“That must keep you busy.”
Armstrong shrugged. Gen led her to the elevator in Bellevue’s northwest annex that would take them down to the skybridge that ran west from building to building on the north side of Twenty-third. Most skybridges still ran either north-south or east-west, forcing what Gen called knight moves. Recently some new higher skybridges made bishop moves, which pleased Gen, as she played the find-the-shortest-route game when getting around the city, played it with a gamer’s passion. Shortcutting, some players called it. What she wanted was to move through the city like a queen in chess, straight to her destination every time. That would never be possible in Manhattan, just as it wasn’t on a chessboard; grid logic ruled both. Even so, she would visualize the destination in her head and walk the straightest line she could think of toward it—design improvements—measure success on her wrist. All simple compared to the rest of her work, where she had to navigate much vaguer and nastier problems.
Armstrong stumped along beside her. Gen began to regret suggesting the walk. At this pace it was going to take close to an hour. She asked questions about their building to keep the lawyer distracted from her discomfort. There were about two thousand people living in it now, Armstrong answered. About seven hundred units, from single-person closets to big group apartments. Conversion to residential had occurred after the Second Pulse, in the wet equity years.
Gen nodded as Charlotte sketched this history. Her father and grandmother had both served on the force through the flood years, she told Armstrong. Keeping order had not been easy.
Finally they came to the Met’s east side. The skybridge from the roof of the old post office entered the Met at its fifteenth floor. As they pushed through the triple doors Gen nodded to the guard on duty, Manuel, who was chatting to his wrist and looked startled to see them. Gen looked back out the glass doors; down at canal level the bathtub ring exposed by low tide was blackish green. Above it the nearby buildings’ walls were greenish limestone, or granite, or brownstone. Seaweed stuck to the stone below the high tide line, mold and lichen above. Windows just above the water were barred with black grilles; higher they were unbarred, and many open to the air. A balmy night in September, neither stifling nor steamy. A moment in the city’s scandalous weather to bask in, to enjoy.
“So these missing guys lived on the farm floor?” Gen asked.
“Yes. Come on up and take a look, if you don’t mind.”
They took an elevator to the farm, which filled the open-walled loggia of the Met tower from the thirty-first to the thirty-fifth floors. The tall open floor was jammed with planter boxes, and the air in the space was filled with hydroponic balls of leafy green. The summer’s crop looked ready for harvest: tomatoes and squash, beans, cucumbers and peppers, corn, herbs, and so on. Gen spent very little time in the farm, but she did like to cook once in a while, so she put in an hour a month to be able to make a claim. The cilantro was bolting. Plants grew at different speeds, just like people.
“They lived here?”
“That’s right, over in the southeast corner near the toolshed.”
“For how long?”
“About three months.”
“I never saw them.”
“People say they kept to themselves. They lost their previous housing somehow, so Vlade set up a hotello they brought with them.”
“I see.” Hotellos were rooms that could be packed into a suitcase. They were often deployed inside other buildings, being not very sturdy. Usually they provided private space inside crowded larger spaces.
Gen wandered the farm, looking for anomalies. The loggia’s arched open walls had a railing embrasure that was chest high on her, and she was a tall woman. Looking over the rail she saw a safety net about six feet below. They circled inside arches and came to the hotello in the southeast corner. She knelt to inspect the rough concrete floor: no sign of anything unusual. “Forensics should take a closer look at this.”
“Yes,” Armstrong said.
“Who gave them permission to live here?”
“The residency board.”
“They aren’t running out on rent or anything.”
“No.”
“Okay, we’ll do the full missing persons routine.”
The situation had some oddities that were making Gen curious. Why had the two men come here? Why had they been accepted when the building was already packed?
As always, the list of suspects began in the ring of immediate acquaintance.
“Do you think the super might be in his office?”
“He usually is.”
“Let’s go talk to him.”
They took the elevator down and found the super sitting at a worktable that filled one wall of an office. The wall beside it was glass and gave a view of the Met’s big boathouse, the old third story, now water-floored.
The super stood and said hi. Gen had seen him around in the usual way. Vlade Marovich. Tall, broad-chested, long-limbed. A bunch of slabs thrown together. Six two, black hair. Head like a block of wood hewn by an ax. Slavic unease, skepticism, bit of an accent. Discontented around police, maybe. In any case, not happy.
Gen asked questions, watched him describe what had happened from his perspective. He was in a position to make the security cameras malfunction. And he did seem wary. But also weary. Depressed people did not usually engage in criminal conspiracies, Gen had long ago concluded. But you never knew.
“Shall we get dinner?” she asked them. “I’m suddenly starving, and you know the dining hall. First come only served.”
The other two were well aware of this.
“Maybe we can eat together and you can tell me more. And I’ll push the investigation at the station tomorrow. I’ll want a list of all the people who work for you on the building,” she said to Vlade. “Names and files.”
He nodded unhappily.
The choice of the discount rate becomes decisive for the whole analysis. A low discount rate makes the future more important, a high discount rate is dismissive of the future.
The moral is obvious. You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself.
Misguided use of a computer is no more amazing than drunk driving of an automobile.
A bird in the hand is worth what it will bring.
c) Franklin
Numbers often fill my head. While waiting for my building’s morose super to free my Jesus bug from the boathouse rafters where it had spent the night, I was looking at the little waves lapping in the big doors and wondering if the Black-Scholes formula could frame their volatility. The canals were like a perpetual physics class’s wave-tank demonstration—backwash interference, the curve of a wave around a right angle, the spread of a wave through a gap, and so on—it was very suggestive as to how liquidity worked in finance as well.
Too much time to give to this question, the super being so sullen and slow. New York parking! One can do nothing but practice patience. Eventually the zoomer was mine to step into, off the boathouse dock and then out the doorway onto the shadowed surface of the Madison Square bacino. Nice day, crisp and clear, sunlight pouring down the building canyons from the east.
As on most weekdays, I hummed the bug east on Twenty-third into the East River. It would have been shorter to burble south through the city canals, but even just past dawn the southward traffic on Park was terrible, and would only get worse at the Union Square bacino. Besides I wanted to fly a little before settling in to work, I wanted to see the river shine.