Chapter 9 - The Salt Water Ledger
The Red Hook Marine Terminal had changed since the Kane family had run it from the back of an asphalt-paving company’s garage in the 1990s.
The rusted chain-link fence had been replaced by eight-foot welded steel palisade; the old timber piers that had been rotting into the black mud of the Gowanus Bay had been recapped with fourteen inches of reinforced marine concrete; and the six cranes that stood against the gray New York sky were no longer diesel-belching antiques, but silent, electric-hydraulic giants that moved fifty-ton shipping containers from the holds of German freighters with no more noise than the hum of a large refrigerator.
Adrian walked along the edge of Pier 4, the wind coming off the Upper Bay tasting of salt, diesel exhaust, and the cold, clean iron of the open ocean.
Beside him, Genevieve walked with her hands in the pockets of her tweed jacket, her hair whipping across her face in the fifteen-knot breeze. She didn't tuck it back. She let it blow, her slate-gray eyes fixed on the distant silhouette of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge where the afternoon fog was beginning to roll in from the Atlantic.
Marco met them at the entrance to the terminal office—a low, brick building that had been painted white, with bullet-resistant glass in the windows and two German shepherds sitting quietly beside the gatekeeper’s booth.
"The manifest for the Hamburg-Süd is clear," Marco said, handing Adrian a leather clipboard. "Forty-two thousand tons of industrial machinery, eight hundred metric tons of specialty steel from Sweden, and three containers of Italian tile for the job on 68th Street."
"Any visitors?" Adrian asked.
"Two guys from the waterfront commission came by at eleven," Marco said, his leathery face splitting into a wide grin. "They wanted to see the hazardous cargo permits for the storage bays. I showed them the seal on the deed. Miss Vance’s signature. They looked at it for about four seconds, got back in their Plymouth, and drove back to Brooklyn like they’d seen a dead body on the floorboards."
Genevieve took the clipboard from Adrian’s hand. She glanced at the signatures, her pencil making three tiny, precise ticks beside the customs clearance stamps.
"Tell the stevedores the third shift gets a four-dollar differential," she said to Marco.
Marco blinked. "Miss Vance, the union contract only calls for two-fifty."
"The union contract was negotiated by Arthur’s people," she said, without looking up. "The men who worked the second shift last night were standing in three inches of slush on the apron while the cranes were resetting. If their feet are cold, their reaction time drops by fifteen percent. If a forty-ton container drops because a winch-man's boot slipped off the brake pedal, the insurance deductible is eighty thousand dollars. Four dollars an hour is cheaper than a wrongful death suit in Kings County."
Marco looked at Adrian. Adrian didn't say anything; he just looked out at the bridge.
"Yes, Miss Vance," Marco said. He touched the brim of his hat with one blunt finger and walked back toward the crane-line.
Adrian leaned his back against the brick wall of the terminal office, watching her as she folded the manifest and tucked it into her pocket.
"You’re good at this," he said.
"It’s arithmetic, Adrian," she said. "The street was arithmetic. You count the seconds between the patrol cars. You count the calories in a loaf of stale bread from the bakery on 8th Street. You count the number of steps it takes to get from the vent on Broadway to the heated water pipe behind the laundry. If you get the numbers wrong, you freeze. Here, if you get the numbers wrong, you just lose money. This is much easier."
She stepped to the edge of the pier, where the tide was running out toward the Narrows, sucking at the green timber pilings with a low, rhythmic slosh-slosh-slosh.
"You haven't asked about the salon," she said.
"Lindqvist?"
"I bought it yesterday," she said.
Adrian turned his head. "The salon on Fifth?"
"The building," she said simply. "The salon was on a twenty-year lease that expired in June. The landlord wanted to raise the rent by forty percent to push them out and put in an Italian handbag boutique. Théo was going to have to sell the fixtures to pay the severance for his six junior stylists."
"So you bought the land."
"I bought the block," she said. "From 54th to 55th. The holding company was owned by a bank in the Netherlands that had two billion dollars in non-performing Greek shipping bonds. My father had an option on their preferred shares from 1999 that was sitting in the safe in Zurich."
She turned around, her back to the ocean, the wind pulling the hem of her jacket tight against her ribs. For the first time since he had pulled her out of the alley on Suffolk Street, her mouth softened into something that looked like a genuine, unguarded human smile.
"I gave Théo a ninety-nine-year lease," she said. "One dollar a year."
May you like
"And the condition?" Adrian asked.
"No walk-ins," she said. "Unless they have leaves in their hair."
