From There to There, I Want It All
A café near Harvard Square.
Steam rose from the espresso machine, carrying the buttery scent of freshly baked croissants.
Inside, clusters of graduate students sat hunched over thick textbooks, gathered in little knots at their tables.
Victor and I were seated in a corner booth.
The man we were meeting today was a lawyer named Vito.
He was Victor’s cousin and, by Wall Street standards, a fairly successful auction specialist.
Victor said with obvious confidence, “My father doesn’t usually introduce people to just anyone. If the introduction isn’t solid, all he gets for it later is complaints. So if he introduced him to us, you can trust him. I’m not just saying this because he’s my cousin—he’s genuinely good. He’s especially known for cleaning up messy auction properties with tangled rights and claims, and—”
Just then.
…Ding!
The bell on the café door rang.
A man walked in wearing a new leather jacket over a crisply pressed white shirt.
Blond hair, blue eyes, and the kind of handsome face that looked to be in its mid-thirties.
He bore a strong resemblance to Victor.
“Hyung!” Victor raised a hand.
Vito spotted our table and strode over.
“Long time no see, Victor. A little late, but congratulations on getting into Harvard. Guess that makes you my junior now, huh?”
He, too, was a Harvard graduate.
Vito pulled out the empty chair and sat down, then extended a hand to me.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Vito Hamilton. I heard about you from Victor. You’re interested in auctions?”
“I’m Lee Sanha.”
“Right, Sanha. Ask me anything—don’t hold back. What’s on your mind?”
I shook my head.
“I didn’t come here just to ask questions. I’d like to formally retain you.”
“Hm?”
“There’s a property with a very complicated chain of rights attached to it, and I need an expert to untangle the auction process.”
I pulled a thick stack of files from my briefcase and set it on the table.
Across the cover, large black letters read:
Massachusetts Western “Wishville” Abandoned Mine and Vacant Warehouse Auction Package
Wishville.
A ghost town on the western edge of Massachusetts, three hours by car from Harvard.
Right before the 1849 California Gold Rush broke, rumors spread that a gold vein had been discovered in the East as well.
Speculators swarmed in like hornets, and for a few years, gold really did come out of the ground.
That was how the town got its name: “Wishville,” a place where wishes came true.
But the vein dried up within a year or two, and all that was left were the mine shafts and the ruins of a smelter.
Over the next half century, the town slowly died.
It seemed to come back to life for a moment in the 1960s as a cheap industrial warehouse district, but when the oil shock hit in the late 1970s, the factories closed one after another.
The owners vanished as if they’d fled in the middle of the night, leaving everything in the warehouses behind.
After decades of changing hands, unpaid taxes, entangled liens, and environmental contamination piled on top of it all, the place had become land nobody wanted to touch.
Vito’s eyes stopped on the lettering on the cover.
His mouth tightened almost imperceptibly.
He picked up the file, hesitated for a moment, and then set it back down.
“…Hmm. This area’s hard to recommend. No, that’s not even right—it’s so bad I’d actively try to talk you out of it.”
Like the expert he was, he skimmed the documents and gave a cool, matter-of-fact explanation.
“This abandoned warehouse district in Wishville has been neglected for decades. When an owner can’t pay taxes, the county places a tax lien on the property. If that piles up for years, the county eventually auctions off the lien. You know that part, right?”
“Yes.”
“The problem is that other liens have stacked on top of it like layers of sediment. There are mechanic’s liens from contractors who were never paid, utility liens for unpaid bills, and even a former tenant’s claim of possession. It’s all tangled together like a spiderweb; just figuring out who actually has the valid claim can take months.”
“And interest and penalties keep accumulating the whole time.”
“Exactly. You understand.”
Vito nodded.
At that moment, the waitress set a hot espresso in front of him.
Vito gave her a wink, then continued his explanation.
“For a while, this place was notorious among New York law firms. They used to call it the ‘Curse of Wishville.’ Years ago, a mine shaft collapsed here and killed a whole group of miners. Their families are still tied up in litigation to this day. That wasn’t the end of it, either. Smelter sludge leaked out and killed a herd of cattle, so the farmers filed a joint lawsuit. It’s all ancient history by now, but nothing about this place ever got resolved cleanly. So who would want to buy it? People were tempted by the cheap price, then ran screaming once they realized what they’d gotten themselves into.”
“What about environmental liability?”
Victor cut in from the side.
Vito reached over and gave Victor’s head a rough pat.
“My little brother’s been studying. Look at you, knowing that too. Yes, that’s right. Let’s say you somehow clean up the title issues. Environmental liability still remains. Under the federal Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act—what people usually call the Superfund law—the key point is this: the moment you win the auction, you can be saddled with cleanup responsibility simply because you’re the ‘current owner,’ regardless of what happened there in the past. Soil remediation, groundwater cleanup—you can get billed for all of it. The state could send you a bill for millions of dollars. The old mines almost certainly didn’t comply with environmental regulations.”
Those were the reasons why no one should buy the abandoned warehouse district in Wishville.
But that was only the logic of people who knew nothing about the present era.
I flipped through the documents.
Flap.
Pages dense with lien lists and creditor information.
Vito looked down at them with renewed curiosity.
I tapped the first item with the tip of my pen.
“Lien number one. The creditor is Massachusetts Industrial Machinery, Inc. A mechanic’s lien filed in 1971. Principal of $120,000, and with compound interest at 8 percent a year, it’s now over $1.8 million on the books.”
“…”
“But this company was liquidated through Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1973. I checked the corporate registry. The claimant itself no longer exists. One request to the county recorder’s office to cancel the lien, and that’s the end of it.”
“…”
My pen moved to the second item.
“Number two is different. Thompson & Sons Construction. Lien filed in 1968, principal $48,000. The creditor’s still alive.”
The part I’d marked in red highlighter was the important one.
“The current owner is the founder’s grandson, David Thompson. He lives in Pittsburgh, and I’ve verified his current address and contact information. The accumulated interest is more than seven times the principal, but in cases like this, you can usually settle for about thirty percent of the original amount. From their perspective, it’s cash from a ghost claim that’s been dead for fifty years, so there’s no reason not to settle. And if we can drive the settlement amount down further, even better. That depends on the lawyer’s skill, of course...”
“Uh... that is, in fact, my specialty.”
Vito nodded slowly.
I continued.
“Numbers three through seven are all the same type as number one. Either the creditor corporation has been dissolved, or the statute of limitations has run. Only eight and eleven need negotiation. Number thirteen is the only one that’s a little tricky. It’s a secured mining-rights lien filed in 1952, and after the original creditor died, the inheritance chain got tangled twice over. The problem is, the county already struck it from the records in 1978, but it still shows as active on the deed registry.”
“So it’s an administrative error that was double-entered.”
“Yes. So all we need is a petition to the county to correct the recording error. I attached three similar precedents. Probability of success is about eighty-five percent, and the expected timeline is around four months.”
“Hmm… and environmental liability?”
Vito’s posture changed.
He uncrossed his legs and leaned in toward me.
I turned to the next page.
The old investigation records from the state environmental protection agency and a breakdown of estimated cleanup costs were neatly organized there.
On a copy of the site map, I’d marked suspected contamination zones in red pen.
“I’ve calculated the costs using a worst-case scenario. Lead and arsenic levels were already checked in the previous survey, and the groundwater contamination was only one notch below the residential threshold. Even if we include soil removal and capping, the maximum per acre is this amount. Converted against the appraisal value of the entire site, we can keep it within fifteen percent. It’s not nearly as much as it seems.”
“…”
Vito didn’t say anything for a while.
I kept going.
“As you know, environmental remediation is basically just a numbers game against the government or a civic group. The issue isn’t how dirty the land is—it’s how much of the cost you can control. Which section you buy, which section you don’t, how narrowly you define liability for only the area you purchase in the contract, how much leverage you can preserve in negotiations with the creditor group. If you draw those lines clearly, the rest stays within the range we’ve budgeted.”
A silence followed.
Vito tore his gaze away from the file and looked at me.
“At this point, maybe you should be the lawyer instead of me. Who put all this together?”
“I did. I stayed up all night doing it. My eyeballs feel like they’re about to roll out and fall into my coffee.”
I pressed hard at my eyelids, as if to keep my eyeballs from tumbling into the cup.
Vito clicked his tongue.
“I didn’t think a freshman would come in with this level of due diligence. This is professional-grade work.”
“That’s my friend, hyung.”
Victor puffed up for me instead.
Vito leaned back, his posture going a little crooked.
“In any case, I hope you find a good lawyer and make this work. As for me, I’m afraid it’s too much. Before I even get to negotiation with the creditor groups, there’s too much to clean up, and more importantly, even if I succeed, there won’t be much left over. For the lawyer or the client. Personally, I still wouldn’t recommend this property...”
“Ah, I forgot to mention the fees. I should have said so earlier. I’ll pay ten times the industry average. Fifty percent of the retainer up front, upon signing. The remaining fifty percent as a success fee.”
“I have the contract right here, client.”
No sooner had I finished speaking than Vito pulled a contract from his briefcase.
His attitude turned exceptionally polite as he slid it across the table toward me.
I smiled faintly.
“I’ll pay the success fee once every title issue is cleared and the ownership transfer is officially recorded. And if any environmental lawsuits arise, I’ll handle the first round of response entirely on my side. If I end up retaining you for a second round, that fee will, of course, be paid separately.”
“Thank you for trusting me with this. I will devote my soul to the work.”
Vito gave a military-style salute.
Seeing that, Victor shook his head.
“You really have no style, hyung. What are you doing in front of a kid younger than you?”
“Shut up, Victor. You little brat who doesn’t know how the world works. People who pay you aren’t ‘little brother’—you call them ‘client’ or ‘boss.’”
Pens moved on both sides.
Vito and I drew up the retainer agreement that way.
Even as he filled it out, Vito muttered as if still worried.
“Are you sure you don’t want to look for another property? Like I said, Wishville has such a terrible reputation. It’s a trash property, honestly. Under these terms, I could take on just about any other case. Of all places, why Wishville...”
“It’s fine. I’ve already decided.”
“Hmm.”
At my words, Vito stroked his chin.
Then he held up one finger.
“In that case, how about you visit the site before you make your final decision? You might change your mind once you actually see it.”
Watching him try so hard to keep the client from buying a toxic property made him seem like a pretty trustworthy lawyer.
* * *
Once we left the city by car, the scenery changed.
The busy shopping district and neat rows of houses disappeared, replaced by an old industrial road.
A Ford pickup truck with all four tires gone sat slumped beside a truck stop where the sign had been worn completely blank.
After three hours on the road, we reached Wishville.
Red-brown wasteland, dead cacti standing upright, tumbleweeds rolling by.
Whoooosh...
When I got out of the car, the dry wind brushed against my cheeks.
In front of us stretched the abandoned mine district.
Across the seemingly endless land, blackened smokestacks rose here and there.
The buildings that must once have been smelters had collapsed roofs and exposed skeletons, and between them ran the wrecked framework of conveyor belts like the vertebrae of some giant dinosaur.
The entrance was blocked by rusty barbed wire.
NO TRESPASSING - TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. SURVIVORS WILL BE SHOT AGAIN.
The warning on the old wooden sign was pocked with bullet holes.
Creak... creak...
Below the tilted, rusted sign, a chain someone had hung there swayed like a noose on a gallows.
Vito leaned against the car door and muttered, “It’s a lot bigger than it looked in the file photos. The atmosphere’s even more sinister, too.”
“Yeah.”
I slowly scanned the boundaries of the vast site.
I was comparing what I saw with the map in my head, figuring out where exactly the auction property began and ended.
So that’s the auction zone over there. Beyond this point, it belongs to someone else. If I want to buy up those areas too, I’ll need separate negotiations outside the auction.
Thinking this through, I vaulted over the rusty barbed wire.
Once inside, an endless warehouse complex unfolded before me.
Warehouses with slate roofs lined up like the walls of a maze.
Dry wind threaded through the narrow passages between the gray roofs.
Every warehouse door was wrapped tight in bright red rusted chains.
Beside one chain lay a metal cutter, abandoned halfway through the job—evidence that someone had tried to snap the lock and open the door, then given up.
The smell of oil, rust, and old paint hit my nose like a punch.
In the puddles gouged into the alley, iridescent oil slicks floated on the surface, and beyond them there were mounds of dried filth—whether from dogs or people, I couldn’t tell.
I examined the warehouses nearest the front.
The numbers painted on the doors had flaked almost beyond recognition, and beyond the iron doors sealed shut with chains and locks, there was no way to guess what might be inside.
Victor said, hunching his shoulders, “I looked into this a little... The police found thirteen skeletons in this abandoned warehouse maze three years ago. Some people say they were homeless drifters who got lost, others say it was a cult, and some say it was a body-dumping site. Anyway, it seems like a terrifying place. Be careful.”
“W-wait, seriously? I only looked at the paperwork. This is my first time seeing it in person... Huh? W-what’s that over there!”
Vito slapped Victor’s arm and pointed somewhere.
There, sprawled on the ground, lay a pale white skeleton.
Victor and Vito screamed at the same time.
“Aaaah!”
“It’s a pig bone. The land below here used to be a livestock barn, so nothing strange about that.”
Unlike the two drama queens, I was calmly surveying the surrounding warehouses.
I could make a rough guess about what was inside them.
Not the exact contents of each and every warehouse, of course, but at least in broad strokes.
Things left abandoned behind rust-and-dust-stained locks, untouched for the last half century.
They were waiting in this darkness for their rightful owner.
Step, step, step, step.
I stopped at the heart of the warehouse maze.
Vito, who had quietly followed behind me, asked, “So how much of this vast place are you planning to buy?”
“…”
I raised a finger and pointed off to one side.
Far to the north, I could see a rusted water tower.
“From there.”
My finger moved slowly, sweeping along the horizon.
It passed over hundreds of warehouse roofs, all the way to the very end, where a factory smokestack had half-collapsed.
“To there.”
Victor’s head followed that path across the horizon, and Vito’s mouth fell open as well.
“I’m buying the whole thing.”
I was planning to buy all 400 acres of this abandoned warehouse site—160 hectares in total.
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