because you’re late,” she clarified. “I’m upset because you don’t seem to
care
that you’re late. This office starts work at nine-thirty, and you have to start respecting that.”

“Diana,” said Jason gently, hoping the thin veneer of respect cloaking his disdain would hold, “we’re talking about fifteen minutes. I work at least nine or ten hours a day, sometimes on the weekends. What can you possibly be concerned about?”

“I am
concerned,
” she said too loudly, “because if people straggle in at all hours of the morning, this office doesn’t coalesce properly, and nothing gets done before noon.”

As he watched her return her attention to painting her nails, it finally occurred to Jason that he was just being hazed—that this was all about confirming hierarchy. “Well, not everyone’s a morning person,” he suggested simply, sure it would be taken as a challenge.

“Why do creatives always try to get away with that one?” Diana said smoothly, patronizingly, focusing cross-eyed on the lacquer. “This is about personal discipline. You have it or you don’t.”

“I just don’t think that—”

“You need to start getting in by nine-thirty,” she interjected busily. “That’s all.”

“Fine,” he replied, washing his hands of the argument. “Is there anything else?”

“No—that’s it,” she said with calm finality, and hit the intercom button with the heel of her hand, sparing the wet nails. “Marci,” she called, “I’ll take that coffee now.”

Thus dismissed, Jason rose from the chair to go find some Maalox, shouting down the voices in his head urging him to quit, to torch that bridge just to watch the gory conflagration.

“Where’s Janine today?” he asked blandly, not really caring about Diana’s regular assistant, just blurting out conversation to relieve the pressure of holding his peace.

Diana didn’t speak for a few moments, then looked up, annoyed. “Well, Janine’s no longer with us,” she said pointedly: a warning. “Good-bye, Jason.”

His thoughts whirling, Jason forced his feet to march out of her office, pausing just outside her open doorway to get a look at the new girl, a hot little number in a soft-looking wool skirt and sweater combo, ladling sugar into a coffee mug. He pictured Janine outside somewhere, running through a breezy wheat field in a sundress, laughing and tossing fresh-picked flowers into the sky.

From behind, he heard a grumpy “Is there anything else, Jason?” and realized he was still darkening the beast’s doorway. Marci glanced up at him with new-gal curiosity, but Jason’s eyes were transfixed by the coffee in her hand—steaming and impenetrably dark, a black hole at the fixed center of his vision, slowly swirling, sucking in the light of the world. Marci waited, confused—he was now officially blocking the door—and Jason breathed in deeply, inflating his chest with a feast of cool oxygen.

Slowly, he turned and stepped back into Diana’s room. “Yeah, there is one more thing,” he said.

“And what’s that?” said Diana, not looking up.

“I’m going to start leaving at five-thirty.”

Because he was watching her face intently, Jason caught the exact moment when his words took effect. “What?” she said, recovering quickly. “The
hell
you are.” Her voice was naked with hostility.

“Listen,” Jason replied, “if you’re going to start requiring that I get in at nine-thirty, I’m leaving at five-thirty, too. We either go by the book or we don’t—you can’t have it both ways.”

“Oh, no, no, no,” she said in haughty disbelief. “We are
so
not having this discussion.” She rose from her seat, absurdly outstretched fingers absently drying themselves through the air. “You work for me. If you don’t like the rules, you are more than welcome to take your sorry butt to another firm.”

But Jason was already gone. “Well, then,” he replied, “I suppose this is the part where I invite you to pucker up and kiss my hairy ass,” he said, savoring the words like individual bonbons.
My God,
he thought, watching real shock, and something like fear, spread across her face.
That felt every bit as good as I hoped it would.

Diana was visibly shaken. “You absolutely
cannot
talk to me like that!”

“Oh, but I
can,
” he replied. “I quit, Diana. And I’m quite sure I won’t be the last.” Adrenaline had turned his arteries into fire hoses.

Diana made a very visible attempt to recover her vanished dignity, one that began by closing her mouth. “Very mature, Jason. Very professional.”

“Well, you know us flighty creative types.”

“Just get out,” she said calmly, suddenly the voice of the company. “We’ll mail you your last check, prorated to”—here she checked her watch—“nine-fifty today.”

“I have a bit of career advice for you,” he continued, trying to prolong the moment.

“Marci, get security,” she screeched.

Marci poked her head into the room, correctly read the firestorm in progress, and wheeled back out again, stammering, “I don’t…uh, do you know the number?”

“FIGURE IT OUT,”
bellowed Diana.

Jason smiled.
No point in leaving any napalm in the chopper, right?
“Here’s the career advice, Diana, so listen carefully.”

“Get out!”

“You…are…a…secretary.”

CENTRAL PARK
, 10:35
A.M.

Two hours ago, I was an ad executive,
thought Jason, languishing on a bench in the park, the tongue of his discarded tie flapping out of his shirt pocket, as if coughing for air. The realization aroused nothing but amusement, and he shook his head in surprise at his own lackadaisical reaction. He was unemployed and literally on a park bench, and while his considerable savings put him a long step from homelessness, his career was officially in shambles. But he searched his soul high and low for the panic that ought to be there, and found nothing but elation.

Why does quitting always feel so good?
he mused. Is it just the brief taste of a life of permanent leisure? That was part of it, surely. Quitting temporarily lifts the curse of Cain, luring you with the prospect of no more toiling in the dust. For the moment, he felt as carefree as in his college days, though he knew remorse and responsibility would have to set in at some point, if only to keep hunger at bay.

Another reason quickly suggested itself: We love to leave a job for the same reason we like to be the one to break up a relationship. Nobody wants to get dumped. Quitting is a way of declaring superiority to a job, even a career, a shorthand way of saying:
I don’t know what I am yet, but I am better than this.
If you were not committed wholly to an enterprise, you didn’t have to take full responsibility for failing at it.

This postcollege freedom wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. In fact, the responsibility of figuring out how to spend your own working life was almost too much to bear. Was there any avoiding becoming a washed-up old man? he wondered. How could you possibly do the same thing, whatever it is, for fifty, sixty years and not grow to hate it—and hate yourself for doing it?

His eyes drifted to the passing joggers, bicyclists, and Razor scooterers, but his mind was miles away, back at Princeton. With graduation looming, Jason had applied to ad companies on the idle suggestion of a vocation counselor whose name he’d forgotten; he’d taken this job because it was April and he’d wanted to sew up his first job quickly, so he could get down to the business of enjoying the rapidly burning wick of his senior year of college.

And then, the summer of disaster.

Jason looked at the beautiful, suddenly obsolete briefcase he’d set on the bench next to him. Money, at least, wouldn’t be a problem, if he decided to drift awhile. Being exactly twenty-one at the time of his parents’ demise, Jason had had no trouble accessing the funds they’d left him. In the bank he had rent and fart-around money for a couple of years, and that was ignoring the big account: six figures’ worth of untouched premium from a double life insurance policy. He shuddered; he’d eat his own frostbitten toes before he dipped into that particular nest egg.

An insane woman sauntered by, an old black hag with horrible teeth and two different shoes, lugging a clear, torn trash bag from which a horrible cornucopia of cast-off items threatened to spill. She was shaking her head and laughing, or crying, and he watched with great trepidation.