Strangers at the Feast (27 page)

But before that could happen, a New York civil-liberties lawyer got wind of the project and warned the homeowners that if the city could prove “blight,” their homes might be torn down. One Saturday morning, the lawyer drove up to Freedom Avenue with a truck full of paint, linen curtains, brooms, mops, cans of Raid, a lawn mower. Douglas watched in horror from his car as teenagers, old women, and the lawyer began painting and mowing lawns, pulling up weeds. They planted red begonias.

Douglas thought,
Oh shit
.

Suddenly everybody in the Obervell office was flipping open dictionaries to figure out the definition of
blight
. They called their lawyers. What did
blight
actually mean? Did they have to
prove
blight? Could the homeowners
unblight
these places long enough to shut down the project? Dean Obervell, who was losing sleep and a good amount of hair, suggested they drive by in the middle of the night and hose the places with dirt.

“Or maybe gasoline and a lit match,” he said. “I’m not fucking joking.”

Douglas visited the homeowners once again and tried to explain about eminent domain, making it clear that if the courts got involved, Obervell would have to pay only market value for the homes: fifty thousand dollars, far less than their original offer. Douglas slapped his checkbook in his palm and offered two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Parcels 3, 6, and 9a handed over their titles.

The owner of parcel 5, an old woman, refused.

“Look, the law is on my side,” Douglas said. “You have to understand eminent domain.”

“I understand plenty, Your Eminence,” she said, and closed her door.

Fred Bradley at the city council made a call, and garbage trucks stopped picking up on Freedom and Hancock. In a panic one night on his way home from the office, Douglas jumped out of his car and from a pay phone reported a rat infestation. The police made two arrests for open containers and one for drunk and disorderly, and designated the area a high-crime zone.

Finally, the city issued the condemnation notice and filed suit against the remaining homeowner to acquire title by court order. In response, the civil-liberties lawyer filed an injunction for misuse and abuse of the Fifth Amendment. Declaring a “necessity challenge,” she said she saw no
need
for the city to redevelop the property.

Douglas was staring down another six months in court, his hands tied on breaking ground, $40 million in investor capital doing zilch. If things didn’t start moving, the hedge funds might pull out. Obervell might default on their loans. It suddenly looked like the whole project might go kaput.

But in March 2004, luck hit Douglas like a brick. New London had been knee deep in a similar swamp for five years with waterfront homeowners, led by a woman named Susette Kelo, refusing to budge for Pfizer’s proposed $300 million research center. And those weren’t even slums. They were middle-class homes sitting on some of the most valuable urban property in northeastern Connecticut. The court ruled that New London had the right to take unblighted property for the purposes of “economic development.”

Exactly, thought Douglas.

New London needed Pfizer. When the Naval Undersea Warfare Center had closed in 1996, fifteen hundred people lost their jobs. For a city to survive, somebody needed to build.

He thought about Bridgeport and Hartford. Look what happened when a city lost its industry.

With the March decision, the city of Stamford decided to press forward.

But by summer, Douglas had gotten wind of a terrible omen: in a landmark reversal, the Michigan State Supreme Court decided that the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause, which allowed the taking of private property for public use, did not include taking private property for private development, even if the development “contributed to the health of the general economy.” The court declared Detroit’s history of invoking eminent domain to raze residential communities for GM factories a whopping mistake.

And then another bad omen: the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the New London homeowners’ appeal. Not since
Berman v. Parker,
a half century earlier, had the court been willing to reconsider eminent domain and the Fifth Amendment.

While the New London case was being heard, the Stamford courts didn’t move an inch on theirs.

Meanwhile the lots Douglas’s company had purchased sat vacant. The Dairy Queen and U-Haul stores were boarded up and overrun with weeds. Miranda and Sanders & Son had already mounted the scaffolding for their glistening condo towers and arts center. Nearly a year had passed since Obervell bought the first properties on Freedom Avenue, and the company still couldn’t lift a hammer.

The investors called.
Olson, are we looking at another hole?

“The hole” was a trash-covered, overgrown lot on Tresser Boulevard that had been abandoned for over twenty years, since the Rich Company lost the site after digging the foundation—a terrifying reminder of how a project could tank.

Obervell held a meeting to discuss the financial advantages of declaring bankruptcy. Denise wanted Douglas to pull his money out of the project.

But finally, a year and a half after Douglas drafted the tower proposal, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in New London’s favor. Susette Kelo, the Institute for Justice, and the NAACP all went home with their tails between their legs. And the civil-liberties lawyer going after Stamford backed off.

Douglas, who had never been much of a liberal, thought, God bless John Paul Stevens. God bless liberal meddling and its love affair with big government, government that once in a while needed to flex enough muscle to defend economic development.

In the boardroom where for months he had worked until all hours of the morning to keep the project alive, Douglas read aloud Sandra Day O’Connor’s dissent. The entire office gathered; Brinkman and Formanek popped open beers. Douglas touched his heart and put on his best old-lady voice: “‘The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel Six with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.…’”

“Exactly! Down with Motel Six! Vive le Ritz-Carlton!”

The project moved quickly after that: demolition permits, asbestos and rodent abatement, utility disconnection.

The day of the demolition, Douglas went to watch the wrecking ball and the hydraulic excavators. Until the last hour, when the police cordoned off the area and handed out hard hats, the final holdout sat on her stoop. Beside her stood a hulking young man, her grandson, glaring at the machinery. The woman jabbed her cane toward a sign:

JUST?

COMPENSATION?

After the city took her title, she had asked for Obervell’s original offer. But having lost millions in the almost two-year delay, Obervell paid only the city’s appraisal price: $40,000, less than the appraisal when the battle began because the surrounding vacated houses had devalued her plot.

Finally her grandson led her from her house, and the wrecking ball fell.

A newspaper photographer shot Douglas watching the demolition, grinning proudly beneath his hard hat. The photo appeared the next day with the caption: “Project Manager Douglas Olson looks on, after the long fight to demolish the final home.”

The excavators dug up the foundations, the fire department hosed down the dust. The arrowheads and clay pots unearthed by the construction crew were sent to the state archaeology department—except for one item, which Douglas, who stayed at the site until dusk, could not believe he glimpsed in the rubble: a polished stone knife, obsidian or granite, carved with small images of deer and antelope. He wrapped it in tissue paper and tied it with a ribbon for his sons, who loved playing Cowboys and Indians.

Once construction on the tower got under way, the Obervell firm
never again spoke of the homeowners. As far as Douglas was concerned, they were long gone, on their way to Norwalk or Larchmont or Stamford’s West End.

But the civil-liberties lawyer had managed to squeeze one caveat out of the city. Since the uprooted families were all black, the city had to guarantee the children would be bused to public school in their original district if the families so chose.

At the time, the provision seemed meaningless to Douglas.

DENISE

Even if something had happened with Masood, Denise hadn’t been imagining an actual affair. Between Douglas and the twins, where was the time? Affairs were for the rich and unemployed. Any woman who had to get groceries and throw a lasagna into the oven after a day at work wasn’t going to be lazing around a motel running ice cubes over the history teacher.

Still, she thought about what it would be like to have sex with him. Or what it would be like to be the kind of woman to do that. Denise had always assumed she could be if she wanted to—she was no prude. So she was miffed with herself for what seemed to be, when she thought back on that night in his car, her flat-out fear.

After all, people had slipups, indulgences, and then went on with their cheery suburban lives. Maybe some people could power down the brain’s marital lobe, force their neurons to whiz right past the region of spousal sentiment, so they could fondle a new man and not think,
Oh, but he’s nothing like my husband!
Maybe they even trained ahead of time, a regimen of sit-ups and leg lifts and lunges, and bought special lace-trimmed adultery panties.

These things took time and planning. She couldn’t afford either.

In the cafeteria, as the fall session began, Denise made a point of sitting apart from Masood and staring into her couscous. She left a good five feet between them if they passed each other in the hall, admiring, as though they were museum paintings, the Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg posters plastering the locker doors.

Soon she was grateful she hadn’t risked her marriage for a night of tangled sex in a trash-strewn car. After months on the market, their house sold at a shocking profit. “I told you I’d make it up to you,” Douglas said. His confidence returned, and with it came flowers and airline tickets to Mexico. Denise felt their life stabilizing, and thought she might even be able to quit her job. They looked for a new house.

One night, well past dinnertime, the phone rang at the house and when she picked up, the line was silent. “Hello? Hello?”

When it rang again ten minutes later, she carried the phone into the bathroom, closing the door.

“Masood?”

Again, the line went dead. Douglas saw her emerge, phone in hand, but said nothing.

The next two days, Masood was not in school, but she feared asking about his whereabouts would draw suspicion.

The third day, early in the morning, after Douglas had taken the train into Manhattan and she was getting the kids ready for day care, the phone rang.

“Turn on the TV right now.” It was Douglas, calling from work. “And don’t let the kids see.”

Over and over again she watched the footage of the airplane hitting the second tower, the buildings crumbling, dazed survivors and sobbing rescue workers wandering the wreckage. She smoked half a pack of cigarettes and drank a glass of bourbon before she pulled herself together enough to call the few people she knew who lived or worked in the city.

By the time Douglas came home that night, his suit thick with dust, she was on her third bourbon.

“Jesus, are you okay?” She licked her thumb and wiped dirt from his cheek. “I couldn’t reach you on your cell.”

“All the signals froze,” he said softly. He looked around the kitchen, somewhat bewildered. “I couldn’t reach Ginny so I walked all the
way up to her apartment.” He almost seemed to be whispering. “You could see all the smoke from there.”

“She’s okay?”

“She was home when it happened. How are the boys?”

“Sleeping. Oblivious.”

He stared hard at her, and then said, “Come here.” He enclosed her in his arms, lay his head on her shoulder, and they stood silently like that, in the brightness of the kitchen, for what seemed several minutes. Finally, he began unloading his pockets—keys, coins, Rolaids, phone—and walked in slow circles. “What a mess of logistics everything was.” His voice was suddenly louder, gaining in volume with each word. “Cell signals tied up, no trains or buses. We need to be proactive.”

He took out a map and designated the north side of the Triboro Bridge as an emergency meeting spot, in case phone lines went dead. He pulled an old duffel bag from the hallway closet and shoved in a first-aid kit, flashlights, batteries, water bottles, umbrellas, Power-Bars.

“Can you get to the mall in the next week and buy gas masks?” He fastened a wad of cash with a rubber band and stuck it into a ziplock bag. “Throw some clothes in there. And we should stock up on canned goods. Soups and stuff like that. I have my old camping stove in the attic. I’ll pick up some propane.”

In bed that night, Doug fell asleep quickly, exhausted, but Denise lay awake.

Somewhere around her second bourbon she had wondered what Masood was making of all this.

When she finally returned to school a few days later, Carmen Velasquez, the principal’s assistant, was holding court by the watercooler. Nobody ever listened to Carmen, yet she was now sitting on the scoop of her lifetime.

“I mean gone, poof! Just like that!”

After Masood’s two days out sick—he had phoned in complaining
of the flu—he had not returned to school. In fact, he had not returned to his apartment. All his belongings had been left there, a half-buttered piece of toast on the table, the coffeemaker full, the radio playing. The landlord had called the school.

Colleagues stood around conjecturing that he’d been rounded up in one of the arrest blitzes, whisked off for months of interrogation and sleep deprivation because he was an Arab. Or he was the leader of a Fairfield County Al-Qaeda cell.

“Maybe he was
studying
the school,” Carmen suggested, trying to draw out the drama. “Figuring out ways to hurt the children.”