Kim Robinson: New York 2140

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.

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.

The East River too was busy with its usual morning traffic, but there was still room in the fast southbound lane to plane up onto the Jesus bug’s curving hydrofoils and fly. As always the lift off the water was exhilarating, a rise like a seaplane taking off, some kind of nautical hard-on, after which the boat flew over its magic carpet of air some six feet off the river, with only the two streamlined composite foils shearing through the water below, flexing constantly to maximize lift and stability. A genius of a boat, zooming downriver in the autobahn lane, ripping through the sun-battered wakes of the slowpokes, rip rip rip, man on a mission here, out of my way little bargie, got to get to work and make my daily bread.

If the gods allow. I could take losses, could get shaved, get hosed, take a hammering, blow up—so many ways to say it!—although all were unlikely in my case, being well hedged and risk averse as I am, at least compared to many traders out there. But the risks are real, the volatility volatile; in fact it’s the volatility that can’t be factored into the partial differential equations in the Black-Scholes family, even when you shift them around to account for that quality in particular. It’s what people bet on, in the end. Not whether an asset price will go up or down—traders win either way—but just how volatile the price will be.