Lawyers, Guns and Money

Thursday Night,4 August 1977

UPPER BAY, NEW YORK HARBOR

The Statue of Liberty's torch, flickering in the dark and shrouded by rain, could be an invitation or, more realistically, a warning. Since he was piloting a boat, William Kane, who was fond of maps, likened Lady Liberty these days to those sea serpents drawn on the blank spaces of ancient charts with the dire warning: Here there be monsters! Stay away!

Three weeks earlier the city had been savaged by massive rioting during the nightlong Blackout on the 13th of July, an explosion on top of a decade of a slowly filling cesspool of blight and decay. There were many who felt New York would never recover and that the Blackout had been the death knell. They compared it to the fond memories of the '66 Blackout as proof the city had gone to hell.

Kane, who was also a student of history, was rather ambivalent about the memories and the projections. New York City had survived many trepidations and would plod into the future in one form or another. Being practical, he used glimpses of Lady Liberty's torch to the southwest to fix the boat's position in the rotten weather, drawing a mental line from it to the muted glow of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to the northeast. He twitched the dual throttles to keep the forty-two-footer in position, the eastern point in a triangle with Liberty and Ellis Island equidistant to the west.

"That's the subway," Kane nodded his head, indicating a barely visible dark mass in the harbor.

"Excuse me?" The man Kane had labeled Money, since he wasn't big on remembering names, had been a pain ever since boarding, ordering him about as if Kane were a servant, which technically was true, given he was on the job.

Money was seated in the plush chair to Kane's left rear. The Actress was in the chair next to him. Money was from Texas, a point he'd made within the first minute. He wore tailored jeans, a starched white shirt under an expensive sports jacket, alligator hide boots and a black Stetson crowning silver hair.

Kane's attire wasn't in the same income bracket, or fashion consciousness, with his dyed black jungle fatigue pants, grey t-shirt and unbuttoned blue denim shirt, sleeves rolled. He wore scuffed jungle boots, bloused inside the cuff of the pants with boot bands. A forty-five-caliber pistol rested in a supple leather holster under the denim shirt on his left hip, two spare magazines behind it on the belt, a commando knife in the small of his back and other assorted weapons secreted here and there.

"Ellis Island," Kane explained the comment as he released one of the throttles and pointed. "Most of it's built with fill from subway excavation. Originally, it was only three acres, but landfill expanded that to over twenty-seven. On top of old oyster beds. The island wouldn't exist without the subway and vice versa."

"Doesn't look like much of anything," Money said. "My waste yard on the ranch has more acreage. My people were in the States long before Ellis Island let in the riff-raff." He checked his watch as if he had an important date, beyond the beautiful woman seated next to him who'd been vaguely pitching him a movie concept since they pulled away from the Battery on the southwest shore of Manhattan. "This is bullshit," he muttered.

The Actress reached out and put a hand on the Money's arm. "See? History. That interests people. That's our film's motif and—"

Money cut her off. "You know what the blackout did to Superman? How far over-budget that is?"

"That's because of Brando, not the city," the Actress countered. "And that's not a New York movie. They only shot a couple of weeks at the Daily News as a stand in for the Daily Planet. The rest was filmed elsewhere. Saturday Night Fever is under budget."

Money wasn't impressed. "A dancing movie with that disco bongo drum crap. It's buying a stud-bull that can't get it up. It'll disappear without anyone noticing it was ever made. Along with that Welcome Back Kotter kid they cast." He waved a dismissive hand. "The city's a pigsty." He indicated Kane. "We need a man with a gun just to go out on a boat. Are there pirates out here?"