The Deed (46 page)

“Run,” he said. “No, this way.”

“One minute,” she said, racing back over to the car and slamming open the driver’s-side door. Reaching in awkwardly, she yanked out the car keys, hauled back, and launched them off the far side of the bridge as far as she could throw.

“Damn,” she said, racing back toward him. “I really thought I could hit the river.”

He grinned broadly, and they picked up the pace in unison and together raced back down the ramp to where it merged with the rest of the inbound Brooklyn Bridge traffic.

Jason glanced over at Amanda as they ran, then at the road, then back to her. He felt buoyant, as if he could easily win a marathon. It was easier running without the briefcase, but harder, in a way; he couldn’t escape the distinct notion that he was leaving something important behind.

“My hand feels empty,” he confessed aloud, turning up his palm to inspect it.

“Here,” she said, slipping her hand in his, and together they ran as if their lives depended on it, due west, down the hill of the off-ramp and into the heart of their city, into a blazing sunset.

The seagull cried and swooped in a lazy helix high above the bay, crazy with the worms in its gut and the stink of the sea. Seconds later, an infinitesimal guano grenade exploded into a smear on the rust-iron hull of a garbage scow steaming a line across the gray-blue ocean. In the ship’s wake lay Manhattan Island, dusky gem of the East, a rocky, bridge-bound glacial outcropping overrun to ecological insupportibility with just a few species: rats, cockroaches, pigeons, and a certain annoyingly tenacious hairless ape.

Dead ahead in her sights sprawled the docks at Fresh Kills, Staten Island, the world’s largest landfill and a mound of waste that was already taller than the Great Pyramid of Cheops; a project of such unthinkable mass it was scheduled to be closed in just a few years, lest its bloated bulk sink its host island below sea level.

But not today. Behind the barge, another was already loading up on the Manhattan side in a more or less continuous flow of waste disposal. Talk about Flushing, New York. The seagull skimmed along at the water-line, gamely pounced on a bit of sea foam, then flapped angrily up, up, and away, into the brooding sky.

UPPER WEST SIDE
, 8:00
P.M.

A man slouches in an easy chair, moves not a muscle as a heavy bump and grind kicks into gear. He is intently watching something behind us, outside the camera’s range. A woman’s voice, a husky soprano, begins shadowing the melody, throaty and pleading, a latter-day Billie Holiday. The man’s head begins bobbing gently in time to the music, as if he’s nodding yes, yes, yes. A smile, lecherous but playful, steals across his face. Still we don’t see the object of his attraction; his body remains motionless in repose.

And now the music creeps toward some sort of crescendo. The man’s smile broadens and the inane bobbing stops. The camera tightens on his face, then slowly pans around. The point of view rotates and rotates—first bare wall, then a door creeps in at stage left and makes its way out stage right, and you’re going crazy with trying to find out what’s got him so turned on. Then more bare wall and a corner—and suddenly, half a circle too soon, we find ourselves looking at the man again: It’s a mirror.

Watching him in reflection now, we see him grin lustily; he reaches up to touch his hair. The crescendo peaks; the woman’s voice becomes a wail as she belts out a message of heart-wrenching sluttiness that makes your knees buckle. The man’s eyes remain fixed, entranced; the camera pans down too quickly, as if falling, from his shit-eating grin to the lime green bottle on the counter beside him, focusing in tight on the label itself: “Hair Peace.”

“Who cares about that crap?” said Nick. “Tell us the rest of the story.”

Jason shrugged, tossed back the last third of his beer, and glanced around the table at his rapt little audience. “I already told you, there’s nothing else to tell. She went home, I went home.”

“And you never got a chance to find out if it was the real thing or not,” said Becky.

“The document?” Jason smiled wryly. “Well, it wasn’t in English, I can tell you that much.”

“It was probably some old parts list for the statue,” said Paul, feigning a French accent. “Feefty-thousan’ rivets,
oui oui.
”

“I’m sorry, but that’s a
ma
zing,” said Becky, drawing out the middle syllable in rank disbelief. “You guys went through all that together, you rescued her from
kidnappers,
and she sent you home alone?”

“What’s romantic about that?” said Nick. “He lost the Maltese falcon.”

“She didn’t send me home,” Jason replied. “We were both exhausted. And we’ve each got our own issues to sort out, I reckon.”

“Tell me something, Beck,” said Nick. “Why do gals always find it romantic when a guy throws away money?”

“We don’t, you imbecile.”

“Let’s take the diamond ring, as another example. Why does a guy sinking all his savings into a tiny rock spell ‘This guy’s a smart provider’?”

“It seems awfully suspicious we’ve never even met the girl,” interrupted Paul.

“Couldn’t agree more,” said Nick. “There’s some kind of an elaborate hoax going on here.”

“You’ll meet her someday,” said Jason. “I think so, anyway. She’s coming over”—he checked his watch—“later on tonight.”

“Here?” said Becky hopefully.

He smiled. “Sorry.”

“Oh, bring her by,” said Paul. “We’ll be ready for her.”

“Yeah, right,” Jason replied, pushing the hair back on his forehead. “I’m sorry, does it say ‘stupid’ up here?”

J.D. returned from the bar and sat in the last empty chair, depositing a round of shots on the table before him. The odor gave it away instantly.

“Oh, you and your tequila,” said Becky. “It’s eight o’clock, for Chrissakes.”

“Did you know that a tequila shot is technically better than finding out you’re the richest person in the world?” said Paul, looking at Jason.

“I’ll bite,” said Jason. “How do you figure?”

His friend shrugged. “Well,
nothing
is better than finding out you’re the richest person in the world. But a tequila shot is better than nothing.” He paused for effect. “Don’t you think?”

Amanda waltzed restlessly around his apartment, sipping the Rolling Rock he’d handed her at the door. Jason sat down next to the coat she’d shucked on the couch and quietly watched her white denim shorts and loose V-necked cardigan move. There was an uneasy silence between them, as if the events of the preceding week had drained them of all ability to communicate.

“So, you want to rent a movie or something?” he said, meaning it as a joke.

“It’s on Fresh Kills, you know.”

“Oh, Christ, Amanda—leave it alone,” he replied, touching a bruise the size of Rhode Island on his hip. “Who wants this polluted piece-of-shit city, anyway?”

“That’s where all the municipal garbage goes—they don’t do any ocean dumping anymore,” Amanda continued, now talking directly to her beer. “We probably have a window of maybe a week to halt dumping there.”

“Halt dumping? Did you actually say ‘halt dumping’? I’m not picking through ten thousand tons of bagel chips and dog poop,” said Jason. “I made my choice.”

She plumped down next to him on the couch, defeated. “Do you really think that guy would have shot me if you hadn’t been so damn clever?”

“I have no idea,” said Jason. “But it seems to me that if you’re the kind of person who’d go to the effort of buying a gun and carrying it around, you probably don’t have a lot of scruples about using it.”

Amanda took a long draft of her beer, swirled it around in her mouth thoughtfully. “We had it in our
hands.
I haven’t told my mom yet. I don’t know how I’m gonna do it.”

“What are you going to do about your dad?”

She was silent, and he let it go.

“I have a question for you, too, Amanda. Do you truly, honestly think this thing would have held up in court?”

She considered this for a long while. “Oh, probably not,” she admitted. “But maybe, sure. A fatalistic part of me wants to say of course not, that it was a pipe dream from the beginning. But everything that should have been impossible just kept coming up roses.”

Jason nodded. “Well, on the bright side, it’s on top of the heap, in a good sturdy bag, and Fresh Kills is closing in a couple of years. That puppy could conceivably last another thousand years.”

He saw the hope light up her eyes. “You think so?”

“Yes, I do,” he said. “In fact,” he continued, narrowing his eyes and fishing a folded square of paper from his pocket, “I took the
liberty
of writing the next stanza.”

“I think I’m depressed enough right now, thanks,” she said.

“‘I snuggle under mounds of discarded crap,’” read Jason. “‘Cold banana peels are my bedding/An old man’s diaper beneath my head.’”

“How can you possibly joke at a time like this?”

“Because I saved the princess. Let’s not lose all perspective, sweetheart.”

“Yeah, well…”

“Come on,” he said, grabbing her hands and pulling her closer. “Tell me it’s not over just because the game’s over.”

She let her hands lie in his, but stared at him gravely. “Jason, all my life, all I’ve ever had was that deed,” she said. “I’ve spent most of my adult years chasing it down. All that wasted time…it’s not easy for me to swallow.” She put her forearms on his shoulders. “I can’t promise anything.” She paused, searching for the right phrase. “But I’ll try. I want to try.”

Going to have to be good enough,
he thought as their lips took their cue and found one another; she caressed his hair as they fell back into his couch. If Amanda’s love for him was still conditional, still derivative of her philosophy, it seemed like as good a starting point as any.

“So you wanna dance, or something?” he wondered.

“Something,” she murmured. “Do you have anything at all to eat?”

He laughed out loud. “I thought you’d never ask.” He brushed an imaginary hair out of her eye as an excuse for preserving the moment. “Look in the cupboard right over the microwave.”

“Those are your dishes,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Whose apartment is this, yours or mine?”

The creak of the floorboards, then a cabinet door; muffled sounds of rooting around. “Plates,” she said.

“Second shelf, behind the glasses,” he said, rising from the couch. “Just keep looking; you’ll find it.” Carefully avoiding the squeaky floorboard, he padded over to the kitchen archway to watch. When she whirled around, eyes wide, with the document in her hand, he was right there, grinning.

“Did you find something to chew on?” he said.

“You total bastard!” she said merrily, socking him hard in the arm. “You said the game was over!”

“It
is
over. I didn’t say we lost.”

She was bewildered. “But how—?”

“Your mom’s map is gone, I’m afraid,” said Jason. “When those guys had you, I was sitting here in the apartment frantically trying to decide what to do when it occurred to me that they had no way of knowing we’d already solved the puzzle. They were still after the map—so that’s what I gave ’em.”

“I can’t breathe,” she said, holding the stiff, heavy page up before her and running a finger delicately over the dark lettering. The ancient script was still easily legible, though in some very old Dutch neither of them could decipher. In fact, the only two words they recognized comprised the oversize signature at the bottom, under the big wax gubernatorial seal: Pieter Haansvoort.

Jason hooked a finger over the top edge of the deed and pulled it back down so he could see her face again, flushed and exquisite. “So,” he said, “where do you want to go today?”