Rosario Ortiz (reluciente) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2023-09-19 13:04:00 |
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Entry tags: | rosario ortiz, the moirae |
WHO Amparo Moreno Martinez, ft. various other Ortizes and Ortiz-adjacent persons
WHEN Winter 2022 to Spring 2023
WHERE Brooklyn
WHAT Amparo’s girls are so stubborn, always trying to handle things on their own. Not like Amparo.
WARNINGS None
He wants to help, Rosario says, but he’s an idiot. Thinks he gonna make up for his daddy by throwing money around. And Amparo thinks, Habla paja. Oh, the boy’s throwing plenty money around, and isn’t it strange how none of it’s landing in Rosario’s lap? She doesn’t say that, though. She sees her girls in that moment: Rosario with her strained face and rehearsed words, Carla gone rigid with panic, both of them stretched near to the point of tearing. Now, she’s gotta be the one that pulls them in close. Now’s not the time for pushing. That don’t mean she’s not going to push it. Of course, Rosario might be right about the boy: trying to make things right with his father’s money, so proud of his grand gesture he’s not thinking what she needs. But foolishness is foolishness, and good intentions don’t make it sit any lighter on her granddaughter’s tensed shoulders. Amparo means to find out exactly what’s up. Next day, Amparo lights a fat red candle, pours a generous splash of rum into a glass, and places both on her little altar before the faded picture of Saint Michael. Then she gets to work. When Rosario sets her mind to figuring something out, she draws up a list. Research is usually involved: library books and search engines, websites thick with text. She slashes through phrases with coloured highlighters and makes notes and even more lists. Amparo asks questions. Sometimes you gotta talk to a couple dozen people to get to that cousin of a brother-in-law of a friend who’s got the answer you need. Sometimes it’s just about getting in that one person’s face again and again, till their resolve cracks. Or it’s pushing through to the moment where a couple of answers or non-answers come together with a neat click. The important thing – really the only thing – is just to keep asking. And she barely even has to do that, just now: everybody wants to talk about the shiny new landlord. “Did you know he was on the news?” says Silvia. “He was the one saved that girl in a helicopter, remember, last year?” “—carried that girl right out of the fire,” says Altagracia. “Can you believe it!” “—flying a helicopter into a fire, god save us,” says Myriam. “These men, all that money and they think it makes ‘em Batman.” “—it said he’s a medical student at Columbia,” says Lito. “Ain’t that where Rosario’s at school?” The same conversation, again and again— well, except with Patricia, who heard he was a big-name actor, but it turns out she’s thinking of the one who was Captain America. Everybody wants to talk, but nobody knows anything. It takes her days to pin down Roy, the building manager, but she catches him at last trying to sneak unseen into his office at quarter to eleven on a weekday (Amparo’s been camped there with a thermos and snacks since just before eight). “Mrs Moreno,” he sighs, on the edge of exasperation (but lots of things drive Roy to exasperation; asking him to do his job, for instance), “he’s the owner of the company. I’m a long way down the totem pole. I promise you, you’ll know more when I do.” Which is pure shit; Roy only ever promises things to make you go away faster. But Amparo’s eyes catch the sheen of sweat on his thinning head and the damp patches at his pits, and she’s gotta wonder if he’s under the pump from more than just gossip-hungry tenants. Usually Nat Weber can be found holding court in her shop, seated behind the counter in an armchair of threadbare olive velvet that years ago was declared too comfortable, ahem, too damaged to sell. Today it’s occupied by Chloe, her granddaughter. Nice girl, Amparo’s always thought. Much too young to be spending so much time cooped up in an old shop with a bunch of old people. Amparo has been nudging Rosario for years to make friends, but Rosario is so stubborn the girl would argue with her lungs if they reminded her to breathe. Chloe’s perched on the edge of the armchair, laptop open in front of her. School, Amparo supposes, thinking of her own granddaughter. Then she thinks of something else. “Excuse me, Chloe? Do you know how to find somebody on the internet?” Amparo fancies she’s pretty good at the internet. She has the distinction of having been kicked out of multiple Facebook groups (unjustly, she might add). She couldn’t tell you what a meme is, but she knows it when she sees it. But her usual blunt-force approach to Google hasn’t yielded anything on Archer Goldenhawk, the boy or the father, and Chloe is young, which is as good as a qualification usually. The girl smiles. “You’re trying to find someone?” “Archer Goldenhawk.” Chloe’s eyes widen (and upstairs, her finger-pads tracing spider-delicate over the threads of a loom, the woman Amparo knows as Lena momentarily stills) (and out back with the latest haul of donations, sorting once-loved keepsakes into piles of sellable and not, into valuable and not, slicing them down the middle as unsentimental as a pair of shears, the woman Amparo knows as Nat twists the corner of her mouth) and Amparo, misunderstanding the girl’s expression, says, “I know. Stupid name. I need to find out about him, anything there is.” “O— oh. Well, I could take a look…?” Chloe is indeed better at the internet than Amparo, but she doesn’t find a whole lot more. There are some Instantgram pictures, some Tick Tock videos, showing a golden-haired boy entangled with one girl or another, or in the centre of a crush of whooping teenagers. There are the same nothing-much news stories Amparo’s already seen. “I’m sorry,” says Chloe. “That’s everything I can think of.” Apologetic and uncertain. Amparo reassures her: “Don’t worry. You given me some ideas, that’s helpful.” Chloe looks worried still, and the worry makes her look older than her years, makes her clear lake-blue eyes seem unfathomably deep. Amparo resolves to give Rosario another nudge. The girl really ought to be spending more time with kids her own age. Jude, the new librarian at Bushwick Library, has tattooed hands and dark stubble and hair that just brushes their broad shoulders. Them, because they have pronouns, which is something Amparo still doesn’t really understand, but she’s been on the receiving end of enough wilful mispronunciations to know you don’t have to understand to show respect, so she dutifully commits the shiny they/them pin on their lanyard to memory and then spends the rest of the conversation absently-minded thinking of them as a clever young man. “Well, for company holdings, first place I’d look is the SEC,” Jude says, scratching their chin thoughtfully when she explains what she’s looking for. “Let’s see what we can find.” Sometimes it’s just about asking the right person. Before long, they’re scrolling through pages of Orion Property Group’s company filings. Under its list of assets are a half dozen Manhattan addresses. Jude punches each one into Google for her, bringing up real estate listings for a luxury condominium in Gramercy Park, sleek and modern, a mosaic in gold-mirrored glass; a historic town house in NoHo resplendent in Grecian columns and meanders; a refurbished art deco building in the Theatre District. The numbers beside each listing have a lot of zeroes. Amparo frowns. “What about Brooklyn? There should be a Brooklyn, should be one in Bushwick.” And that gets a sidelong look from Jude. “You think these people are moving in on Bushwick?” So Amparo explains. She leaves out the family part; a big property investor from the City buying up their building and straightaway dropping the rent is suspicious on its own. Jude’s expression sharpens as she speaks, polite interest gaining a new edge. “Okay. These filings are only a couple weeks old, could be that’s why your building’s not on there. But they have to file quarterly, so we can keep checking back. And, hey, there’s another thing we could try…” Virgil twists in his chair. “Amparo, I’m not a property lawyer. I do immigration. And even if I was, I don’t know what you want me to do. Guy’s not doing anything illegal, is he?” Amparo’s been waiting for this. With a triumphant flourish, she slaps the papers down on the desk between them. Virgil draws them towards him, brow furrowing, and she manages all of three seconds’ silence while he scans the top page before her patience cracks. “It’s not just our building, see? This proves it. This here is some real shit.” It was Jude who figured it out. Amparo had been waiting on their call, waiting on the quarterly report that would prove in black and white that Rosario’s brother had made himself her landlord. Jude had found much more than that. “It’s the other filings that tell the whole story,” they explained, all urgent excitement. “You know we were talking ‘bout shell companies? Well, I’ve been digging some more and…” And it turns out Goldenhawk owns a lot of them. Shells inside of shells, dozens of them. Just finding them took a lot of grunt work, but once Jude realised their guy was an ancient Greek aficionado, they were able to narrow down their search. Which is how they learned that Goldenhawk’s been busy as well, these last couple months. On Wilson Ave, only two block down from their home, another apartment building’s been quietly bought by Boedromios Holdings. A little further down on Linden, Antares Property Holdings has acquired two walk-ups, and Akestor Property Group’s snagged a place on Evergreen. This ain’t just helping: the boy is moving in. Virgil makes a strangled noise in his throat. “That’s… some shit, yeah,” he concedes. “But it’s regular gentrifier shit, Amparo, it’s not against the law.” Amparo counters with an eyebrow. “It’s still shit.” Virgil is six foot two in his socks, big and broad, and also, you know, nearly fifteen years under his belt in Legal Aid, but The Eyebrow never fails to make him feel like a misbehaving boy in a bad necktie. (Which is ridiculous because he’s wearing his Avatar: The Last Airbender tie, which is some top-shelf tie game.) He shuffles the pages and sighs. “I guess… it can’t hurt to keep an eye on the situation.” “I’ll tell you what’s really creepy,” says Jude, some months later. “These company names? I ran them through a translator, you know, just to see if there was any common thread. So— Boedromios, rescuer. Agyieus, protector of the streets. Akestor, saviour. It’s giving serious paternalism.” They’re not wrong. That thought sticks in Amparo’s mind like gum to the bottom of a shoe, bothering at her the entire bus ride home. Can you read too much into a name? Perhaps. But somebody chose them. And they’re up to three mid-rises, three walk-ups, a shop and a townhouse, and that, to Amparo, seems like a lot of real estate investment for a boy not much past twenty. For the first time, she wonders if she’s been pinning all this on the wrong Goldenhawk. Some things stall, and other things take precedence. The City pulls a dirty one, tries to rip the community garden from under them, and somebody’s gotta take a stand against that. Sarah Ramos’ sister got caught with a purse full of pills, stupid girl, and now Sarah’s got three nephews to feed along with her own two, and ain’t right she should have to take that on alone. Then one evening, Camino comes home in a flush of excitement, ‘cause she’s finally found a place, she and Tanisha— the girls’ve been apartment hunting for months and just about despairing of finding anything they can afford outside of the Hole, and then as if by a twist of fate something lands in their lap and it’s right here in Bushwick. Walking distance, even. Camino is elated. Amparo is suspicious. She’s right to be. It only takes a single phone call, a few moments’ distracted muttering down the line, then Jude’s voice: “Yeah, it’s here. Patroios Property Holdings, acquired it in December.” Patroios: she can guess at what that one means. He must think they’re total fools. Maybe she has been. I don’t even have his number, Carla had mumbled all those years ago, eyes wide and dark and unable to meet Amparo’s. A child still, afraid, turning to her mother for direction. And Amparo had said, Probably that’s for the best. Well, not any more, it’s not. Amparo decides it then and there. It’s time she found that phone number. And then she’s gonna do what she ought to have done twenty-some years ago and give Archer Goldenhawk the Second a solid piece of her mind. |