Kim Robinson - New York 2140

“I hope so. Just listen. Once upon a time, there was a big investment firm with a couple hotshots running it. One of them was an asshole and a cheater, one of them was a nice guy. The cheater was cheating systemically in ways that were submerged so deep that the nice guy didn’t even know they were happening. That could happen, right?”

“Maybe,” Larry said, poking around in the crème brûlée as if looking for something.

“So then a quant working for them found this cheat, and tried to whistle-blow. But the cheater found out about it, and he went to his personal security team and said, Will not someone rid me of this mad quant? And his security said, We can do that no problem. Seeing as they were high on the FBI’s list of worst private security firms. Which is saying a great deal. But then the nice guy found out about it. That his partner had hired someone to kill someone to keep his cheating a secret. Which, due to joint enterprise laws, was their cheating. As the murder would be also.”

Larry was now chewing on his spoon a little, and his pale freckled Ivy League skin was a little flushed.

“So, at that point the nice guy was in a fix. Joint enterprise laws are crazy these days. If you know someone is going to commit a crime you become a party to it. And the cheater had some stuff he could blow the nice guy up with, maybe. But the nice guy had his own security company, more reputable than the cheater’s, and bigger. So he asks his security to enact a little preemptive involuntary witness protection on the quants in danger. And his team does that, moving fast to prevent the hit. They are not geniuses either, being private security after all, and they do the first thing that comes to mind. But then they have these quants they have saved from getting killed. They have to figure out how to release them back to the wild while still keeping them safe and the situation stable. It’s not obvious, but there’s no rush. So the situation hangs fire for a while.”

“So, you mentioned this isn’t blackmail,” Larry reminded her. “And I can see that. So I’m waiting for the bad part.”

“Oh it’s just a story. I tell the story because it was told to me by a friend of mine, Inspector Gen Octaviasdottir. She lives in my building, and she’s very devoted to the New York Police Department, and to lower Manhattan, and she’s well-known down there as the solver of all kinds of mysterious crimes. But she’s a pretty unconventional thinker, I guess you’d call it, when it comes to enforcement of the laws. She has her own views. And she likes those quants, and she’s happy that someone made an effort to keep them alive. And so she likes whoever that was. So she told me that although she and her team worked out the details of this story, she also gathered all the evidence herself, and she and her team have it sequestered, kind of like those quants were. No one else has the story, or at least the evidence to prove it, and she doesn’t plan on giving it to anybody. So if, for instance, the cheater ever tried to blackmail the nice guy in the fairy tale, it wouldn’t work. There’s nothing there, all the way back up the line. And now it’s a matter of letting the whole thing sink to the bottom of the canals. To the dark and backward abysm of time.”

Larry swallowed the last of the crème brûlée. “Interesting,” he said.

“I hope so,” Charlotte said. “The main thing to take from it is that my friend the inspector is a very good friend to have. I kind of love her. Like once we asked her for some financial advice, about an inheritance some young friends of ours had come into, and you wouldn’t believe how good her advice was. Possibly semilegal, but good. She basically made those kids rich. So she’s a good friend to have, and to keep. A very strong sense of what’s just. So that she ends up doing a kind of anti-blackmail blackmail, if you see what I mean.”

“Mmm,” he said, savoring the final spoonful. Or maybe it was “Hmmm.”

They ate in silence for a while.

“Cognac?” she suggested.

“Please.”

Vlade spent his days working on the building, as always. Things were back to normal, whatever normal was; he couldn’t remember. All the years had congealed together in his head like the mud on the canal bottoms, and the events since the start of the storm had been so overwhelming that the past before it was more squished than ever. Also the building was still stuffed with new refugees Charlotte insisted had to be sheltered until other arrangements could be found, and this was bad, because the building had already been full before the storm, so now things were simply desperate, and yet at the same time many of their refugees were very grateful to be there and had fallen in love with the Met, the way a limpet falls in love with a pier piling it runs into after being scraped off a ship. They would have to be pried off the walls here too, and at that point, as Charlotte had put it, the communal ethos of one for all and all for one would become an obstacle to good governance. They would have to redefine all to mean some, as in any situation that wasn’t the whole world. It would be awkward.

Meanwhile it was just crowd control, coping with power and water and sewage. Happily food was not his problem, but he did have to help get it into the kitchens, and then get the various residues out of the building. Compost all saved in house now, as they were baking up many boxes of new soil. And now Vlade was thinking about storm windows for the farm, and that wasn’t going to be easy, or fast, or cheap. Not that there was any time for that now. No, it was a crazy time, a crazy fall in the city.

However: the sabotage attacks on the building had stopped, as far as he could tell. And if he couldn’t tell whether they were happening or not, then all was well. He mentioned this to Charlotte once when she was home and they were dealing with refugee guest problems. She still hadn’t given up on being chair of the co-op board, though many urged her to. But not Vlade; even at only ten minutes a day she was better than any of the other board members, as far as he was concerned. One of the bad aspects of her running for Congress was the likelihood that she would win, and then she really would have to quit the board, at least for two years and maybe for good. That would be a disaster, but he would cross that bridge when he got to it.

She laughed when he mentioned the cessation of sabotage. “They’re the ones sabotaged now. The tables are turned, they’re rocked on their heels. The empty towers scandal was the first blow, and now their investments are in free fall. I think whoever was making offers on us might be very busy right now avoiding bankruptcy.”

“I like the sound of that,” Vlade said.

She nodded. “Meanwhile, we should be free of harassment. Also of any hostile takeover bids. Actually I was kind of looking forward to the vote on that comeback offer, because I think knowing we’ve been under attack, it would have gone down again. That would have been nice. But to have it withdrawn is even nicer.”

“Hurray for the storm,” Vlade said, unamused by his own joke.