AllFreeNovel
Share Us
ChapterTen
Jonathan
I’m on a flight back home from Paris, flying over the Atlantic, when I get the news that my firm won the contract to restore the Vanderbilt Belle Haven Estate.
The rest of first class sleeps as my inbox floods with emails. I’m sure my phone would be ringing off the hook as well if I didn’t have it on airplane mode.
Emails from my friends:Congratulations!
From the Banks and Barclay marketing department:Interview request. Please send your availability.
From Christopher:Get the fuck home!
The contract is a big deal. We were up against a dozen other firms from around the world, bigger firms, even, and I know for a fact we weren’t rock bottom in terms of pricing. Our work speaks for itself, though. I’m not surprised we landed the gig.
What initial excitement I felt gets shoved aside almost immediately by big-picture issues that need my attention right away.
I grab my legal pad and impatiently bite off the cap of my pen before starting to scribble away on a to-do list. When we first landed the job consulting for the restoration work for Notre-Dame, we had to hire twenty new employees to cover the workload. We outgrew our old office space and expanded into a building in downtown Boston that Banks and Barclay had restored a few years prior. The top two floors were up for lease, and rather than allow some finance firm to swoop in and put their name on the side of the building, we put ours there instead. Fortunately, it’s big enough to handle this next round of expansion. There’s no way around it; we’ll need at least ten new hires, and that’s only counting in-office personnel. On site, we’ll need a slew of tradesmen: iron workers, stonemasons, painters, carpenters—each of them trained in the art of historical restoration.
“Can I get you anything, sir?”
I look up at the flight attendant, only belatedly realizing I can’t answer her with my pen cap still wedged between my teeth.
I remove it and shake my head. “I’m fine.”
She has a hard time dragging her attention away from my mouth as she continues, “No champagne to accompany your late night?”
“I’m not really a champagne kind of guy.”
I thought this was a polite enough sendoff, but turns out it was too polite.
She doesn’t leave, instead wedging herself in the doorway of my first-class suite and trying a different tactic.
“You’re the only one still awake, you know. Normally, if all the guests are sleeping, we’re allowed to go on break…”
Her tone doesn’t hold any hint of annoyance about still having to be up on her feet. I think maybe she’s just trying to let me know we could have some privacy if I wanted it.
If I weren’t so busy, would I take her up on her offer?
No.
“By all means, take your break. I don’t need anything.”
I’ve had dinner and a drink; now I want six uninterrupted hours of silence to work.
Her smile tightens as she nods.
“If you need anything at all, don’t hesitate to ring me.”
She points toward the intercom button beside my chair, but I’ve already refocused my attention down on my notes.
Tradesmen who’ve trained in this field are hard to come by. Any carpenter can go into a modern new-build project and throw up some crown molding and built-in bookshelves. What we do takes a dedicated, trained hand, someone fluent in the ways of old masters.
For past projects, we’ve brought people in from Florence, workers whose families have handed down knowledge in these niche fields for generations. I’ll have to consult with Christopher and see what he thinks is required. We might be able to train guys and avoid the expense depending on the timeline we ultimately negotiate.
I still haven’t toured the Vanderbilt estate myself. I don’t know what we’re up against.
Christopher has been keeping an eye on the project over the last few weeks. I sat in on meetings and gave my two cents as much as I could, but I’ve been majorly hands off owing to the fact that work has kept me in Paris for so much of the last year.
