“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 Inspector 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.