The Deed (24 page)

“Well, we’re not just surveying your property; I’m trying to prepare you for the detective work to come. So anyway, Wall Street.”

“Didn’t there use to be an actual wall here?” he remembered suddenly.

“Good,” she said. “It was put up by Peter Stuyvesant, New York’s famous one-legged governor, after this or that native uprising. The Indians would come down Broadway”—here she turned uptown—“with furs, and be let in through the wall, where they’d trade them with the Dutch for seeds, pipes, guns, et cetera. Anyway, I’m very sure our transaction happened before this wall went up, in 1650.”

“Because the island was starting to matter to the Dutch?” suggested Jason.

“Right,” she said. “Plus, more specifically, Stuyvesant would
never
have signed the island away—he’d have eaten his other leg first. He’s the one who wanted to fight the whole British army by himself to keep it, remember. No, I think our man is his predecessor, Kieft. He was notoriously awful and corrupt.”

Jason watched the noon traffic, letting her monologue flow over him.

“Try to imagine what this must have looked like three hundred and fifty years ago,” she cajoled him. As Jason complied, she held his shoulders from behind and gently turned his body uptown. “Ahead of you is a couple of cornfields, then virgin forest—Indian land. Wild and untamed, and just the leading edge of a vast green continent, millions of square miles of uninterrupted forest, grasslands, rivers, prairies. You’re peeking over a five-foot wooden wall at the primeval planet.”

“Gotcha.”

“Behind you is your fort, a few hundred skittish Dutch and a handful of soldiers. The typical gun of the time takes about two minutes to load and fire, bare minimum. You’ve got a wooden ship or two, anchored far out in the harbor—no docks yet—and beyond that, the unthinkably vast sea, with the rest of your world and everything you’ve ever known—civilization itself, to your way of thinking—on the other side.”

He nodded, entranced, as she continued.

“Now put yourself on the other side of the wall, looking in.”

BATTERY PARK
, 2:00
P.M.

Several minutes later, after a winding tour of the canyons, they were standing in Battery Park, a subway stop that spilled out into a backyardsize green at the southern tip of the island. Here, great sweeping postcard views unrolled before them: Brooklyn to the east, New Jersey to the southwest, and in between, off in the mists to the southeast, the spidery Verranzano-Narrows Bridge, a distant but majestic span that kept Staten Island from floating off to Jersey.

“This is where we originally sold you the island,” said Amanda distractedly. “A clearing in the forest, a dozen tribal leaders, Peter Minuit, and maybe twenty or thirty Dutch. Your ancestors versus mine.”

“Right here?” said Jason.

“Close enough,” she said. “Nobody knows for sure, anymore, of course.”

“Pretty wild,” he said.

“What we’re looking for is somewhere between here and Washington Heights, at the northern end of the island…twenty-four square miles of real estate.”

“No problem,” said Jason. “We’ll sweep the city. You take the east side, I’ll take the west.”

She gave him a withering look, and he put his arm around her.

“I know you think there’s no way it could have survived,” she said. “All I’m asking is for you to rephrase the thought: If it
did
survive, where would they have had to put it?”

They sat down on a nearby park bench, scattering seagulls from a treasure trove of bread crusts.

“There can’t be much still around that was here in 1650,” said Jason, playing along. “Central Park?”

Amanda shook her head. “Central Park’s not a preserve—it was artificially created in the 1800s. It was mostly farmland before that.”

“Just a thought,” said Jason dejectedly.

“I’ve thought about it a lot, as you might imagine,” said Amanda.

“So where do we start?” said Jason. “I’m assuming you checked the obvious, rare-book rooms and all?”

She shook her head. “There are a thousand tiny libraries and museums on Manhattan. Plus I don’t know what I’m looking for. It could be tucked into an old survey, or something. It could take a couple of lifetimes of searching.”

“That’s encouraging. What about churches?” said Jason. “If you’re trying to set something aside for a couple of centuries, that seems like a good bet.”

“Absolutely,” said Amanda. “Trinity Church is the oldest—that’s right down here by Wall Street. Then there’s St. Paul’s, and St. Bart’s on Park Avenue, St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights…”

“This is going to be like finding a needle in a million haystacks, isn’t it?” murmured Jason.

“It doesn’t even make sense to worry about it until we find out whatever my mother knows,” said Amanda. “We’ve simply got to narrow the search. That’s why I’m going to see her tonight.”

“You want me to come along, stir things up a bit?”

She laughed. “No thanks—go have your drinks with your friend. Mom’s a tough old bird, but she’s got a vested interest in this, too.”

“And you’re certain she’s got something useful to contribute.”

“We can’t find it if she doesn’t, so yes,” she replied.

“You may not want to hear this,” said Jason, “but I think it’s a big assumption that this thing’s still on the island. What’s to keep it from being hidden in the false drawer of some old rolltop desk in a Massachussetts antique shop?”

Amanda shrugged. “‘The page and the land are one,’” she said quietly.

“What’s that?” said Jason.

She shrugged. “Just an old saying.”

UPPER WEST SIDE
, 5:00
P.M.

He reached her at her apartment, barely a half hour after they’d parted company in the subway station.

“You’ve gotta come up and see this,” he repeated. “Quit wasting time.”

“It really can’t wait? What is it?” she said into the phone.

“Just come over,” replied Jason, ear pinching the phone to his shoulder as he paced inside his front door, repeatedly sidestepping the hastily discarded UPS packaging at his feet. The book lay in his hands now, heavy and thick and impossibly old, its triumphantly pure white leather cover lovingly embossed with a giant gold cross.

“I’m all the way on the East Side, pal,” she said, already weakening. “This’d better be important.”

He smiled at this, picturing her reaction. It was a King James Bible, splendid and ancient, its hide tarnished only by a blackened trail along the spine, where some old fire had ventured a taste. The note was on a flowery piece of personalized stationery inside the cover: “Got to looking and realized I had this after all, Jason. Thought you should have it. Love, Grandma.”

He ran one finger lightly across the overleaf, inscribed in old ink: “William Haansvoort, anno Domini MDCCL.”

“Hellooo…,” she said impatiently. “Jason, what is it?”

He beamed. “I think I just found Jesus.”

He gazed down over the railing, into the eye of a tornado of circular stairs, watching Amanda lumber upward in a slow spiral, puffing under an unwieldy stack of books.

“Need some help?” he called down, his attempt at a macho tone undercut by the tinny, half-assed tenement echo.

Amanda, two flights down, raised her face to the sound. “I know—it’s ridiculous, right? I really only meant to grab a couple.”

He stepped out into the hall, relieved her of her load, and waved her past, into the apartment.

“Thanks,” she said breathily, peeking inside from the doorway. “This is nice.”

Jason stepped in behind her and stole a glance at her exquisitely flat belly when she pulled her sweater up over her head and the shirt went partway along for the ride; he ignored her navel’s one-eyed disapproval.

“So,” he said, “you want to rent a movie or something?”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, just show it to me!” she demanded happily.

The grave, imposing book overflowed Amanda’s straining, upturned palms like a monstrous bar of white gold. It was more than a foot tall and almost as wide, and thicker than a Coke can. The leather of the cover was disconcertingly pliable, like a well-worn coat, with a gently scalloped border that fell in toward the pages as if trying to envelop them completely. The page edges had once been gilt, and some hardy flakes of gold still clung here, and to the blocky, weatherbeaten cross embossed into the cover, beneath the wholly unnecessary “Holy Bible.”

“Now,
that’s
a Good Book,” said Jason.

“My God,” said Amanda, agape. “It’s beautiful.”

“She dates to 1750, if my Latin still holds,” said Jason as she turned back the cover to see the illuminated overleaf. “Flip to the end.”

She carefully turned the book onto its face in her left hand and peeled up the back cover with her right. A few loose pages, the last gasps of Revelation, momentarily rose, too, then slid back dramatically to reveal a two-page spread of handwritten names, a compendium of changing pens and penmanship beneath a single, monolithic, totemic word: “Haansvoort.” All the names below were followed by a small
H
to the power of
t
and a date. The last date was 1856; the first, one Adriaen H
^t
, was born in 1685.

“Ohh,” Amanda breathed from her diaphragm, a mystical syllable of total sensory satisfaction.

“It’s not complete,” he warned with a grin. “I mean, I’ve just taken a glance—it doesn’t have all the relationships spelled out, and some of the dates are spotty. But—”

“But together with what we learned from the gravestones,” she finished for him, “we ought to be able to connect the dots.”

Jason grinned. “A
monkey
ought to be able to connect the dots. Put it this way—if we can’t, we don’t
deserve
this thing. Assuming it’s all correct, of course.”

“We can carbon-date the pages and the ink,” said Amanda professionally, eyes still drinking in the page, “but I’m sure it’s right. These things are sacred, you know.”

“Yes, I know.” He smiled, amused by her abject wonder, reveling in her mood.

“It’s just such a beautiful…thing,” said Amanda, and together they watched the pages uncurl as she slowly flipped backward through the ages: the letters to the churches, the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus’ death, and birth, then the prophecies of his birth, and so on, right back toward Creation. Glimpsed snatches of text—the quaint King James stylings, folks begetting other folks, going forth unto another place, and so on—here seemed gloriously in tune with the ancient parchment that was their vehicle. It was like peeking into a cathedral and spotting medieval clerics at their matins.

“I don’t have to leave for about an hour,” said Jason. “You wanna sit down?”