Breakfast was a bit strange. Wally had brought his usual bagels, from yet another shop considered one of New York’s finest. He was determined to give us the full selection of top bagel places during our time in New York, and I appreciated his diligence.
No, what made breakfast a bit odd was that after a while it became clear that Luisa was avoiding looking at me. At least, mostly. I’d catch her looking at me but quickly glancing away when I glanced in her direction. I didn’t let it annoy me, but I did find it strange.
After breakfast Wally took Luisa to her storage rental to get some more of her things while Emmy and I did a more thorough exploration of the house, starting from the top.
There were the two small studio apartments up there, each with its own kitchenette and tiny bath. I guess by Manhattan standards they were on the small side, but not any smaller than millions of New Yorkers lived in every day. Luisa had mentioned that it was bigger than her last apartment, so I didn’t feel too bad about having her live in the “servant’s quarters” of the house. After all, as Emmy had pointed out, she had free run of the rest of the house, too.
In addition to the two apartments, there was a storage closet filled with stuff we would have to sort through, and a room that held some machinery that looked as if it had to do with the elevator. I guess that made sense, since it was right above the shaft. Looking at it, though, I wasn’t really clear on why it needed a room the size of a decent walk-in closet.
There were a few pieces of outdoor furniture stored in there, along with an old cafe umbrella that was probably trash.
The sixth floor had the sunny sitting room that was to become Emmy’s studio, a bathroom, a small, windowless room that was set up as an office (Emmy had referred to it as the housekeeper’s office, and I figured she knew more about these things than I did) and a larger office facing the street, with an old, ornate desk (that we’d had sex on). The larger office was where Emmy had envisioned that I would set up my work office and I had no objections to that. I still didn’t think we were going to spend all that much time in New York, but I would need to have something set up for when I was in town.
The fifth floor had a front-facing bedroom and another that faced to the back of the house as did the fourth floor, but the bedrooms on the fifth were just a little bit smaller and had much smaller bathrooms, leaving the space in between for a sort of kids’ play room.
The fourth floor’s two bedrooms were larger, with bigger en-suite baths and walk-in closets. The space between the bedrooms was a decent-sized storage room, again filled with boxes of who knows what, and a small room with a fan and an old exercise bike.
“I guess this was the old gym,” I said as we checked it out.
Opening a tall cabinet, Emmy said “Look! A massage table!” Pulling a bottle of baby oil off a shelf, she had a gleam in her eye. “This gives me some wonderful ideas…” she said.
“Not with that old oil, no you don’t,” I replied. “If we are going to get all rubby dubby it’s going to be with a fresh bottle of massage oil, not that manky old stuff.”
“We must do some shopping today, then,” Emmy announced, putting the bottle back on the shelf.
We bypassed the third floor, since we’d already fully explored what the master bedroom and front bedroom (soon to be gym) had in store.
The second floor had the living room facing the street, with a little Juliet balcony overlooking the front door. Really, the room didn't need much help other than a paint job. The ornate carved wooden fireplace was in great shape and the pre-war mouldings were all intact. The furniture, though, was hideous, like most of the rest of the house.
The parlor where we had the wine last night was a nice room, a bit cozier than the living room. The only area I hadn’t really checked out was the corner wet bar, which was about half stocked. I figured the real estate agents or whoever had already grabbed whatever full or really good bottles there might have been on display, but there was a locked cabinet above the refrigerator that might hold something worthwhile. I made a mental note to have the locksmith open that for us later.
Proceeding down to the first floor, I finally took the opportunity to look at the books on the shelves in the classic library. I say classic in the sense that the room itself fit every stereotype. Dark-stained wood paneling, carved wood fireplace, shelves filled with hardcover books that look like prints of the great novels, overstuffed chairs… As I said, you’ve seen it in any number of costume drama movies and T.V. shows.
Well, to my great surprise, the books turned out to be fakes. Not even real books at all, just props of a sort to look like books. Pulling one of the things off a shelf, I showed it to Emmy who couldn’t figure out what I was holding at first. From the back it looked like a box- only the front and top varied according to the ‘book’ it was supposed to represent.
“How bizarre,” Emmy commented, turning the object masquerading as a row of books in her hands. “Why would anyone do this?”
“I have two guesses, and they basically boil down to the same thing. The last owner wasn’t a reader, but wanted the look of impressive bookshelves, or their interior designer did. I’d bet these were kind of expensive, since they’re obviously well made, but still…”
“What should we do with them?” Emmy asked, pulling another from a different shelf.
“Well, let’s make sure they haven’t left anything hidden in or behind these things- but that would be pretty cliche, don’t you think? Second, we ask our designer. I’d bet she would know who would want ‘em.”
“It would be like that cartoon show, with the idiots and the dog!” Emmy exclaimed, thrilled with the idea of something hidden. “We must find a hidden room!”
“I hate to burst your bubble, Em, but that wall is the front of the house, that one is the side, and on the other side of that one is the entry hall. That leaves that little wall there, and it’s the coat closet on the other side.”
Downcast, Emmy pouted. “You are too logical! You spoiled the fun.”
“I tell you what,” I said. “Let’s have Erich build us a secret little room. He can put in a secret door right there,” I said, pointing at the wall shared with the coat closet. “We’ll have him shrink the closet a little bit, enough for a spiral staircase down into the basement. If I have my bearings right, that would lead down into the giant boiler room, and that’s definitely big enough to steal part of.”
Her eyes wide with the idea, Emmy said “We must do that. Except the staircase must go past the boiler room and down into the wine cellar. Yes! That will be so perfect!”
Laughing at the expression on Emmy’s face, I said “Well, we’ll see if it’s possible. That would be really cool.”
A few minutes of checking the faux books revealed nothing as cool as a hidden safe or secret jewelry box, so we put them all back just as we saw Wally pull up to the front of the house. The open door of the limo revealed a mess of boxes crammed inside, so Emmy and I went out to help bring the stuff in.
“This is probably the first time in history that a limo was used to help somebody move,” Luisa said as I picked up a box.
“You’d be surprised how often it happens,” Wally replied.
“Seriously?” Luisa demanded, stopping to look at Wally in surprise.
“Twice so far this year for me alone,” he replied, nodding.
“Wait- twice, plus me makes three, or I’m the second one?”
“You’re number three,” Wally said, laughing.
With the four of us, it only took a few minutes to get the car emptied out. Wally pulled a dust brush and cordless vacuum from the trunk and gave the interior a quick once-over, then came in.
“Wally, I’ve got a pick-up at La Guardia at a quarter after twelve for you. The guy’s name is Grant Henry. Here, let me text all the info,” I said, pulling out my phone to forward the flight number and ETA to Wally. “The guy is about this tall, has a salt-and pepper military haircut and likes dark blue suits, so that’s probably what he’ll be wearing. I doubt he’ll have any luggage, probably just a carry-on. If he’s hungry, stop somewhere good for lunch, and get yourself some, too. We’ll call for delivery for something for the three of us.”
“All right. I’ll get going, then,” Wally replied. “You wouldn’t happen to have a picture of Mr Grant, do you?”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“No, sorry,” I said. “But if you can imagine a Marine combat instructor in a nice suit, that’s exactly what he looks like.”
As we loaded some of the boxes in the elevator, I suggested we take the stuff to the other apartment. “That way you won’t have the clutter in your place while you’re unpacking,” I said.
“Well, a lot of it doesn’t get unpacked,” Luisa replied. “The boxes with blue tape go to my studio, when I find a place and get one set up.”
“Then it makes even more sense to not load them into your room,” I said, opting to carry a large but light box up the stairs.
Hearing somebody on the stairs behind me, I glanced back to see Luisa carrying a wooden contraption that I figured had to be an easel. On the fourth floor landing I let her go ahead of me, since she had a lighter load. It hadn’t occurred to me that this would mean several flights of stairs staring at her butt in her grey yoga pants. Really, it hadn’t. But there it was, and once I realized what was right in front of me I couldn’t make myself look away, as much as I really felt I ought to.
I can’t even say that Luisa was flaunting her attributes. I mean, she was just carrying some stuff up some stairs, and I was the one who suggested she go first, so really, it was on me.
We got to the top floor not a moment too soon, and as I’d suggested, carried the things into the empty apartment.
“Thanks,” Luisa gasped, a bit out of breath. “Man, that is a lot of stairs! But look at you- you aren’t even breathing slightly hard. It must be that jogging you do. How far do you run every morning, anyway?” she asked, using a lot of air, for somebody out of breath.
“The route I’ve been running works out to a little over eleven miles,” I say, setting the box down in the corner.
“And you do that every morning?”
“Well, every morning we’ve been here, sure. Back home I usually only run every other day, but I do a lot of gym work,” I explained.
“I have to say, and don’t take this the wrong way, but it absolutely shows,” Luisa said as we walked down a floor to call the loaded elevator up.
“Thanks,” I replied as we waited for the next load of boxes to make its way up the six floors.
“Hey, I’ve been thinking about the wine,” Luisa said. “I’ve got some thoughts on it, but I want to see if they make sense to you.”
“Sure,” I said as the elevator arrived and the door unlocked. “What are you thinking?”
“So, there are three problems, the way I see it. First off,” she said, as we worked to unload the boxes from the small elevator car. “We need to catalog and evaluate the bottles, just to know what’s there and what is any good and what isn’t, right? I mean, I did a little bit of reading and there are ways to tell if a bottle has gone bad without opening it, but I wouldn’t know enough to judge. But I think we need a pro for that. But we know this wine has been in that cellar for a long time, right? And it’s nice and cool down there, so the conditions are probably good and have been forever.”
“Um hm,” I agreed, carrying boxes.
“We also need to know what the wine is worth. If Emmy’s right and that bottle we drank was worth fifteen hundred Euros, and it was just one you grabbed randomly, then there could be a whole lot of money wrapped up in that collection, right? But we don’t know market prices, or really, what any of it should go for if it went up for sale, right? This means that the whole situation is ripe for fraud or outright theft until it’s catalogued. And that includes the pros that we bring in to evaluate it. Also, anybody even knowing there is potentially a million dollars worth of wine in the basement may try to break in and simply steal it, right?”
“Yeah, I’d kinda thought those same things,” I agreed as I punched the button to send the elevator back down to the first floor.
“So we need to catalog it ourselves first, before we let anybody know. Also, we probably don’t want it in the house while the construction is happening, so we need to find a wine storage facility for the duration of the work, too.”
“I guess I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted. “I was just thinking a better lock on the door would be enough, but I can see your point. I imagine there must be facilities that specialize in long-term wine storage, and you’re right- that would be much better than trusting a lock to prevent some random construction worker from making off with a few bottles.”
“O.K., so we write every bottle down and take photos of the labels, front and back. We have them evaluated for whether they’ve spoiled or not, and the bottles the experts say have gone bad, we pour out right in front of them, right then. That way we can see if they actually are bad, and if the expert knows what he’s talking about.”
“Wow, you really have been giving this some thought,” I said, surprised.
“I think we send the list, maybe with photos, to at least one other expert who isn’t here in New York, and has no possible stake. We just pay him (or them) for an assessment, a reasonable estimate of market values, and see how that compares with our local expert’s valuation. That way we have a backstop against the local guy lowballing.”
“Why do you think the local guy would do that?” I asked.
“Because he thinks he can give us a low number, then offer to take the entire collection for a ‘fair’," here Luisa did air quotes with her fingers, "price. Even if we tell him we aren't interested in selling, he may still figure there’s a way to try to scam us rubes,” Luisa explained. “It’s a New York thing.”
Laughing, I said, “It sounds as if you’ve given it a lot of thought. I tell you what- you go ahead and do the photos and catalog, find the wine experts and a storage facility, and you get whichever bottle you want as a sort of bonus. Drink it, sell it, whatever. It’s yours.”
“Seriously? We’re talking about potentially over a thousand dollars!” Luisa said, stopped in her tracks.
“Seriously,” I agreed. “It’s a lot of work, what we are talking about. You’ll earn it, believe me.”
By this time we’d brought all of the boxes up, so we headed back down the elevator.
“You know, this elevator is pretty cool because it’s so old, but at the same time that kind of worries me,” I commented.
“I’m glad I’m not the only one who’d had those thoughts,” Luisa said, laughing. “Look at that plaque,” she said, pointing. “Otis Elevator, 1911. Over a hundred years old. I’d be rickety and creaky at that age, too!”
We’d finished off our lunch of Thai food by the time Wally and Grant arrived.
“Any problems?” I asked Wally, and he shook his head.
“You described him perfectly,” he said with a chuckle.
“How was the flight?” I asked Grant.
“I have to say, working for you spoils a man,” he replied. “I could get used to business class, let me tell you.”
“Speaking of spoiling you, I wasn’t sure if you were O.K. with staying here in the house, of if you’d prefer a hotel,” I said, apologetically.
“I appreciate it, but I’d be better off here, if I’m going to evaluate the site,” he said.
“Makes sense,” I said. “Here, let’s get you set up,” I said and indicated he should follow me up the stairs, leaving Luisa, Wally and Emmy downstairs. “You get to choose which room you want on the fourth floor,” I said. “I suppose you could stay on the fifth floor, but those are kid’s rooms.”
“And you’re dragging me up all these stairs for a reason, I imagine,” he replied with a chuckle.
“Well, you need to get some movement in after six hours of sitting down, for one, but also, I want to talk to you in private a little bit and I figured nobody would follow us up three flights of stairs.”
After a quick inspection, Grant chose the room facing the street. “This way I can develop a feel for the traffic patterns,” he said, which is exactly what I expected him to say.
“What is it that you don’t want the others to hear?” he asked once he’d set his bag down.
“I need you to do a deep dive on Wally and Luisa. Emmy has hired Luisa to manage this house for us, and her recommendations were very good and my initial impression is that she’s trustworthy, but I’d like to know if there are any skeletons in her closet.”
“And Wally, that’s the driver, right? He’s already had to pass a background check to get a commercial chauffeur’s license here in New York, and besides, that’s the limo company’s business,” Grant said, taking out his phone to write notes.
“Well, I’m considering hiring him away to be our driver slash gopher slash general assistant. Again, he seems really straight-up, and he’s extremely knowledgeable about New York, and that could come in very, very handy.”
“Are you planning a full-time move here? I thought you’d said you two were moving to L.A.,” Grant said, typing on his phone.
“Well, we are, and we just bought this place so Emmy would have a sort of getaway pad here on the opposite coast,” I explained. “But it sure seems as if Emmy’s enjoying this place a lot, so I have the nagging suspicion that we may split our time more than we’d really thought.”
“Sure. It would be useful to have a man on the ground, that’s true. But you said Luisa has already been hired. Couldn’t she do all the errands you expect might happen?” Grant asked, voicing a concern I’d had.
“Well, a lot of them, sure. But she would have been hard pressed to pick you up from the airport, for example. I don’t think she really drives,” I explained, realizing that I might be making an assumption not based on reality.
“Well, if you’re going to employ him full time but only need him part time, he’ll have a pretty easy gig. But unless I somehow missed it, this house doesn't have a garage for the car.”
“No, but the title includes ownership of two spots in the parking garage half a block down," I said.
“Hmm… Well, that’s a security risk right there, not having control of the car at all times,” Grant said, thinking about it. "I’m assuming Luisa will live here at the house, right?” he said, changing the subject.
“Yeah, there are two small apartments on the top floor. I guess they would have been fairly deluxe servant’s quarters back in the day, but I hate calling them that,” I said.
“So Wally would have the other?”
“No, he has a family and they have their own place in Queens somewhere,” I said.
“All right. Anything else, before we go back down?”
“Maybe we could go and get some gear and clear out the room I’ve been thinking would be the gym? I could use a bit of sparring- I’m feeling rusty, you know?” I said, hopefully.
“I brought my gear,” Grant answered with a laugh. “I was hoping we could get some mat time in.”
Walking back down, I said “The place next door is the Algerian Embassy, and on the other side is a condo building with six floors, one condo per floor. We have the height advantage over both buildings. You saw across the street- that’s an apartment building, eight floors. In back we have our small walled garden, then a ten foot drop to a large pedestrian patio-type park back there. Reasonably secure, but certainly not impenetrable.”
“Reasonably secure is all you can really ask for in an urban setting like this,” Grant said. “But let’s see what we can do to take it to the next step. What time is the meeting with the builder?”
Looking at my watch, I said “An hour and a half.”
Hearing voices from the parlor, we stopped on the second floor, to find Wally, Luisa and Emmy sitting in the sunroom, chatting about pickles.
“Leah, both Luisa and Wally agree that we must try pickles from a pickle shop in the Lower East Side they say is the best. Maybe after the meeting?” Emmy asked, a hopeful look on her face.
“Sure, sounds good,” I agreed.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a few minutes to inspect everything,” Grant said. “Luisa, I hate to intrude, but may I look in your room upstairs?”
“Um, sure,” she replied. “Here, we’ll go up together and I can let you in.”
After the two of them left, Wally asked “Mr Henry, he works for you, right?”
“Yeah, he’s my chief of security,” I said. “He’s here to evaluate the security of the house, and specify what may need to be upgraded.”
“He strikes me as a very serious man,” Wally said.