“Just do it again,” Charlotte suggested again. “Do it in secret.”
Protecting endangered species in secret was a paradigm buster that left Amelia obviously conflicted, or even confused. But at least she was no longer on the verge of weeping. In fact she was refilling her cup.
“It’s a good idea,” Vlade said in transition, “but for now, the boys and Mr. Hexter and I have some news too.”
Charlotte nodded, relieved at the change of subject. She knew Vlade was very fond of their resident cloud star, but to Charlotte she seemed just as spacey and superficial as she did on her program, not that Charlotte had ever watched more than ten minutes of it. Naked starlets wrestling wolf pups: no. “So what’s up?” she said. “We need something better to celebrate than kidnapping, murdered bears, and almost selling our home to some fucking gentrifiers.”
“Did that happen?” Amelia cried.
“It did,” Charlotte said grimly.
“But, on the other hand,” Vlade weighed in heavily, “we didn’t take the offer. And the boys here used Mr. Hexter’s awesome historical research to locate the wreck of the HMS Hussar.”
“Which means what?” Charlotte asked.
The boys were delighted at her ignorance and quickly told her the story. British treasure ship, sunk in Hell Gate, searched for ever since, but only Mr. Hexter had pinned the spot where it went down, under a drowned parking lot in the Bronx. And the boys had dived it using their own diving bell (“Wait, what?” Charlotte said), and there it was, right where predicted, but down under twenty feet of mud and landfill, an unwieldy goo, impossible for the boys to dig up on their own, so Vlade had enlisted the help of his friends Idelba and Thabo, who ran a huge, huge, gigantic sand dredge out at Coney Island, they were moving Coney Island’s beach up to the new shoreline twenty blocks north, and for them digging up the Hussar’s treasure chest (actual treasure chests, small but insanely heavy) was nothing, it was toothpick work, and now Idelba and Thabo were part of their consortium, joining the people right here around this table.
“Gold?” Charlotte and Amelia said together.
Mr. Hexter and the boys explained the story of the British army’s adherence to the gold standard, mark of an earlier age’s concept of money. Four million dollars in gold. In 1780 dollars. Meaning that now, using the median of about twenty inflation calculators Mr. Hexter had found, they were sitting on about four billion dollars.
“Aren’t there laws about salvaging sunken treasure?” Charlotte asked.
There were. But the flood had created so many legal snarls around the intertidal that the laws were no longer so clear as they had been.
“You ignored the laws,” Charlotte said.
“We didn’t tell anyone,” Vlade clarified. “So far. And Idelba has a salvage license. But that gold was lost. It was never going to be found. So, you know. If we melted the coins down, it would just be gold bars.”
“But wait. These gold coins, aren’t they more valuable historically than just plain gold would be? And the ship too. Aren’t they archaeological artifacts, part of the city’s history and all?”
“The ship was smooshed,” Roberto said. “It was all gooed up in the gunk, all rotted and everything.”
“But the chests, and the coins?”
“They found a cannon of the Hussar a long time ago,” Vlade said. “It was even still loaded, they had to cut the cannonball out of the rust and get the gunpowder out of it so it wouldn’t blow up. It’s somewhere in Central Park.”
“So since we’ve got that we don’t need the gold coins, is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes.”
Charlotte shook her head. “I can’t believe you guys.”
“Well,” Vlade said, “look at it this way. How much was that bid on the building here? Four billion, right? Four point one billion dollars, didn’t you say?”
“Hmm,” Charlotte said.
“We could outbid them.”
“But it’s already our building.”
“You know what I mean. We could afford to fend them off.”
“True.” Charlotte thought it over. “I don’t know. It still strikes me as a problem. I’d be very interested to hear what Inspector Gen would say about it. About what we should do with it to normalize it, so to speak. To monetize it.”
The others said nothing to this. Obviously consulting a police inspector about the matter did not appeal to them. On the other hand, Inspector Gen was a resident and a known presence. Solid; polite; reassuring; a straight shooter. A bit scary, in fact, and now in more ways than one.
“Come on,” Charlotte said. “She would keep it to herself.”
“Would she?” Vlade asked.
“I think so.”
Vlade shrugged, looked around at the others. The boys were round-eyed with consternation, Mr. Hexter cross-eyed, Mutt and Jeff not yet returned to this planet, Amelia busy leaving it by way of the wine. Charlotte pinged Gen, found she was down in her room. “Gen, could you come up to the farm and give us an opinion on a city issue?”
A few minutes later, Inspector Gen Octaviasdottir was standing there before them, tall and massive in the dark, hard to see well. They invited her to sit down, and then hesitantly, as if it were some kind of hypothetical case, Vlade and Mr. Hexter explained about the recovery of the Hussar’s gold. Gen watched them politely as they spoke.
“So,” Charlotte said at the end of their recitation, “what do you think we should do about it?”
Gen continued to look at them, blinking as she regarded them each in turn. “You’re asking me?”
“Yes. Obviously. As I just said.”
Gen shrugged. “I’d keep it. Melt the coins down, sell the gold as needed.”
Charlotte stared at her. “You would do that?”
“Yes. Obviously. As I just said.” Slightly slow and pointed with that last sentence, and including a glance at Charlotte.
“Sorry,” Charlotte said. “It’s been a long day. But, I mean—melt the coins?”
“Yes.”
“But what about the …”
“What about the what?”
“What about the law?” Roberto said. “You’re police!”
Gen shrugged. “I hope you know that the New York Police Department is about more than making lawyers rich.” She gestured to Amelia to pour her a cup of wine. “Look, if you go public it will be big news for a week, and then in the courts for ten years, and at the end of that time, whatever the gold was worth will belong to the lawyers. Charlotte, you’re a lawyer, you know what I’m saying.”
“True.”
“So why? Just keep it. You could use it to set up a foundation or whatever. Buy this building or whatever.”
“We already own the building,” Charlotte complained, still aggrieved by the night’s vote.
“Whatever. Do some good with it. If it’s really four billion, you should be able to do something.”
“Four billion dollars is just the start of it,” Jeff muttered darkly.
“What do you mean?” Charlotte asked.
“Leverage. Monetize the gold, use it as collateral, leverage it like a hedge fund would, those fuckers are leveraged out a hundred times what they start with.”
“Sounds dangerous,” Vlade said.
“It is. They don’t give a shit.”
“I hate that kind of thing,” Charlotte said.
“Of course you do. You’re a sensible person. But when you’re fighting the devil, sometimes you gotta use the devil’s weapons.”
“There’s finance people in the building,” Vlade said. “The guy that keeps saving the boys, he’s kind of a jerk, but he does finance.”
Charlotte frowned. “Franklin Garr? I like him.”
Vlade rolled his eyes at her just like Larry used to back in the day. “If you say so. Anyway he lives here. And he did pull these boys out of the drink a couple of times. We could maybe talk it over with him as a hypothetical situation, see how he seems about it.”
“That would be interesting,” Charlotte allowed. “Although I’m still not sure that you guys should be hiding this gold you found.”
They all regarded her. Gen was shaking her head and helping Amelia open a second bottle. Charlotte sighed and gave up on that issue. To her the rule of law was the last thread holding them all from a fatal plunge into the abyss of anarchy and madness. But there was their Inspector Gen, famous policewoman, a power in the city, a pillar of the SuperVenice, happily ignoring this bad fate by conferring with Amelia about vintages of vinho verde or some such nonsense.
“What do you think?” Charlotte asked Mutt and Jeff.
Mutt waggled a hand. “Anyone could monetize that gold for you. The hard part is figuring out what to do with it.”
“And staying out of their clutches,” Jeff muttered.
“They being?”
Jeff and Mutt looked at each other. They were like feral twins at this point, Charlotte thought. Dragged out of the woods with their own private language, semi-telepathic and probably barking mad.
“The system,” Mutt suggested.
“Capital,” Jeff clarified. “It will always win. It will eat your brain.”
“Not my brain,” Charlotte declared.
“You say that now, but you’re not a billionaire. Not yet.”
“I hate that shit,” Charlotte said. “I’d like to crash it.”
“Me too,” Amelia interjected. “I want it for the animals.”
“I want it for this building,” Charlotte said grimly.
Mutt regarded her. “So to save your co-op from a takeover you would destroy the entire global economic system?”
“Yes.”
“Nice work if you can get it!” Jeff pointed out crabbily. Charlotte glared at him, and he raised a hand to ward her off: “Hey, I like the concept! It’s just not that easy. I mean that’s what I was trying to do, and look what happened.”
“But did you really try?” Charlotte inquired.
“I thought I did.”
“Well, maybe we need to try again, then. Take another angle.”
“Please,” Mutt said.
Jeff scowled. “I will be interested to see this different angle.”
“Me too.” Charlotte looked around at them, stuck out her coffee cup for seconds. Amelia smiled the smile that had made her a cloud star, filled her cup. When they all had gotten refills they toasted Mutt and Jeff’s safe return.
Popeye speaks Tenth Avenue’s indigenous tongue. Betty Boop speaks in exaggerated New Yorkese.
explained the Federal Writers Project, 1938
Words her biographer claimed first appeared in print in the prose of Dorothy Parker: art moderne, ball of fire, with bells on, bellyacher, birdbrain, boy-meets-girl, chocolate bar, daisy chain, face lift, high society, mess around, nostalgic, one-night stand, pain in the neck, make a pass, doesn’t have a prayer, queer, scaredy-cat, shoot, the sky’s the limit, to twist someone’s arm, what the hell, and wisecrack.
Hard to believe.
New Yorkese is the common speech of early-nineteenth-century Cork, transplanted during the mass immigration of the south Irish two hundred years ago.
Also hard to believe.
f) Franklin
So the building super, Vlade the derailer, came over one morning when he was pulling my bug out of the rafters of his ever-more-crowded boathouse, leering in what appeared to be his attempt at a friendly smile. Ever since he had dragooned me to save the dock rats from drowning, he’d regarded me as if we were buddies, which we were not, although it would have been nice if he had kept my boat closer to the door as a result of this pseudo-bond.
“What?” I said.
“Charlotte wants to talk to you,” he said.
“So?”
“So you want to talk to Charlotte.”
“It doesn’t follow.”
“In this case it does.” And he gave me a look that had lost all the new bondiness. “You will find it very interesting,” he added. “Possibly even lucrative.”
“Lucrative? For me?”
“Possibly. Certainly for people in this building that you know.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the boys you helped me rescue the other week. Turns out they are needing some investment advice, and Charlotte and I are stepping in as their help.”
“Investment advice? Are they selling drugs now?”
“Please. They have come into an inheritance, so to speak.”
“From who?”
“Charlotte will explain the situation. Can you meet her for drinks after dinner?”
“I don’t know.”
“You want to do this.” With a Transylvanian look that suggested my boat could be suspended quite high, like up there with the cloud star’s blimp on top of the building.
“All right.”
“Good. Bottle of wine, up at the farm, tonight at ten.”
“I’ll be there.”
So I passed the day in the usual multiple temporalities of the screen, so many different chronologies mooshing together that it felt like no time at all. In this no-time I firmed up my impression that the intertidal bubble was getting bigger and thinner, closer to popping. But with winter bearing down at last, the real estate in the drowned zone would freeze in place physically, causing prices to do the same. Volatility suppression by way of extreme low temperatures: a known phenomenon, empirically confirmed in the data and known as freezing prices. Certain kinds of traders devoted to volatility as such didn’t like it. Jokes were made about these traders throwing themselves out of skyscrapers because stock prices had gone too stable.
So I spent the bulk of my day researching submarine demolition and dock piling foundations. In the late afternoon I skimmed home by way of the East River, moving through the alternation of long shadows and lanes of silver sunlight. It was cold, and the river was like a plate of brushed aluminum set under a lead sky, a sight that announced winter and took my mind off Jojo; or rather it made me think, Ah, now I’m not thinking about Jojo. Damn it anyway. I turned into Twenty-third and hummed to the Met, which was still flying Amelia Black’s blimp like a big wind sock, the late sun burnishing the gilded cupola under it. Gold against lead: very nice. As I came chugging into the bacino, homey in its shadows, I found myself in a better mood than when I had left the office. That was something the city could do for you.
After a perfunctory dinner in the commons I went up to the farm floor and found Charlotte already there, with Vlade and the old man that the two boys had taken in, and Amelia Black the cloud babe, plus a couple of men who looked like hobos. It was explained to me that they were the quants from our farm who had gone missing, now restored to us.
“What’s up?” I said, taking a coffee cup of wine from Vlade.
Charlotte clinked her coffee cup with mine. “Have a seat,” she said, a bit chairpersonistically. “We have questions for you.”
I sat down with Charlotte facing me, and the others sat around us. Amelia Black kept the wine bottle on the floor by her chair.
Charlotte said, “Our boys, Roberto and Stefan, have inherited some money.”
“Our boys?” I inquired.
“Well, you know. They’ve become like wards of the building.”
“Is that possible?”
“Anything’s possible,” Charlotte said, then frowned, as if realizing the inaccuracy of that statement. “I suppose I might foster-parent them. Anyway, they’ve inherited a kind of trust fund.”
“What, are they brothers?”
“They’re like brothers,” Charlotte said. “Anyway they’re both part of this, and they want us to be part of it. Meaning Vlade, me, and Mr. Hexter. And a couple of Vlade’s friends.”
“And how much are we talking about?” I asked.
“A lot.”
“Like how much?”
“Maybe a few billion dollars.”
I could feel my jaw resting on my chest. The others were staring at me as if I were an amusing screen comed
y. I closed my mouth, sipped from my coffee cup. Horrible wine. “Who adopted them again?”
They laughed briefly at my needlepoint wit. “The point is,” Charlotte said, still smiling, “they want to help the co-op, and they know you and trust you.”
“Why?”
“That’s what I said.”
The others laughed again. The chairperson and I were like a comedy team, although all I could think to say at that moment was “Touché.” Which is never much of a riposte, even though it is a fencing term, but I was still startled by the notion of the squeakers as billionaires.
“Joke,” Charlotte reassured me. “I trust you too. And they said that you’ve come through every time they’ve gotten in trouble. And they need financial advice. So I was wondering if you could suggest any way for them to invest this nest egg in a way that is safe but would grow it fast.”
I shook my head. “Those are opposites. Safe and fast are financial opposites.”
The two hobo quants nodded at this. “Economics one,” the smaller one observed. Which it was.
“Okay,” Charlotte said. “But finding the right balance between them is what you do, right?”
“That’s right,” I said, just a tad patiently, to indicate the oversimplicity of this description. “The heart of the problem, you might say. Risk management.”
“So, we were wondering if you would be willing to advise us, on a kind of pro bono basis.”
I frowned. “Typical hedge fund terms are two percent of the amount invested up front, then twenty percent of whatever I make for you over the market average for that period. Twenty percent of the alpha, as they say.”
“Right,” she said. “Which is why I asked about pro bono.”
“But it sounds like they can afford the fee.”
“They’re including the co-op in this deal.”
I let her contemplate just how vague that statement was. Like meaningless. But she waited me out, looking unrepentant. The others watched me like I was TV.
“Let’s talk hypothetically for a while,” I suggested. “First, why do you want to put this money in a hedge fund? Because there are more secure ways to invest it.”