People in Trouble Read Online Free PDF

property, so Ronald Home had extended it by filling in the water around the island, piece by piece.   Eventually a person would be able to walk to New Jersey and Ronald Home would collect the toll.   In the meantime, Peter decided, he'd better keep on top of zoning laws if he wanted a grasp on his own future.
     
    Downtown City's main drag was called Freedom Place.   That was the perfect name for this morally slipshod era-meaninglessly patriotic and so crass.   The buildings were mostly sky-rise condominiums, although there were a few newly constructed waterfront townhouses reminiscent of Henry James's Washington Square.   That way the truly wealthy could stare out at Ellis Island through their bay windows as they drank down their coffee every morning.   The only visible storefront was Chemical Bank.
     
    Peter jogged past the playground filled with black maids watching white children, past the stretch limos and sportier imports.   But when he got to Liberty Avenue he just had to stop and stare.   There were two huge brand-new office buildings of identical design with their names emblazoned in gold: New York Realty and United States Software.   These were Ronald Horne's largest and most profitable holdings, according to all the profiles and interviews Peter had seen of the billionaire.   The guy was on TV more often than Walter Cronkite.   Was Walter Cronkite still on TV?   Looking around him at all that wealth, Peter saw immediately how Downtown City was advanced capitalism's version of the company town.   It was like those snowy corners of the Northwest that he'd passed through on tour, where the Wallace Company Store was on Wallace Avenue and everyone worked at the Wallace Mine which all added up to Wallace, Idaho.   Only, in this case, Downtown City was a huge barracks for investment bankers.   Even though the complex had only recently been inaugurated, Liberty Avenue was designed to replicate the solid turn-of-the-century Rockefeller-style riches usually found on Fifth.   There was a square, preDepression, oldmoney austerity; an impenetrable magnificence.   No expense had been spared and yet there was nothing garish; imported marble, tasteful ironwork, elegant windows.   It had all the elements of a made-to-order American shrine.
     
    It is design machismo, Peter thought, deciding to share this observation with Kate later.   It is intimidation architecture.   He had to be sure to tell her that one too.
     
    Peter ran on through Battery Park past all the signs warning of rat poison and past all the homeless people avoiding the lines of tourists waiting to see the Statue of Liberty.   He sprinted through the South Street Seaport, Manhattan's only shopping mall, down around the big Pathmark where every morning black men and old Chinese women in straw hats stood together on line waiting to cash in the empty cans they had collected for the fivecent deposit.   The river smelled of abandoned cars, old fish and stale beer.   Peter turned up East River Park, under the Manhattan Bridge, and jogged slowly back over to the West Side.
     
    That morning, everything had been white; his T-shirt, his jock, shorts, socks and running shoes.   Now they were soaked in his sweat and covered in the city's filth.   He was happy.   He was a dirty, sweaty man.
     
    He stopped in a restaurant for an iced tea, and leaned back in the booth, feeling his blood pulse.   At the next table were two young men, overdressed in fashionable new wave suits and short haircuts showing clean necks with equally pristine ties.
     
    "Look, you stop talking about Rick and I'll stop talking about the goddamn cat."
     
    Peter watched them whine like two suburban matrons.   He hated to see men act like that.   No, he corrected himself, he hated when anyone acted like that.   A third man joined them then, just as overdressed and just as slight.   Peter noticed that his own chest was twice the size of theirs.
     
    "There you are, did you find