Tadek Holdings

You don't sleep. You sit on your couch with your laptop and the letter and the new square of drywall over your head, and at 4:10 a.m. you find the city's property records site, which looks like it was built in 2003 by someone who hated joy.

You type in 1129 Crane Street.

The page loads slowly, one line at a time, like it's deciding whether to tell you.

Owner: TADEK HOLDINGS LLC.

Sale date: January 9.

Sale price: a number that makes you put the laptop down on the cushion and look at it from a distance, like a dog that might bite.

You pick it back up. There's a link to the deed. You click it. A scanned PDF opens, crooked, stamped, signed. Horst Strube's spidery signature on the seller line. On the buyer line, a signature you can't read. Under it, a mailing address for the LLC.

1129 Crane Street, Unit 4B, Philadelphia PA 19125.

You read it four times. You actually put your finger on the screen.

Then you go looking for the other thing, the thing you've spent six months not thinking about. You know the date without looking it up. December 29. The day the letter from Strube's lawyer came, the one that said notice to quit and failure to pay rent even though you'd paid every cent into an escrow account because there had been no heat since Thanksgiving and the city wouldn't do anything and someone had to. You'd organized the building. You'd gone door to door with a clipboard. Strube had picked you to make an example of.

You'd had a court date. January 20.

You find the court docket. Landlord-tenant, Strube versus you. The filing is there, dated December 29. And under it, a single line.

Withdrawn by plaintiff. January 16.

You remember that day. You got a letter saying the matter was dismissed and the building had a new owner, and the heat came on that night like a miracle, and you were so tired and so relieved that you never asked a single question. You just turned the radiator up and slept for twelve hours.

Bought January 9. Withdrawn January 16.

Eleven days after Strube tried to throw you out, someone bought the building out from under him.

And that someone gets their mail in 4B.

At seven you go downstairs because you can't stand being near her door.

Mrs. Edda Bruzzone is leaning out of her second-floor window in 2A in a quilted housecoat and pearls, watering geraniums with a teapot. She's eighty-one. She's lived in this building for fifty-two years. She wears the pearls to take out the trash, and she has never, in five years, let you walk past without telling you something you didn't know.

"You look terrible, Ethan," she calls down. "Come in. I made pizzelle."

Her apartment smells like anise and lemon furniture polish. There are framed photos on every surface: weddings, christenings, a young Edda in a cinched dress beside a sewing machine. She puts a plate of thin lacy cookies in front of you and sits down across the table with her hands folded.

"Mrs. Bruzzone. When Strube sold the building. Who did he sell it to?"

She looks at you over her glasses for a long moment. "Why are you asking now?"

"Because I never asked before."

"Hm." She picks up a pizzelle and breaks it in half with great precision. "Strube was selling to the big company. The one with the glass buildings by the river. Everybody knew it. They wanted it empty. That's why he went after you first, tesoro. You were the loud one. You get rid of the loud one, the others get scared and leave." She shrugs. "I was next. Eighty-one years old, they were going to put me in a home in Delaware County."

"But they didn't buy it."

"No." She eats half the pizzelle. "Somebody else did."

"Tadek Holdings."

Something moves in her face. Very small. A woman who has kept secrets for half a century deciding whether this is one of them.

"You know who Tadek was?" she asks.

"No."

"Tadeusz Dobrowski. A carpenter in Port Richmond. Big mustache, terrible jokes, best hands in the city. He fixed the pews at St. Adalbert's for nothing when the parish was broke." She smiles a little, at something far away. "Everybody called him Tadek. His daughter too."

The room goes very quiet. A clock ticks somewhere. A bus groans past on the street.

"His daughter," you say.

Mrs. Bruzzone reaches across and pats your hand with her dry, light fingers. "Eat your cookie," she says. "Then go upstairs. And don't shout. She's had enough shouting."

You print the deed on Mrs. Bruzzone's ancient printer, which takes four minutes and sounds like it's dying, and you climb the stairs with it.

Two flights. Three. Four. Your heart is going like you ran it.

You think about the key ring. Super quit, I've got his ring. You think about how she knew where the main shutoff was, how she had a panel in your closet you'd never noticed, how she knew about the line to the roof tank and that Strube never capped it. How the rent notice knew you'd lost your job. How she had your phone number. How she looked at Hadrian on the stoop, and how Hadrian looked at the building. I'm very interested in this block.

You think about the heat coming on in January like a miracle.

It wasn't a miracle.

You knock on 4B. Not hard. Your hand doesn't seem to want to do it hard.

Footsteps. The lock turns. The door opens.

She's in the doorway in a black T-shirt and jeans, hair down, a coffee mug in one hand, and her face starts to do the thing it does when she sees you, the small dry almost-smile she always flattens before it finishes.

Then she sees the paper in your hand.

You watch her read it from three feet away. You watch her eyes go to the buyer's address. You watch the color leave her face all at once, like water out of a sink.

For a long second she doesn't say anything. Behind her the radiator ticks. Down on Crane Street a car alarm starts and stops.

You expect her to lie. You realize you're bracing for it. You'd almost prefer it.

She doesn't.

She sets the mug down on the little table by her door, very carefully, the way she'd set down a tool. She looks up at you, and her gray-green eyes are steady, and her voice is quiet and doesn't shake at all.

"Yes," Marlena says. "I own the building, Ethan. I bought it the week Strube tried to put you on the street."