Hidden within this metamorphosis has always been the legal antwork of individual humans and corporations, repeatedly buying, selling, leasing, mortgaging, and reparceling every square inch of the island, and even the rights to the smoggy air above it, in greedy pursuit of their own interests. And although the particulars of that greed- the piled and papered secrets of who owns the island's thirty or forty thousand buildings and how much they paid for them- would seem almost infinite, nearly all are contained within just one place: Room 205, Surro-gate Court, 31 Chambers Street, in lower Manhattan.
And that was where I stood the next morning, outside the court under a threatening sky, stamping my feet and nibbling from a warm bag of caramel peanuts bought from a vendor. The building, erected in 1901, was a magnificent beaux arts pile, with giant bronze Puritans guarding its doors. I'd slept poorly, almost not at all, and when the gray light of day crept down the airshaft next to my window, I'd jolted awake, hoping that the events of the previous night might somehow be remembered as benign. Many mornings I woke in my grimy cell on Thirty-sixth Street hoping in the half-second blink to consciousness that I might discover that I was still living in my eight-room apartment on the Upper East Side, with Timothy asleep in his pajamas and Judith involved in her coffee rituals, available for a cottony, dorsal grope in the kitchen, but on this morning a simple return to my lonely, cracked-plaster innocence of the day before would have filled me with relief, even a kind of refracted happiness.
No such luck. The vision of Herschel's frozen, snow-covered grimace- conjurable and godlike as an Easter Island totem- had chased me along Broadway's snowy, shadowed facades as I'd walked the long blocks toward Chambers Street. You don't move dead bodies, I cursed myself, not in the middle of the night when no one's looking. White lawyers, especially, even ones down on their luck, don't move dead black bodies, no matter how plausible the explanation. And then lie to the cops about it. I could only hope that a few days would go by, Poppy and Jay would smooth over any questions from Herschel's family, the man would be buried in peace, and that would be that. If Jay was smart, he'd pay for the funeral.
And if I was smart, I'd have nothing further to do with him, no matter what Allison might say or promise. The problem was that my name had been hijacked onto his documents of sale, forever and ever, and even as his quickie, one-night-stand lawyer, I was obliged, if only to myself, to see that the deal was sound. Having had no opportunity to examine the documents beforehand, and given the dubious activities of the previous night, I wanted a look at the recorded deeds of the building at 162 Reade Street. The word "recorded" is the key term. A deed has to be executed, tendered, and received, but it's not official until recorded. Only then is the pile of bricks, the box of timbers, possessed. The change in ownership of any property is mysterious, when you think about it; the tangible thing remains unaltered but the description of it, the name attached to it, changes in an instant. Three hundred years ago, under English common law, the sale of real estate used to be marked by the snapping of a stick, which symbolized the specificity and permanence of the moment.