He sighed. “I don’t know how I got caught up helping you. You are such a revolutionary.”
“Is that what it is?”
“Yes!” He stared at her hard. Then he grinned. He even started to laugh.
“What?” she demanded.
“It’s just I finally get what revolution means. It’s maximum volatility with no hedging. And it’s insider trading too! Because, since I know in advance you’re going to default your people, I can buy put options up the wazoo before the IPPI goes down! It’s totally illegal! I finally get why revolution is illegal.”
“I’m not sure that’s its main illegality,” Charlotte said.
“Joking.”
“So we’ll do it and see what happens.”
“Well, I still think you should wait, and have it more prepped than you do. Maybe wait until the storm stuff is a bit past, so that it doesn’t just get confused with an incapacity to pay. I mean you do want it to look like a choice, to make it clear that it’s a conscious strike.”
“Hmm,” Charlotte said. “That’s true.”
“You need time for the full prep anyway, right? So for now, maybe just enjoy the idea that it’s coming.” He held up his glass, now almost drained, and she raised hers and they toasted again. “To revolution!”
“To revolution.”
They polished off the wine.
He grinned again. “Part of a decent prep would be you accepting that draft and running for Congress.”
“I already did.”
“No way!”
“Way.”
“Well, that’s fair. Heck, we need more wine to toast that. I guess it’s a case of you break it you bought it. Crash the system and you have to build the next one. We’ll all insist on it.”
“Fuck,” Charlotte complained. “Go get more wine. Fuck fuck fuck.”
“That’s my line!” He laughed at her again. Tired as she was, still she liked it that she could make him laugh. Smartass youth that he was.
Starting in 1952, Macy’s security team set a dozen Doberman pinschers loose in the store every night at closing time, to sniff out shoplifters and thieves. They let this procedure be known, and the dogs never caught anyone.
Anger was the real zeitgeist in New York. Everyone was angry.
Manhattan Island, with deep rivers all around it, seems an almost ideal scene for a great city revolution.
f) Inspector Gen
Gen worked overtime day after day. She couldn’t remember if it had ever been like this before or not. Every waking moment given to the work. Everyone on the force doing the same. The storm was over, the world’s interest had gone away; the National Guard had come for a few days and then gone away; the people in Central Park didn’t go away. Food and sanitation were becoming huge problems, followed closely by violent person-on-person crime, also drug overdoses. The usual bad inputs creating the usual bad outputs, in other words. Utterly predictable, but now out in the open field of Central Park where everyone could see it. Feel it blowing up in their faces. It was not a sustainable situation, and yet there was no obvious next step, and meanwhile the impasse was something everyone could see and feel, something they were living moment to moment, day to day.
Then on the night of July 7, 2142, a huge bonfire on the Onassis lawn illuminated an enormous gathering, basically everyone in the park plus more, and somehow this turned into a riot. It happened under a full moon; no one saw the origins of it, but fighting spread through the park. The cops on hand put out the call for backup and crowd control. Some of them said it looked like gang-on-gang violence, but when Gen got there, coming up on a packed police cruiser, she couldn’t see anything resembling sides; it was just a scramble, knots of people roaming the park, roaring, setting fires with brands from the big bonfire, throwing burning brands, and fighting other groups. She got the sense that most of the real damage consisted of people falling down and getting trampled underfoot by the crowd. Most of the shouts and screams came from ground level; when she noticed that, she felt a jolt of fear and called headquarters.
“We need major medical, quick as possible, Central Park, Onassis Meadow. And there’s a crowd headed north from there, looks like.”
“We know,” said Chief Quinn Taller, an acquaintance of Gen’s. “Up Broadway, Amsterdam, and St. Nick.”
“They’re headed uptown?” Gen said.
“Looks like it.”
“Have we got reinforcements coming?”
“The National Guard has been ordered by the governor to come back, but we don’t know how long they’ll take to get here. They were slow last time.”
Gen took a deep breath. “Have you called in all the off-duties?”
“Yes I have.”
“What about the fire departments?”
“I don’t think that’s happened yet.”
“You should call up fire right away.”
“Are there fires?”
“There are going to be fires. And we might need their hoses for people too.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“I’ll pass the word along.”
Gen got off. She had stopped to talk, and the other cops had gone ahead. Now she hurried north after them, pausing to break up fights if it looked like she could, using her height and uniform and the darkness to support a fairly brutal approach, knocking aggressors down with her nightstick and then handcuffing that person with plastic quickcuffs, and ordering the people around to leave the scene. Nightstick in one hand, hand on pistol in holster, ready to shout if she had to. Putting her size and copness to work. People were generally happy to run off into the night. On she moved north, trying not to see fights that looked serious enough to be beyond her capacity to stop. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail at her and she dodged it and continued north at speed. She needed backup, it had to be teamwork now or it was nothing. And there before her was a team of six cops, not the same ones she had come with, looked like beat cops, gathered together for safety. “Okay if I join you?”
“Shit yeah, what is this?”
“Riot, I don’t know why. There was a bonfire on the meadow, I heard.”
“Yeah but still. They’re burning in their heads.”
“I heard there was more of that bad shit out there, wonder if that’s it.”
“But it’s everyone.”
“True. Let’s get north, try to get ahead of the crowd. There’ll be more of us up there.”
“You think we can hold the line up there?”
“Not sure, but the island is awful narrow there, it might work. We need fire and the guard though.”
They moved up together. Gen was relieved to be with other cops. They cut through the crowds, calling for calm, asking for people to disperse, to go to their homes or their camps, wherever, just disperse. Head south. One of their little platoon had a mini-bullhorn, and she took the lead vocally, with the rest deploying flashlights, trying to blind people who looked aggressive. “Go home!” she shouted over and over. “Go home!”
“We are home!” someone yelled back.
It would be so easy to get shot on a night like this. One had to hope the idea wasn’t occurring to anyone of bad intention near them. All of them were on point like a patrol in enemy territory, and the shouting around them reinforced the feeling. Lot of ill will tonight. People were fed up. Moments came when no one liked NYPD. Moments like these.
They got to St. Nick Park and were hurrying up the shore path at the high tide mark, still a shambles of wrack from the storm surge, when a branch hurtled out of the dark and struck the cop right next to Gen on the head. A helmet would have made it so much less disastrous, but the guy went down and then they were holding his scalp to his skull and trying to stem the bleeding, which as usual with a head wound was prodigious. Black blood, as always at night. Always the same shock when a flashlight beam turned it from black to red. He was still conscious, seemed like it was more a cut than a blow, but they needed to stop the bleeding. First aid in the dark, Gen working the downed cop, the rest bulling around ordering dispersal, angry but lacking any way to take it out appropriately. Settle in around the downed one, radio for help, shout through the bullhorn at people to go south, to go home, to go away. Roar of crowd pouring north around them, ignoring them. Nothing to be done until a medevac arrived, after which they could hustle north again one fewer, that much more anxious and on point.