Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

"There's probably a little beach."

"Yes, a beautiful little sandy beach just on the tip of the inlet. Very private. Backed by a stand of Norfolk pines planted a hundred years ago. One of the nicest beaches on the Sound, totally private."

"Jay never mentioned that."

"He probably didn't care much about it." She pointed to the little inlet called Crabber's Cove. "Surrounded by luxury houses. Serviced by one dead-end road. Large lots, mostly two acres. The subdivision was done in the early eighties and the lots sold for maybe ninety thousand back then."

"What would they be now?"

"Oh, at least four hundred thousand."

"Wow."

"That's the way it goes, Mr. Wyeth, up, sideways, then up again. Now, look here." She pointed at the property marked Boatyard. "This was owned by Kyle Lorton, who came home so dirty his wife made him wash off in the yard with a hose. Naked. You could see it from the road. His rear end looked like an old apple left out in the sun. So did his front end, for that matter. Kyle's business was lobster boats. That's what he did. He was no good with regular people. That's why lobster-men liked him. He was dirty and smelled and had black teeth and could fix anything."

"The lobsters are gone, though."

"That's right. Giuliani, your old mayor, who pretended he wasn't as bald as my knee, sprayed poison all over New York City for West Nile virus."

"Which turned out to be basically harmless."

"Yes, except for the old people and the lobsters. All that mosquito poison washed into Long Island Sound and killed our lobsters. They should have let the old people die and the lobsters live, if you ask me, which, as usual, no one did. Now the lobster business is dead and Kyle Lorton went bankrupt. It didn't help that he'd been dumping oil out back for twenty years and the DEC caught him. But that piece has a grandfathered commercial-marine-use zoning, which is now impossible to get, the only one on the inlet, by the way. It also has a nine-foot channel that Lorton used to dredge himself illegally, which means you can get a big boat in there."

"So all these pieces are in play?" I asked, studying the map. "It's a land assembly. Is that what you're saying?"

"Yes," Martha Hallock went on. "The cabbage farm also sold its development rights. I guess no one eats cabbage anymore. These little strips, A, B, C, D, maybe eight or ten acres each, are in contract now. They're used for sweet corn and potatoes. Actual potatoes, which you don't see very often anymore on the North Fork, except for the fingerlings. This is Christmas trees. This fellow's failing because too many people are selling Christmas trees and America is less and less a Christian country. We're pagans, Mr. Wyeth, every year more so, and I've been saying it for forty years." She sighed. "This is what Mr. Marceno has in mind, Mr. Wyeth."

She handed me an altered copy that looked like this:

I studied it.

"Not just a vineyard, you see."

"A giant project," I said. "Have they bought all the pieces?"

"Everything except strip A, where he's holding out for a little more money, which he'll get. They own everything else or have it in contract."

A huge piece, being assembled. The key was to divide and conquer using stealth; to work through different brokers and to sequence the land buys in such a way as to avoid purchasing contiguous properties simultaneously, and to do it all as quickly as possible so prices didn't rise too much. Sometimes a matter of buying leases instead of land, it nonetheless was a common technique in developing property. The land under Rockefeller Center, for example, was assembled by gaining control over 229 deteriorating brownstones. Early in my career I helped put together an enormous lot in the East Sixties by buying nine little properties, one a mere sixteen feet wide. The firm sent me in because I looked young and guileless. I was thrilled, of course. The nine sellers sold to nine different legal entities, one with a Korean-sounding name, another with a Jewish name, and so on. If the sellers compared notes, they might not see the game. Of course, each buying entity was merely a stack of paper owned by our client, a Dutch bank.

"A big piece. Now I see it's, what, two hundred-plus acres?"

"Yes. There are a number of other sizable pieces on the North Fork, but very few of them are on the water, suitable for grapes, have proper zoning, come with their own private access preserve, have access to a sheltered inlet, and also are for sale."

"How much is involved here? I mean how much money?"

"The most expensive piece was the old estate piece, because it has the ocean frontage and the approval for the golf course. That was about six million. Sea Gull Poop Vineyards went for three million, owing to the quality of the vines."

I found myself remembering H.J.'s outrageous claim about the purchase price of Jay Rainey's property. The number was wildly high, but viewed in this new context, it made a kind of crazy sense. The locals must have figured something was afoot- seen the black Lincolns arriving, men in business suits standing in muddy fields, agate-type listings of real estate transfers in the weekly paper- and chattered among themselves, some of this talk reaching Mrs. Jones, and then H.J. himself, who, like Jay Rainey, was a native son. "But if you're talking putting in new vines, a golf course, and maybe building luxury housing, the total cost is moving up past, what, twenty, thirty million?"

She shook her head. "Forty-two million, Mr. Wyeth, in phases. A ten-year project. That includes a beautiful wine-tasting center right at the end of Jay's property. Golf and wine. Forty-two million." She leaned forward conspiratorially. " They have the money. A Latin American company buying prime oceanfront in the United States of America gets Latin American money very easily. These are smart, sophisticated people. They do business in eight or nine countries."

"What about all the local approvals, the zoning?"

"They have it. Or they will massage it through. All the property falls within the town of Riverhead, which is much easier. All those unemployed blacks in downtown Riverhead, frankly. Displaced by the Mexicans and Guatemalans who will work for less, live in a tent if we'd let them. Riverhead has huge social problems. The town has lost industry. One of the aerospace companies, Grumman, had a huge site but closed up, taking their tax dollars with them. The strip malls have sucked money out of Main Street. The town is addicted to new tax dollars, Mr. Wyeth. A project like this means jobs," she said proudly. "It won't be too hard to get through. Also they've hired a local person who knows all the right people. An old hand. Somebody who can fix things when they go wrong."

"Who?"

"Me."

Judging from the map, it looked like the wine-tasting building would be located in about the place where Herschel had been regrading the land. Did this account for Marceno's anxiety? I kept studying the map. "You could bring in private tour boats or small luxury cruisers in the inlet, have them dock at the boatyard and drive them straight to the golf course or the vineyards."

"Now you're starting to think like a real estate developer." Martha Hallock smiled. "There's a local airport only five miles away. Private high-speed jet foil service to downtown Manhattan- a beautiful ride, by the way- takes forty-five minutes. You got a beach, a nature preserve, the whole thing."

"Why not do it on the South Fork, in the Hamptons, where there's more money and the famous beaches?"

"Because the Hamptons are too crowded, too built out, and you can't get pieces of land like this anymore. They just don't exist. All carved up. Plus, growing grapes on the South Fork isn't as feasible. The soil is different, the season is slightly shorter, and the zoning boards are controlled by ladies who lunch and run flower shops."