“Still, it must be fun to tell him what to do?”
Larry laughed. “Actually he tells me what to do.”
“Really?”
“But of course. Repeatedly, all the time. He wants rates this way, he wants them that way.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“He can talk to me, anyone can. He’s free to talk to me and I’m free to ignore him.”
“So nothing’s changed.”
He laughed again. “True.”
“So is that how it works, with you now in government regulating them?”
“It’s just me in a different job. I don’t stay in touch, but no one ever does.”
“So it’s not the fox guarding the henhouse?”
“No, I hope not.” He frowned at this idea. “I think what everyone likes is for the Fed and Treasury to be staffed by people who know the ropes and speak the language. It helps just in being able to communicate.”
“But it’s not just a language, it’s a worldview.”
“I suppose.”
“So you don’t automatically support the banks over the people, if push ever comes to shove?”
“I hope not. I support the Federal Reserve.”
Charlotte nodded, trying to look like she believed it. Or that he hadn’t just answered her question by saying he would support the banks.
The late-afternoon light was bronzing the air of the park, giving all the autumn leaves and the air itself a yellowy luster. The ground was now in shadow. It was crisp but not cold.
“Want to walk around a bit?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, and got up. She would be able to show that she had become a stronger walker. Assuming he had ever noticed she had been having trouble with that, as probably he hadn’t. She pondered how to bring up Vinson again. Once they got up and going, headed north up the west side, she said, “It’s an odd little thing, but a cousin of Henry Vinson’s was living in my building as a temporary guest, and then he went missing. We have the police looking into it, and they were the ones who found this relationship to Vinson.”
“Cousin?”
“Family relationship? Child of a parent’s sibling?”
He tried to shove her and she dodged it. “It’s just one of the things they’ve been finding out,” she added.
“That is odd. I don’t know what to say.”
“I only mention it because we were talking about the old days, and that made me think of Vinson, and how I had heard about him in this other connection.”
“I see.”
Larry being Larry, he managed to make that sound like he saw more than Charlotte would like. They had fought a lot, back in the day; she was remembering that now. That stuff had happened; that was why they had divorced. The good times before that were hard to remember, but not that hard. As they walked around the park paths, she found their past was very present to her mind, all of it. She often imagined the past as an archaeological dig, with later events overlying and crushing the earlier ones, but in fact it wasn’t like that; really every moment of her past was present to her all at once, as in the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. So the good times stood right next to the bad times, alternating panel by panel, room by room, making for a garbled queasy stew of feelings. The past.
The upper halves of the superscrapers ringing the north end of the park caught the last of the day’s sunlight. Some windows facing southwest blinked gold, inlaid in immense glass curves of plum, cobalt, bronze, mallard green. The park’s advocates had had to fight ferociously to keep the park free of buildings; as dry land it was now ten times more valuable than it had been before. But it would take more than drowning lower Manhattan to make New Yorkers give up on Central Park. They had made one concession by filling in Onassis Pond, feeling that there was enough water in the city without it; but other than that, here it was, forested, autumnal, same as always, lying as if at the bottom of a steep-walled open-roofed rectangular room. It looked like they were ants.
Charlotte said something to this effect, and Larry shook his head and chuckled at her. “There you go again, always thinking we’re so small,” he said.
“I do not! I don’t know what you mean!”
“Ah well.” He waved it aside; it wasn’t worth trying to explain, the gesture said. Would only cause her to protest more, protest something obvious about herself. He didn’t want to get into it.
Annoyed, Charlotte said nothing. Suddenly the persistent sense of being ever so slightly condescended to coalesced in her. He was indulging her; he was a busy important man, making time for an old flame. A form of nostalgia for him: this was what lay there under the surface of his easy tolerance.
“We should do this more often,” Charlotte lied.
“For sure,” Larry lied back.
To some natures this stimulant of life in a great city becomes a thing as binding and necessary as opium is to one addicted to the habit. It becomes their breath of life; they cannot exist outside of it; rather than be deprived of it they are content to suffer hunger, want, pain, and misery; they wouldn’t exchange even a ragged and wretched condition among the great crowd for any degree of comfort away from it.
Damon Runyon’s ashes were cast by Eddie Rickenbacker from a plane flying over Times Square.
c) Vlade
Vlade now made a kind of cop’s round of the building every evening after dinner, checking all the security systems and visiting all the rooms lower than the high tide line. Also the top floors under the blimp mast, and while he was at it, anywhere he thought taking a look would be a good idea. Yes, he was nervous, he had to admit it, to himself if no one else. Something was going on, and with that offer on the building looking like a hostile takeover, the attacks might be pressure to accept. It wouldn’t be the first time in New York real estate, nor the thousandth. So he was nervous, and made his rounds with a pistol in a shoulder holster under his jacket. That felt a little extreme, but he did it anyway.
A couple of nights after they had pulled Roberto out of the south Bronx, at the end of his tour of the building, Vlade got off the elevator at the farm and went out to the southeast corner to see how the old man was doing. No surprise to look in through the hotello’s flap door and find Stefan and Roberto there with him, seated on the floor around a pile of old maps.
“Come in,” Hexter said, and gestured to a chair.
Vlade sat. “Looks like the boys got some of your maps back.”
“Yes, all the important ones,” the old man said. “I’m so relieved. Look, here’s a Risse map, 1900. It won a prize at the World’s Fair in France. Risse was a French immigrant, and he took his map back to Paris and it was the sensation of the fair, people lined up to walk around it. It was ten feet on a side. The original was lost, but they made this smaller version to sell. It’s a kind of celebration of the five boroughs coming together. That happened in 1898, and then they commissioned Risse to do this. I love this map.”