Gen shrugged. “I’d keep it. Melt the coins down, sell the gold as needed.”
Charlotte stared at her. “You would do that?”
“Yes. Obviously. As I just said.” Slightly slow and pointed with that last sentence, and including a glance at Charlotte.
“Sorry,” Charlotte said. “It’s been a long day. But, I mean—melt the coins?”
“Yes.”
“But what about the …”
“What about the what?”
“What about the law?” Roberto said. “You’re police!”
Gen shrugged. “I hope you know that the New York Police Department is about more than making lawyers rich.” She gestured to Amelia to pour her a cup of wine. “Look, if you go public it will be big news for a week, and then in the courts for ten years, and at the end of that time, whatever the gold was worth will belong to the lawyers. Charlotte, you’re a lawyer, you know what I’m saying.”
“True.”
“So why? Just keep it. You could use it to set up a foundation or whatever. Buy this building or whatever.”
“We already own the building,” Charlotte complained, still aggrieved by the night’s vote.
“Whatever. Do some good with it. If it’s really four billion, you should be able to do something.”
“Four billion dollars is just the start of it,” Jeff muttered darkly.
“What do you mean?” Charlotte asked.
“Leverage. Monetize the gold, use it as collateral, leverage it like a hedge fund would, those fuckers are leveraged out a hundred times what they start with.”
“Sounds dangerous,” Vlade said.
“It is. They don’t give a shit.”
“I hate that kind of thing,” Charlotte said.
“Of course you do. You’re a sensible person. But when you’re fighting the devil, sometimes you gotta use the devil’s weapons.”
“There’s finance people in the building,” Vlade said. “The guy that keeps saving the boys, he’s kind of a jerk, but he does finance.”
Charlotte frowned. “Franklin Garr? I like him.”
Vlade rolled his eyes at her just like Larry used to back in the day. “If you say so. Anyway he lives here. And he did pull these boys out of the drink a couple of times. We could maybe talk it over with him as a hypothetical situation, see how he seems about it.”
“That would be interesting,” Charlotte allowed. “Although I’m still not sure that you guys should be hiding this gold you found.”
They all regarded her. Gen was shaking her head and helping Amelia open a second bottle. Charlotte sighed and gave up on that issue. To her the rule of law was the last thread holding them all from a fatal plunge into the abyss of anarchy and madness. But there was their Inspector Gen, famous policewoman, a power in the city, a pillar of the SuperVenice, happily ignoring this bad fate by conferring with Amelia about vintages of vinho verde or some such nonsense.
“What do you think?” Charlotte asked Mutt and Jeff.
Mutt waggled a hand. “Anyone could monetize that gold for you. The hard part is figuring out what to do with it.”
“And staying out of their clutches,” Jeff muttered.
“They being?”
Jeff and Mutt looked at each other. They were like feral twins at this point, Charlotte thought. Dragged out of the woods with their own private language, semi-telepathic and probably barking mad.
“The system,” Mutt suggested.
“Capital,” Jeff clarified. “It will always win. It will eat your brain.”
“Not my brain,” Charlotte declared.
“You say that now, but you’re not a billionaire. Not yet.”
“I hate that shit,” Charlotte said. “I’d like to crash it.”
“Me too,” Amelia interjected. “I want it for the animals.”
“I want it for this building,” Charlotte said grimly.
Mutt regarded her. “So to save your co-op from a takeover you would destroy the entire global economic system?”
“Yes.”
“Nice work if you can get it!” Jeff pointed out crabbily. Charlotte glared at him, and he raised a hand to ward her off: “Hey, I like the concept! It’s just not that easy. I mean that’s what I was trying to do, and look what happened.”
“But did you really try?” Charlotte inquired.
“I thought I did.”
“Well, maybe we need to try again, then. Take another angle.”
“Please,” Mutt said.
Jeff scowled. “I will be interested to see this different angle.”
“Me too.” Charlotte looked around at them, stuck out her coffee cup for seconds. Amelia smiled the smile that had made her a cloud star, filled her cup. When they all had gotten refills they toasted Mutt and Jeff’s safe return.
Popeye speaks Tenth Avenue’s indigenous tongue. Betty Boop speaks in exaggerated New Yorkese.
explained the Federal Writers Project, 1938
Words her biographer claimed first appeared in print in the prose of Dorothy Parker: art moderne, ball of fire, with bells on, bellyacher, birdbrain, boy-meets-girl, chocolate bar, daisy chain, face lift, high society, mess around, nostalgic, one-night stand, pain in the neck, make a pass, doesn’t have a prayer, queer, scaredy-cat, shoot, the sky’s the limit, to twist someone’s arm, what the hell, and wisecrack.
Hard to believe.
New Yorkese is the common speech of early-nineteenth-century Cork, transplanted during the mass immigration of the south Irish two hundred years ago.
Also hard to believe.
f) Franklin
So the building super, Vlade the derailer, came over one morning when he was pulling my bug out of the rafters of his ever-more-crowded boathouse, leering in what appeared to be his attempt at a friendly smile. Ever since he had dragooned me to save the dock rats from drowning, he’d regarded me as if we were buddies, which we were not, although it would have been nice if he had kept my boat closer to the door as a result of this pseudo-bond.
“What?” I said.
“Charlotte wants to talk to you,” he said.
“So?”
“So you want to talk to Charlotte.”
“It doesn’t follow.”
“In this case it does.” And he gave me a look that had lost all the new bondiness. “You will find it very interesting,” he added. “Possibly even lucrative.”
“Lucrative? For me?”
“Possibly. Certainly for people in this building that you know.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the boys you helped me rescue the other week. Turns out they are needing some investment advice, and Charlotte and I are stepping in as their help.”
“Investment advice? Are they selling drugs now?”
“Please. They have come into an inheritance, so to speak.”
“From who?”
“Charlotte will explain the situation. Can you meet her for drinks after dinner?”
“I don’t know.”
“You want to do this.” With a Transylvanian look that suggested my boat could be suspended quite high, like up there with the cloud star’s blimp on top of the building.
“All right.”
“Good. Bottle of wine, up at the farm, tonight at ten.”
“I’ll be there.”