Chapter 13: The Hearing

Chiara Bonetti was chief executive of Venturi Holdings for six days before she came for my pier.

The port board put Caroline Street back on the agenda for the next Tuesday.

This time it was a public hearing, with two bidders.

Venturi Holdings, represented by its new chief executive.

And the Caroline Street Co-op, represented by me.

The hearing room on the fourth floor had sixty chairs.

By nine o'clock there were a hundred and ten people in it.

The dockworkers came in their work jackets and stood three deep along the paneling.

The woman from the boatyard brought her whole shift.

My three tellers sat in the front row in their church coats.

They passed a tin of pizzelle down the row.

The steward sat beside me with the two napkins in a plastic sleeve.

There were ninety-four names on them now.

"You nervous?" he asked.

"No."

"Your knee's going like a sewing machine."

I put my hand on my knee.

Across the aisle, Chiara sat with three lawyers and a man in a quilted vest I'd never seen before.

Tullio wasn't there.

Neither was Dario.

Chiara went first.

She'd had her suit made for the job, cream wool with gold buttons.

The new slides came up.

They weren't mine anymore.

A glass tower of eighteen stories stood where the fish market should be.

Underneath it, in small letters, it said Mixed-Use Waterfront Living.

"Venturi Holdings has secured full private financing," Chiara said. "We'll bring four hundred residents and a world-class marina to Caroline Street."

"And the fish market?" the board chair asked.

"There'll be a seafood restaurant on the ground floor."

The steward made a sound.

"And the ice house?" the chair asked.

Chiara smiled.

"Our engineers have advised demolition. The structure is unsafe. New pilings will be driven to bedrock."

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