“Of course. I’ll do the same.”
After that it was just a matter of staying visible for a while, looking politely ominous, then getting away unobtrusively. Claire’s team would be taking it from there. It wasn’t much different from visiting Ellie’s. Show up and give them a shock, see if any guilty fled where woman pursueth. She surveyed the minions herself, trying to gauge the room; they were very attuned to the mayor’s mood, and now they were a little freaked, and not looking Gen’s way. With a sudden onset of lethemlucidity Gen saw the power structure of the city with x-ray vision, all atremble with force fields like magnetic lines emanating from the gorgeous mayor. Gen had broken the glass over some kind of psychic alarm bell, and now it was ringing.
Eventually she left, and as it was late, she called a police cruiser to the floating tide dock at Eighth between Thirty-fifth and Thirty-seventh. When she got back to her apartment in the Met she changed clothes, went down to Vlade’s basement room, buzzed the door. No answer, so she walked up one flight of stairs to the boathouse office, and there he was. Gen had the impression he spent far more time here than in his room, which was basically just a place to sleep. Like her in that regard. This office was his living room.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“Pretty well. I’m still nosing around the stuff that happened here. Anything new there?”
“I’m not sure. The generator wouldn’t start, and there was a clog in the sewage line. If there weren’t other things going on I wouldn’t think twice about it, but as it is, I don’t know.”
He looked up into the hung boats high in the boathouse, frowning somberly. Slab shoulders slumped, slab cheeks too. Apprehensive. Which made sense. Even if he had been somehow bought or otherwise won over by the people offering on the building, or the people messing with the building, if they weren’t the same, he could never count on them keeping their word to him when they took over. More typically new ownership would hire new management, in which case Vlade would be out of a job. That would represent disaster for him, it seemed to Gen. The building was his clothing and home, it was his skill, his skull. It would make better sense if he were perhaps doing things to make the building look worse to the people interested in buying it. But these little problems were not going to do that.
“So, most of these problems, you’ve seen them before?”
“Yeah, sure. All but those guys disappearing and the cameras not working when it happened. That is truly an odd one. And”—he frowned—“I haven’t seen a leak like the one I found either. That wasn’t an accident. So, you know. Seems like it might be a pattern.”
“Happens to me all the time. Listen, will you show me the records for all your employees, including their references when you hired them?”
“Yes. I’m curious myself.”
Gen put her pad on his desk and he transferred some files into it.
As he was finishing a young man looked in his doorway. Franklin Garr, a resident. “Hey can you get my zoomer down pronto please?”
Six foot one, dishwater blond, good-looking in a bland way, like a model in a cheap men’s clothing catalog. Eyebrows bunched as he drove home his request to Vlade. Smart, quick, nervy. Cocksure, but maybe a little rattled too.
“On its way,” Vlade said heavily, toggling his boathouse dashboard.
A little motorboat with hydrofoils descended out of the murk of the boathouse rafters, and the young man threw a “Thanks” over his shoulder as he rushed out to it.
“One of your favorite residents,” Gen guessed.
Vlade smiled. “He can be a jerk. Impatient youth, that’s for sure.”
After that, she could either go to the dining and commons, or to her apartment, or keep working. So she kept working. She hoofed over to the vapo dock next to the Flatiron and took the Fifth south down to the Washington Square bacino, where she knew that the Lower Manhattan Mutual Aid Society was having its monthly. Lots of building supers would be there, and various obliged and interested parties from the buildings and organizations that altogether made Lame Ass a lively place.
They met on a big roof terrace that NYU provided for the meetings, a kind of cocktail hour before the evening meetings. Gen was a well-known figure and lots of friends and acquaintances came up to greet her; it had been a while since she had made one of the monthlies. She was friendly to all but kept an eye out for her particular friends, the supers and security experts she called her Bacino Irregulars. Clifford Sampson, an old friend of her father’s from the Woolworth building, Bao Li from the Chinatown security detail, Alejandra from the James Walker Bacino association: all these people were well-known to her, and with each of them she could give them a certain look and they would follow her aside ready to answer questions. She quickly ran through them: Any buildings getting sabotaged? Any unsolicited offers to buy communal buildings? Anything unusual or untoward in their employees, disappearing without quitting, messing around with security systems?
Yes, they all said. Yes, yes, yes. Right in my own basement. Fucking with my structural integrity. Cameras not seeing things. You should talk to Johann, you should talk to Luisa. In all of them a tight russrage at the ugly cynicism of whoever or whatever it was doing these things. Gentrification my ass. Fucking slimeballs just want what we got. We got the SuperVenice humming and they want to horn in. We’re going to have to hang together to keep what we’ve got. Time for your goddamn NYPD to show us which side they’re on.
I know, Gen kept saying. I know. NYPD is on New York’s side, you know that. Nobody on the force likes those uptown creeps. Uptown is uptown, downtown is downtown. Got to make sure there’s a balance kept. Rule of law. I need the Bacino Irregulars to jump into action, people.
This she said to a group of old friends, people who knew her from Mezzrow’s and Hoboken, the old guard, children of the hard years, after the Second Pulse had wrecked everything. People who were paid in food and blocknecklaces, people indentured to their buildings by money and love. They were gathered in a corner and happy at the little reunion she had convened. Drinking beer and swapping stories. The meetings later would be contentious as always. People complaining, arguing, shouting, calling for votes on this and that. The crazy messiness of intertidal life. For now they were a functioning in-group in that madness. There were probably twenty such meetings going on now all around Washington Square bacino, prepping for the more public meetings or just letting off steam among people they trusted.
“We’re all going to need the Bacino Irregulars,” she said to them. “I have a task force working on this now, and my own building, my folks’ building, is in the crosshairs with you. So start trolling and let me know what you find out.”