“A thread through the maze,” she would reply. “The maze was always four dimensions.”
“But think six dimensions,” Sean would suggest.
And she would shake her head. “There’s only four dimensions, youth. Try to keep your head on.”
And he would shake his head. So old school! his look would say. Only four dimensions! When there are clearly six! Which Gen would refuse to ask him about. She didn’t want those two extra dimensions, so clearly fictional, explained to her. Let the youth navigate that realm.
Now she asked them what they had managed to dig up on the black sheep front. The two cousins apparently had lived in the same house for a time, after Jeff’s childhood home got inundated in the Second Pulse. This might have led to fraternal feelings or to lifelong hatred. Fifty-fifty on that, but only after starting with another fifty-fifty split, as to whether the cohabitation had produced strong emotions or complete indifference. But even that suggested a twenty-five percent chance that later on Vinson would be keeping tabs on his black sheep coder cuz.
And yet he had hired him twice for jobs. One of these hires, well after Rosen had recused himself while Vinson was being investigated. Keep your friends close, your enemies closer? Keep the black sheep in the pen? Then comes a flash bite on the CME. Trust among traders easy to lose, hard to regain. So, put the black sheep out to pasture, somewhere far away.
“Too many theories, not enough data,” she said, at which observation her assistants looked relieved. But she had a sense that the explanation might be somewhere on the whiteboard, no matter Olmstead’s objections. Garbled no doubt, but the players were there. Maybe. If it was a case that made sense; sometimes they just didn’t. “See if you can crack Morningside Realty’s confidentiality.”
Olmstead wrinkled his nose. “Hard without a warrant.”
“We won’t get one. See if you can suborn someone there.”
Her assistants snorted in tandem.
“Come on,” she protested. “Are you NYPD or not?”
They looked at her like they didn’t even know what that meant. She sniffed at them. Might have to find out some of these things by herself, on the side. Use her Bacino Irregulars. Or her friends in the feds. Or both. People still living in 3-D.
Off the two youngsters went. Soon it would be lunchtime. Her to-do list was barely dented. Eat at the desk, as so often.
Then she worked. Departmental biz. Wasted hours. Then it was almost four, and she decided it would indeed be good to visit her friends at Mezzrow’s. Time to go native, dive back down into the deep depths of home. For she too had once been the black sheep of a family.
Lieutenant Claire joined her down on the narrow long dock outside their building on Twenty-first, and they waited for Sergeant Fripp to show up in his cruiser, a narrow hydrofoil, standard now as the water police’s usual speedster.
“You really want to go there again?” Fripp asked as they boarded. White teeth in black beard; Ezra Fripp liked going to Mezzrow’s, or anywhere else that put him on or under the water, poking at the chaos.
Gen’s cynicism about the amphibious and their speakeasies and bathhouses had hardened in recent years; too many things had changed, too many crimes committed, but she could reach down to that kernel of nostalgia for the old days if she tried hard enough. “Yes,” she told Fripp.
Fripp purred up Second to Thirty-third, turned west, and glided to a halt near the old subway station. The intersections were crowded with boats following the old adage take turns when taking turns. The narrow dock on the west side was full, but police had some of its ancient prerogatives still, and Ezra nosed in without being too obnoxious about it, but without wasting too much time either. He tied off the painter to a dock cleat and they hopped up, leaving the speedster guarded by a dronecop.
On the north end of the dock they dropped down stairs in a big tilted graphenated tube that descended at a forty-five-degree angle into the submarine warren that had once been a subway station. The speakeasy door at the bottom of the stairs was in the classic style, and Gen rapped on it using the old code for the submarine gang she had been part of over in Hoboken, thirty years before. An eye appeared in the Judas window, and after a moment the door opened and they were escorted in.
“Ellie is expecting me,” Gen said to the doorman, which was not true except in the sense that it was permanently true. She and Ellie went back forever.
Soon Ellie showed up and waved them into a back room, which was dominated by an ancient but immaculate pool table, with booths against the walls. Lights were dim, booths were empty. It was early for Ellie’s place.
“Have a seat,” Ellie said. “What brings you here? Want anything?”
“Water,” Gen said, to be annoying. Ezra and Claire asked about using the pool table, and when Ellie nodded they set to, clacking balls around the table without much sign of dropping them in pockets. Ellie sat down at her corner table and Gen joined her.
“So,” Ellie said.
She was still very stylish. Swedish, and so white-blond she was rumored to be albino, which many submarine people of color found funny, in the redundant or how-can-you-tell category of jokes. Five nine, 120 pounds, well distributed what little there was of her. Glamorous. She stretched her fingers on the table as if to display them. Always she made an attempt to overawe Gen with her etched pale beauty, and Gen had to allow that it took an effort to keep this from working. Of course it was easy to stay slim on the little thread of fentanyl Ellie was on, easy to stay relaxed. Gen knew all that and yet it was still hard not to feel a little frumpy. Like a cop. Like a big black female cop wedded to her job. Ebony and ivory, chess queens black and white, the supermodel and the glump, the capo and the copette, on and on it went. But mainly old friends gone separate ways.
That was the way it had been for many years. And knowing Ellie was here meant Gen knew what was going on underwater. She knew that the dealing that got done here was small time, like regular businesses, at least compared to what could have been. Taking care of the amphibious ones meant knowing who was bringing in what to where, and developing relationships, and using the relationships when possible. This was true for both of them.
“I heard there’s bad stuff getting sold in Kips Bay,” Gen said, “and I came over to check it out. It didn’t seem like you. I didn’t believe it.”
Ellie frowned. This was too direct, as Gen well knew. But it was time to forgo gossip about new submarine fashions and such.
Ellie finished pouting at this brushback fastball, then said, “I know what you mean, Gen, but it isn’t any of us. You know I wouldn’t allow that.”
“So who is it?”
Ellie shrugged, looked around the room. The room was in a Faraday box with a magnetic charge that would scramble any recorders, and Gen didn’t have one anyway. No recorder, no body cam, it was all part of the protocol between them. Talk here rather than down at the station, et cetera. Gen nodded to confirm this, and Ellie leaned forward and said, “There’s a group from uptown putting this shit out, I think to try to wreck the feel down here. It’s so stupid I think it must be on purpose. We lost someone last week, so now I’ve pulled everyone in and put them on alert, keep an eye out for strangers and the like.”
“Who is it?”
“I still don’t know, and it’s interesting how hard it is to find out. No one underwater will say anything about it. I think they’re feeling pressure, and they don’t want to be unfriendly, but they don’t want to help either. So I’ll have to deal with that later, but meanwhile I’ve got a friend up in the Cloisters who says she heard someone up there mention that we’re ripe.”
“Ripe?”
“Ripe for development.”
“Real estate?” Gen said.
“As always, right? I mean, when is it not real estate?”
“But in the intertidal?”
“The intertidal is ripe. That’s what they’re saying. It’s got problems, it’s been a mess, but people have dealt with it, and now we’v
e got it going. So now uptown wants to take it over again. It’s like, renovation’s over, time to flip.”
“But you’ve got to own before you can sell.”
“Right.”
“But what about the legal questions? No one is supposed to be able to own the intertidal.”
“Possession is nine tenths of the law, right? Then again the buying hasn’t been going that well, and maybe that’s part of it. There’s been a lot of resistance. Hardly anyone wants to sell to these assholes, even at prices you’d think would work. A lot of money is being offered. I heard ten thousand a square foot, for some buildings. But, you know. If you like the water, you can only get that in the water. It doesn’t matter how much money is offered to limpets like that. So the assholes offer more, until it’s crazy time, and then you can see that the offers are a threat, right? Like, take our mad money and make a bundle, or else. If you don’t, then it’s your fault. You’re not playing the game. Bad things can happen to you if you don’t play the game, and it’s your fault for not playing.”
“This is happening to you,” Gen said.
“Sure it is. It’s happening to everyone in the drink. New York is New York, Gen. People want this place, drowned or not.”
“Mildew,” Gen suggested.
“Venice has mildew, and people still want Venice. And this is the SuperVenice.”
“So they’re selling defective goods to make you look bad?”
“That’s what it looks like to me. It’s not my friends doing it, that’s for sure. We take good care of our own. Everything people need has been tested, and most of it is made or grown underwater. I know I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know, right?”
Gen nodded. “That’s why I came by to ask you what was up. It was weird.”
“It is weird.”
They sat there looking at each other. Two powerful figures in lower Manhattan. But no one was capable of withstanding pressure from uptown on their own. It took a team effort. This was the look on Ellie’s fashionable face, now looking kind of drawn and strung out. Gen could only nod.
Ellie smiled a tight smile. “When we heard you were coming by, there were those who wanted me to ask you if you’d go in the ring again. Bets are being laid already.”
Gen shook her head. “I’ve retired, you know that. I’m too old.”
Ellie’s smile got a little friendlier. “So some bets have already lost.”
“And some have won. I’ll come watch with you. Always enjoy seeing a match or two.”
“Okay, better than nothing. They’ll enjoy having the champ on hand.”
“The old champ.”
“Please quit reminding me. I’m older than you.”
“By a month, right?”
“That’s right.” Ellie got up and went to the door, spoke to someone.
Gen gestured at Ezra and Claire, still knocking around the same number of balls on the table. They had not misspent their youths, that was clear. Screen kids for sure. Could not handle the third dimension. Shit at Ping-Pong too, Gen presumed. “You’ve got to attend to the sixth dimension,” she told them, but that was Sean’s thing, and they didn’t get it.
“I’m going to watch some water sumo,” Gen told them. “Come along and keep an eye on the audience in there. Don’t get distracted. See if you see anyone watching Ellie during the match, watching her rather than the action in the pool.”
They nodded.
Ellie returned and led them along a long hallway, to a stairwell leading down. They took flights of these stairs down until they were far under the city streets, maybe seventy feet below low tide, in an aerated portion of old subway tunnel. Old tunnel walls and bulkheads, heavily coated with diamond spray, held out the subterranean waters. These chambers were called diamond balloons or diamond caves and could be quite extensive. The diamond sheeting was all that was keeping them dry, that and the hard old bedrock of the island itself.
They came into a big bright chamber that had a gleaming round turquoise pool cut down into its center, lighting the room like a blue lava lamp. A New York bathhouse, sure; another nostalgia trip, like the speakeasy. Same idea. The main pool was a hot tub in Icelandic blue lagoon style, with different parts of it bubbling at different temperatures. A place for people to hang out in hot water and drink and talk. All very familiar to Gen. She had spent a lot of hours in rings like this one, but it had been so long ago that she had outlived nostalgia itself, it seemed, and felt no desire to get back in the ring. Her knees ached at the thought, and sometimes she had trouble catching her breath even in the open air. No, it was a kids’ game, as so many of them were.
A crowd was arriving from other rooms and other pools, many of them in bathing attire or nonattire, and wet already. Gen sat by Ellie and enjoyed the vibe, the friendly hellos, “Oh she’s back,” “Coming back to Mama,” that kind of thing.
“Please, Gen-gen, get back in!”
“No way,” she said. “Show me what you got.”
“I’m taking even money! Even money here!”
“They’ll be here in a second,” Ellie said to Gen.
Gen nodded. “Anyone I know?”
“I doubt it. Youngsters. Ginger and Diane.”
“Okay fine. But look, afterward it’ll get all social, and we won’t want to go back to business. But I want you to find out who’s horning in on you, okay?”
“I’m trying,” Ellie complained. “I’d like to know myself.”
“So, maybe keep an eye out for a security company called Pinscher Pinkerton.”
Ellie’s eyebrows rose. “You think?”
“I wonder.”
“That’s interesting, because someone else was talking about them.”
“That is interesting. Look to it.”
Then two young women came in, already wet in two-piece bathing suits, red and blue. Both women substantial and curvy, and the crowd oohed and ahhed. People were coming in from other rooms, and this one quickly filled.
The wrestlers entered the central ring in the pool. They were nice and friendly as they shook hands. The crowd settled down around the pool, in short risers and just sitting or standing on the decks. Many were of indeterminate gender, wearing flamboyant water dress or undress. Lots of intergender in the intertidal; inter as such was a big thing now, amphibiguity a definite style, which like all styles liked to see and be seen. The big low chamber, now lit entirely by the pool lights, was in fact turning into quite a delanyden, such that it was best not to look too closely at what was happening in the corners, but everyone was really friendly. This was the norm at Ellie’s or in any speakeasy bathhouse, so Gen found it all familiar and reassuring. Ezra and Claire were looking a little round-eyed; they were clearly not denizens of the deep like Gen had once been. But they were well positioned to scan the crowd to see if Ellie was being watched.
The ref asked if Gen would preside. This was mostly a ceremonial position, as the tosses were ultimately determined by laser and camera, so she agreed, and stood to a little smattering of applause and hooting. She spanked the water to warn the two wrestlers it was time. They ducked their heads under and came up looking gorgeous. The Diane looked like a shot-putter, brown-skinned and solid; the Ginger looked more Mediterranean and seemed like a water polo player. In many respects water sumo resembled the legwork part of water polo, although in truth it was considerably less vicious than that.
They met in the center of the pool and waited for the cheers and encouragements to subside. Gen took the wand from Cy, the usual ref, who was wearing a red eyepatch tonight, and clicked it to turn on the light. A cylinder of laser red shot from the ceiling straight into the pool, tangible in both the humid air and the water, very vividly marking a red circle on the floor of the pool. This lit circle and cylinder was the sumo line; whoever got shoved completely outside it lost. A simple old game, imported from Japan to the bathhouses of New York many decades before. Gen had been a champion in her time, and she felt a little ghost of the buzz as she wat
ched the two wrestlers settle in.
She said to them, “No poking or pinching or punching or grabbing the face, ladies! You know the rules, keep it sumo clean so I don’t have to call you on anything. We’ll go three tosses to the win, and if it goes to la belle, I’ll remind you of that.”
The two women stood about chest deep in water. Four feet was still standard. Gen said, “Go!” and they approached each other, shook hands, moved back. Then Ginger ducked down, and Diane did the same.
In some forms of the game you had to keep your head above water, but full immersion had become standard back in Gen’s time, so now these two had sucked air and were down there looking at each other underwater. A whiff of heated chlorine in the air, people quiet and watching the action below. Like a visit to an aquarium.
The Ginger made the first attack, and Diane planted her feet on the pool floor and leaned into it. Young Ginger bounced right off her, and Diane went after her; Ginger planted her feet to counterpush, so Diane twisted aside and took her opponent’s momentum and pulled her by the waist and butt. Ginger was thrown out of the circle, and Gen called the toss to cheers. One throw.
After that the two settled in and worked harder. Ginger kept her head above water, Diane did the same. They mirrored each other for a good long while, trying to frustrate each other. But being one throw down, Ginger had gotten conservative, and she appeared to be faster. In the end it was Diane who got impatient first, and with a quick wrist grab and pull Ginger got her moving and then escorted her out by a kick to the butt. People loved to see women fight, Gen liked it herself. Now it was one to one, and the smaller one faster than the heavier one. Of course that was the way it would be.
So at that point the Diane resorted to the frog. This was what Gen would have done in her own good youth. Go to the bottom and shove around down there, wedge under the other and push up as well as out. Very effective if you could hold your breath long enough, and keep your balance when frogged in a low crouch. Which this Diane could do. She managed to grab the Ginger by the ankles and spin her like a discus out of the circle.