“Maybe you can help us figure out who to talk to.”
“Sure. I can put you in touch with some old friends.”
“They work in your building?”
“Yes, either there or at the mayor’s office.”
“You worked at the mayor’s office?”
“Once upon a time.”
I must have been giving her a look, because suddenly she waved a hand. “Yes, I began in Tammany Hall.”
“I heard you interned for Machiavelli,” I said.
She laughed. She did have some white hairs salting the black. “That’s what you’ll need now. Do you think these raft apartments could be put in one at a time, as infill, rather than knocking down a whole neighborhood?”
“Yeah sure. They’re modular. It would be more expensive.”
“Even so. Ever since Robert Moses, knocking down whole neighborhoods has been frowned upon.”
“This could be piecemeal. But everything scales in this kind of project. Maybe we could tell them about Peter Cooper Village.”
“Good idea. Or Roosevelt Island.”
“Whatever seems nicest.”
“Of course. But precedents. That this kind of thing has been done before.” She poked around in the remains of her salad. “So how does this match up with what we were talking about before, of popping the intertidal housing bubble?”
“That’s where we short. This is where we go long.”
“And you still think a householders’ strike could cause a crash.”
“Yes. But look, if you were to do that, you would want to have a government in place that was ready for it. Because when the crash comes, the government needs to nationalize the banks. No more bailing them out and forcing taxpayers to foot the bill. You would gather all the big banks and investment firms. They’ll be panicked but they’ll also be saying, give us all the money we’ve lost or the whole economy crashes. They’ll demand it. But this time the feds have to say, Yeah sure, we’ll save your ass, we’ll reboot finance with a giant infusion of public money, but now we own you. You’re now working for the people, meaning the government. Then you make them start making loans again. They become like arms of a federal octopus. Credit unions. At that point finance is back in action, but its profits go to the public. They work for us, we invest in what seems good. Whatever happens, the results are ours.”
“Including the disasters?”
“We already own those! So why not? Why not take the good as well as the bad?”
Charlotte leaned over and clinked her glass of water to mine. “Okay,” she said. “I like it. And since the current head of the Federal Reserve is my ex-husband, I see a little edge there. I can talk it over with him.”
“Don’t warn him,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what I meant.
“No?” she said, seeing my uncertainty.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
She had a quick smile. “We can figure that out later. I mean, they do have to know about it. It should be a well-known plan, maybe. We can talk it over. I want to hire you. Better yet, I want you to volunteer your services. And run for the executive board of the co-op.”
Now it was my turn to smile. “No. Much too busy. And I’m not even a co-op member.”
“Buy in. We’ll cut you a deal.”
“I would deserve it, if I were to be so foolish as to be on the board. But I have to admit, I’ve been thinking of buying in. Maybe you’ve talked me into paying full price.”
“Even so you should be on the board.”
“It would be a busman’s holiday.”
“You don’t run anything in your job! You’re just a gambler! You play poker!”
I made an unhappy face. “I was thinking it was more. You said you liked my plan.”
“The building project, yes. The analysis, yes. I like those. The gambling, no.”
“It’s trading. It’s creating market value.”
“Please, you’re going to make me sick. You’re going to make me throw up.”
“Get over to the compost bin then, because that’s the way the world works.”
“But I hate it.”
“It doesn’t care that you hate it. As you have surely noticed by now.”
A quick wince of a laugh. “Yes, I’ve noticed. At my advanced age. Which is now clonking me on the head, actually. I’ve got to go get some sleep. But listen, I like these plans of yours.” She stood, picked up her plate, patted me on the head with her free hand as if I were a golden retriever. “You are a very nice young man.”
“And you are a very nice old woman,” I said before I could stop my mouth.
She smiled cheerfully. “Sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to condescend. You are a fucking piece of work, how’s that.” She walked to the elevator door grinning. When she got in the elevator she was still smiling.
I stared at the closed elevator door, feeling puzzled. Pleased. At what, I didn’t know.
“Relationships in New York are about detachment,” she said.
It is the bank that controls the whole system.
g) Charlotte
Charlotte found herself actually pleased to be giving her ex Larry a call to ask for another coffee date. Given everything that had happened lately, it was sure to be interesting. So she pinged him in the cloud, wondered to him if he had time for another et cetera.
He wrote back to say he’d tell his people to look for a time, and an hour later wrote again to say he could do it at the end of the following week, coffee at the sunset hour again, but could they do it in Brooklyn Heights because he had to be there for a thing. She wrote back and said fine, and then he wrote back again and suggested they tack an early dinner onto afternoon coffee, he knew a place on top of one of the Brooklyn Heights towers, unpretentious, open-air, he had a reservation, blah blah. She wrote back to say fine.
As it happened, on the day of their date the East River was still frozen over, but it was predicted to break up soon. Midharbor was a clutter of ice plates headed down to the jam at the Narrows, where they were grinding their way out on the ebb tides, then floating back in on the flood tides, and freezing from time to time in whatever configuration they happened to be in. This had gone on throughout the short days of beastly February, but now March was lambing in.
On the appointed day, Charlotte got in one of the cable cars running up thick steel lines from the East Village to the Brooklyn Bridge’s western tower. When that rising car had carried her over the water to the tower, she got out and walked across the old bridge with the rest of the well-bundled New Yorkers crossing the river. The river ice just below them was patterned like a jigsaw puzzle, and only broke open to black water past Governors Island. The wind whistled in the cat’s cradle of wires overhead in its aleatoric aeolia, surely the greatest music ever heard—if not the music of the spheres, then surely by definition the music of the cylinders.
It was cold waiting in the line for another cable car, this one running from the bridge’s east tower over to Brooklyn Heights. Definitely time to deploy icebreakers and get the vapos back in action, everyone in the line agreed, with their noses white, their lips blue, their teeth chattering. Brooklyn Transit Authority was going to get slapped with a class-action suit, someone remarked, assuming any of them survived to sue. If you or any of your loved ones has died from freezing on the Brooklyn Bridge, call this number.
The Bridge to Heights zipline was long, so by the time she was walking in the shadows of the superscrapers she was a little late. She hurried the last part of the way, and arrived out of breath at the building Larry had suggested. And there he was at the door too, so that was good, though it meant he got to see her huffing and puffing, red-cheeked, nose running, hair wild. Oh well. His grin was the same old grin, friendly as ever, with just that touch of sardonic mockery to worry her.