It was also in Madison Square that the first lit Christmas tree was erected for the public’s enjoyment. During World War II the Christmas trees were left dark, and the square was said to feel like it had reverted to primeval forest. It doesn’t take much in New York. The square was also the first place where an electric advertising sign was put up, advertising from the prow of the Flatiron some ocean resort, and later the New York Times, with its boast that it always included all the news that fit.
The Flatiron Building was the first flatiron-shaped skyscraper in the city, and the tallest building in the world for a year or two. It also created the windiest place in town at its north end, people said, and men liked to gather there to, yes, watch ladies’ dresses get tossed up like Marilyn Monroe’s over that subway grate. Two cops were assigned to patrol this lascivious intersection and chase men away. Definitely a piece of work, the Flatiron, a great shape for Alfred Stieglitz to photograph, almost as great a shape as Georgia O’Keeffe. Stieglitz and O’Keeffe had their studio on the north side of the square.
And baseball was invented in Madison Square! So, okay: holy ground. Bethlehem get outta here!
The first French Impressionist show in America? Sure. The first gaslit streetlamps? You guessed it. The first electric streetlights? Ditto. These latter were at first “sun towers” with six thousand candlepower each, visible from sixteen miles away in the Orange Mountains. People had to wear sunglasses to stand under them without being blinded, and there were complaints that in their light human flesh looked distinctly dead. Edison himself had to be brought in to figure out how to dial them down.
The first bacino aquaculture pens in the city? Sure, right here, first pen being installed in 2121. Also the first multistory boathouse, installed in the old Met tower when they renovated it for residential after the First Pulse. A very popular idea, immediately imitated all over the drowned zone.
By now it’s clear that Madison Square has been the most amazing square in this amazing city, yes? A kind of magical omphalos of history, the place where all the ley lines of culture intersect or emanate from, making it a power spot beyond all power spots! But no. Not at all. In fact it’s a perfectly ordinary New York square, mediocre in all respects, with many of the other squares actually much more famous, and able to rack up similarly impressive lists of firsts, famous residents, and odd happenstances. Union Square, Washington Square, Tompkins Square, Battery Park, they are all bursting with famous though forgotten historical trivia. Aside from being the birthplace of baseball, admittedly a sacred event on a par with the Big Bang, Madison Square’s specialness is just the result of New York being that way everywhere. Stick your finger on your little tourist map and wherever it lands, amazing things will have happened. The ghosts will rise up through the manhole covers like steam on a cold morning, telling you their stories with the same boring maniacal ancient-mariner intensity that any New Yorker manifests if they start talking about history. Don’t get them started! Because a New Yorker interested in the history of New York is by definition a lunatic, going against the tide, swimming or rowing upstream against the press of his fellow citizens, all of whom don’t give a shit about this past stuff. So what? History is bunk, as the famous anti-Semite moron Henry Ford quipped, and although many New Yorkers would spit on Ford’s grave if they knew his story, they don’t. In this they are fellow spirits with the stupendous dimwit himself. Keep your eye on the ball, which is coming in from the future. Stay focused on either the scam that is or the scam to come, or you are toast, my friend, and the city will eat your lunch.
There is nothing peculiar in the situation of living out one’s life amid persons one does not know.
—Lyn Lofland
really?
d) Inspector Gen
Gen Octaviasdottir usually woke at sunrise. Her apartment windows faced east from the twentieth floor, and she often got up in a blaze of light over Brooklyn, a magnesium glare off the clutter on the water. It always looked as if something glorious could happen.
In that sense every day was a little disappointment. Not much glory out there. But on this morning, as most of them, she was willing to try again. Hold the line! as a handwritten birthday card announced over her bathroom mirror, along with a few other messages and images left by her father for her mother: Carpe Diem/Carpe Noctum. Big Blue. A painting of a tiger couple. Another of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. A photo of a statue of a pharaoh and his sister/wife, which Gen’s father had thought looked like him and Gen’s mom. As they almost did.
Gen kept meaning to take all these down, they were dusty, but she never got around to it. Her parents had had a good marriage, but Gen’s one youthful attempt had failed badly, and after that she had let the NYPD occupy her time. Following her father’s death she had taken care of her mother, until she too passed; and that was that. Here she was, another day. She wouldn’t have thought it would turn out this way.
Down to the dining room for breakfast with Charlotte Armstrong. Funny how you could live in a building for years and never meet someone just a floor away. Of course that was New York. Talk to one person and then the next, find out if they were someone you could talk to. It was one of the things she liked about her job. So many stories. Even if most of them included a crime. It was always possible she could make things better, for someone anyway. For the survivors. Anyway it was interesting. A set of puzzles.
She got to the dining hall at the same time Charlotte did, both right on time. They commented on this as they got in the line for bread and scramblies, then got their coffee and sat down. Charlotte took her coffee white. People came to look like their habits.
“So did your assistant find out anything about our missing guys?” Charlotte asked after they sat down. Not one for small talk.
Gen nodded and pulled out her pad. “He sent me some stuff. It’s kind of interesting, maybe,” she said, and tapped up the note from Olmstead. “They work in finance, as you said. They’re maybe what the industry calls quants, because they did coding and systems design.”
“They were mathematicians?”
“I’m told finance doesn’t require very complicated math. One guy told me that if you just designed a clean data display, people were amazed. So it’s more just advanced programming, maybe. Ralph Muttchopf did his graduate degree in computer science. Jeffrey Rosen had a degree in philosophy, and he worked as a congressional staffer for the Senate Finance Committee about fifteen years ago. So they weren’t the typical quants.”
“Or maybe they were, if it isn’t a pure math thing.”
“Right. Anyway, couple things about Rosen that my sergeant found—while he was working for Senate finance, he recused himself while they were investigating some kind of systemic insider trading, because a cousin of his was head of one of the Wall Street firms involved.”
“Which firm?”
“Adirondack.”
“No way. Really?”
“Yes, but why do you say that?”
“Was it Larry Jackman who was his cousin?”
“No, a Henry Vinson. He runs his own fund now, Alban Albany. But he was the CEO of Adirondack at the time of the Senate investigation. But why do you ask about Larry Jackman?”
Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Because Jackman was the CFO at Adirondack. Also he’s my ex.”
“Ex-husband?”
“Yes.” Charlotte shrugged. “It was a long time ago. We were going to NYU at the time. We got married to see if that would help keep us together.”
“Good idea,” Gen said, and was relieved when Charlotte laughed.
“Yes,” Charlotte admitted, “always a good idea. Anyway, the marriage only lasted a couple of years, and after we broke up I didn’t see him for a long time. Then we crossed paths a few times, and now we’ve got each other’s contacts, and we get together for coffee every once in a while.”
“He’s something in government now, if I recall right?”
“Chairman of the Federal Reserve.”
“Wow,” Gen said
.
Charlotte shrugged. “Anyway, he doesn’t talk about family much, so I just thought this Jeff Rosen might turn out to be one of his cousins.”
“Lots of people have lots of cousins.”
“Yeah. Both of Larry’s parents had lots of siblings. But go on—it was Vinson who Jeffrey Rosen is related to, you say. So why do you find this connection interesting?”
“It’s just a way in,” Gen said. “These guys are missing, and there’s been no trace of them physically or electronically. They haven’t used their cards or pinged the cloud, which is hard to do for long. That can mean bad things, of course. But also it leaves us without anything to look at. When that happens, we look at anything we can. This connection isn’t much, but the Senate investigation included Adirondack, and Rosen recused himself.”
“And Jackman now runs the Fed,” Charlotte added, looking a little grim. “I remember something about how he left Adirondack. The board of directors chose Vinson as the CEO over him, so pretty soon he left and started something on his own. He never said much about it to me, but I got the impression it was kind of a painful sequence.”
“Maybe so. My sergeant says it looks like Adirondack blew up. Then more recently, Rosen and Muttchopf did some contract work for Vinson’s hedge fund, Alban Albany, enough to get them tax forms for last year. So there’s another connection.”
“But it’s the same connection.”
“But twice. I’m not saying it means anything, but it gives us something to look at. Vinson has any number of colleagues and acquaintances, and so did Muttchopf and Rosen. And Adirondack is one of the world’s biggest investment firms. So there are more threads to follow. You see how it goes.”
“Sure.”
Gen watched her closely as she said, “Please don’t say anything about this to Larry Jackman.”
Would she understand that this request meant there might be lines of inquiry that led back to her?
She did. She followed the implications and blanked her features. “No, of course not,” she said. “I mean, we very seldom see each other, as I said.”
“Good. That means it won’t be hard.”
“Not at all.”
“So tell me again how the two guys came here?”
“They had a friend in the Flatiron Building, and they were camping out on its roof farm looking across the square at us, so when the Flatiron board told them to leave, they came over and asked if they could stay.”
“So they applied to the residency board?”
“They asked Vlade, and Vlade asked me, and I met with them and thought they were okay, so I asked the residency board to let them stay on a temp permit. I thought we could use their help analyzing the building’s reserve fund, which isn’t doing very well.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It’s been in the minutes.”
Gen shrugged. “I don’t usually read those.”
“I don’t think many people do.”
Gen thought it over. “Do you often intervene like that with the residents’ board?”
Now she would definitely know she was being questioned with purpose.
She nodded as if to acknowledge that, and said, “I do it from time to time, if I see a situation where I think I can help people and help the building. I think the board doesn’t like it, because we’re a little overfull. So they have enough going on with the regular waiting list. Plus special cases of their own.”
“But openings keep happening.”
“Sure. Hardly anyone actually moves out, but a lot of residents have been here for a long time, and there’s a certain mortality rate.”
“People are reliable that way.”
“Yes.”
“That’s why I’m here, actually. I moved in to take care of my mom after my dad died, and when she died, I inherited her co-op membership.”
“Ah. When was that?”
“Three years ago.”
“So maybe that’s why you’re a member of the co-op but don’t pay attention to the building’s business.”
Gen shrugged. “I thought you said hardly anyone did.”
“Well, the reserve finances are a little esoteric. But it’s a co-op, you know. So actually a lot of people keep their hand in the game one way or other.”
“I probably should,” Gen allowed.
Charlotte nodded at this, but then something else struck her: “Everyone’s going to know pretty soon about something that came up at the last board meeting. There’s been an offer made on the building.”
“Someone wants to buy the whole building?”
“That’s right.”
“Who?”
“We don’t know. They’re operating through a broker.”
Gen had a tendency to see patterns. No doubt it was an effect of her job, and she recognized that, but she couldn’t help herself. As here: someone disappears from a building, they have powerful relatives and colleagues, the building gets an offer. She couldn’t help wondering if there was a connection. “We can refuse the offer, right?”
“Sure, but we probably have to vote on it. Get an opinion from the membership, even a decision. And the offer is for about twice what the building is worth, so that will tempt a lot of people. It’s almost like a hostile takeover bid.”
“I hope it doesn’t happen,” Gen said. “I don’t want to move, and I bet not many residents here want to either. I mean, where would we go?”
Charlotte shrugged. “Some people think money can solve anything.”
Gen said, “How can you tell if their bid is twice what the building’s worth? How can anyone tell what anything is worth these days?”
“Comparisons to similar deals,” Charlotte said.
“Are deals like this going down?”
“Quite a few. I talk to people on the boards of other buildings, and Lemmas meets once a month, and a lot of people are reporting offers, even a couple of buyouts. I hate what it means.”
“What does it mean?”
“Well, I think that now that sea level appears to have stabilized, and people have gotten past the emergency years—well, that was a huge effort. That took a lot of wet equity.”
“The greatest generation,” Gen quoted.
“People like to think so.”
“Especially people of that generation.”
“Exactly. The comebackers, the water rats, the what-have-yous.”
“Our parents.”
“That’s right. And really, they did a lot. I don’t know about you, but the stories my mom used to tell, and her dad …”
Gen nodded. “I’m a fourth-generation cop, and keeping some kind of order through the floods was hard. They had to hold the line.”
“I’m sure. But now, you know, lower Manhattan is an interesting place. So people are talking investment opportunities and regentrification. New York is still New York. And uptown is a monster. And billionaires from everywhere like to park money here. If you do that you can drop in occasionally and have a night on the town.”
“It’s always been that way.”
“Sure, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. In fact I hate it.”
Gen nodded as she regarded Charlotte. She was on the watch for any signs of dissembling, because Charlotte had connections with the missing men in more ways than one, so there was reason to be attentive. And she was a woman of strong opinions. Gen was beginning to see why her youthful marriage might have failed: a financier and a social worker walk into a bar …
But in fact Gen saw no signs of dissembling. On the contrary, Charlotte seemed very open and frank. Although it was true that being forthcoming in one area could be used to disguise withholding in other areas. So she wasn’t sure yet.
“So you’d like to stop this bid on the building?”
“Hell yes I would. Like I just said, I don’t like what it means. And I like this place. I don’t want to move.”
“I think that will be the majority opinion,” Gen said reassuringly. Then she shifted gea
rs fast, a habit of hers; pop a surprise and see if it caused a startle: “What about our super? Could he be involved in this?”
“In the disappearance?” Definitely surprised. “Why would he be?”
“I don’t know. But he has access to the building’s security systems, and the cameras went out right when they went missing. I don’t think that could be a coincidence. So there’s that. Then also, if this hostile takeover bid wanted inside help, they might offer some people here a better deal if they took over.”
Charlotte was shaking her head through most of what Gen had said. “Vlade is this building. I don’t think he would react well to anyone trying to fuck with it in any way.”
“Well, okay. But money can make people think they’re helping when they aren’t, know what I mean?”
“I do. But he would see anything like that as a bribe, I think, and then people would be lucky to get away without getting thrown in the canal. No, Vlade loves this place, I know that.”
“He’s been here a long time?”
“Yes. He came here about fifteen years ago, after some bad stuff happened.”
“Meaning trouble with the law?”
“No. He was married, and their child died in an accident, and after that the marriage fell apart, and that’s about when we hired him.”
“You were on the board even then?”
“Yes,” Charlotte replied heavily. “Even then.”
“So you don’t think he could be involved with any of this.”
“That’s right.”
Now they were both done eating, coffees emptied, and they knew the urns would be empty too. Never enough coffee in the Met. And Gen could tell she had managed to irritate Charlotte more than once. She had done it on purpose, but enough was enough. For now, anyway.
“Tell you what,” she said, “I’ll keep looking for these guys. As for the building, I’ll start coming to the member meetings, and I’ll talk to the people in the building I know, about holding on to what we’ve got.”