So I passed the day in the usual multiple temporalities of the screen, so many different chronologies mooshing together that it felt like no time at all. In this no-time I firmed up my impression that the intertidal bubble was getting bigger and thinner, closer to popping. But with winter bearing down at last, the real estate in the drowned zone would freeze in place physically, causing prices to do the same. Volatility suppression by way of extreme low temperatures: a known phenomenon, empirically confirmed in the data and known as freezing prices. Certain kinds of traders devoted to volatility as such didn’t like it. Jokes were made about these traders throwing themselves out of skyscrapers because stock prices had gone too stable.
So I spent the bulk of my day researching submarine demolition and dock piling foundations. In the late afternoon I skimmed home by way of the East River, moving through the alternation of long shadows and lanes of silver sunlight. It was cold, and the river was like a plate of brushed aluminum set under a lead sky, a sight that announced winter and took my mind off Jojo; or rather it made me think, Ah, now I’m not thinking about Jojo. Damn it anyway. I turned into Twenty-third and hummed to the Met, which was still flying Amelia Black’s blimp like a big wind sock, the late sun burnishing the gilded cupola under it. Gold against lead: very nice. As I came chugging into the bacino, homey in its shadows, I found myself in a better mood than when I had left the office. That was something the city could do for you.
After a perfunctory dinner in the commons I went up to the farm floor and found Charlotte already there, with Vlade and the old man that the two boys had taken in, and Amelia Black the cloud babe, plus a couple of men who looked like hobos. It was explained to me that they were the quants from our farm who had gone missing, now restored to us.
“What’s up?” I said, taking a coffee cup of wine from Vlade.
Charlotte clinked her coffee cup with mine. “Have a seat,” she said, a bit chairpersonistically. “We have questions for you.”
I sat down with Charlotte facing me, and the others sat around us. Amelia Black kept the wine bottle on the floor by her chair.
Charlotte said, “Our boys, Roberto and Stefan, have inherited some money.”
“Our boys?” I inquired.
“Well, you know. They’ve become like wards of the building.”
“Is that possible?”
“Anything’s possible,” Charlotte said, then frowned, as if realizing the inaccuracy of that statement. “I suppose I might foster-parent them. Anyway, they’ve inherited a kind of trust fund.”
“What, are they brothers?”
“They’re like brothers,” Charlotte said. “Anyway they’re both part of this, and they want us to be part of it. Meaning Vlade, me, and Mr. Hexter. And a couple of Vlade’s friends.”
“And how much are we talking about?” I asked.
“A lot.”
“Like how much?”
“Maybe a few billion dollars.”
I could feel my jaw resting on my chest. The others were staring at me as if I were an amusing screen comedy. I closed my mouth, sipped from my coffee cup. Horrible wine. “Who adopted them again?”
They laughed briefly at my needlepoint wit. “The point is,” Charlotte said, still smiling, “they want to help the co-op, and they know you and trust you.”
“Why?”
“That’s what I said.”
The others laughed again. The chairperson and I were like a comedy team, although all I could think to say at that moment was “Touché.” Which is never much of a riposte, even though it is a fencing term, but I was still startled by the notion of the squeakers as billionaires.
“Joke,” Charlotte reassured me. “I trust you too. And they said that you’ve come through every time they’ve gotten in trouble. And they need financial advice. So I was wondering if you could suggest any way for them to invest this nest egg in a way that is safe but would grow it fast.”
I shook my head. “Those are opposites. Safe and fast are financial opposites.”
The two hobo quants nodded at this. “Economics one,” the smaller one observed. Which it was.
“Okay,” Charlotte said. “But finding the right balance between them is what you do, right?”
“That’s right,” I said, just a tad patiently, to indicate the oversimplicity of this description. “The heart of the problem, you might say. Risk management.”
“So, we were wondering if you would be willing to advise us, on a kind of pro bono basis.”
I frowned. “Typical hedge fund terms are two percent of the amount invested up front, then twenty percent of whatever I make for you over the market average for that period. Twenty percent of the alpha, as they say.”
“Right,” she said. “Which is why I asked about pro bono.”
“But it sounds like they can afford the fee.”
“They’re including the co-op in this deal.”
I let her contemplate just how vague that statement was. Like meaningless. But she waited me out, looking unrepentant. The others watched me like I was TV.
“Let’s talk hypothetically for a while,” I suggested. “First, why do you want to put this money in a hedge fund? Because there are more secure ways to invest it.”
“I thought hedge funds were all about security. I thought hedging meant like hedging your bets. You invest it in ways such that whatever happens, we’ll still make money.”
The shorter of the quants was snorting in his coffee cup, elbowing his partner, who was stifling a grin.
“That’s what the term may have meant at some point,” I allowed. “At some point in the early modern period. But for a long time now, hedge funds have been about helping investors who have a lot of money, like enough money that they can afford to lose some, to make more than the other forms of investing would make them, assuming things go well. It’s high risk high reward, with some actual hedging going on to reduce the high risk.”
Charlotte was nodding like she knew this already. “And each hedge fund manager makes different choices in that regard, that are like their trade secret.”
“That’s right.”
“And you work for WaterPrice, and are good at what you do.”
“Yes.”
“You look like you are,” Amelia Black tossed in.
“You do too,” I said, realizing too late that this could perhaps be understood as a way of saying You look like you would be good at hanging from blimps without your clothes on. That didn’t seem quite right, but she must have heard versions of this compliment before, as it was kind of true, and in any case she only smiled her lovely smile.
Charlotte aimed a look at Amelia, like, Don’t encourage him. “So,” she said, “if you were in charge of the boys’ money, what would you do with it?”
“Again, what do they want? And why would you do it this way?”
“What we’re ultimately hoping for is that this might allow us to protect the building from any kind of hostile takeover. And for that, we were thinking that four billion dollars might not be enough.”