“Come on,” she protested. “Are you NYPD or not?”
They looked at her like they didn’t even know what that meant. She sniffed at them. Might have to find out some of these things by herself, on the side. Use her Bacino Irregulars. Or her friends in the feds. Or both. People still living in 3-D.
Off the two youngsters went. Soon it would be lunchtime. Her to-do list was barely dented. Eat at the desk, as so often.
Then she worked. Departmental biz. Wasted hours. Then it was almost four, and she decided it would indeed be good to visit her friends at Mezzrow’s. Time to go native, dive back down into the deep depths of home. For she too had once been the black sheep of a family.
Lieutenant Claire joined her down on the narrow long dock outside their building on Twenty-first, and they waited for Sergeant Fripp to show up in his cruiser, a narrow hydrofoil, standard now as the water police’s usual speedster.
“You really want to go there again?” Fripp asked as they boarded. White teeth in black beard; Ezra Fripp liked going to Mezzrow’s, or anywhere else that put him on or under the water, poking at the chaos.
Gen’s cynicism about the amphibious and their speakeasies and bathhouses had hardened in recent years; too many things had changed, too many crimes committed, but she could reach down to that kernel of nostalgia for the old days if she tried hard enough. “Yes,” she told Fripp.
Fripp purred up Second to Thirty-third, turned west, and glided to a halt near the old subway station. The intersections were crowded with boats following the old adage take turns when taking turns. The narrow dock on the west side was full, but police had some of its ancient prerogatives still, and Ezra nosed in without being too obnoxious about it, but without wasting too much time either. He tied off the painter to a dock cleat and they hopped up, leaving the speedster guarded by a dronecop.
On the north end of the dock they dropped down stairs in a big tilted graphenated tube that descended at a forty-five-degree angle into the submarine warren that had once been a subway station. The speakeasy door at the bottom of the stairs was in the classic style, and Gen rapped on it using the old code for the submarine gang she had been part of over in Hoboken, thirty years before. An eye appeared in the Judas window, and after a moment the door opened and they were escorted in.
“Ellie is expecting me,” Gen said to the doorman, which was not true except in the sense that it was permanently true. She and Ellie went back forever.
Soon Ellie showed up and waved them into a back room, which was dominated by an ancient but immaculate pool table, with booths against the walls. Lights were dim, booths were empty. It was early for Ellie’s place.
“Have a seat,” Ellie said. “What brings you here? Want anything?”
“Water,” Gen said, to be annoying. Ezra and Claire asked about using the pool table, and when Ellie nodded they set to, clacking balls around the table without much sign of dropping them in pockets. Ellie sat down at her corner table and Gen joined her.
“So,” Ellie said.
She was still very stylish. Swedish, and so white-blond she was rumored to be albino, which many submarine people of color found funny, in the redundant or how-can-you-tell category of jokes. Five nine, 120 pounds, well distributed what little there was of her. Glamorous. She stretched her fingers on the table as if to display them. Always she made an attempt to overawe Gen with her etched pale beauty, and Gen had to allow that it took an effort to keep this from working. Of course it was easy to stay slim on the little thread of fentanyl Ellie was on, easy to stay relaxed. Gen knew all that and yet it was still hard not to feel a little frumpy. Like a cop. Like a big black female cop wedded to her job. Ebony and ivory, chess queens black and white, the supermodel and the glump, the capo and the copette, on and on it went. But mainly old friends gone separate ways.
That was the way it had been for many years. And knowing Ellie was here meant Gen knew what was going on underwater. She knew that the dealing that got done here was small time, like regular businesses, at least compared to what could have been. Taking care of the amphibious ones meant knowing who was bringing in what to where, and developing relationships, and using the relationships when possible. This was true for both of them.
“I heard there’s bad stuff getting sold in Kips Bay,” Gen said, “and I came over to check it out. It didn’t seem like you. I didn’t believe it.”
Ellie frowned. This was too direct, as Gen well knew. But it was time to forgo gossip about new submarine fashions and such.
Ellie finished pouting at this brushback fastball, then said, “I know what you mean, Gen, but it isn’t any of us. You know I wouldn’t allow that.”
“So who is it?”
Ellie shrugged, looked around the room. The room was in a Faraday box with a magnetic charge that would scramble any recorders, and Gen didn’t have one anyway. No recorder, no body cam, it was all part of the protocol between them. Talk here rather than down at the station, et cetera. Gen nodded to confirm this, and Ellie leaned forward and said, “There’s a group from uptown putting this shit out, I think to try to wreck the feel down here. It’s so stupid I think it must be on purpose. We lost someone last week, so now I’ve pulled everyone in and put them on alert, keep an eye out for strangers and the like.”
“Who is it?”
“I still don’t know, and it’s interesting how hard it is to find out. No one underwater will say anything about it. I think they’re feeling pressure, and they don’t want to be unfriendly, but they don’t want to help either. So I’ll have to deal with that later, but meanwhile I’ve got a friend up in the Cloisters who says she heard someone up there mention that we’re ripe.”
“Ripe?”
“Ripe for development.”
“Real estate?” Gen said.
“As always, right? I mean, when is it not real estate?”
“But in the intertidal?”
“The intertidal is ripe. That’s what they’re saying. It’s got problems, it’s been a mess, but people have dealt with it, and now we’ve got it going. So now uptown wants to take it over again. It’s like, renovation’s over, time to flip.”
“But you’ve got to own before you can sell.”
“Right.”