The Watchmaker’s Hand

Inside, the big man, balding in an unenthusiastic way, sloughed off his brown raincoat and hung it. Not that Rhyme cared, but Sellitto seemed to buy the ugliest garments on the rack. And one could find colors that were not muddy-camel-brown, could one not? Sellitto’s clothes were often wrinkled too, as today, a function of the man’s round physique, Rhyme guessed. Most manufacturers presumably created garments out of textiles whose waiting state was smooth.

Then again, what did Rhyme know? Thom and Sachs bought his outfits — like today’s taupe slacks, black polo shirt and forest-green cardigan. Someone once commented that what he was wearing looked comfortable. Thom had cut him a glance and Rhyme’s planned response — “Wouldn’t exactly know, now, would I?” — was replaced with an insincere smile.

Sellitto offered a brief nod to all in the room. Then a frown crossed his face as his eyes shot to an overlarge Sony TV screen mounted in the corner. “Why isn’t the news on?”

“Lon.”

“Is this the remote? No. Where’s the remote?”

Thom picked it up from a shelf and powered the unit up.

Rhyme said, “Why don’t you just tell us, instead of waiting for the anchor-bot?”

“A situation,” Sellitto said, but didn’t elaborate. He took the remote and clicked to one of the national stations. Depicted were a Breaking News bulletin, a crawl at the bottom that Rhyme was too far away to read, and video of damage at a construction site. Another message popped up. It reported E. 89th Street, New York City. This was replaced by: One dead, six injured in crane collapse.

Sellitto looked from Sachs to Rhyme. “It wasn’t an accident. Somebody did it on purpose. They’ve sent the city a list of demands. And if they don’t get what they want, they’re going to do it again in twenty-four hours.”

3

The mayor had received an email with a URL that took him to a private chat room on the anonymous message board 13Chan.

Rhyme read the words that Sellitto called up on the computer monitor in the center of the parlor.

Nearly 50 million Americans live in housing they can’t afford. 600,000 have no homes at all, and one third of those are families with children. Yet New York continues to encourage developers’ building luxury high-rises, which it has done since the early twentieth century.

The city is the largest landowner in the area. It holds 370 million square feet of property and its obsene how little of that is devouted to affordable housing. There are huge amounts of space in the city that are unused and not being planned for development, which we know because we have examined real estate records.

Our demand is this: The city will create a nonprofit corporation; to this corporation, the city will transfer the properties that are on the list below and convert them to affordable housing.

We will be monitoring progress via government records.

New York City will suffer one disaster every twenty-four hours until the corporation is created and the property is transferred.

The countdown has begun.

— The Kommunalka Project

The next page featured a list of properties throughout the five boroughs. Some seemed to be vacant land, but most were built-out structures, presumably abandoned: schools, a public housing tower, a former dock and helipad in Brooklyn that had been bought from the Defense Department, a research lab that had been owned by the National Institutes of Health and transferred to the City University of New York, warehouses that had been under lease to the state for storing census records, a former National Guard armory.

“The group’s name?” Sachs asked.

No deep digging was necessary.

A brief search revealed that the word “Kommunalka” referred to a program used once upon a time in the Soviet Union — a frenzied building of communal apartments after World War II to address a housing shortage.