She collapsed on one of the chairs and looked around. Her fellow citizens. Their little city-state, their commune. At least they weren’t being bombarded by their own government. Not yet anyway. The Paris Commune had lasted seventy-one days. Then years of reprisals had followed, till all the communards were dead or imprisoned. Couldn’t have a government of, by, and for the people, oh no. Kill them all instead.
When the Russian revolution of 1917 had lasted seventy-two days, Lenin went out into the street and danced a little dance. They had lasted longer than the Commune, he said. In the event they lasted seventy-two years. But so much had gone wrong.
Franklin Garr walked into the room, headed for the food line.
“Hey Frankie!” Charlotte said. “You’re just the man I wanted to see.”
He looked surprised. “What’s up, old gal? You look wasted.”
“I am wasted. Can you get me a glass of wine?”
“You bet. I was hunting one myself, actually.”
“It’s that time.”
“That’s for sure. You heard the boys showed up?”
“I’m the one who told you, remember? That was the good news for the day.”
“Oh yeah, sorry. Good news though. I thought the little fuckers had done themselves in at last.”
“They probably barely noticed. What’s a hurricane to them?”
“No, they noticed. They almost got eaten by muskrats.”
“Say what?”
“They had a Mexican standoff with a herd of muskrats.”
“I don’t think it’s a herd.”
“No, probably not. A flock of muskrats, a murder of muskrats…”
“A murder of crows.”
“That’s right. A what, a drenching of muskrats? A sucking of muskrats?”
“A bedraggle of muskrats.”
“Nice.”
“That’s what the people in Central Park were. A bedraggle of refugees. Here, get that wine.”
He nodded and went off and came back and sat on the floor beside her chair. They toasted the boys and tossed down some of the Flatiron’s horrible pinot noir.
“So listen,” Charlotte said. “I’d like to pull the trigger on this crash you outlined. Will this hurricane pop the bubble you were talking about?”
He waggled a hand. “I’ve been looking at that. Thing is, it’s a global market, and a lot of people don’t want it to pop, because they haven’t shorted it. So they’ll hold on against shocks like this. So I’m not really sure. I don’t think this is enough to do it. Of course the local index will be impacted. But the global bubble, no.”
“Well, but if you wanted to pop it? As in, by way of that householders’ strike you were talking about that time? Would this be a good time for that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think the groundwork is laid that would make it work. Although I’ve done my part, I’ll tell you that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve monetized the boys’ gold. Vlade melted it and I sold it, in increments, in various dark pools. It all got snapped up by the Indian government, it looks like to me. They’re the last goldbugs left, they really like it. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, maybe it’s because Indians like their bling so much.”
“Frankolino, spare me your horrible cultural theories. What did you do with the money?”
“I leveraged it a bit and bought a lot of put options on the IPPI.”
“Meaning?”
“I shorted the IPPI and went long on Case-Shiller, and now this hurricane has made me right. We can sell and make a killing for the boys.”
“That’s nice, but I want to pop the bubble! I want to crash the system!”
He shook his head dubiously. “Really? Are you sure you’re ready?”
“As ready as we’ll ever be. And it’s the right moment to strike. People are mad. And if we don’t do it now, they’ll just pull the noose tighter. More austerity to pay for the reconstruction, the poor will get poorer, the rich will move elsewhere.”
He sighed. “So you want to reverse a ten-thousand-year trend, you’re saying.”
“What do you mean?”
“The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That is like proverb one in Bartlett’s quotations. It’s the first verse of Genesis.”
“Right. Yes. Let’s reverse that.”
He began to think hard, and indicated this fact with a face that made her smile: cross-eyed, mouth pursed, forehead wrinkled vertically between the eyebrows. It reminded her of Larry, but this guy was funnier. “The spread in the indexes is a sign the markets are a bit freaked out,” he said. “There’s been a drop in all of them already, so, it wouldn’t be the best time to make the most money out of it. But on the other hand, things are shaky.”
“So it could work.”
“I don’t know. I mean, I think it would work at any time, if enough people joined a payment default.”
“Call it the strike.”
He shrugged. “Call it the Jubilee!”
She laughed. She took a big sip of her wine. “I can’t believe you can make me laugh after a day like this,” she confessed.
“Cheap drunk,” he noted.
“True. So you think it would work?”
“I just don’t know. I think it might be confusing if it happened now. People defaulting might lose whatever insurance money they were going to get, if they had some coming because of this storm. So I don’t know about the timing of it. You know—you give the financial system a heart attack right after a disaster—I don’t know, it’s a little counterintuitive. I mean who’s going to pay the insurance for rebuilding?”
“I guess government. They usually do. But let’s figure that out later.”
He looked at her with exaggerated amazement. He was a man who really looked at you when he looked. Like you were a marvel. “Well okay then! Roll the dice! Do you have all your ducks in a row with your Fed ex?”
“Fed ex?”
“Your ex who runs the Fed. I think your nickname for him should be Fed Ex, don’t you?”
“Yes, I like that.” She nodded. “He’s as primed as I can make him.”
“And your Householders’ Union?”
“It’s big enough that we can use it as a vanguard party for a mass action. And people who want some cover can join it the same moment they default.”
“A lot of people will want to have that kind of cover. Something to join, so it’s a political position, not just being in default.”
“We only need fifteen percent of the population, right?”
“That’s the theory. But more would be better.”
“Okay, but maybe we’ll get more.”
He pondered it, still regarding her with a bemused look. “Well, we’re pretty well shorted. So if you do it and it works, we won’t make the max possible, but we’ll still make a lot.”
“And if it doesn’t work?”
“I think the more likely possibility is that it’ll work too well.”
“What do you mean?”
“That it could crash the whole system. And if that happens, who will be left to pay me my swaps?”
“Surely it won’t be that bad.”
“We’ll find out.”
Charlotte looked at him, trying to figure out how serious he was. Very difficult. He enjoyed taking risks. So here was a big risk, a political risk. So for the most part he looked pleased. His worried expression was a put-on, or so it seemed to her. Hedging was gambling on volatility. So he was enjoying this.
“There’ll always be a bailout,” she said. “The speculators are too big to fail, too interconnected to fail. So the people in Central Park tonight are fucked, no matter how it plays out.”
He nodded. “So you’re saying we’ll get paid one way or another.”
“Or we won’t get paid no matter what. Unless we change things.”