Across the street the New York Telephone Company Building hunkered in art deco splendor, a graceful, granite rebuke to the steel-and-glass upstarts around it. The peasant structures formerly occupying the construction site had posed no threat to its dignity. A row of unremarkable three-story commercial buildings, they had been vestiges of the old downtown. Carney had looked it up: According to the Hall of Records, Linus Van Wyck had owned three of them since 1961: Barclay Street numbers 101, 103, and 105. The Van Wyck corporation acquired them on August 2, 1964, eight days after his death, the same day that it closed on six adjacent properties on Greenwich. This time next year, the consolidated parcel would be the home of a fifty-six-floor office building, the most ambitious VWR project to date. Open for business well before the World Trade Center was completed and poised to take advantage of the megadevelopment one block south. The World Trade Center was going to transform the city, if you believed the hype from Rockefeller and the newspapers in Carney’s pocket.
Nice to get in early. You don’t have to be first, the Van Wyck philosophy went, merely have an eye for what’s coming down the road.
Carney only had city records and Freddie’s secondhand info to go on. The family business puts the property in Linus’s name as a tax dodge—listening to his father-in-law gloat about screwing over the government had taught Carney about rich people and how they hold on to their money. To keep his allowance, Linus signs where they tell him to, and the power of attorney keeps things cool through his various hospitalizations. Was the break-in about getting that piece of paper and freeing himself, with the jewelry angle to get Freddie to help him out? Or did Linus only realize what he had once he got uptown to the Eagleton, and then try to use that leverage? Rings up Dear Old Dad and makes a threat, light extortion with a side of childhood grudge. Then his overdose—how did that change things?
Say Pepper was right that the numbers in the envelope referred to overseas bank accounts. Judging from the timing of the Greenwich Street deal, maybe VWR needs the money they’ve stashed in order to pull it off. Heart’s Meadow. Ambrose Van Wyck puts the account numbers in an old love letter that reminds him of how things could have gone differently for his son. Reminds him of the shape of Linus’s life if he’d dug women instead of men—and all the things his boy might have built for himself.
Maybe it was all over a baseball card, a 1941 number featuring Joe DiMaggio and Charley Keller. Worth some money if you were a fan, meaningless to everyone else.
It was like trying to decode a mystery from childhood, like why a man leaves his young son alone on a stool in a run-down bar. Anyone who knew the story was dead or wasn’t talking. That left the repercussions and your feeble attempts to make sense of it.
A patrolman dispelled the confrontation in the intersection. The angry drivers went on their way and traffic resumed. Carney looked at his watch. Time to wrap this up.
While he was downtown, he wanted to see Aronowitz’s place one last time. For old times’ sake. He’d seen the protests on the local news. Irate citizens marching between the big bins of radio parts before the courts ruled against them: no eminent domain for private gain. save downtown. Stenciled prayers on cardboard. Carney was too late, as he discovered when he turned onto Greenwich. They’d already knocked it all down.
The neighborhood was gone, razed. Everything four blocks south of the New York Telephone Building and four blocks east of the miserable West Side Highway had been demolished and erased for the World Trade Center site, down to the street signs and traffic lights. This was the aftermath of a ruinous battle. Block after teeming block of Radio Row, the textile warehouses and women’s hat stores and shoe-shine stands, the greasy spoons, even the indentations in the sidewalk where the struts of the elevated tracks had been riveted to the concrete—rubble. The buildings of the old city loomed over the broken spot, this wound in itself.
It was unreal to have your city turned inside and out. He felt unreal those days of the riots when his streets were made strange by violence. Despite what America saw on the news, only a fraction of the community had picked up bricks and bats and kerosene. The devastation had been nothing compared to what lay before him now, but if you bottled the rage and hope and fury of all the people of Harlem and made it into a bomb, the results would look something like this.
The wrecking balls had moved on to their next unravelings. The dump trucks and construction trailers dotted the broken plain, waiting for the next phase—excavation. More dirt and more rock to make more island for more buildings. One day they’ll fill in the rivers altogether and everything will be just more Manhattan.