The Deed (3 page)

“I do
not
give them guns.”

“No? And yet they get them somehow. Perhaps they have invented them simultaneously,” suggested the burgher, drawing up his dignity; he was in his element now. “And now let me ask
you
something, Pieter.” He tapped a bejeweled middle finger on the document between them. “Had the company refused your demand, would you have truly let your countrymen starve? Knowing it was in your power to save them?”

“Don’t be facetious,” said Pieter. “It’s Kieft’s outrageous policies that threaten you with starvation—whatever power I have to intervene hardly bloodies my hand with his crime.”

“That does not answer the question,” noted the burgher.

But Pieter only smiled. “All I have ever intended, Van Cleef, is to do what I can to arm these aboriginals against the abuse of Europe.”

“You know they will only sell it again, the moment your back is turned.”

“That is why it’s in my name, and not theirs.”

“Yes,” said Van Cleef, “but one day you will be gone, and they will lose it, or bury it with some esteemed chief, or warm their hands over its ashes in winter.”

“Perhaps.” Pieter shrugged as together they rose and headed for the door. “We must all of us follow the dictates of conscience, and trust Providence to reward us in kind.” He smiled broadly. “Keep one hand on your scalp, Van Cleef.”

Moments later, as Nahoti cleaned the pheasants at the cooking-table, Pieter was in the throes of a euphoria that was half uncontainable excitement, half dreamlike haze. He returned to the table and sat on the bench by the window, the better to catch the sunlight, and as he settled in to revel in the intricacies of the document, a triumphant smile spread across his face. He had forbidden himself to anticipate this moment. And yet here it was, in the flesh, and the possibilities swirled in his mind like dandelion seeds before the wind. Time itself seemed to have ground to a halt, stranding the sun high in the sky as if unsure of which way to fall.

“‘Go now, write it on a tablet for them,’” Pieter said aloud, quoting Scripture from memory. “‘Inscribe it on a scroll, that for all the days to come it may be an everlasting witness.’”

Any shift in power invites retribution, he knew. But of the danger to himself he took little note: If the peril was not insignificant, neither was it immediate. He’d set in motion a course of events he hoped would outlive his mortal husk, and what Pieter
did
fear, intensely, was for the life of the document itself. Van Cleef’s derision pointed up a real concern—the deed was the Word, legal and binding, but it was parchment as well as document, a fragile paper thing subject to the ravages of fire and water, earth and air, human accident or—deadliest of all—sabotage.

Though Pieter’s disputes with the Dutch were mainly of a philosophical nature, his fear for his adopted people was real. He knew that the Company, and the Dutch government generally, intended to loot the New World of all extractable riches, and the unreal stories that filtered back from other colonial outposts bore testament to the extremes of cruelty men could muster toward this end. While Pieter had an almost supernatural faith in the power of the written word, he was forced to concede that the Manahata, with no written history and no real sense of property, could only dimly, at best, comprehend the importance of this deed. If they were ever to benefit from it, they would somehow have to be convinced to protect the page itself, to keep it safe and dry and out of the hands of the grasping Dutch, perhaps for long years.

Such was the conundrum that faced Pieter now, but for this, at least, he’d had months to prepare. He turned to find Nahoti, a bone knife clenched in one blood-spattered fist, butchering the luckless pheasants with a rare exuberance. Smiling, he called her over.

As his wife approached, with those sad, impenetrable eyes that never held laughter long, Pieter marveled, not for the first time, at the natural transparency of her emotion. Fear, excitement, anger, love—all coursed violently through her body like a river pent underground, seeping conspicuously from every pore, unhindered by disguise or artifice. Sometimes she seemed more animal than human, utterly in thrall to the basest excitements of the flesh, wary and untameable. At other moments, though, the thrilling simplicity of her naked honesty inspired him to wonder whether civilized society, in the end, was anything more than artful camouflage.

“This paper is a great mystery, which I want to explain to you,” he began, smiling in an ill-fated effort to ease her distress as she approached the table and sat beside him. “Nahoti, a few months ago a dream came to me…”

“Well, he signed it,” said Van Cleef, as he met the soldier and together they began trudging back toward the forest.

“Was there doubt?” retorted the other. “The devil himself couldn’t have drawn terms more favorable.”

“That’s as may be,” the burgher replied with a shrug and walked on, a few steps ahead of his subordinate. Before they left the clearing, however, at the wide and grassy mouth of the path that threaded back through the trees, Jacob placed a bold hand on his superior’s arm and turned him around.

“Just know this, Van Cleef,” said the soldier firmly under his breath. “I’ll happily come back and finish this business, on a word from you.”

“Peace, good Jacob, peace,” urged the burgher. “It’s Pieter’s food that will be feeding you, his ale you’ll be drinking this winter.”

“One word,” reiterated the soldier, maintaining his iron focus. “On your authority—official or not.”

All the humor drained from Van Cleef’s face. “Now listen to me carefully, Jacob,” he replied, boldly poking a fat finger into the soldier’s chest. “Whatever slights you believe you’ve suffered, however inequitable you think the agreement between this man and the Dutch West India Company, it is
not
your business. You
may not
lift your hand in anger against him. Is that clear?”

The gunman’s brow darkened, and Van Cleef slid past him, striding purposefully into the woods, muttering, as he passed, “Not until spring, anyway.”

Jacob, caught wholly unawares, nearly laughed out loud.

Back inside the cabin, Nahoti listened quietly as her husband relayed a terrible vision of the future. He was speaking of a time when the god of her people would desert them, when her tribe would be driven from their land and made to walk among strangers.

Nahoti tried to pay attention, though the images disturbed her deeply; prophecy was not to be taken lightly. But her thoughts kept scampering away like children. She was remembering a warm winter’s night when she and Pieter had slipped through the forest down to the shore to walk in the white foam at the edge of the sea, beneath the stars. There, as the dark wind whipped her unbraided hair about her head, he had pointed out over the sea and told her of his own land beyond the water, where the people crowded together in impossible cities, and he foretold that more men would be coming, ship after ship after ship, like the icy waves lapping at their feet. It was here that he’d first promised he would never leave her, no matter what happened.

At the table now, again holding her hands, Pieter was saying that the paper the men had brought contained a great magic that must be kept safe until Manahata’s return, for it would one day restore their land and bring her people home again.

Nahoti argued with him then, though she knew it was futile, protesting, as she always did, any further involvement with these horrible men. Pieter reasoned with her, tried to calm her, and finally resumed his narrative, accepting her sullen silence as acquiescence. But he was wrong. She was brooding, quietly fixating on the terrifying image she’d seen through her little window just moments earlier, when the man with the gun had turned back and stared coldly at the house, as if memorizing the scene for some future horror.

The page and the land are one, her husband was telling her; the page and the land are one.

Unsure whether the devil had seen her, Nahoti had pulled herself back violently from the window, heart pounding. But the spell had been cast; the thin man’s last icy glare would never entirely leave her thoughts and dreams, for all the rest of her days.

As Jason Hansvoort stepped off the curb and into the path of the oncoming taxi, his eyes never wavered. From a park bench on the far side of the street dangled a pair of female legs, sweetly agape, their northern reaches discreetly sheathed in a slack blue-jean wrap skirt. It was this steadily improving celestial view that had blotted out all earthly considerations; a last, curious image absurdly poised to fizzle with his soul into universal static at the crush of metal and bone.

Had Jason peripherally glimpsed the yellow behemoth bearing down on him, or heard the anguished squeal of badly abused brakes, or otherwise sensed the rusty creak of the scissors yawning open to snip short the thread of his life, there might have been just enough time to pointlessly brace for the impact. But he remained oblivious, right to the end. His perception of the event did not collapse into a series of staccato images, like photographs flipping through his consciousness; he did not suddenly see all the colors of the world framed in unusual clarity. His life in no way flashed before his eyes, even as a deadly metallic juggernaut the color of sunshine desperately ground to a halt a few feet from his knees.

“Ass
hole!
” shouted the irate Indian cabdriver, leaning out the window. “Doo you tink dot you are Shuperman?” he wondered angrily. In the center of his turban, a purple stone glowed dully.

Suddenly the world was filled with sound and light, and Jason’s brain scrambled to untangle the knot of input that assaulted his senses: the braying of horns, the pungent incense of burnt rubber and roasted peanuts, the sudden, undeniable presence of a steaming vehicle practically in his lap.

“My bad,” Jason mumbled reflexively, heart belatedly thudding as he rewound, stepping backward onto the curb.

The morning crowd took little notice, but here and there pockets of diverted bystanders watched expectantly, hoping for further drama from the scene. A single white male, twenty-three and reasonably good-looking in dirty blond hair and a clean gray suit, Jason saw himself reflected in their eyes as the perfect urban straight man for a bit of cosmic slapstick. Any minute now, his briefcase would unlatch comically and scatter white papers like doves all across Columbus Circle, to roars of canned laughter.

“Asshole!” the cabbie repeated apoplectically, punctuating his rage with a cryptic two-handed gesture that was probably quite obscene in his country of origin. Without waiting for a response, he floored the pedal with another screech and exited, stage right.

“That’s
Mr.
Asshole to you, buddy,” said Jason bravely into the cabbie’s exhaust, but his audience had already dispersed.

Jason’s near-death experiences were the stuff of legend among his friends. He had fallen in front of a city bus; he had toppled, arms wind-milling in the expected way, from the edge of a subway platform, clambering to safety just in time. He had witnessed a stabbing outside the Port Authority bus terminal late one night, scarcely ten feet from him, a noisy act of public violence that had sent adrenaline shooting around his bloodstream like fireworks trapped in an air-conditioning duct. In Washington Square, two summers ago, he’d been part of a crowd that had scattered like spilled marbles when a limousine hopped the curb and careened into the park, killing two Ohio tourists paralyzed by the sheer
interestingness
of what was unfolding. The limo had also critically injured a street mime performing at the time; the poor bastard’s animated back spasms were mis-interpreted by many as a sick attempt at black humor.

Jason reached behind the knot of his tie to undo the “choke” button, as onlookers lost their cohesion and devolved into the usual pedestrian chaos, and the traffic stream reassuringly resumed its course. From a rational standpoint, he had long suspected these recurrent near misses could not be attributed to mere chance. But warning himself to be more careful was an empty ritual; it always felt disturbingly as if he were trying to be his own parents.

Jason switched back to his left hand a burgundy hand-tooled leather briefcase, the gift of his mother and father on the occasion of his landing his first real job, at Young & Rubicam advertising. The case’s elegance belied Jason’s moderate income—it was pretentious and overstated, relentlessly
adult,
and it had always felt somehow wrong in his hand, though of course he would never part with it now. He stretched the knuckles of his free hand, wiped the palm on the convenient leg of his trousers.
Once more unto the breach, my friend,
he rallied himself, looking uptown and downtown like a five-year-old. When the light changed, he stepped into the crosswalk and successfully forded New York’s only traffic circle.

One bystander waited a moment, then stealthily crossed the street after Jason, following him to the far corner and watching him head east on 59th Street, holding safely to the sidewalk along the southern edge of Central Park. She peered after his retreating figure for a moment before leaning lightly against a utility pole, dizzy with relief. Glancing down, the stranger saw that her hands were actually shaking, and she thrust them into the pockets of her raincoat as she glanced around, inscrutable behind cheap sunglasses.

If she’d been looking for a sign that the iron was hot, this surely had been it. The screech of the taxi’s brakes had chilled her heart; twenty yards or so behind, she’d found herself literally unable to scream or even speak, incapable indeed of any action beyond groping spastically toward him as if trying to propel him to safety through the sheer force of her panic. Now she closed her eyes, relaxed, and breathed deeply, seeking out a familiar inner pool of strength, not yet to tap it, but simply to reassure herself that it was intact and primed.

Jason had turned out to be as expected: somewhere around twenty-five or so, she guessed, roughly her own age. A nice coincidence. In closeup he had genial, good-guy looks: tall, with green eyes and blond hair. No wedding ring, which presumably meant no children—the important thing, of course. He
seemed
approachable, anyway…but perhaps that was hope speaking. The thrill of the prospect of fulfilling a destiny more than three hundred years in the making was tempered by visceral worries: apprehension at the sheer weight of the task ahead, and a dread of ramifications unknown.

When her eyes opened, the girl was pleased to find that her clever hands had drawn two cigarettes from the pack in her coat pocket. She lit one and inhaled deeply, snapping the other cigarette in half and grinding its broken body into the sidewalk with the toe of her cowboy boot. Stepping lightly over the legs of a sprawled homeless person clad in a mink coat mottled with red spray paint, she hopped the four-foot crumbling brownstone wall that girdles Central Park and disappeared into its abruptly green interior.

Jason hit the light switch of his office and laid his suit jacket over the back of the extra chair, where it promptly doubled over in a half gainer and collapsed onto the seat.
Seven point five from the Russian judge,
he mused.
That’s gotta be a disappointment.
The voice-mail indicator on his phone console blinked sleepily in the sudden light.

After grimly zipping through the familiar sequence of buttons that would play back his messages on speakerphone, Jason took up a position by the window, clasping his hands behind his back and flaring his nostrils like an executive. The view was dominated by the imposing glass-and-steel forest of Midtown’s skyscrapers. But twenty-six flights below, Madison Avenue snaked along the base of his building in multicolored scales of morning traffic, and at the extreme right of the view, up beyond the East 60s, a small but treasured corner of grassy park could be glimpsed—slightly more, if he pressed his cheek against the glass.

There were two messages. Nick, his best friend from Princeton, called to relate “a tale of disgusting, unspeakable debauchery that I hope you’ll find inspiring,” and to remind him about their lunch today. Jason smiled at this, anticipating a welcome break from his usual solo routine.

The other message was less benign. Pete Halloran, his project manager, wanted him to come around to his office as soon he got the chance, and could he please bring the Hair Peace file. Jason’s lip curled into an involuntary sneer as his easy morning dipped sharply toward earth, flames streaming from both engines.

Jason’s sudden gloom didn’t spring from the fear of reprisal. Halloran was a notorious soft touch, relaxed and genial to an absolute fault, the textbook hands-off manager. But Hair Peace—the nightmare of the moment, an ill-conceived combination hair gel and scalp treatment—had stubbornly thwarted Jason’s every attempt at a coherent positioning strategy. After two weeks of gale-force brainstorming, the requested file remained a pitifully thin manila sandwich. And while he
thought
Halloran genuinely understood the problems endemic to the new account, Jason’s continuing failure to come up with a creative breakthrough appeared, to himself if not yet to his boss, more and more of a personal statement.

“Knock, knock,” said a voice at his half-open door, to a harmonizing chorus of knuckles, and
they
swept in.

It was Nivens and Walters, an inseparable pair of dorks from personnel who periodically swooped down on Jason’s office like wacky sitcom neighbors. Nivens was the more loathsome of the two, small and froggy, with a shockingly pale freckled face framed by thinning orange clown hair. Walters, bald and pear shaped, wore ridiculous Buddy Holly glasses on a face billowing with flabby jowls and permanently transfixed by a snarky, murderous smile.

By virtue of their positions, perhaps, the two had an inside line on company gossip, and for some arcane reason usually invited Jason to feast on the first fruits of their inside knowledge. For all his disdain, though, he could never quite bring himself to throw them out. They were legendary office fixtures, and their intermittent presence suggested some mythic, eternal quality that he had no right to challenge; therefore, he endured them patiently.

“Howdy,” he said.

“Nice tie,” said Walters, with an oddly brazen sincerity that stopped just short of sarcasm.

“Thanks.” Jason had no idea what tie he was wearing and resisted the temptation to investigate. “Made it myself.”

“Yeah…
right,
” Nivens replied nerdily. Walters—who did little of the talking, although he gave most of the knowing glances—slapped his hands on his formidable paunch and looked slowly around the office, nodding his head in a way Jason found deeply disconcerting.

“So what’s up, guys?” said Jason, feeling itchy and unproductive. “I’m kind of in a rush this morning.”

“Nothing much,” said Walters. “How was your weekend?”

“Fine,” Jason replied woodenly. “And yours?”

“Oh, you know,” said Nivens. “The usual.”

Jason tried to will some dramatic event into being to break up the tedious scene that loomed—the long and terrible endgame of extracting from these two the information they were so desperately eager to unload. A terrified executive bursts through the door, gurgling blood and clawing at a knife in his back, and does a face plant into the fica; a muscular reptilian arm crashes up through the floor, splitting the carpet and dragging somebody screaming down to hell.

“Someone get fired, or something?” Jason prodded, opening his briefcase and removing an orange from an infinitely wrinkled brown paper bag inside. As Nivens and Walters looked sideways at each other, he began denuding the fruit, tossing the little orange scabs with practiced ease over the edge of his desk, where they dropped through the miniature hoop that hung above his wastebasket, just out of sight.

Suddenly he paused, thumb buried in orange rind, and looked up slowly, scanning both of their idiotic faces. “Wait a minute. It’s not me, is it?”

Nivens smiled slightly. “No, it’s not you, you paranoid asshole.”

Jason nodded suspiciously. “But it’s
somebody.
”

The pair again exchanged schoolgirl glances. “Okay,” Nivens gave in. “Let’s just say somebody’s
leaving.
But it’s not official yet, so don’t spread it around. We’re only telling you this because it concerns you directly.” He paused as if expecting still more encouragement, but Jason abstained by popping an orange segment into his mouth.

“It’s your boss,” said Walters in a melodramatic whisper.

“My boss?” mumbled Jason semicoherently through the citrus, keeping up a show of disinterest. “Who, which boss? Halloran?” Since the merger with Grey, his company had become the biggest of the Big Five ad firms, and “boss” now had all kinds of orders of magnitude.