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 stories 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!
Coming in to the Cloister dock, I had to clunk my way through slush caught against the ice boom they had strung in a big circle around the dock, wincing at each hit to my unhappy hulls. Then through the downstream entry gate in the ice boom, taking my turn. While I was waiting, I looked over at the dirty snow covering the salt marsh where I had had my great epiphany. As I watched, a family of beavers came swimming right up to the ragged shore, big noses and heads on the parents, little ones on a line of four babies. They ducked into a beaver mound made of stacked branches and two-by-fours, just offshore from the bank. A low round house, not exactly neat, yet almost so. Constructed, for sure. Strong enough to handle the occasional bash from a passing ice floe. The beaver family disappeared inside, and I recalled from the museum displays that their doorway would be a tunnel underwater, leading up to an above-water level.
Housing in the intertidal.
Spring was springing.