by Leo Champion
Boris grinned.
“There was one woman with five gold hearts on each shoulder, remember her?”
“Yeah, I guess she thought if four pieces of insignia was good then five would be really good!” Annabelle laughed.
Both of them shook their heads slightly.
“And they all say what they claim their rank is equal to on the Intendancy,” said Annabelle. “It’s adorable. But they’re very nice people. Aside from being backwards.”
“Yeah, they’ve got… last-century attitudes on interracial marriage,” said Boris. “Not to judge, but you can tell just by looking at them. It’s hard to tell who’s what, or how they might identify. But they’re very aware of blood otherwise. You wouldn’t believe how many of them thought we needed to know who their grandfathers were!”
“They’re really nice people, though,” said Annabelle. “Everyone was so polite and respectful.”
Some of those tenement bosses skin people alive for looking at them wrong, Diana Angela thought.
“So how much did you distribute?” her father asked.
“About twenty million in development grants and thirty million in direct food aid,” said Annabelle. “They were so grateful!”
“We actually got to meet a few of the workers,” Boris added. “They were such nice people too, so grateful.”
“Well, you were giving them money,” Diana Angela pointed out.
“Yeah,” said Annabelle. “For hunger relief, development, and education!”
“Just wondering, just playing devil’s advocate,” said Diana, “but how much of that money do you think actually reaches the people on the streets? The average worker, I mean.”
“Almost all of it, of course,” said Boris.
“I heard somewhere that the tenement bosses just pocket the money or distribute it amongst their cronies,” said Diana tentatively.
“Well that’s cynical, isn’t it, Di?” her mother scoffed.
Diana pinged her implant and asked it for StreetAid’s passthrough rate, the percentage of a charity’s budget that went to its stated purpose. 4.7%, it said, as of their end-2184 filing.
Cynical would be for me to point out that less than a nickel of every dollar given to StreetAid actually gets beyond fundraising and administrative costs to reach the streets in the first place.
“Well, do you do any follow-ups to see how it’s used?”
“No, that would be classist, colonialist, and maybe even racist,” said Annabelle. “To assume we know better than they do about what they need. Some of them send photos of how they’re giving the canned food to their people.”
Staged photos, or the tenement boss wanted to shore up his popularity a bit.
“They have such simple lives down there,” Boris said. “They’re not at all materialistic. They’re happy, despite having so little.”
“How do you know they’re happy?” Diana asked mildly. Because nobody ever turns down the Lottery. And every last one who comes up from there has screaming PTSD.
“They said so,” Annabelle said. “They really respect their leadership.”
“Or they might have been afraid of their leadership,” Diana observed, against her better judgment.
“You’re so cynical, Diana,” said Annabelle. “You don’t know what it’s like down on the streets until you go there for yourself.”
Yes, she thought, I am the one who doesn’t know what it’s like. I love you Annabelle, but you really are an idiot.
But she’d said too much already, so she um-hummed something and turned back to her plate.
* * *
After dinner she decided to walk back to the Madison Park Building, forgoing a paperclip capsule ride and instead taking an elevator up to the hundred and seventy-fifth floor skyway. That, her home mezzanine, had a concourse she’d known since childhood and associated with it. The local shops.
She took the moving walkways south, finding the high-speed East Side Conveyor that some people had nicknamed ‘Fifth Avenue 175’. High-end storefronts advertising venerable brands – ‘Gucci’, ‘Hermes’, ‘Saks 175th’ – whipped by her on the walkway, as did people on the slower-moving local walkways; she kept a brisk pace up in addition to that. She’d never enjoyed just standing still on these things and she wanted to get home.
Ostentatious gold was everywhere as another skyway took her into the Forty-Six Minus One Building, which had been named for a United States President even whose number was not to be spoken aloud. He had apparently built the tower that had originally stood on this arkscraper’s site, and been partially incorporated into it.
She’d never been sure why Forty-Five had been erased from history; the twenty-first century was too late for him to have owned slaves, after all. But every white person before the 1960s was assumed to have been complicit in oppressive vice almost as bad as slavery, and nowadays people were starting to say that people before the 2080s, who had not even frowned upon interracial marriage, had all been racist sinners as well. When society gives itself over to relativism, she thought, virtue becomes a moving target. You had to damn your ancestors.
* * *
Captain Roger Moncreve didn’t think too often of his political and gangster ancestors, but as the second son of an underboss he’d never really had to. His father was a politician; John Senior had to be. So was his big brother, John Moncreve Junior. Commanding First Company was an inherently political job because the helmet-wearing enforcers all came from good families, people with relatives who could complain about perceived unfairness or mistreatment. Roger had never wanted that job – he was just a man who liked the challenge of a good fight. Let the others decide where to point him and whose ass to kick.
So it had been with some amusement to watch his friend Daniel, who’d been a fighting soldier until his own company had mutinied a week and a half ago, jostling against his uncle for the title of Reverend. Daniel was a good soldier, in Roger’s estimation, but in August of last year he’d stuck a pistol in the face of an acting squad leader, a corporal without family connections to avenge the summary execution that would have followed, and sent that squad down a freakin’ subway entrance in pursuit of raiders. The obvious and inevitable had happened, but not to the company commander. Good fighting men didn’t always make good officers – which was why Roger had always tried to be the first before he was the second. Dan had thought in the other direction.
Actually, the inevitable had happened in more than one way, in that regard. To everyone’s surprise – but strange things did happen underground, everyone knew – two of the squad had survived to emerge days later, alongside a shot-down pigeon named Jeff Hammer who’d shortly after been signed into the guard, to the regret of everyone except perhaps the corporals and senior guards of Fourth Company, who’d apparently come out of the coup with loads of new rank. But Roger sometimes wondered if Fourth Company, which had lost almost an entire squad in the worst possible way, might have started conspiring anyway, even without an ambitious airborne and his outside help to make it happen.
Dan had been asking for an ‘accident’, Roger had warned him of the possibility… and nineteen good fighters of Roger’s Third Company had lost their lives to airborne bombardment followed by the streetganger charge because he hadn’t listened. It had cost his family the tenement, apparently his father and eldest brother their lives, and put the Moncreves into expensive exile. But that wasn’t his business. He preferred coffee over tea, anyway.
But, as Roger Moncreve headed through the upper ground lobby of the Independent Hotel to the town car he’d been told was waiting, it sounded like maybe things had finally been resolved, a week and a morning after the Reverend and his heir had been found dead in an alley – yeah right they’d been killed there – on Valentine’s Eve.
Roger hoped so – his wife didn’t like Times Square and it wasn’t good for his sons to walk around with wire and wax on their blades at all times. That inculcated unsafe habits, which was a concern when your boys were a
n influencable nine, ten and twelve. And neither Roger nor his wife thought being in the constant presence of Times Square’s casinos and high-end prostitutes was a good influence on the daughters, either. It was about time they all went home.
Lieutenant Grimaldi, a round-faced, curly-black-haired man whose family had been Amernian-American mafia back when there’d been such thing as Americans, met him at the vehicle entrance, which a line of armored cabs and town cars was slowly making its way through. Hustling freelancer bodyguards were everywhere and some arkies were amidst the crowds getting anonymous transport, but – it was the Independent Hotel. What business others did here was not his business, he’d learned. His nosy youngest brother, who’d been Bitch Kimmy Karstein’s deputy as intelligence officer for a reason that involved his inquisitive temperament as much as his family’s reliability… had not learned that lesson, and that was another reason to be glad for this summons to finally happen.
It was lucky Roger’s youngest brother hadn’t already been challenged to a duel that quiet family pressure from upstairs couldn’t get them out of. The Moncreves were big fish in the Garson tenement and the family had pull in the southern part of the No-Go Zone, but this was Times Square with people from all across the conurbation and beyond. An exiled tenement deputy only had so many strings to pull, and some people – like Kalashov’s vory v zakone – you outright couldn’t buy or threaten. It was another reason for Roger to be glad his family seemed finally about to go home.
The bodyguards were pestering others with all the dignity of bucket-shop hustlers, but they left the scarred tenement officers alone as, with a nod, tall bald Captain Rorke and his lieutenant joined them. A woman in a red and grey Chang uniform, with sergeant’s stripes and a radio, gave an open-palm-above-right-eye Tong salute to the four Garsons officers and shortly after one of the town-cars stopped. It was as black and anonymous as most of the other vehicles here to drop off or pick up, those that weren’t equally anonymous yellow cabs, but a red and white vig flag flew from the hood of this one.
They boarded the passenger compartment of the vehicle in order of seniority – Roger ahead of Captain Rorke, then Grimaldi and Lieutenant Foster. The two seats faced each other, with the usual armored partition between the passenger compartment and the cab; bars covered the windows but the steel cover was down and there was the usual guard riding literal shotgun next to the driver. A sawn-off would be under peace-bonded wire in the glove compartment.
Roger Moncreve wanted at least one good battle he could get stuck into – that airborne had cost Third Company men who needed to be avenged by their commander’s hand. Why was South Bowery spoiling the fun? And Hammer was paying them the tenement’s vig, wasn’t he? He remembered his dad being quite irritated that the Neighborhood Watch Association had declined to intervene on those grounds last week.
With a wave from the Chang sergeant, the door closed and the town car pulled out. In a couple of minutes they were clear of the hotel and honking their way through the carts and sedan chairs of Times Square, down Eighth Avenue past a line of upscale clubs that at ten in the morning were still open. It took them ten minutes, about normal given the traffic, to go the four blocks from Forty-Second to Thirty-Eighth Street, where Midtown Association troops in their black body armor waved the vehicle through the gate ahead of a line of incoming carts loaded with sorted materials. A foursome of motorcycle escorts fell in around them as they picked up the pace south.
“Captains, lieutenants,” said the offsider, a corporal. He spoke without too much deference as he passed a pair of wirecutters through the partition. Roger took them first, and in a few deft cuts his rapier – already on his lap, ready as they passed along a bumpy, potholed and cracked Seventh Avenue past tenements on the left but streetganger country on the right; you could never be too careful in places like this – was free. A moment later his automatic was out and he gave the cutters to his lieutenant.
Roger Moncreve was an experienced enough soldier that he disdained the idea of a fair fight – those, outside of duels, were for the sort of naïve suckers who also thought you could win the big bears on Coney Island. But he’d at least been hoping for a good one.
* * *
Reverend, formerly Captain, Daniel Garson sat at one end of a long boardroom table of a second-floor conference room in the Changs tenement. At the other end of the seven-seats-a-side table sat his uncle Reverend, formerly Colonel, Roger Garson, and Roger Moncreve suspected he could have done pull-ups on the indignant anger between the two boss-claimants.
Already in the room, which had a door in the middle of each side of the long table, were other Garson tenement high-ups – Lieutenant Wendy Bragg, greying-haired Captain Foster of the guard staff, and a half-dozen older types who were upper civil administration. Most had scars from time as officers in their youths, but they were in their forties through sixties now. They stood waiting expectantly; Roger Moncreve noted that this meeting did seem to be lieutenants and higher.
Both claimants at the table had been wearing double gold eagles on their shoulders for the last week. It did not, to Roger, look like the two men had reached any kind of an agreement whatsoever. Also interesting was how neither his father nor his big brother were present right now.
The sergeant who’d escorted Roger and his group in spoke into a mouthpiece as he closed the door behind them. Roger caught the words: “All here, sir.”
The door closed with a click.
“You two sorted it out yet?” Captain Foster asked with a twinge of irritation. As the Chapel’s former administrative officer, he should have been on the Colonel’s side. As a semi-retired-by-injuries staff officer who’d been paid less than a company commander, he probably just wanted to get this damn thing over with and the tenement retaken. It wasn’t like any of them had been paid since the Reverend’s death, and the hotel bills would be hurting him more than the others. As a staff officer he would also be a sufficiently astute political officer, Roger Moncreve thought, as to not choose a horse until the race had already been fixed.
Reverend-former-Colonel Roger Garson had opened his mouth and was about to reply when the door opposite Roger Moncreve and the other high-ups opened. In came Roger’s father John Moncreve, followed by two corporals from First Company. The corporals carried small tablet computers and moved to each stand behind a claimant; Roger Moncreve didn’t fail to notice their holstered revolvers and sheathed blades. They hadn’t come from Times Square because there weren’t even traces remaining of any wax or wire around the short, broad swords’ hilts. He knew from repeated recent personal experience that peace bonds were easy to undo but their traces were a thorough pain to clean off.
“What is the meaning of this, Tempe?” Reverend-Captain Dan Garson demanded of the corporal behind him, starting to get up.
“Stay down,” John Moncreve ordered coldly. Corporal Tempe placed a firm hold on the man’s double-eagled shoulder – not pressing him down, but keeping him from rising further. Roger Moncreve had never seen his dad use that tone to a member of the ruling family, let alone order a man to lay hands on one!
Reverend Roger Garson, who had been about to speak up angrily himself, turned his glare from his nephew across to John Moncreve Senior. Shock and hate were in the colonel’s eyes but he said nothing.
Into the room came two more men. President Lei Chang was the first, and he took a place at the table next to John Moncreve. He was a cold-eyed man of clear Chinese descent, his paternal line being a Tong dynasty since before the streets had been abandoned if you were to believe his family claims. He wore an immaculately tailored grey suit with three gold stars on each shoulder.
The other man didn’t take a place at the table. He stood just inside the two door and surveyed the room with experienced detective’s eyes. He was scarred, barrel-chested and in his late thirties, and Roger had seen Jamie Ibson before at a few high-level functions. The difference was that those times he’d made a big point of, despite the shiny silver Inspector’s ea
gles on the shoulders of his uniform and an impressive array of the sorts of ribbons you didn’t exactly get for kissing ass or looking pretty, claiming firmly that his presence in the No-Go Zone was in in an absolutely personal and unofficial social capacity.
Now the Mayor’s proconsul wore a plain tan suit that didn’t quite fit, with two spirals of meaningless bling on each shoulder and a badly-tailored shoulder-holster bulge under his right arm. And he wasn’t saying a thing.
Jamie Ibson wearing plain clothes north of Canal Street, Roger Moncreve noted. That was relevant, because if the man wore full uniform for ostensibly personal social functions, he was in plain clothes right now for… something Captain Roger Moncreve had never seen before. It wasn’t supposed to happen.
“Reverend Daniel Garson,” President Chang said coldly in a low tone. “Reverend Roger Garson,” with a viper’s glare at the man on the opposite end of the boardroom table.
“You two have been squabbling over the bossdom for a week now. In this time the half-baked attempt at a second Commune that has taken over your home, has been recruiting, training and reorganizing troops while spreading disruptive literature and illegal weapons all across southern Manhattan!”
There were explosions from both men.
“You don’t say that to a tenement boss, Lei!” the precinct’s former Colonel snarled.
Lei Chang steepled his fingers. His left pinky was missing. He had not always been a tenement boss.
“Last Sunday, in Reverend Carl Garson the Second’s final meeting with us,” President Chang continued in that cold tone while the silent John Moncreve next to him gave a slight nod and the silent plain-clothed NYPD Inspector behind him said nothing even with his eyes, “your father or your older brother requested Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral as part of a territory swap that would result in my men ending this – illegal occupation. At the time, we had to decline that request. It is now granted. Mr. Moncreve, please?”
