A stupendous trio all issuing forth against the idea of caste; What historic denouements are these we so rapidly approach?
—Walt Whitman
e) Franklin
So it had got to the point where I looked up Charlotte Armstrong in the cloud and found out that she was sixteen years older than me. Sixteen years, two months, and two days. This was a kind of a shock, a blow, a mind-fuck. Not that I didn’t think she was older than me, and we had already gone very far into our young man–old woman shtick, but really I was thinking it was more like, I don’t know. As I hadn’t been thinking of her that way at all, I just thought of her as a middle-aged woman. Old, for sure, but not that old. I didn’t know what to make of it. I was stunned to a blankness.
So when she called me to talk more about getting an ocean zoom down to D.C., I said, “Yeah sure!” squeaking like a boy whose voice was changing. I said “When?” rather than Hey babe I like you but why are you so fucking ancient? which was on the tip of my tongue, I had to actually bite my tongue not to blurt that out. Not that she wouldn’t have laughed if I had, and so I was tempted, because making her laugh was a distinct pleasure, a little hook in my heart that drew a helpless smile on my face, every time. But I restrained myself, being so confused. And she named a date for our trip, and then took me far from those concupiscent thoughts with the following: “So did you hear that Inspector Gen’s data hound cracked Morningside and found out who was making those offers on our building?”
“No, who was it?”
“Angel Falls. That’s your guy, right? Hector Ramirez?”
“No way!”
“That’s what she said. Her guy got into Morningside by way of one of the security firms they were using, he got all kinds of stuff, and that was in there.”
“Damn,” I said. “Holy shit. Fuck. Okay, listen—I’m going to go ask him about it.”
“You know, with the offer on the Met gone away, I don’t know if it matters anymore.”
“But he’s an angel investor in the Chelsea raft. And the building here was getting fucking sabotaged, right? No, I’m going to go talk to him about it.”
So I took the bug out to the Hudson, cutting through traffic like a butcher knifing through joints, then zoomed up the big river. Cloudy day, water the color of flint, disturbed as if schools of tiny fish were swirling around just under the surface. Got Hector’s secretariat to ask him for a meeting in the flesh presently, and he said he was about to leave but could meet briefly with me, if it was in the next hour. I said I was already there. Past the salt marsh where I had had my eelgrass satori, up the staircase of the gods to the Munster, up the rocket launch of an elevator. Burst in on Hector in his sky island, his evil villain mastermind aerie, where I said, enunciating articulately, “Hector, what the fuck.”
“What what the fuck?”
“Why were you trying to buy the Met Life tower? What kind of shit was that?”
“No shit, youth. No shit at all. It was just one of a number of bids my people have been making in lower Manhattan recently.” He spread his hands in the classic gesture of total innocence. “It’s like you’ve been telling me. It’s a great place these days. The SuperVenice. Very nice investment. Nothing but upsides down there. I don’t get your dismay here.”
“The Met was getting attacked,” I said hotly. “Your people were sabotaging it to try to scare the residents into selling.”
This caused him to frown. “That I didn’t know. I’m not sure I believe that.”
“It was definitely happening. They’ve got it tracked to a security firm called RNA. Rapid Noncompliance Abatement, very cute fucking name. The Met was noncompliant, and these clowns were rapidly abating us.”
“I would never condone something like that,” Hector said. “I hope you know me well enough to know that.”
I stared at him. I realized that in fact I did not know him anywhere near well enough to know any such thing. He knew that too, so it was a strange thing to say. I had to pause to ponder, and still came up with nothing. Smoke screen in my eyes. He was even smiling a little, perhaps at his little piece of pointing out the thin ice under us.
“Hector,” I said slowly, “I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t do something that stupid. Not to mention criminal. Joint enterprise laws, right? But you run a big organization, and no doubt you delegate a lot of the ugly parts of real estate work out to various security firms. RNA is just one sucker on that octopus arm. And what they are really like, you can’t really be sure about. So there, in that, you are vulnerable, and not doing due diligence, because you are legally responsible for what they do when you hire them. Remember what you used to say when I was working for you? When the people who understand the instruments are divorced from the people who are trading the instruments, bad things can happen. This is just another version of that. You have got people working for you, doing various kinds of dirty work without you knowing about it, and supposedly that keeps you clean, but it’s dangerous, because they’re idiots. And that makes you, if not an idiot, then at least responsible for idiotic shit. Legally responsible.”
He regarded me. “I will take in what you say,” he said. “I will make adjustments accordingly. I hope your harsh opinion here won’t interfere with our work together on the project you have going in Chelsea.”
“We’re buying you out of that,” I said. “I’ll be wiring you your money later today.”
“I don’t know if you can do that.”
“I definitely can. The contract I used was the one we use at WaterPrice to keep control of our investors’ comings and goings. It’s seriously bombproof.”
“I see.” He nodded, looked at his desk. “I’m sorry you feel that way, but I’m sure we’ll go on to work on other things.”
“Maybe we will.”
“Here, youth—sorry to run out on you, but I really was scheduled to leave. I delayed my departure to talk to you, but my crew is getting antsy. Come on up and see me off.”
“Sure.”
He led me to a different elevator, a huge freight elevator, big enough to hold I don’t know what. Elephants. We went up one or two floors, and got out on the very top of the Munster, where Hector’s little skyvillage was tethered. Twenty-one balloons, all prisming bulbously, straining at the leash to loft away. The round platform underneath them was just smaller than Hector’s office, and mushroom-shaped cottages around the circumference and in the middle were connected by clear tubes like little skybridges. Some kind of beautiful little folly. Lots of people already on board up there cocktail partying, including several at the top of a gangplank stairway, waiting for Hector.
He smiled genially at me, shook my hand. “Good luck to you, youth. We’ll meet again in another context.”