Alvin hung up and stared blankly at the distant sea...
He hadn't expected that a momentary impulse to move a Roman cathedral would end up costing him the savings he'd only just gotten his hands on and hadn't even had a chance to enjoy.
But Norman Osborn had just told him that the Roman government was willing to donate a church to Hell's Kitchen, free of charge.
To showcase the artistic achievements of Roman architecture and the full splendor of Italian art during the Renaissance, the long-abandoned church, which had been listed as a historic site, would be dismantled and shipped to Hell's Kitchen, with every brick accounted for.
The main thing was that it was cheap: 200 million dollars...
That was the price the Rome city government had set to appease the public. They'd sold off a church, so they needed to make something from it and use the money to give back to the people. Otherwise, life wouldn't be easy for those politicians.
In fact, the price barely covered the cost of carefully dismantling the church. Once shipping was factored in, they'd even have to chip in a little extra.
An Italian general had even written a heartfelt apology letter about it, asking Norman Osborn's old butler, Greenwald, to make sure it reached Manhattan Axe.
Four strange visitors had approached old butler Greenwald, who was overseeing the dismantling work in Rome. In the end, that cold-faced, hard-hearted old man had seized them with the help of his assistant, "Electro" Max Dillon, and Osborn Corporation's security team...
In the end, old butler Greenwald had no idea how the negotiations had gone, but those living gargoyles had obediently been loaded onto a ship as the first "cargo" bound for New York.
Alvin didn't know that after Greenwald captured those four