She nodded and waited for them to finish.
Eventually they said they were stuffed, and Jeff was looking sleepy. They took the elevator up to the farm floor and went to the southeast corner. There they found two hotellos, a smaller one next to the larger one. Mr. Hexter came out to greet his new neighbors. The two men shook hands with him politely, but clearly they were beat.
They ducked into their hotello and looked around dumbly.
“Home sweet home,” Rosen said, and went immediately to his cot bed and lay down on his back.
Muttchopf sat on the chair by his cot. “I see our pads are gone,” he noted, gesturing at the single plastic desk.
“Ah,” Gen said. “Anything else missing?”
“Don’t know yet. We didn’t have much.”
“So,” Gen said, “you seemed to be indicating that there was something you wanted to talk to me about?”
Muttchopf nodded. “Look, the night we were snatched, Jeff here activated a covert channel he had inserted into one of the high-frequency trading cables of a company we’ve worked for a few times. He sent off some instructions. He was trying to amend the trading rules and the, the state of the world, I guess you’d say, by a direct fix. Shunt some information and money to the SEC, do some whistle-blowing. I’m not sure what else. He had a whole program, but the point bite was probably what caught someone’s attention. It coulda looked like an ordinary theft, or maybe whistle-blowing. Anyway, very soon after he pushed the button on that, as far as we can remember, we were knocked out. It was almost too fast to be a response, but then again, my memory of it is fuzzy. Maybe it was a couple hours, who can say. But for sure that same night.”
“And who were you working for when this happened?”
“No one. We lost our jobs, we were gigging.”
Gen took this in. “You weren’t working for Henry Vinson?”
Rosen looked surprised at this. “He’s my cousin. We worked for him before.”
“I know. I mean, we saw that in your records.”
Muttchopf spoke when it became clear Rosen wasn’t going to. “We did work for him, yeah. And that was where Jeff put in his tap, in his cousin’s company’s dark pool diver. And that’s also who he did a little whistle-blowing on. But we weren’t working for him that night. We were fired before that.”
“He has always been an asshole,” Rosen said bitterly.
Gen watched them closely. “When was this? And what happened?”
Muttchopf had to tell the story. Three years earlier, a stint with Adirondack, where Vinson had been CEO. Questionable work there, rigging dark pools. Later a gig for Alban Albany, Vinson’s company. It was only work for hire, a contract, but they had signed nondisclosure agreements, as always. While doing the job Jeff had found evidence of malfeasance and taken it to his cousin; they had argued. Then Jeff and Mutt had been fired. This, combined with the loss of their apartment to the watery shallows, had started them on their wandering around lower Manhattan, leading to their arrival at the Met.
“He was cheating again,” Jeff added when Mutt had finished. “Fucking sleazebag that he is.”
“What do you mean?” Gen asked.
Jeff just shook his head, too disgusted to speak.
Muttchopf’s lips were pulsing in and out as he regarded Gen, apparently assessing her level of financial acumen.
“It was a dark pool version of front-running,” he said. “Say you get an order for something at 100. Immediately you go out and buy it for yourself at 100, in the hope that that will drive up the price, meanwhile not fulfilling the first order. If the price then goes up to 103, you sell what you bought, while telling the person who made the order that you couldn’t find a buyer. If on the other hand it goes down to 98, you fulfill the order at 100. Either way you’re good. There’s no way to lose.”
“Nice,” Gen said.
“But illegal,” Jeff said, still disgusted. “I told him that and he just told me it wasn’t happening. He told me to fuck off.”
“What if you had blown the whistle on him?” Gen asked.
“I tried that before,” Jeff said. “When I was working for the Senate. No one believed me, and I couldn’t prove it.”
“It’s hard to prove,” Muttchopf said. “It’s like proving an intention. It happens in nanoseconds. You’d have to have complete records of everything, happening more than once.”
“I could prove it now,” Jeff muttered darkly.
“You could?” Gen said.
“Definitely. Most definitely. He was still doing it when we were canned. He’s been doing it for years. I took snaps.”
Gen stared at them. “So, that sounds to me like a good reason to stash you away somewhere. Do you think he did it?”
“We don’t know,” Muttchopf said. “We talked about it a lot, but we have no way of knowing. Some time had passed, and I’m not sure we really could prove it. And Jeff had just tapped into the CME with his bite, and sent a package with the bitten-off points to the SEC. So it’s complicated.”
Gen thought it over. “Okay, get some rest. We’ve got extra security on this building and on this floor, so you may notice that, but it will just be us. No one is going to be bothering you anymore.”
“Good.”
Next day Gen got a private pouch delivered to her by hand, from Goran’s office. The printed lists of letters and numbers were incomprehensible to her. It looked as if some of them were GPS positions, but other than that, nothing.
Then an hour later Goran dropped by.
“Secure room?” he asked.
“Yes. Faradayed, anyway.”
“Okay, what you’re seeing there is a bunch of remotely operated submarines that were visiting the container every twelve hours, coming over from a very busy dock in Queens. So there’s not much we can do there, without catching one of the subs to help us. There are thousands of people using that dock.”
“So we’re out of luck.”
“Looks like it. But you mentioned Pinscher Pinkerton, so I took a look through the data to see if there were any connections to your case, and found some stuff I thought you’d be interested in. They definitely do security for Alban Albany, and they do personal security for Henry Vinson too. And they’ve been tied to a number of disappearances. Also to some murders, in the opinion of the FBI. They’re on the FBI’s top ten list of the worst security companies. Which is a hard list to crack, and a bad sign.”
Gen pondered this. “Okay, thanks Goran.”
“It will be hard to prove anything about what’s already happened,” Goran said. “If it were possible, the FBI would have already stuck them. Your best bet may be to catch them in the act during the next thing they do.”
In the 1920s a plan was proposed to dam and drain the East River, from Hell Gate to the Williamsburg Bridge, afterward filling in the emptied channel and thus connecting Manhattan with Brooklyn and Queens, while also creating for development approximately two thousand acres of new real estate.
e) Charlotte
Time came for the co-op members to vote on whether to accept the bid on the building from Morningside Realty, fronting for whomever. Charlotte’s half-assed investigations had not been able to crack the façade there, and in any case, no matter who was behind it, the CC&Rs of the co-op required that a vote be taken on matters like this within ninety days of their initiation, and this was day eighty-nine, and she wanted no technical infractions to cause trouble later. She had done her best to ask around and get a sense of what people thought, but really, in a building of forty stories and over two thousand people, it wasn’t possible to catch the vibe just by nosing around. She had to trust that people valued the place as much as she did, and toss the dice as required. In essence the vote would be a poll, and if they voted to sell then she would sue them or kill herself, depending on her mood. She was not in a good mood.
Many of the building’s residents gathered in the dining hall and common room to vote, filling the rooms as they were seldom filled, even
during meal hours. Charlotte gazed at the fellow citizens of their little city-state with such trepidation and political distrust that really it seemed like a new kind of fear. Curiosity also was killing her, but there was no way of telling from their faces and manner which way they were going to vote. Most of the faces were familiar or semi- or pseudo-familiar. Her neighbors. Although they were only the ones who had shown up in person; anyone in the co-op could vote from anywhere in the world, and this crowd was probably only half the voting membership. Still, the time was now, and if people were voting in absentia they would have to have already gotten their votes in. So the tally would be finished at the end of the hour.
People said what they had to say. Building great; building not so great. Offer great; offer not so great. Four billion meant around two million per co-op member; this was a lot, or it wasn’t. Charlotte couldn’t stay focused long enough to catch more than the pro or con expressed, leaving the gist of people’s arguments to some later time when she might give a shit. She knew what she knew. Get to it for God’s sake.
So finally Mariolino called for a vote, and people clicked their clickers, which were all registered to them, and Mariolino waited until everyone indicated they had done the deed, then tapped his pad such that he had added the votes of those present to the votes of the absentees. Anyone who hadn’t voted at this point was simply not part of the decision, as long as they had a quorum. And there was going to be a quorum.
Finally Mariolino looked up at Charlotte and then the others in the room.
“The vote is against taking the offer on the building. 1,207 against, 1,093 for.”
There was a kind of double gasp from those in the room, first at the decision, then at the closeness of it. Charlotte was both relieved and worried. It had been too close. If the offer was repeated at a substantially higher amount, as often happened in uptown real estate, then it wouldn’t take many people to change their minds for the decision to shift. So it was like a stay of execution. Better than the alternative, but not exactly reassuring. In fact, the more she thought about it, the angrier she got at the half of her fellow citizens who had voted to sell. What were they thinking? Did they really imagine that money in any amount could replace what they had made here? It was as if nothing had been learned in the long years of struggle to make lower Manhattan a livable space, a city-state with a different plan. Every ideal and value seemed to melt under a drenching of money, the universal solvent. Money money money. The fake fungibility of money, the pretense that you could buy meaning, buy life.
She stood up, and Mariolino nodded at her. As chair it was okay for her to speak, to sum things up.
“Fuck money,” she said, surprising herself. “It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Because everything is not fungible to everything else. Many things can’t be bought. Money isn’t time, it isn’t security, it isn’t health. You can’t buy any of those things. You can’t buy community or a sense of home. So what can I say. I’m glad the vote went against this bid on our lives. I wish it had been much more lopsided than it was. We’ll go on from here, and I’ll be trying to convince everyone that what we’ve made here is more valuable than this monetary valuation, which amounts to a hostile takeover bid of a situation that is already as good as it can get. It’s like offering to buy reality. That’s a rip at any price. So think about that, and talk to the people around you, and the board will meet for its usual scheduled meeting next Thursday. I trust this little incident won’t be on the agenda. See you then.”
After she had spoken with a number of people who came up to commiserate or argue, Vlade approached. It was clear he wanted to talk to her in private, so she made her excuses to the last clutch of residents, who would have been happy to argue all night long, and followed Vlade to the elevators.
“What’s up?” she said when they were alone.
“Some things have come up you should know about,” Vlade said. “So now that you’re free, why don’t we go up to the farm. Most of the people involved are up there, and Amelia is just about to arrive and tie off her blimp, and she might be a good one to have in on this too.”
“In on what?”
“Come on up and see. It will take a while to explain.” He pulled a bottle of white wine from his refrigerator and held it up for her inspection. “We can also celebrate holding on to the building.”
“For now.”
“It’s always for now, right?”
She was not in the mood to indulge his Balkan clod-of-earth stoicism, and merely hmphed and followed him into the elevator.
Up they rode in silence and got off at the farm. Vlade led the way over to the hotellos and called out, “Knock knock, we’re here to visit.”
“Come on in,” said a voice.
“Too crowded in there,” Vlade replied. “Why don’t you guys come out here and we’ll drink a toast.”
“To what?” someone asked, while someone else said, “Good idea.”
Out of the tent emerged the two boys Vlade indulged around the docks, and the old man they had befriended and then rescued from his drowned squat; and then the two men who had disappeared from the farm so many weeks ago.
“Hey!” Charlotte said to the two men. “You’re back!”
Mutt and Jeff nodded.
“I’m so glad to see you!” She gave them each a brief hug. “We were worried about you! What happened?”
Mutt and Jeff shrugged.
Vlade said, “We were over in the Bronx doing some treasure hunting with the boys here, and we found these guys in a container down in the Cypress subway hole.”
Charlotte was amazed. “But didn’t you, you know—”
“Yeah,” Vlade said. “We got the water police to extricate them. They’ve been checked out at the station. Gen took care of all that. It’s been a long couple of days. But now they’re back, and I thought we should celebrate.”
“We persist in living,” Jeff said sardonically.
“Good idea,” Charlotte said, and sat down heavily on a chair by the railing. “Plus we voted to keep this building in our own hands, and won by like two votes. So lots to celebrate, yeah.”
“Come on!” Vlade objected. “There is! Plus the boys and Mr. Hexter have news too, right boys?”
The two boys nodded enthusiastically. “Big news,” Roberto declared.
They sat around the vegetable cleaning and cutting table, and Vlade uncorked the bottle and poured wine into white ceramic coffee cups. The two boys looked eagerly at him as he did this, and he regarded them squinting for a second, and then, shaking his head, poured them about a mouthful each. “Don’t start drinking now, boys. There’ll be plenty of time for that later.”
Roberto snorted at this and downed his shot like an Italian espresso. “I was a lush when I was seven,” he said. “I’m past that now. But I won’t say no to a refill.” Holding his cup out to Vlade.
“Quit it,” Vlade said.
Then while the two men were telling Charlotte their tale, Vlade went to the elevator and came back with Amelia Black. She had clearly been weeping on his shoulder, as he was frowning in a pleased way.
“Amelia’s back,” he said unnecessarily, and made introductions all around. Charlotte had only met the cloud star once before, and was content to be introduced again, as Amelia didn’t seem to recall their earlier meeting, in their conversation over the phone when Amelia had been trapped in her blimp’s closet.
“We’re celebrating,” Charlotte said grumpily.
“Well I’m not,” Amelia said, tearing up again. “They killed my bears.”
“We heard,” Vlade said.
“Your bears?” Charlotte asked.
Amelia gave her a bereft look and said, “I just mean I was the one who took them down to Antarctica. They were my friends.”
“We heard,” Vlade repeated.
“Fucking Antarctic Defense League,” Amelia said. “I mean there’s literally nothing down there but ice.”
“That’s what they like about it,”
Charlotte supposed sourly. “It’s pure. And they’re pure. Purifying the world is their idea of what they’re doing.”
Amelia was scowling. “It’s true. But I hate them. Because it was a good idea to move those bears down there. And it could be temporary, you know? A few centuries. So I want to kill them, whoever they are. And I want the bears down there.”
“You could always move them in secret,” Charlotte suggested. “You don’t have to tell the whole world about it.”
“I didn’t!” Amelia protested. “We didn’t broadcast live.”
“But you would have later.”
“Sure, but not with the location. Besides, do you really think anything happens in secret anymore?” she asked, as if Charlotte were naïve.
“Lots of things happen in secret,” Charlotte said. “Just ask Mutt and Jeff here.”
“We were held hostage in a secret location,” Mutt explained to the mystified Amelia. “Three months.”
“I almost died,” Jeff said.
“I’m sorry,” Amelia said. She drained her cup in a single swallow, like Roberto. “But now you’re back.”
“And so are you,” Vlade reminded her. “And the boys helped Mr. Hexter here out of his lodging when it was melting, over in Chelsea. So some assisted migrations have worked, you might say. And here we are. We’re all here.”
“Not my polar bears,” Amelia objected.
“Well, true. That was a disaster, for sure. A crime.”
“It was about five percent of all the polar bears left alive in the wild. And Antarctica is their big chance for survival.”