Chapter 5 - The Discovery of the Sub-Basement
The legal department of Lantern House Productions occupied the thirty-fourth floor of an aluminum-and-glass tower on Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan.
It smelled of commercial air scrubbing, expensive upholstery leather, and the faint, burnt-almond aroma of toner from high-speed laser printers running twenty-four hours a day to generate cease-and-desist letters.
On Wednesday morning, four days after the wedding, Dr. Aris removed the Morgan lens from my left eye.
The cornea had not died.
The autologous serum—my own blood, diluted to twenty percent in sterile saline—had done what sixty thousand dollars’ worth of synthetic pharmaceuticals could not. A thin, fragile, milky sheet of living epithelial cells had crept across the raw stroma, covering the central visual axis like a layer of grease on water.
I couldn't read an eye chart. The letters on the third line—the E, the F, the P—were gray, shifting ghosts that wavered like kelp in an outgoing tide. But the light was there. The retina was intact. The limbal stem cells at twelve o’clock had survived the flush, protected by the heavy bone of my brow ridge.
My left cheek was still a patchwork of purple granulation tissue and white silver sulfadiazine cream, the elastic net replaced by a clean, flesh-colored sterile dressing that ran from my zygomatic arch to the middle of my neck.
I did not wear a hospital gown to the deposition.
I wore my charcoal wool pantsuit from Brooks Brothers, my dark sunglasses with the polarized UV lenses, and my father’s five-dollar reading glasses tucked into my breast pocket like a carpenter’s pencil.
Beside me sat Douglas Hall, the senior maritime and commercial litigation partner at Choate, Hall & Stewart in Boston.
Hall was sixty-seven years old, with the broad, blunt face of an old Salem sea captain and a reputation among federal judges for being the most expensive, most relentless bastard north of the Connecticut River. He had been my father’s attorney when the city tried to take the Gloucester net lofts under eminent domain in nineteen-eighty-nine, and he had spent forty years reminding people that Massachusetts general law was older and meaner than Delaware corporate code.
Across the four-foot slab of polished black granite sat Jenna Stroud, her executive producer, Marcus King, and three litigators from a white-shoe firm in New York whose billable rate was six hundred dollars an hour per chair.
Jenna Stroud had not slept.
She was thirty-eight, with an expensive asymmetrical haircut that had begun to lose its shape, wearing a black silk blouse with the cuffs rolled up. On the table before her was an iPad Pro displaying the analytics dashboard for the teaser trailer they had uploaded forty-eight hours ago.
The numbers were in red:
Views: 14.2 Million.
Shares: 840,000.
Comments: 112,000.
Trend Rank: #1 (United States, Canada, United Kingdom).
“Mr. Hall,” the lead New York attorney, a man named Sterling, said, adjusting his titanium-rimmed glasses. “We are prepared to be extremely generous given the unfortunate personal circumstances of your client. Lantern House is willing to establish a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar medical trust for Miss Vance’s reconstructive therapy, provided she executes a complete, global release of all rights to the footage captured on September twenty-eighth, along with a standard nondisclosure agreement regarding the production details.”
Douglas Hall didn't open his briefcase.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out an old silver Zippo lighter, set it on the granite table with a heavy, metallic clink, and looked at Jenna Stroud.
“Miss Stroud,” Hall said, his voice like two gravel stones rubbing together in a bucket. “Do you know what a maritime lien is?”
Sterling scoffed. “Mr. Hall, this is an entertainment contract dispute. Maritime law has zero relevance to an intellectual property release—"
“Shut up, Arthur,” Hall said, not even turning his head toward the lawyer. “The grown-ups are speaking.”
He pointed a thick, freckled finger at the window, toward the south where the Hudson River ran gray into the bay.
“The Harbor Light net loft,” Hall said, “sits on Pier Seven of the Gloucester Inner Harbor. The pilings beneath that floorboards were driven in eighteen-ninety-four by the Boston and Maine Railroad. Under Massachusetts General Laws Chapter Ninety-One—the Public Waterfront Act—every timber, every deck board, and every square foot of air space within one hundred feet of the high-water mark is subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the Commonwealth’s waterways licensing authority.”
He pulled a three-page document from his coat pocket and slid it across the granite until it tapped the edge of Jenna Stroud’s iPad.
“On August fourteenth of this year,” Hall continued, “the Harbor Light was designated an active commercial maritime staging facility for the Gloucester fishing fleet under an emergency permit issued to Vance Marine Properties, LLC. That means that any commercial enterprise conducted on those boards without an industrial port security endorsement is an unlawful trespass under federal admiralty law.”
Sterling’s mouth opened slightly. “That’s... that’s absurd. It’s an event space. They hold weddings there fifty times a year.”
“They hold weddings under an auxiliary agricultural and hospitality variance that expired on September first,” Hall said. “Which Beverly Vance knew, because the renewal notice was sent to her kitchen table in July. She didn't pay the four-hundred-dollar fee because she was seventy thousand dollars overdrawn at Coastal Heritage.”
Hall leaned forward, his elbows resting on the granite, his gray eyes locking onto Jenna Stroud’s face.
“Your camera crew entered an unpermitted, high-security maritime facility without a United States Coast Guard port security clearance,” Hall whispered. “You brought eighty thousand dollars’ worth of uncertified electrical equipment across an active water-line bulkhead. You plugged three high-draw charging arrays into a four-hundred-and-eighty-volt three-phase marine power station that hadn't been inspected since nineteen-seventy-eight.”
He tapped the document.
“And under Title Forty-Six of the United States Code, Section Thirty-One-Three-Zero-Five, any visual recording, digital telemetry, or commercial asset created during the commission of an unpermitted maritime trespass is subject to immediate, summary forfeiture to the owner of the bottom-lands.”
Jenna Stroud looked at Sterling. “Arthur? What is he talking about?”
Sterling was reading the small, hand-stamped seal at the bottom of the third page. His face had gone from the healthy pink of a Midtown squash club to the gray of skim milk.
“It’s a federal arrest warrant,” Sterling muttered, his voice barely audible over the hum of the air conditioning. “In rem. Against the digital assets.”
“Not just the assets, Arthur,” Hall said, a slow, wide, predatory smile showing his yellowed teeth. “The server. The physical RAID array currently sitting in your client’s technical hub on West Twenty-Sixth Street. A federal marshal is standing in the lobby right now with two technicians from the Coast Guard Investigative Service. If you don't take that teaser trailer down within twenty minutes, they will pull the primary drives out of the racks with crowbars.”
Jenna Stroud grabbed her iPad. Her fingers hovered over the screen, trembling.
“You can’t do that,” she whispered. “Fourteen million people have seen it. It’s... it’s the biggest launch we’ve had since twenty-eighteen.”
I took off my sunglasses.
For the first time since I entered the room, I looked Jenna Stroud directly in the eyes with both of mine.
My left eye was pink, the pupil dilated to eight millimeters by the atropine drops, the milky haze over the cornea giving it the cold, unblinking appearance of a dead cod’s eye. The red, raw granulation tissue along my jawbone twitched once, a tiny, involuntary muscular spasm that pulled the corner of my mouth into an asymmetrical sneer.
“Fourteen million people,” I said.
My voice was very quiet. It was the tone I used when I was explaining to a corporate risk committee that their quarterly dividend had been entirely wiped out by an unhedged catastrophic loss in the North Sea.
“And every single one of them,” I told her, “is worth eighty-four cents in statutory damages under the Massachusetts Privacy Act. That’s eleven point seven million dollars, Miss Stroud. Plus triple damages for willful and knowing distribution of an unlawful recording of a felony assault.”
May you like
I reached into my pocket, took out my father’s wire-rimmed glasses, and laid them on top of her iPad, right over the red numbers of her analytics dashboard.
“Take it down,” I said. “Or I will take your company, your server racks, your apartment in Soho, and the shoes off your feet.”
