“Velvet glove. Minimize the trauma drama.”
“I always like that.” She sips her wine. “It would be interesting to hear what Franklin might say about that. About how we could finance it.”
“Why him?” Jeff asks.
“Because I like him. A very nice young man.”
Jeff shakes his head at her like he’s regarding a true miracle of stupidity.
Mutt, thinking to divert Jeff’s no doubt withering critique of their young financier, says, “Have you ever noticed that our building is a kind of actor network that can do things? We got the cloud star, the lawyer, the building expert, the building itself, the police detective, the money man … add the getaway driver and it’s a fucking heist movie!”
“So who are we?” Jeff says.
“We are the wise old geezers, Jeffrey.”
“But that’s Gordon Hexter,” Jeff points out. “No, we’re the two old Muppets on the balcony, cracking lame jokes.”
“Lame-ass jokes,” says Mutt. “I like that.”
“Me too.”
“But isn’t it a little weird that we have all the right players here to change the world?”
Charlotte shakes her head. “Confirmation bias. That or else representation error. I’m forgetting the name, shit. It’s the one where you think what you see is all of what’s going on. A very elementary cognitive error.”
“Ease of representation,” Jeff says. “It’s an availability heuristic. You think what you see is the totality.”
“That’s right, that’s the one.”
Mutt acknowledges this, but says, “On the other hand, we do have quite a crew here.”
Charlotte says, “Everybody does. There are two thousand people living in this building, and you only know twenty of them, and I only know a couple hundred, and so we think they’re the important ones. But how likely is that? It’s just ease of representation. And every building in lower Manhattan is the same, and they’re part of the mutual aid society, and those are everywhere now, all over the drowned world. Probably every intertidal building in the world is just like us. For sure everyone I meet in my job is.”
“So it’s mistaking the particular for the general?” Mutt says.
“Something like that. And there’s something like two hundred major coastal cities, all just as drowned as New York. Like a billion people. And we’re all wet, we’re all in the precariat, we’re all pissed off at Denver and at the rich assholes still parading around. We all want justice and revenge.”
“Which is one thing,” Jeff reminds her.
“Okay whatever. We want justice-revenge.”
“Jusvenge,” Mutt tries. “Rejustenge. It doesn’t seem to combine.”
“Let’s leave it at justice,” Charlotte suggests. “We all want justice.”
“We demand justice,” Jeff says. “We don’t have it, the world is a mess because of assholes who think they can steal everything and get away with it. So we have to overwhelm them and get back to justice.”
“And conditions are ripe, is that what you’re saying?”
“Very ripe. People are pissed off. They’re scared for their kids. That’s the moment things can tip. If it works like Chenoweth’s law says it does, then you only need about fifteen percent of a population to engage in civil disobedience, and the rest see it and support it, and the oligarchy falls. You get a new legal regime. It doesn’t have to get all bloody and lead to a thugocracy of violent revolutionaries. It can work. And conditions are ripe.”
“So how does a thing like that start?” Charlotte wonders.
“Any kind of thing. Some kind of disaster, big or small.”
“Okay, good. I always like rooting for disaster to strike.”
“Everybody does!”
Jeff cackles along with Charlotte. She refills their cups. Mutt feels a smile stretching his face in an almost forgotten way. He clicks ceramic cups with Jeff. “It’s good to see you happy again, my friend.”
“I’m not happy. I’m furious. I’m fucking furious.”
“Exactly.”
In a storm the Flatiron appeared to be moving toward me like the bow of a monster ocean steamer—a picture of new America still in the making.
said Alfred Steiglitz
d) Vlade
Vlade’s wristpad beeped and said, “So how’s it going with our gold?”
“Hi Idelba. Well, they’re figuring it out.”
“What do you mean?”
“We talked to Charlotte about it, and she convinced us to ask Inspector Gen what we should do.”
“You asked a policeman?”
“A policewoman. Yes.”
Long pause over the radio phone. Vlade waited her out. That always worked with Idelba; he had about fifty times more patience than she did.
“And what did she say?”
“She said melt it down and sell the gold and put it in the bank, and don’t tell anyone where we got it.”
“Well good for her! I was worried you would turn it over. I’ve dealt with salvage before, and it never goes well. So how long is that going to take? When do Thabo and I get our cut?”
“I’m not sure.” Vlade took a deep breath, then gave it a try: “Why don’t you come on over and we’ll talk about it with the gang here.”
“Like when?”
“Let me check on that. And listen, when you come, can you bring that vacuum you drug up the gold with? I want it to see if I can apply it to a problem I’m having with the building here.”
He explained his plan.
“I guess so,” she said.
“Thanks Idelba. I’ll get back to you on when the group can meet.”
Gathering the treasure consortium was hard, mainly because Charlotte was part of it now, in an advisory role, and she was mostly away, and busy even when she was home. But she carved out an hour at the end of one of her long days, and Idelba agreed to come in her tug and anchor between the tower and the North building.
Vlade was still finding leaks appearing below the low tide mark on the building, small but worrisome. Actually infuriating. Of course one could play drone versus drone, and he did that, but it wasn’t working. It seemed possible that going old school with Idelba might accomplish what he wanted. And it gave him an excuse to see her again.
So Idelba showed up in her tug, which was of a size that allowed it to just fit through most of the canals of lower Manhattan. Nervously Vlade welcomed her to the Met and showed her around. It was the first time she had visited, so he gave her the grand tour, starting below the waterline, including the rooms that had been broached. Boathouse, dining hall and commons, some representative apartments occupied by people he knew well, everything from the solo closets to the big group places, occupying half a floor and accommodating a hundred people dorm-style; then up to the farm, then above that to the cupola and the blimp mast. Then back down to the animal floor, pigs chickens goats, very smelly, and right under that the farm again, to get the views of the city through the loggia’s open arches.