When No One Is Watching

by Alyssa Cole

  Terry and Josie wander over with Arwin and Toby, greeting the newcomers with a combination of air kisses and firm handshakes.

  Sydney pushes past me and drops onto the couch. “Am I going crazy? Please tell me the truth, because I already thought I was, but this feels like I’m going crazy for real.”

  I flex my hands, breathing slowly, trying to collect my thoughts. Mr. Perkins was so kind and welcoming to me, and constant, and now he’s just gone.

  “I was at the meeting,” I say. “He had no plans to move, and he wouldn’t leave his dog if he did. If you’re crazy, I’m crazy, too.”

  She covers her face with her hands for a few minutes and I don’t push her; a moment of quiet wouldn’t hurt either of us right now.

  Eventually, she sighs shakily through her fingers and her head pops up.

  “I’m thinking about the tour,” she says, which is maybe the last thing I expect her to say.

  “The tour? You still want to do it tomorrow?” I can’t keep the edge of you’re kidding me out of my voice.

  “We looked up a lot of history. We talked to a lot of people. And some of those things are ringing bells for me now.”

  She looks at me for a long moment, as if waiting for me to guess, but I have no clue what she’s talking about.

  “I researched the past and present of Gifford Place. Of Brooklyn. I wanted to throw my middle finger up at Zephyr, at VerenTech, at . . . at you.”

  I get what she means, but it still chafes. “At gentrification.”

  She nods. “But I hadn’t found the thing that ties it together. The hook, like brownstones, or famous architects, or whatever. And if I’m right, this hook is fucking old and sharp. There are patterns in all of these situations that were just going to be stops on the tour, spiraling out from the beginning.” She pauses, licks her lips. “None of this is happening by chance. How could it?”

  “What do you mean?” I ask. I told her I would believe her, but I’d already dealt with Kim’s paranoia—

  Kim’s words slam into me.

  “There are just so few of us.”

  “We need to know whether there’s anything to worry about. Safety-wise.”

  They had a private group on OurHood . . . What for?

  Charlie knows Kim. Knows me.

  Sydney kicks the coffee table that I’ve always hated away from the couch, pulls my duffel between her legs, and starts picking through the mess of papers. When she speaks, her words spill out in a rush.

  “Okay. Boom. Remember when you came to Mr. Perkins’s before the meeting and I was reading about Underhill? Well, no, you wouldn’t remember that, but this is what I was reading.” She pulls out an old yellowed pamphlet. “It’s this British dude jerking off about how great killing Native Americans is so you can take their land and about how America is great because it’s so uninhabited. The cognitive dissonance of that, right? He wouldn’t be out there killing Native Americans if no one was on the land. He was a mercenary for the colonizers, basically, and the Dutch hired him to kill the Natives around here. He helped pave the way for New York City as it is now.”

  “Okay.” I take the pamphlet and stare at it, going along with her but worried for the first time that her beliefs are going to fall into the “all in her head” category. “So, this was in the 1600s?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Now think about the info from the heritage center. The laws preventing Black people from passing down property they owned to their children were put in place in the 1700s. Weeksville was founded in the 1800s because you had to own land to vote, which is why they made it so hard for Black people to own land.” She’s nodding as she talks. “The people in Weeksville build a whole community, and then boom, suddenly the government just has to plow right through with Eastern Parkway, like no one lived there? Just like they did with the indigenous people. Just like they’ve done with so many communities when you do even the most basic Google search for this. Central Park was built on a Black community. I am leaving a whole lot out right now, but it’s like this cycle repeating over and over again.”

  “Hey. Maybe we need to just think on this a bit,” I say.

  “You don’t see the pattern? I thought you said we were both crazy. Damn it, Theo.” She plucks a packet of papers out, flips a few pages, and then shakes it at me. “These are internal documents from the VerenTech Pharma proposal. Compare this description of the neighborhood and Underhill’s little manifesto.”

  Her eyes are wide, begging me to make the connection, so I glance back and forth between the two pieces of evidence she’s given me.

  “Okay, are you saying you think some dude from the 1600s is involved in the VerenTech Pharmaceuticals headquarters?”

  She closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose before speaking.

  “No! I’m saying that this VerenTech memo feels like the same thing. How they talk about all the resources in the neighborhood that are underutilized, even though we’re right fucking here? And now Abdul is gone and some racist motherfucker owns the bodega. Mr. Perkins—the Mayor of Gifford Place—supposedly just up and moved, without telling a single soul?”

  “Where did you even get this from?” I ask, flipping through the pages.

  Her hand slaps to her mouth then.

  “Oh no. Fuck.” She pulls out her phone, swipes around, and her face falls. “Drea. I got it from Drea. She’s been typing for like three fucking days!”

  I look at her, hunched over her phone, eyes wide, body taut with terror. I should get far away from here, right now. This is above my pay grade. I was going along with her, but right now she’s possibly having a psychotic break. Something is going on here, though, even if Sydney’s behavior is freaking me out.

  I think of William Bilford mimicking the kaboosh of a nuclear bomb.

  “Remember what you said about how you got caught at your company?” Sydney’s voice is suddenly dull. “That you triggered some internal system, or something?”

  She gently pulls the VerenTech pages from my hand, flips to the first document, and reads it. “‘The Company (VerenTech) acknowledges that this Memorandum is a public record subject to disclosure but do hereby require that we be notified of any and all FOIA requests, both during the city selection process and in the event that a city is chosen, to allow the Company to seek a protective order or other appropriate remedy.’”

  “Other appropriate remedy,” I repeat, taking the papers back from her. That seems like something designed to scare people on its own, but along with everything else it’s kind of ominous. “You know, there is a chance that Drea ran off. She’s an adult.”

  “She wouldn’t,” Sydney says, a sudden fierceness in her tone. “It’s possible she made a mistake, but we’ve been friends for half of our lives. She’s never let me down and she sure as hell wouldn’t run from me.”

  The look in her eye is how my mom looked at me when she’d let her asshole boyfriend move back in after telling me he was gone for good—indignation, hope, and desperation.

  “Okay.” I nod and flip through the projection pages that show the future plans for the neighborhood. “Sometimes a company tries to push their luck. Get in ahead of the competition. Or ahead of anyone who might want to stop them. Same as a gang or any other criminal enterprise.”

  I look at the clean, reimagined future of the neighborhood; this is what was sold to me and Kim by the realtors. They’d talked of revitalization and changing demographics and I’d nodded along because of course that had nothing to do with me, but I’d still get to reap the benefits. And when there are benefits to be reaped, there’s always someone ready to do some illegal shit to get even more of them.

  I know that all too well.

  Sydney sits on the floor beside the duffel bag and wraps her arms around her knees, staring at the couch as she thinks.

  “I’m worried about Kavaughn, too. Len said he went down south, but it’s not like him to just dip like that.”

  Kavaughn, the guy I replaced as her researc
her, the reason I inserted myself into this mess to begin with.

  She grabs her phone again and makes a call, putting it on speaker this time. We both stare at the picture of the thick-necked man on the screen.

  “Jesus Christ.” I pick up the phone as an automated message announces that the number is no longer in service.

  Sydney looks up at me. “What is it?”

  I wave the phone from side to side as his picture fades away. “This is the guy that came at me in front of the medical center that I tried to tell you about. He was on something. I assumed he was just your average methhead—”

  “Meth isn’t the drug of choice here, Theo. And especially not for Kavaughn.”

  “Okay, whatever. He was high. But at the meeting, Len said Kavaughn went to visit his grandmother, right? And if he was high and roaming around grabbing people, wouldn’t someone in the neighborhood know he was back? I can’t have been the only person to have seen him.”

  “Kavaughn doesn’t mess with drugs,” she says, shaking her head. “He is absolutely a ‘drugs are a tool of the oppressor’ type dude. He doesn’t even drink coffee. Are you sure it was him?”

  I close my eyes and bang my fist lightly against my forehead as I remember when he bumped into me. I’d assumed he was trying to attack me, but in retrospect . . . I saw that fear in his eyes.

  “Please. Money.”

  Was that really what he’d been saying?

  “Mommy is in the garden. Mommy.” That’s what Sydney said. I’m not used to adults calling their mothers that, but . . .

  My stomach lurches.

  “Did he live with his mother?” I ask.

  “With his grandmother, but she raised him, so she was basically his mom.”

  His garbled words repeat in my head, but this time I don’t imagine he’s begging for money for his next fix. I imagine he’s asking for what most disoriented people ask for when they’re terrified. The sounds are so similar.

  “Mommy? Bring Mommy. Help. Please! Please!”

  I’d reacted to what I was taught to think when a large Black man ran up to me acting strangely.

  Drugs.

  Crime.

  Danger.

  And when the cops asked me where he’d gone, I ratted him out. A couple days later, I’d glibly pulled on a Black Lives Matter T-shirt and got pissy when I was called on it.

  “Was it him?” she asks again.

  I want to lie to her, to ignore my disgust with myself and the fear growing into a palpable presence in my torso.

  “It was him. For sure.” I look at her. “I’d stopped because I thought I saw something moving through the window in the old hospital. And when he attacked me . . . it was right after I asked him if he wanted to go to the hospital.”

  She stares at me, that distance in her gaze again, and I don’t volunteer that I snitched on him to the cops.

  “Okay, let’s just . . . process for a minute,” she says.

  I pull out my own phone and sit beside her. At my last job, I learned that most companies have their fingers in many pies, no matter what their business. Hell, even before that, working with my dad in low-level shit had taught me how a front operates. How dirty money gets clean.

  “Most of this stuff happened after the VerenTech announcement,” I say.

  She nods.

  I hear William’s kaboosh again.

  I Google “VerenTech + Brooklyn + Real Estate.” The first few pages are a mix of articles from this week celebrating the borough’s winning the VerenTech contracts and older ones warning of the harm the company might bring. Nothing stands out, but I scroll until something snags my eye:

  VerenTech, which is primarily known for its pharmaceutical endeavors but is also the primary shareholder in Bevruch Ten Properties (BVT Realty) . . .

  That’s the agency Kim and I used. I flash Sydney my screen.

  “They’re the ones putting up all those condos,” she says, her voice surprisingly subdued.

  As Sydney gazes over my shoulder, I Google “VerenTech + Bevruch Ten Properties.”

  This time only a handful of results show up. One is a link to an r/shadybusiness forum page about the VerenTech campus search.

  Brooklyn can have them. Everyone forgets about the town they bought in Connecticut in the early 00s. Promised tons of wealth, but they used eminent domain to kick people out of their houses and then never built their location there. Local businesses all closed down because they had no customers. Politicians and investors all lost big. It turned into a ghost town.

  There’s a link in response that I hesitate to click on but do.

  A diagram of all the businesses connected to VerenTech pops up in a new tab. Smaller or larger circles reflect how much money each subsidiary produces for the company overall. VerenTech (pharmaceuticals) is large, but only slightly smaller is the circle representing Civil Communities Inc. (private prison company).

  “These motherfuckers,” Sydney growls.

  Several smaller circles cluster around that, offshoots of that company. The third-largest circle is BVT Realty, and the fourth is . . .

  “Veritas Bank. Isn’t that the one you told me about?” Sydney asks. “The one the former slaveowner started?”

  “Yeah. And when I looked them up, a lot of the headlines were people calling them out for offering subprime loans to minorities in the lead-up to the 2008 housing bubble bursting.”

  “Gaining how many houses when the foreclosures started rolling out,” Sydney says bitterly. She expands the circle around BVT Realty so that a pixelated name in a smaller circle takes up most of the screen: Good Neighbors LLC.

  “Those are the people who stole Mommy’s house. Drea—” She takes a deep breath. “Drea once told me that BVT got special treatment, which is why they’re building here more than anyone else. She also said someone had pulled lots of strings for the VerenTech deal.”

  “I’m no Robin Hood, but one of the reasons I felt okay stealing from my job was because so much of the money coming in was graft, pure and simple,” I say. “They laundered more cleanly than the job I had before, but people who have money use that money to make more of it, and they don’t care who they hurt while doing that. VerenTech has more money than most of us can imagine.”

  “They chose Brooklyn, out of all the places vying for their new campus,” Sydney says. “The most expensive place, but the one that would make them the most money once they got us all out of here. If they’ve been collecting houses since the earlier housing crises . . .”

  “Yeah. It’s possible that this has been years in the making.”

  Sydney meets my gaze, and I confirm what she said a minute ago, because something like this bears repeating to make it real.

  “Something shady is going on here, and it’s connected to them.”

  Chapter 18

  Sydney

  I WRAP MY ARMS AROUND MY KNEES.

  “You know, sometimes my mother used to send me these illuminati videos she got from her friends—she barely knew how to text but could forward those—and I would shake my head like she was being foolish. But this whole situation makes those videos seem quaint.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut as the connections keep forming in my head, lighting up as they do.

  The police presence has exploded over the last few years, with cops stationed en masse at subway entrances and stepped-up foot patrols that were supposed to increase safety, but haven’t for the people who lived here. Preston and the many other people in the neighborhood who’ve been arrested over the last couple of years have likely been taken to VerenTech’s jails and prisons. All the new condos going up in any available slice of land are owned by BVT. Veritas Bank, the biggest lender to the new businesses opening—and the owner of so many of the defaulted loans of the past—is part of VerenTech.

  And all the people who moved away and never checked in with old neighborhood friends. Where were they?

  “We can’t tell anyone this, can we? This is lock-you-up-and-sedate-you shit
.” I shake my head, trying to stop the conspiracy theory domino rally. “Even if it’s true.”

  “Especially if it’s true,” Theo says.

  I never want to see the inside of an institution again. I was only at the one in Seattle for three soul-breaking days, trying to explain that I was fine, that Marcus had lied, that I wouldn’t hurt myself or him.

  Just the thought of being ignored while I screamed the truth, again, makes me want to vomit. It took months to assure myself I wasn’t actually crazy after Marcus’s final act of humiliation, and all of this is making me start to doubt again.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I get up and pace. “I’m not walking into a police station and announcing there’s an organized movement to kill Black people and steal our land. Even though it’s been happening in this country for generations and it shouldn’t be hard to believe. Can we even call this a conspiracy theory? I mean . . . that’s why the police exist in the first place. Of course they won’t help!”

  The last of my good nerves fray, so that I’m hanging on by a thread. Theo stands and steps in front of me, blocking my restless stride and forcing me to look up at him.

  “We’ll figure this out, okay?” He runs his knuckles over my jawline, gently, and I take a deep breath.

  “How?” I want to believe him. So bad. But at this point I don’t see any way this ends well.

  “Sydney.” Theo is grinning as he calls my attention back to him, though his eyes are somber. “I need you to channel the confidence of a mediocre white man. I’ll give you mine. We’ll figure it out because we don’t have any other choice.”

  “Right. Right.” I take a deep breath, steady myself a bit. “Do you have chamomile tea or something? I prefer scotch, but I need something that won’t affect my thinking.”

  “Let me see,” he says, then heads down the hallway to the kitchen. I hear the hiss and catch of a stove being lit, and jump out of my seat ready to fight when it’s followed by a curse and a metallic crash.