* * *
THREE TRIES WAS ALL IT TOOK to catch Treenie Lazzarra’s eye and have it seem like happenstance. Twice I walked up to her storefront window and pretended to peruse the FOR SALE AND RENT postings, but both times the space was empty and I had to walk down the block and wait five minutes before attempting it again. According to Attalah, the girl we’d gone to high school with ran the city’s busiest realty office. And according to her ads, which were up all over town, the New York Times had called her “one of the prime architects of Hudson’s renaissance.”
The third time I went by, she was sitting at her desk facing out. I saw her see me, out of the corner of my eye, saw her jump up out of her seat waving frantically while I fronted like I couldn’t see her.
“Ronan?” she called, opening the door, her voice every bit as too-loud as it had been in high school. “Ronan Szepessy?!?”
“Treenie?!” I exclaimed, mock-shocked. “It is you! I saw your name on the sign and I just didn’t believe it. ‘Must be another Treenie Lazzarra,’ I told myself, but of course there could only be one.”
We hugged. I held on extra tight for extra long. Like I was just that happy to see her.
“Come in, come in,” she said, ushering me over the threshold into a spare wide space that held only images. Giant flat-screen televisions. Picture frames for slideshows shuffling through images of houses. Silvery black and white; bright, clean, muted color. Hudson’s history; Hudson’s new moment. Her desk was tiny, minimalist; a white shelf built into a white wall. The place smelled like money, like a bank.
“Wow,” I said, meaning it. “This is something.”
“Isn’t it though?” Her hair, wild and big and curly in high school, had been straightened into lifeless drapes down the side of her head. She looked older, in spite of the makeup. “Who would have thought shitty little Hudson would become such a happening place?”
“Not by accident, I’m sure,” I said. “We owe all this to a small handful of hardworking people who made it happen. People like you.”
“Oh, stop,” she said. “There’s just something about this place, you know? Something magical. Like Bruges. Have you ever been to Bruges?”
“Not yet.”
“It feels frozen in time. Old buildings, untouched by modern development. I wanted to share Hudson with the rest of the world, but so did plenty of others. Have you seen Dom since you’ve been back? You two were inseparable. Made the oddest pair”—she paused, thought about how that sounded, then added—“Because he was so much taller than you.”
“Right,” I said, smiling, remembering how we must have looked when we left the potluck together: the tall, well-groomed cop beginning to fill out his uniform and the short skinny, scruffy haggard addict. We’d looked different back in high school, yes, but now we were worlds apart. “Yeah, I’ve seen him.”
“I am such a fan of yours,” she said. “I’m sorry, I know I come across like a total stalker with how I use that GIF of Michael Jackson eating popcorn every time you’re tearing some new asshole a new . . . well, asshole.” I smiled. I hadn’t noticed. I had set my Twitter so I only ever saw notifications from blue-check accounts—famous people, fellow “influencers,” whatever the fuck that meant on any given day. Small-town real estate agents didn’t cut it, no matter what the New York Times said about them. “How long are you in town for?”
She sat. Treenie had always been formidable, a bundle of energy and enthusiasm that was unstoppable once she set her mind to something. In high school the something had always been related to cheerleading or the yearbook or something else I had no emotional stake in. But now, mere feet away from her, I could feel the radioactive intensity of her determination. Idle, now—a down moment—but a deadly engine once cranked up all the way. What a foe she would be, when she knew what I was up to. Why I was there.
“You here for your dad?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, and didn’t fight the sudden rush of sadness that bowed my head. Emotion was good. People understood emotion.
“We’re all so sad for him,” she said. “And for you. He was an amazing man, your dad. Is an amazing man.”
Except that we’re all salivating over the prospect of his death because he’s the only thing standing in the way of our plan to transform this city into a playground for the very rich.
“Yeah,” I said, and decided not to ask about the Pequod Arms just then. I knew she was involved—Attalah had said so, and there were images of the expensive artist renderings mixed in with the slideshows on her wall—but better to make it seem like I was clueless for as long as possible. “Such a different world now, it seems like. A whole different crowd of people.”
“Oh my God, Ronan, you’d fucking love it here now. There’s so much cool stuff happening! So many gay people, so many artists . . . you had a rough time of it in high school, but you wouldn’t recognize the place now.”
“I hear that guy—what’s his name? The tech superstar?” And I pretended to wonder. “Jark Trowse? I hear he walks around town like it’s nothing. Like he’s not worth more than God.” So casual.
Treenie laughed. “You have got to meet him. He is such a character. We’ve become quite close. Obsessed with this town. You know he’s going to be our next mayor, right?”
Yes, I thought, pocketing the TROWSE FOR MAYOR button she handed me. I have got to meet him.
Word was, he’d offered my father five million, six times the building’s assessed value. You couldn’t stand long, against money like that. Sooner or later he’d take it off the table, offer it somewhere else. Bribe a mayor to engage eminent domain; launch a smear campaign. Hire a hit man.
“Let’s set it up,” I said, refraining from licking my lips. “The three of us, let’s get drinks.”
This, I could do. This was my skill set.
I was a photographer, sure, but the photo itself was only the icing on the cake of my art, the tip of the iceberg of me. My vision, my concepts—they took work to make real. They took plotting, and scheming, and manipulation. Finding bizarre locations; sweet-talking owners into offering them up for free or cheap. Reaching out to hungry Instagram thirst-traps, pretty tatted unemployed gym boys who would work dirt cheap for someone with a six-figure follower count. Props; stylists; catering; costuming. To say nothing of the concepts themselves, the smutty or gory story lines that got me called a fucking sicko on the regular, like the one I did for PETA where the reality-star-child-turned-clothing-empire-maven of the moment stood naked and blood-drenched over a very realistic-looking CGI skinned human corpse with a sign in her hands that said: FUR: HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT?
“I’ll text him right now,” she said, and then her phone rang and she excused herself.
There were no documents to root through, and the computer on her desk was showing a password-locked log-in screen. But this was just a scouting run. An attempt to make contact. Form a relationship. Work a source. Already I’d wrangled an invite to hang out with a billionaire mastermind. I’d work my way into the inner circle of whatever the fuck this was in no time.