“I thought you were on a city contract.”
“No, it’s just the association over there. We get paid or given goods by people there, but sometimes we’re just taking lemmas or IOUs.”
“I understand. It’s like that here too. I just thought it was a city project.”
“A city project, in the wet zone?”
“True. Anyway, we’re talking to people to figure out what to do about the gold.”
Idelba wasn’t happy at this. “Maybe you could start payments on what you owe me.”
“We don’t have that kind of money available. What about some kind of goods exchange? Goods or services?”
“Like how I’m helping Vlade work on your place’s security?”
Charlotte frowned. “Yeah, only flip it.”
Idelba shrugged. “I don’t know if you have anything I need.”
“Possibly we could put you up here over the winter. You see those hotellos across the farm, we could put up a couple more, right, Vlade?”
Vlade tried to imagine what it would be like living near Idelba again, failed, but managed to say “Sure” without much delay. Just enough for Idelba to give him the stink eye.
“I don’t think so,” she said darkly. “I don’t know if I want to use up any of our compensation that way. A room is a room, and we have space heaters and blankets out there.”
Charlotte shrugged, imitating Idelba, Vlade saw. “You can let us know.”
“Meanwhile you’ll work on turning that stuff? Or give us some to turn?”
“Yes. Of course. We’ll have something figured out within a week.”
Vlade escorted Idelba back down to the boathouse. “You should join us while it’s winter,” he ventured. “It’s nice.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Back in his boathouse office he offered her a shot of vodka, and she sat down and sipped it. She had never been a big drinker. They sat drinking by the light of the various screens and instruments, and the boathouse’s few night lights. Sharing the dimness and quiet. No huge need to keep a conversation going; they had already not said all the things they weren’t going to say. It was painful to Vlade.
“Here,” he said, “I’ll show you what I’m doing with the gold.”
“Have you shown the boys?”
“Sure, but that’s a good idea. It doesn’t get old.” He wristed the boys as he got out the equipment from boxes under his worktable, and in a few minutes they ran in, goldbug madness lighting them like gas lantern mantles.
“This is so cool,” Stefan promised Idelba.
“Even though we shouldn’t be doing it,” Roberto added.
Vlade had had to look it up, but it turned out to be fairly simple. The melting point of gold was just under two thousand degrees. He had borrowed a graphite crucible and an ingot mold, both standard salvager’s equipment, from Rosario, and he already had an oxyacetylene torch in his shop. After that it was just a matter of sprinkling some baking soda over ten of the darkened coins when they were stacked in the crucible, putting on a welder’s mask and heavy gloves, firing up the torch, and slowly cooking the gold under direct heat, until the coins turned red and slumped into a single bumpy red mass, sizzling or bubbling very slightly at the edges; then the mass melted further and became a fiery red puddle in the crucible. Always interesting to do and to see. Then while it was liquid, he seized the crucible in tongs and poured the gold redly out into the ingot mold.
Idelba and the boys watched with keen interest. Idelba even said “Aha” when the coins turned red. When they deformed and melted together, leaving a scum of the sodium carbonate and dirt on the top, the boys squealed “I’m meltingggg …” which Charlotte had taught them was appropriate.
Vlade turned off the torch and flipped up the mask. “Pretty neat.”
“Did you let the boys here do it?” Idelba asked.
“Oh yeah.”
“It was fantastic! You see how hot it is. You feel it.”
Then Idelba got pinged and she looked at her wrist. “Are your systems showing anything outside?”
He glanced at his screens, shook his head. “Yours are?”
“Yep. I think your radar must be baffled on this shit.”
“I was wondering about that.”
“Let’s see if we can suck something up for you.” She spoke to Thabo, who was still out on the tug. Vlade went out and untied the building’s runabout from the boathouse dock, and they got in and hummed out the door into the bacino. Idelba indicated the north side, between the Met and North, under her tug. When they came around from the bacino into the Twenty-fourth canal, Vlade saw that the tug was about half as wide as the canal. Thabo and a couple other men were standing in the bow wrangling one of their dredging hoses, and suddenly the big vacuum pump motor revved up to its highest banshee scream. With the pale slabs of the buildings walling them in, it was very loud.
All of a sudden the vacuum was shut off and things went quiet again. Vlade pulled up to the tug and Thabo caught the rope Idelba threw up to him and tied them off.
“Whatcha got?” Idelba called.
“Drone.”
“Oh my,” Vlade said. “Hey, have you got a strongbox on board there?”
“You think it might explode?”
“I don’t want it to with your guys exposed to it, right?”
Idelba called sharply to Thabo and the other man in Berber, and Vlade glimpsed the whites of their eyes before they scrambled belowdecks on the tug. A tense minute later they returned with a box and one held it while the other tossed an object from the screen end of the vacuum tube into it. They worked fast.
“Okay, locked up,” they called down.
“Strong one?” Vlade inquired hopefully.
“That’s why they call them strongboxes,” Idelba said.
“I know, but you know.”
“I don’t know! Who do you think you’re dealing with here, the military?”
“Or someone with military stuff.”
“Shit.” Even in the dark, Idelba could do a very good slow burn. Whites of her eyes. “Well our strongbox is military too. So quit paranoiding and tell me what to do with it.”
“Let’s put your strongbox in a bigger strongbox,” Vlade suggested. “I’ve got one in the office.”
“What will you do with it then?”
“Give it to the police. We got a police inspector lives here, she’ll be interested I think. We can do that tomorrow.”
“Doubt you’ll get much from the drone.”
“You never know. At least I can prove we’re being attacked.”
“Sort of. Any idea who’s doing it?”
“No. But there’s been an offer on the building, so it could be them. And even if we can’t prove it, the fact we’re getting attacked might make some residents mad and convince them to vote against the offer. There was a vote that went against it, but it was close, and the offer might get upped.”
“I guess I better figure out whether I want to winter here while you still own the place.”
Vlade tried to think of a snappy reply but failed. He sighed, and Idelba heard it, and quit her needling. Which surprised him. Truce in the Vlade-Idelba cold war? He would find out later. Right now he was just happy to have her around giving him shit. Mostly happy. Well, happy wasn’t the right word for it. He wanted her around in a tense, apprehensive, unhappy, even miserable way. But he wanted it.
The largest apartment of which we found record was sold to John Markell—forty-one rooms and seventeen baths at 1060 Fifth Avenue for $375,000. The story goes that shortly after Mr. Markell moved in, a servant unlocked a door that nobody had noticed and discovered ten rooms they didn’t know they had.
—Helen Josephy and Mary Margaret McBride, New York Is Everybody’s Town
Labor, n. One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.
—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
e) Inspector Gen
After a sudden February thaw Inspect
or Gen had to take to the skybridges again, having been enjoying her walks on the frozen canals, and she was headed for the one that ran over to One Madison, intending to proceed east from there to the station, when Vlade stopped her at the doors to the skyway.
“Hey there Gen, I got something I want to give you.”
He explained that he and his friend Idelba had sucked a submarine drone out of the canal next to the Met, and that they had put it in a strongbox in case it exploded, because he suspected it was there to drill a hole in the building. “I know you can’t carry it to the station, but can you send some of your people over to pick it up? I’ve got it in my safe in the office, but I’m not happy taking it over to the station myself.”
“Sure,” Gen said. “I’ll call now and they’ll be over soon.”
She walked her usual route, gazing down on but not quite seeing perfect Canaletto wavelets on cobalt water. Physical evidence of an attack on the building. She called Lieutenant Claire and told her to send a boat over to pick up Vlade’s evidence.
If it was what Vlade thought it was, it might help. The various elements of the case weren’t matching up in her head, and as the leads petered out (they had not been able to get the courts to penalize Vinson for throwing them out of his office, warrant notwithstanding), she was getting more irritated. The longer it went on without coming clear, the more it had the potential for passing into that category that she hated so much, the Unsolved. Maybe even the Great Unsolved. If it did she would have to let it go and get past it. Not letting go of the frustration of the Unsolved, which could also be called the Unsolvable—that way lay madness, as she had learned long before, and more than once, by going mad. She was done with that. Hopefully.
By the time she reached her office in the station and got through the first rush of the day’s problems and paperwork, the boat had returned, and Lieutenant Claire walked in from the lab looking pleased.
“The device exploded three blocks away from Madison Square, so it was probably on some kind of proximity fuse. But the strongboxes held. It was messy inside, but it was the remains of a little drone sub for sure, with a needle drill included. And we found some taggants. It was made by Atlantic Submarine Technologies.”
“They make a drone that will puncture waterproofing? How do they advertise that?”
“It’s just a submarine drill with a very fine tip. You know, to thread little wires or something. They have to puncture diamond coating all the time.”
“It seems a little suspicious.”
“No, I think it’s just an ordinary tool. Almost any tool can wreck things as easily as build things, don’t you think? Maybe easier?”
“Maybe so,” Gen said, thinking of the police as a tool. “So do the taggants let us know who they sold it to?”
“They do. A construction company in Hoboken, started five years ago, out of business a year ago. Possibly a cover company to gather equipment and disappear, so Sean’s looking into that. Also into connections between that company and the names on our lists. Hopefully he can pick up the track on this thing.”
“Maybe. I can imagine otherwise. Let me know what you find out.”
Late that afternoon Gen went down the hall to the little office carrels inhabited by Claire and Olmstead. The two of them were sitting hunched in front of a screen, staring at a map of uptown all overlaid with colored dots, most of them green and red. Olmstead had a pad under the screen, and he was tapping away at it with his usual pianistic touch. “Don’t let that map fool you,” Gen advised Olmstead.
But they were on the hunt, so she sat in the corner and waited. Eventually they split off an inquiry and gave it to her to work on. She settled in and began to apply overlay maps to the snaps of the days when Rosen and Muttchopf had been kidnapped. Stacks within the great stack that was the city in four dimensions. An accidental megastructure, a maze they could reconstruct and then weave threads through. Outside the carrel the station emptied as people went home or out to dinner. They ate sandwiches brought in for them. More time passed, and the graveyard shift came in on a waft of cold air and bad coffee. On they worked.
Gen paused at one point to regard her assistants. So many hours they had spent together like this. Her youngsters were so much younger than she was. Twenty years at least, maybe more. She was fond of them; they were like nephews and nieces, but closer than that, because of the long hours they spent together. Her kids. Her surrogate children. So many hours. But after hours, off work, she never saw them.
Olmstead tapped a new screen out of the cloud, then glanced over at her. “Check this out. The company that bought the drone had pallets on the Riverside dock on October 17. Same day, a cruiser owned by—”
“Pinscher Pinkerton,” Gen said.
“No. Escher Protection Services. Remember them? They were working for Morningside when Morningside evicted the occupants of a property in Harlem they had bought. There were injuries, so they had to give enough information that I pierced the veil. They were brokering for a company called Angel Falls.”
“Good job,” Claire said.
“Morningside has certainly become the big dog uptown. The mayor’s group has used them, Adirondack used them. And now it’s fronting the bid on your building, right, Chief?”
“Right,” Gen said. “Wow, I wonder if it’s one of them. At this point I’m surprised anyone is using Morningside anymore, they’re looking kind of obvious.”
“Well, none of this is well-known,” Olmstead protested. “It took digging.”
“Let’s keep digging and see if we can find out who’s behind this offer. There must be other angles to get at that.” Then Gen saw the looks on their faces. “But not now! For now, let’s go get something to eat.”
The young officers nodded eagerly and went for their coats. Gen returned to her office to get hers. When they left the station she was wondering whether the kidnapping of Rosen and Muttchopf and the bid on the building and attendant sabotages were connected. They didn’t have to be. And now there were two security firms involved.
She didn’t know. It was cold out. She let her young cops lead the way to some all-nighter they liked up in Kips Bay. Skybridges were scarcer here, and the youngsters discussed taking a water taxi. Very cold night, but the canals were thawed out again, or covered by skim ice only. The chill woke them all up. Have to keep following the leads as best they could. Hungry now. Could sit and eat, listen to the youngsters shoulder the burden of talk. Of thinking.
Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money—and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.
—Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations
Certainly there had been trouble coming. Anyone who had had any experience would have seen it coming.
—Jean Merrill, The Pushcart War
f) Franklin
No one knows anything. But I know less than that, because I thought I knew something, but it was wrong. So I know negatively. I unknow.
So, okay, it’s not quite that bad. I know how to trade. Get me in front of my screens and I can see spreads spreading or shrinking against the grain of the received wisdom as marked by the indexes. I can buy puts and calls and five seconds later get out with points in the black, and do it again and again all day and win on average more than I lose. I can dodge the tic-tac-toe situations, and the chess situations, and stick to checkers, stick to poker. I can play the game. When I’m feeling crisp I might dive into a dark pool and do a little spoofing, in and out before it becomes noticeable. I might even spoof that I’m spoofing and catch the backwash from that.
But so what? What is all that really? A game. Games. Gambling games. I’m a professional gambler. Like one of those mythical characters in the fictional Old West saloons, or the real Las Vegas casinos. Some people like those guys. Or they like sto
ries about those guys. They like the idea of liking those guys, makes them feel outlawish and transgressy. That too might be a story. I don’t know. Because I don’t know anything.
So okay, back to square one. Quit the whining.
An investment is like buying a future. Not an option to buy, but a real future bought in advance of the event.
So what’s the future that the so-called real economy is offering here? What is this harbor, the great bay of New York, offering for investment?
An option on housing, let’s say. Decent housing in the submarine zone, in the intertidal.
Why is Joanna Bernal losing some liquidity there? It’s like she’s buying put options, making a bet that decent housing in the intertidal will be worth more later than now. Seems like a good bet.
What does Charlotte Armstrong want to avoid selling a call option on? She doesn’t want there to be an opportunity to buy the Met Life building. She didn’t offer that option and doesn’t like it that people are acting like she has.
What happens if there’s lots of decent housing in the intertidal? It increases a supply, which then decreases the demand on Charlotte’s place. Our place, if you want to put it that way. If I were to buy into the co-op that owns the place.
Okay.
So I went back up to the Cloister cluster to talk with Hector Ramirez again.
The trip up the Hudson was fun as always. Although the East River had refrozen and was now locked solid, the Hudson ice had broken up the week before, forming a giant ice jam at the Narrows that would slosh in and out on the tides until it either poured out to sea or melted. A fabulous slushy grumble from down there was sometimes audible all the way through lower Manhattan. The entire length of the Hudson had refrozen twice in the last week, then broken again on the tides. All that ice mostly had flowed south to join the jam, but upriver the breakup was still cracking off big chunks and floating them downstream. It was a time of year when it was obvious why it was called the mighty Hudson. The big ice plates floated around messing up traffic, shipping channels clogged with them, and all the barges and containerclippers had to dodge them like flocking birds, using the same algorithm and employing a lot of the cursing you hear among New Yorkers when they are cooperating with each other. Flocking birds curse each other in the same way, especially geese. Honk honk honk get outta my way what the fuck!