“Sure,” Gen said. “I’ll call now and they’ll be over soon.”
She walked her usual route, gazing down on but not quite seeing perfect Canaletto wavelets on cobalt water. Physical evidence of an attack on the building. She called Lieutenant Claire and told her to send a boat over to pick up Vlade’s evidence.
If it was what Vlade thought it was, it might help. The various elements of the case weren’t matching up in her head, and as the leads petered out (they had not been able to get the courts to penalize Vinson for throwing them out of his office, warrant notwithstanding), she was getting more irritated. The longer it went on without coming clear, the more it had the potential for passing into that category that she hated so much, the Unsolved. Maybe even the Great Unsolved. If it did she would have to let it go and get past it. Not letting go of the frustration of the Unsolved, which could also be called the Unsolvable—that way lay madness, as she had learned long before, and more than once, by going mad. She was done with that. Hopefully.
By the time she reached her office in the station and got through the first rush of the day’s problems and paperwork, the boat had returned, and Lieutenant Claire walked in from the lab looking pleased.
“The device exploded three blocks away from Madison Square, so it was probably on some kind of proximity fuse. But the strongboxes held. It was messy inside, but it was the remains of a little drone sub for sure, with a needle drill included. And we found some taggants. It was made by Atlantic Submarine Technologies.”
“They make a drone that will puncture waterproofing? How do they advertise that?”
“It’s just a submarine drill with a very fine tip. You know, to thread little wires or something. They have to puncture diamond coating all the time.”
“It seems a little suspicious.”
“No, I think it’s just an ordinary tool. Almost any tool can wreck things as easily as build things, don’t you think? Maybe easier?”
“Maybe so,” Gen said, thinking of the police as a tool. “So do the taggants let us know who they sold it to?”
“They do. A construction company in Hoboken, started five years ago, out of business a year ago. Possibly a cover company to gather equipment and disappear, so Sean’s looking into that. Also into connections between that company and the names on our lists. Hopefully he can pick up the track on this thing.”
“Maybe. I can imagine otherwise. Let me know what you find out.”
Late that afternoon Gen went down the hall to the little office carrels inhabited by Claire and Olmstead. The two of them were sitting hunched in front of a screen, staring at a map of uptown all overlaid with colored dots, most of them green and red. Olmstead had a pad under the screen, and he was tapping away at it with his usual pianistic touch. “Don’t let that map fool you,” Gen advised Olmstead.
But they were on the hunt, so she sat in the corner and waited. Eventually they split off an inquiry and gave it to her to work on. She settled in and began to apply overlay maps to the snaps of the days when Rosen and Muttchopf had been kidnapped. Stacks within the great stack that was the city in four dimensions. An accidental megastructure, a maze they could reconstruct and then weave threads through. Outside the carrel the station emptied as people went home or out to dinner. They ate sandwiches brought in for them. More time passed, and the graveyard shift came in on a waft of cold air and bad coffee. On they worked.
Gen paused at one point to regard her assistants. So many hours they had spent together like this. Her youngsters were so much younger than she was. Twenty years at least, maybe more. She was fond of them; they were like nephews and nieces, but closer than that, because of the long hours they spent together. Her kids. Her surrogate children. So many hours. But after hours, off work, she never saw them.
Olmstead tapped a new screen out of the cloud, then glanced over at her. “Check this out. The company that bought the drone had pallets on the Riverside dock on October 17. Same day, a cruiser owned by—”
“Pinscher Pinkerton,” Gen said.
“No. Escher Protection Services. Remember them? They were working for Morningside when Morningside evicted the occupants of a property in Harlem they had bought. There were injuries, so they had to give enough information that I pierced the veil. They were brokering for a company called Angel Falls.”
“Good job,” Claire said.
“Morningside has certainly become the big dog uptown. The mayor’s group has used them, Adirondack used them. And now it’s fronting the bid on your building, right, Chief?”
“Right,” Gen said. “Wow, I wonder if it’s one of them. At this point I’m surprised anyone is using Morningside anymore, they’re looking kind of obvious.”
“Well, none of this is well-known,” Olmstead protested. “It took digging.”
“Let’s keep digging and see if we can find out who’s behind this offer. There must be other angles to get at that.” Then Gen saw the looks on their faces. “But not now! For now, let’s go get something to eat.”
The young officers nodded eagerly and went for their coats. Gen returned to her office to get hers. When they left the station she was wondering whether the kidnapping of Rosen and Muttchopf and the bid on the building and attendant sabotages were connected. They didn’t have to be. And now there were two security firms involved.
She didn’t know. It was cold out. She let her young cops lead the way to some all-nighter they liked up in Kips Bay. Skybridges were scarcer here, and the youngsters discussed taking a water taxi. Very cold night, but the canals were thawed out again, or covered by skim ice only. The chill woke them all up. Have to keep following the leads as best they could. Hungry now. Could sit and eat, listen to the youngsters shoulder the burden of talk. Of thinking.
Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money—and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.
Certainly there had been trouble coming. Anyone who had had any experience would have seen it coming.
f) Franklin
No one knows anything. But I know less than that, because I thought I knew something, but it was wrong. So I know negatively. I unknow.
So, okay, it’s not quite that bad. I know how to trade. Get me in front of my screens and I can see spreads spreading or shrinking against the grain of the received wisdom as marked by the indexes. I can buy puts and calls and five seconds later get out with points in the black, and do it again and again all day and win on average more than I lose. I can dodge the tic-tac-toe situations, and the chess situations, and stick to checkers, stick to poker. I can play the game. When I’m feeling crisp I might dive into a dark pool and do a little spoofing, in and out before it becomes noticeable. I might even spoof that I’m spoofing and catch the backwash from that.
But so what? What is all that really? A game. Games. Gambling games. I’m a professional gambler. Like one of those mythical characters in the fictional Old West saloons, or the real Las Vegas casinos. Some people like those guys. Or they like stories about those guys. They like the idea of liking those guys, makes them feel outlawish and transgressy. That too might be a story. I don’t know. Because I don’t know anything.