The Deed

Peter Lefcourt author of Eleven Karens A funny, smartly-written and engaging book -- The Sotweed Factor meets The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight.

Autorentext

Keith Blanchard

Klappentext

A hip and hilarious debut novel about a twentysomething guy searching for love, for meaning...and for a long-lost deed that could make him heir to the island of Manhattan Meet Jason Hansvoort, a single New Yorker with a curious knack for surviving near-death experiences. Wistful about college, apprehensive about the future, he's currently flailing around in post-college limbo as low man on the totem pole at one of Madison Avenue's "Big Five" ad agencies, impatiently waiting for the Next Thing to happen. And then one day he's approached by Amanda, an attractive young law student and one of the last members of the Manahata, the Native American tribe who sold Manhattan Island to the Dutch almost four hundred years ago. She's spent years on the trail of a lost document that supposedly gave ownership of Manhattan to a seventeenth-century benefactor and all his descendants. She believes Jason's the last of this line...and therefore heir to the island of Manhattan and everything on it. If they can find the deed, that is. Jason's skeptical...but enchanted enough to play along. If Jason and Amanda can indeed locate the deed, the consequences will be tremendous and far reaching: grave for millions of landowners and mortal for every title insurance company on the Eastern seaboard. There are literally billions at stake, and when a dysfunctional New York City crime family looking for a big break picks up the scent, it places Jason's streak of surviving near-death experiences in peril. Informed by Blanchard's gift for dead-on observation and pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, The Deed heralds the arrival of a fresh comic voice in contemporary literary fiction.

Leseprobe
Chapter One

MANHATTAN, 1999

**THURSDAY, 9:05 A.M.

COLUMBUS CIRCLE

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.

"Asshole!" 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 windmilling 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 misinterpreted 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 ar…