New York 2140, Page 3

  I came to an hour or so later. Time to get out onto the canals and putter through traffic while there was still sun on the water, get out on the Hudson and get a little zoom-on headed north, blow all the numbers and gossip out of my head. Another day another dollar. About sixty thousand of them on this day, as estimated by a little program bar in the upper right corner of my screen.

  I had put in an option for my boat at 4, and was able to strike on it with a call down at 3:55, and by the time I got down to the boathouse it was in the water ready to go, the dockmaster smiling and nodding as I tipped him. “My Franklin Franklin!” he said as always. I hate to wait.

  Out onto the crowded canal. The other boats in the financial district were mostly water taxis and private boats like mine, but there were also big old vaporetti grumbling from dock to dock, jammed with workers let out for the last hour of day. I had to look sharp and pop through openings, surf wakes, angle for gaps, cut corners. Vaporetti as they pass each other slow down, to courteously reduce the size of their wakes; private watercraft speed up. It can be a wet business at rush hour, but my bug has a clear bubble I can pull over the cockpit, and if it gets wild enough I use it. On this afternoon I took Malden to Church, then Warren to the Hudson.

  Then out onto the big river. Late on an autumn day, the black water sheeting over a rising tide, a bar of sunlight mirrorflaking across the middle of it right to me. Across the river the superscrapers of Hoboken looked like a jagged southern extension of the Palisades, black under pink-bottomed clouds. On the Manhattan side the many dock bars were all jammed with people off work and starting to party. Pier 57 was popular now with a group I knew, so I hummed into the marina south of it, very expensive but convenient, tied off the bug and went up to join the fun. Cigars and whiskey and watching women in the river sunset; I was trying to learn all these things, having only known prairie sunsets in my youth.

  I had just joined my group of acquaintances when a woman walked up to the old delta-hedging guru Pierre Wrembel, her black hair gleaming in the horizontal light like a raven’s wing. She kept her eyes on the famous investor, speaking beauty to power, which is perhaps more common than speaking truth to power, and definitely more effective. She had wide shoulders, muscular arms, nice tits. She looked great. I meandered to the bar to get a white wine like hers. It’s best to meander at times like this, circle the room, make sure your first impression was correct. So much can be determined if you know how to look—or so I assume, as in fact I don’t know how. But I tried. Was she friendly, self-conscious, wary, relaxed? Was she available to someone like me? Good to figure that out in advance if possible. Not that it would be wasting my time to chat in a bar with a good-looking woman, obviously, but I wanted to know as much as possible going in, because under the impact of a woman’s direct gaze I am likely to suffer a mind wipe. I am way better at day trading than at judging women’s intentions, but I know this and try to help myself if I can.

  Also, circling allowed judgment of whether I really liked how she looked. Because on first impression I like every woman. I’m willing to say they are all beautiful in their own style, and mainly I wander the bars of New York thinking, Wow, wow, wow. What a city of beautiful women. It really is.

  And to me, when you look at people’s faces you’re seeing their characters. It’s scary: we’re all too naked that way, not just literally, in that we don’t conceal our faces with clothes, but figuratively, in that somehow our true characters get stamped on the front of our heads like a map. An obvious map of our souls—I don’t think it’s appropriate, to tell the truth. Like living in a nudist colony. It must be an evolutionary thing, adaptive somehow no doubt, but looking in the mirror I could wish for a nicer face myself—meaning a nicer personality, I guess. And when I look around I’m thinking, Oh no! Too much information! We’d be better off wearing veils like Muslim women and showing only our eyes!

  Because eyes aren’t enough to tell you anything. Eyes are just blobs of colored gel, they aren’t as revealing as I used to think. That whole idea that eyes are windows to the soul and tell you something important had been a matter of projection on my part.

  This woman’s eyes were hazel or brown, I couldn’t be sure yet. I stood there at the bar and ordered my white wine and looked around, roving my eye in a pattern that kept returning to her. When she looked my way, because everyone in a bar looks around, I was talking to the bartender, my friend Enkidu, who claimed to be full-blooded Assyrian and went by Inky, and had bad old green tattoos all over his forearms. Popeye? A can of spinach? He would never say. He saw what I was doing and kept working on drinks while at the same time giving my roving eye a cover story by chatting floridly with me. Yes, high tide in three hours. Later he was going to sling his hook and float down to Staten Island without even turning on his motor. Nicest part of the day, dusk under the blurry stars, lights on the water, ebbing tide, topless towers of Staten lighting up the night, blah blah on we went, either looking around or working, drinking or talking. Oh my, this woman was good-looking. Regal posture, like a volleyball player about to leave the ground. Smooth easy spike, right in my face.

  So when she joined my group of acquaintances I slipped over to say hi to all, and my friend Amanda introduced me to those I didn’t know: John and Ray, Evgenia, and Paula; and the regal one was named Joanna.

  “Nice to meet you, Joanna,” I said.

  She nodded with an amused look and Evie said, “Come on, Amanda, you know Jojo doesn’t like to be called Joanna!”

  “Nice to meet you, Jojo,” I said, with a mock elbow into Amanda’s ribs. Good: Jojo smiled. She had a nice smile, and her eyes were light brown, the irises looking as if several browns had been kaleidoscoped. I smiled back as I tried to get past those beauties. I tried to stay cool. Come on, I said to myself a little desperately, this is just what beautiful women see and despise in men, that drowning-in-the-whirlpool moment of agog admiration. Be cool!

  I tried. Amanda helped by elbowing me back and complaining about some call option I had bought on the Hong Kong bond market, which had followed her lead but multiplied it by ten. Was I drafting her or accidentally spoofing? That was the kind of thing I could riff on all day, and Amanda and I went back months and were used to each other. She was beautiful too, but not my type, or something. We had already explored what there was to explore between us, which had consisted of a few dinners and a night in bed and nothing more, alas. Not my call, but I wasn’t heartbroken either when she claimed business abroad and we went our separate ways. Of course I will like forever any woman who has gone to bed with me, as long as we don’t become a couple and hate each other forever. But affinity is a funny thing.

  “Oh she’s such a JAP,” Evie said to John.

  “Jap?” he said ignorantly.

  “Come on! Jewish American Princess, you ignoramus! Where did you grow up?”

  “Lawn Guyland,” John reparteed. Good laugh from us.

  “Really?” Evie cried, also ignorantly.

  John shook his head, grinning. “Laramie Wyoming, if you really want to know.”

  More laughs. “Is that really a town? That’s not a TV show?”

  “It is a town! Bigger than ever, now that the buffalo are back. We rule the buff futures market.”

  “You are buff.”

  “I am.”

  “Do you know the difference between a JAP and spaghetti?”

  “No?”

  “Spaghetti moves when you eat it!”

  More laughs. They were pretty drunk. That might be good. Jojo was a little flushed but not drunk, and I was not even close. I am never drunk, unless by accident, but if I have been careful I will never be more than lightly buzzed. Nurse a single malt for an hour and then switch to ginger ale and bitters, keep compos mentos. Jojo looked to be doing the same; tonic water had followed her white wine. That was good up to a point. A woman does need a little wildness, maybe. I caught her eye and chinned at the bar.

  “Get you something?”

  She though
t it over. More and more I liked her.

  “Yeah, but I don’t know what,” she said. “Here let’s go check it out.”

  “My man Inky will make suggestions,” I agreed. Oh Lordy, she was cutting me out of the rude-and-crudes! My heart did a little bouncy-bouncy.

  We stood at the bar. She was a little taller than me, though not wearing heels. I almost swooned when I saw that, put my elbows on the bar to keep myself standing. I like tall women, and her waist was about as high as my sternum. Women wore high heels to look like her. Oh Lord.

  Inky dropped by and we got something exotic he recommended that he had made up. A something or other. Tasted like bitter fruit punch. Crème de cassis involved.

  “What’s your name?” she asked with a sidelong glance.

  “Franklin Garr.”

  “Franklin? Not Frank?”

  “Franklin.”

  “As in, you be lyin’, but I be franklin’?”

  “Ben Franklin. My mom’s hero. And my job needs a fair bit of lying, to tell the truth.”

  “What are you, a reporter?”

  “Day trader.”

  “Me too!”

  We looked at each other and smiled a little conspiratorially. “Where at?”

  “Eldorado.”

  Oh my, one of the biggies. “What about you?” she asked.

  “WaterPrice,” I said, happy that we were substantial too. We chatted about that for a while, comparing notes on building location, work space, colleagues, bosses, quants. Then she frowned.

  “Hey, did you look at the CME for yesterday?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you see that glitch? How for a while there was a glitch?” She saw my look of surprise and added, “You did!”

  “Yes,” I said. “What was it, do you know?”

  “No. I was hoping you did.”

  I had to shake my head. I thought it over again. It was still mysterious. “Seems like maybe tweakers must have gotten in?”

  “But how? I mean, things can happen in China, things can happen here, but the CME?”

  “I know.” I had to shrug. “Mysterious.”

  She nodded, sipped her punch. “If that had gone on for long, it would have gotten a lot of attention.”

  “True.” As in, end of world, but I didn’t point that out, not wanting to make fun of her too soon. “But maybe it was just another flash bite.”

  “Well, it did come and go. Maybe it was somebody testing something.”

  “Maybe,” I said, and thought that over.

  After a moment of silent contemplation we had to talk about other things. It was too loud to think, and talking shop was only fun when you could hear the other person without shouting. Time to get back to basics, but also she was finishing her drink and going into leave-taking mode, or so it appeared from her aura. I didn’t want to blow it; this was not going to be quick and I didn’t want it to be, so it required some tact, but I can be very tactful, or at least try.

  “Hey, listen, would you like to go out to dinner some Friday to celebrate the week?”

  “Sure, where?”

  “Somewhere on the water.”

  That made her smile. “Good idea.”

  “This Friday?”

  “Sure.”

  Windows split the city’s great hell

  Into tiny hellets

  —Vladimir Mayakovsky

  From now on each new building strives to be “a City within a City.”

  —Rem Koolhaus

  In King’s “Dream of New York” illustration from 1908, the future city is imagined as clusters of tall buildings, linked here and there by aerial walkways, with dirigibles casting off from mooring masts, and planes and balloons floating low overhead. The point of view is from above and to the south of the city.

  While working as a detective in New York, Dashiell Hammett was once assigned to find a Ferris wheel that had been stolen the year before in Sacramento.

  d) Vlade

  Vlade’s little apartment was located at the back of the boathouse office, down a set of broad stairs. The rooms had been part of the kitchen pantry when the building had been a hotel, and were below the waterline even at low tide. Vlade didn’t mind this. Protection of the submerged floors was one of his main jobs in the building, interesting to manage and valued by the building’s occupants, although they took it for granted when there were no problems. But the water work was never done, and never less than crucial. So it had become a little point of pride for him to sleep below, as if deep in the hull of a great liner for which he was ship’s carpenter.

  Methods to keep water out kept improving. Vlade was currently working with the team from the local waterproofing association that had caissoned the Madison Square side of the building to reseal the building’s wall and the old sidewalk. The aquaculture cages covering the floor of the bacino had to be avoided, making for a tight squeeze, but the latest Dutch equipment could be angled and accordioned in a way that gave them room to work. Then new pumps, dryers, sterilizers, sealants—all better than ever, even though this same work gang had passed through only four years before. It made sense, as Ettore, the super for the Flatiron, pointed out; this work was the crux for every building in the drink. But Vlade kept thinking things were as good as they could get. Ettore and the others laughed at him when he said this. That’s you, Vlade. They were a good group. Supers for the buildings of lower Manhattan formed a kind of club, all enmeshed with the mutual aid associations and cooperative groups that knitted together to make intertidal life its own society. Lots of complaints to share about all kinds of things, such as being paid in wetbits and blocknecklaces, which some called torcs, as they were basically forms of indenture to the building, a fancy version of room and board—people went on and on, but despite all the moaning they were lively and helped keep Vlade out of the depths.

  On this day he woke in almost pitch-darkness. Green light from the clock cast hardly any illumination. He listened for a while. No rushing liquid except for his blood, moving sluggishly around in him. Internal tides, yes. Low tide in there, as on most mornings.

  He pulled himself up and turned on the room light. The building screen reported all was well. Dry to bedrock: very satisfying. North building the same, or almost—some as-yet-unidentified crack was leaking into the foundation over there, very vexing. But he would find it.

  He had slept four hours, as usual. That was all the time the building and his bad dreams gave him. Part of his low tide. Nothing to do but get up and go for it again. Up to the boathouse, to help Su get the dawn patrollers out the door and onto the canals. There were six lifts in the boathouse, and the boathouse computer provided them with a good sequencing algorithm. Where the human touch was still needed was in mollifying boat owners if their departure was delayed. Even a minute could get a bad response. Ah yes, very sorry, Doctor, I know, important meeting, but there’s been a slipped sling at the bow of the James Caird, it’s a bit of a tub. Not that the doctor’s boat wasn’t a barge itself, but no matter, the balm of chatter, all would be well. Everyone who wanted to be out the door without stress could do it. It was true there were people who needed a fight a day to satisfy some awful itch, but Vlade made them find it elsewhere.

  Su was happy to see him, as Mac had gotten a call for her water taxi and wanted to take the job. This altered the drop sequence, and it took some hunting to find an alternative that balanced Mac’s need with Antonio’s standing request to be out at 5:15 a.m. Small things made Su nervous; he was a careful guy.

  Then Inspector Gen showed up. Very senior NYPD, and a famous defender of downtown when uptown. She usually walked the skybridges to the police station on Twentieth, and the day before she hadn’t seemed to know who he was. They had never talked, but over dinner she had grilled him about the building’s security systems. She had known the local co-op he had hired to install the system and in general seemed quick to understand the issues in surveilling a building. No surprise there.

  Now they greeted each oth
er and she said, “I wanted to ask you more questions about the two missing men.”

  Vlade nodded unhappily. “Ralph Muttchopf and Jeff Rosen.”

  “Right. Did you talk to them much?”

  “A little. They sounded like New Yorkers. Always pounding their pads when I was up there. Hardworking.”

  “Hardworking but living in a hotello?”

  “I never heard what that was about.”

  “So you were never told anything about them by anyone on the board?”

  Vlade shrugged. “My job is to keep the building running. The people aren’t my worry. Or so I am led to understand by Charlotte.”

  “Okay. But let me know if you hear anything about these guys.”

  “I will.”

  The inspector left. Vlade felt a little relief as he watched her walk away. Tall black woman, as tall as he was, rather massive, with a sharp look and a reserved manner; and now he had the oddity of his failed security cameras to account for. He definitely needed the security company that had installed the system to come over and check it out. Like with a lot of things, he needed tech support when he got far enough in. Being superintendent of a building definitely meant having to superintend. His crew numbered ninety-eight. Surely she would understand that. Must be the same for her.

  He walked on the boardwalk that led out the tall boathouse door to the Met’s narrow dock on the bacino, still in the morning shade of the building. There the sight of a little hand reaching up over the edge of the dock to snag some of the stale bread he left out there did not surprise him. “Hey, water rats! Quit taking the ducks’ bread!”