The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

  "There's probably a little beach."

  "Yes, a beautiful little sandy beach just on the tip of the inlet. Very private. Backed by a stand of Norfolk pines planted a hundred years ago. One of the nicest beaches on the Sound, totally private."

  "Jay never mentioned that."

  "He probably didn't care much about it." She pointed to the little inlet called Crabber's Cove. "Surrounded by luxury houses. Serviced by one dead-end road. Large lots, mostly two acres. The subdivision was done in the early eighties and the lots sold for maybe ninety thousand back then."

  "What would they be now?"

  "Oh, at least four hundred thousand."

  "Wow."

  "That's the way it goes, Mr. Wyeth, up, sideways, then up again. Now, look here." She pointed at the property marked Boatyard. "This was owned by Kyle Lorton, who came home so dirty his wife made him wash off in the yard with a hose. Naked. You could see it from the road. His rear end looked like an old apple left out in the sun. So did his front end, for that matter. Kyle's business was lobster boats. That's what he did. He was no good with regular people. That's why lobster-men liked him. He was dirty and smelled and had black teeth and could fix anything."

  "The lobsters are gone, though."

  "That's right. Giuliani, your old mayor, who pretended he wasn't as bald as my knee, sprayed poison all over New York City for West Nile virus."

  "Which turned out to be basically harmless."

  "Yes, except for the old people and the lobsters. All that mosquito poison washed into Long Island Sound and killed our lobsters. They should have let the old people die and the lobsters live, if you ask me, which, as usual, no one did. Now the lobster business is dead and Kyle Lorton went bankrupt. It didn't help that he'd been dumping oil out back for twenty years and the DEC caught him. But that piece has a grandfathered commercial-marine-use zoning, which is now impossible to get, the only one on the inlet, by the way. It also has a nine-foot channel that Lorton used to dredge himself illegally, which means you can get a big boat in there."

  "So all these pieces are in play?" I asked, studying the map. "It's a land assembly. Is that what you're saying?"

  "Yes," Martha Hallock went on. "The cabbage farm also sold its development rights. I guess no one eats cabbage anymore. These little strips, A, B, C, D, maybe eight or ten acres each, are in contract now. They're used for sweet corn and potatoes. Actual potatoes, which you don't see very often anymore on the North Fork, except for the fingerlings. This is Christmas trees. This fellow's failing because too many people are selling Christmas trees and America is less and less a Christian country. We're pagans, Mr. Wyeth, every year more so, and I've been saying it for forty years." She sighed. "This is what Mr. Marceno has in mind, Mr. Wyeth."

  She handed me an altered copy that looked like this:

  I studied it.

  "Not just a vineyard, you see."

  "A giant project," I said. "Have they bought all the pieces?"

  "Everything except strip A, where he's holding out for a little more money, which he'll get. They own everything else or have it in contract."

  A huge piece, being assembled. The key was to divide and conquer using stealth; to work through different brokers and to sequence the land buys in such a way as to avoid purchasing contiguous properties simultaneously, and to do it all as quickly as possible so prices didn't rise too much. Sometimes a matter of buying leases instead of land, it nonetheless was a common technique in developing property. The land under Rockefeller Center, for example, was assembled by gaining control over 229 deteriorating brownstones. Early in my career I helped put together an enormous lot in the East Sixties by buying nine little properties, one a mere sixteen feet wide. The firm sent me in because I looked young and guileless. I was thrilled, of course. The nine sellers sold to nine different legal entities, one with a Korean-sounding name, another with a Jewish name, and so on. If the sellers compared notes, they might not see the game. Of course, each buying entity was merely a stack of paper owned by our client, a Dutch bank.

  "A big piece. Now I see it's, what, two hundred–plus acres?"

  "Yes. There are a number of other sizable pieces on the North Fork, but very few of them are on the water, suitable for grapes, have proper zoning, come with their own private access preserve, have access to a sheltered inlet, and also are for sale."

  "How much is involved here? I mean how much money?"

  "The most expensive piece was the old estate piece, because it has the ocean frontage and the approval for the golf course. That was about six million. Sea Gull Poop Vineyards went for three million, owing to the quality of the vines."

  I found myself remembering H.J.'s outrageous claim about the purchase price of Jay Rainey's property. The number was wildly high, but viewed in this new context, it made a kind of crazy sense. The locals must have figured something was afoot— seen the black Lincolns arriving, men in business suits standing in muddy fields, agate-type listings of real estate transfers in the weekly paper— and chattered among themselves, some of this talk reaching Mrs. Jones, and then H.J. himself, who, like Jay Rainey, was a native son. "But if you're talking putting in new vines, a golf course, and maybe building luxury housing, the total cost is moving up past, what, twenty, thirty million?"

  She shook her head. "Forty-two million, Mr. Wyeth, in phases. A ten-year project. That includes a beautiful wine-tasting center right at the end of Jay's property. Golf and wine. Forty-two million." She leaned forward conspiratorially. "They have the money. A Latin American company buying prime oceanfront in the United States of America gets Latin American money very easily. These are smart, sophisticated people. They do business in eight or nine countries."

  "What about all the local approvals, the zoning?"

  "They have it. Or they will massage it through. All the property falls within the town of Riverhead, which is much easier. All those unemployed blacks in downtown Riverhead, frankly. Displaced by the Mexicans and Guatemalans who will work for less, live in a tent if we'd let them. Riverhead has huge social problems. The town has lost industry. One of the aerospace companies, Grumman, had a huge site but closed up, taking their tax dollars with them. The strip malls have sucked money out of Main Street. The town is addicted to new tax dollars, Mr. Wyeth. A project like this means jobs," she said proudly. "It won't be too hard to get through. Also they've hired a local person who knows all the right people. An old hand. Somebody who can fix things when they go wrong."

  "Who?"

  "Me."

  Judging from the map, it looked like the wine-tasting building would be located in about the place where Herschel had been regrading the land. Did this account for Marceno's anxiety? I kept studying the map. "You could bring in private tour boats or small luxury cruisers in the inlet, have them dock at the boatyard and drive them straight to the golf course or the vineyards."

  "Now you're starting to think like a real estate developer." Martha Hallock smiled. "There's a local airport only five miles away. Private high-speed jet foil service to downtown Manhattan— a beautiful ride, by the way— takes forty-five minutes. You got a beach, a nature preserve, the whole thing."

  "Why not do it on the South Fork, in the Hamptons, where there's more money and the famous beaches?"

  "Because the Hamptons are too crowded, too built out, and you can't get pieces of land like this anymore. They just don't exist. All carved up. Plus, growing grapes on the South Fork isn't as feasible. The soil is different, the season is slightly shorter, and the zoning boards are controlled by ladies who lunch and run flower shops."

  "You sound a little bitter."

  "I'm sick of the Hamptons, Mr. Wyeth. Hate them. Snobs and bores. Silver spoons jammed into their brains. They've been looking down on the North Fork for fifty years. Believe me, I know. So now they've gone and ruined it and are looking around and want to gobble up the North Fork. All the big real estate agencies have opened offices, want to drive me out of business. Well, fine. But let them and anyone
else who wants our fork pay. Let them make the old farmers and fishermen rich."

  I jabbed at the map. "If it's all wrapped up, what's the problem?"

  "I can help with the local officials," said Martha. "But if there's an environmental problem, then that involves the state of New York. I don't know anyone at that level. The state will take its own time, the state doesn't care that Mr. Marceno has money burning. Also, this deeded preserve piece has a section of wetland. It's on the maps. Wetland is federally protected. Any lobbying to change its designation would have to be done in Washington."

  "You could lose five years."

  "That's right. Easily. You see Jay's land dips to the east and drains into this section of wetland. They want to know what's under the ground before they dig it up, Mr. Wyeth. Once they dig it up, then they're locked into a sequence."

  "And Jay knows what's buried there."

  "They think so."

  "Does Marceno know Poppy is familiar with the land?"

  "He could find out easily enough. There's a lot of pressure on them. The next town board elections are in the fall and I'm pretty sure they want to railroad all this through before then."

  She'd just wiggled past something. I said, "You're pretty sure, huh?"

  "Yes."

  "They're paying you to read the local weather patterns?"

  "Well, yes."

  "So you're telling them to get this pressed through before the local elections."

  She looked at me.

  "It seems, Martha, that you're being paid to make this happen and have guided them all along, and now you have a problem they expect you to solve."

  "Well, that'd be one—"

  "And that you weren't just thinking of Jay's better interests in all this."

  "Mr. Wyeth," said Martha, "I'm here to help."

  "I still don't understand why you don't talk to Jay directly."

  She chewed a bit of steak in response, and it was hard for her. But she kept at it, just as she was doing with me.

  "You do know about the accident?"

  I shook my head. "Not really."

  "Oh my. Well, so you don't understand a word of what I'm saying. One of the summer girls was just terribly enamored of Jay. And he of her. This was fifteen years ago, more or less. He wasn't even twenty. I think she was from a very wealthy family. British. They'd rented a big house on the water a few miles away. Girls like that would never look at local farmboys. But then Jay came along. She'd fallen in love with him, and her parents were closing up the house for the summer and the girl was frantic, you know, that was the way I heard it, anyway, and she called Jay's house and his father said he couldn't go out and— well, to make a long story short, he slipped out that night and on the way back he ran through the potato fields, his father's own fields, and someone had left a paraquat sprayer on. Use it on weeds, anything that grows. Terrible stuff. They found him in the morning, just about dead."

  Martha looked straight through me. "The same night that happened, Jay's parents had a terrible fight. I told you his father was a rotten man. His mother ran away. Never seen again, never contacted anyone. No one could believe it, except that her husband was so bad. They think she left the North Fork, could have gone anywhere. She was a good-looking woman and might have called a few men— who knows?

  "And then Jay got better. He came out of it, after being in the hospital for weeks. It was terrible— a terrible blow for a boy. He was still a boy, nineteen. I call that a boy. His mother was gone and his father was no good. And Jay himself was— he was in a wheelchair for a month, too weak to walk. There was considerable lung damage. Permanent."

  "Yes, I know."

  "So, Mr. Wyeth, I'm trying to help Jay get free of that land. Get on with his life. What's wrong with that?"

  "Can't blame you," I said.

  "He left town after the accident. The family had blown apart. We didn't see him. I heard he went to Europe, ran chasing after that girl, still loved her. His father drove the farm into the ground just like I knew he would, finally leased it out, let the hands stay in one of the houses. He died a few years ago when his liver gave out and then the land passed to Jay and I guess he felt it was time to sell it."

  She watched me as she finished her story, and it occurred to me that much as Martha Hallock had filled in Jay Rainey's biography, much as she had demonstrated the size of the operation arrayed against him, and me, she had not in any way helped solve the problem. In fact, I could even say that she was turning the screw— on me.

  "Martha," I began, "what exactly is your fiduciary relationship with Marceno?"

  "Well, I said I was helping a bit. Nothing more than that."

  "I mean specifically. Contractually. Are you a consultant, fee-for-hire, an agent working on percentage, or a principal?"

  "That's a ridiculous question, Mr. Wyeth, I'm an old woman who's only trying to—"

  "Since you aren't answering me, I'll assume you're a principal. You have a stake in this thing. Which means, from a legal point of view, that you're Marceno's partner. Which means your interests are aligned, Martha. I might as well be talking to him directly."

  She stared at me, eyes troubled.

  "What's buried in the ground out there, Martha?"

  She shook her head once, almost as if slapped. "Nothing."

  "How do you know?"

  "I don't," she hissed.

  "Then how can you assert anything one way or another?"

  "Nothing is in the ground that is going to hurt anything."

  These were shavings of an answer. "Then why can't you tell your business partner that? Your interests are the same, are they not?"

  "It's not like that."

  "And while I'm on the topic, it sounds to me like you have a conflict of interest, Martha. You were the seller's broker. Your sign was out there in the weeds."

  "That's not true."

  "How else did I know to find you?"

  She couldn't answer that.

  "You were the seller's broker yet representing the buyer's interests. Does Jay realize this? And by the way, does Marceno know the man who found the dead body is your nephew?"

  "I can't answer these questions, and even if I could, I wouldn't."

  She started to rise. But I reached around the table and grabbed her cane. "Martha, you came into the city to put pressure on me, didn't you? Just like Marceno is putting pressure on you, now."

  "No."

  "He's suing me, you know, Jay as well."

  "You don't say."

  What kind of answer was this? "Marceno sent you."

  "No."

  "Told you to act like you were helping us."

  "No, Mr. Wyeth!"

  "And either you do know what is buried on that property and don't want anyone else to know, which means you're in a hell of a fix with Mr. Marceno— I could tell him all this, by the way, or"— I stuttered for a moment, trying to understand—"or you actually don't know what's buried there and fear that something is. Something very bad. Like a barnload of arsenic or something. In either case, it seems to me, you are certain that Jay Rainey has no idea what it is. As am I! And yet you are letting Marceno attack him, and me. Isn't that right?"

  "Give me my cane!"

  But I didn't. "I just realized what you want, Martha, why you came into the city."

  "I doubt that."

  "No, I got it, I got the message."

  "What?" she cried, seemingly more alarmed than ever.

  "You wanted me to figure it out. This is all a big mistake. It was never supposed to happen. There is something buried there, and even if you don't know what it is, you want me to find out. Jay doesn't know, so he's of no use! Marceno doesn't know that you know either what's there or that Jay doesn't know. You want me to somehow figure it out— and if you do know, you're not telling me— and you want me not to inform Jay, but to inform Marceno, but not in such a way that it looks like you were coaching me to do so. Yes, you're in some kind of jam with both men, Martha, and you're dropping
the pressure on me!"