Greenhouse Summer (5 page)

Relations between Bad Boys and Force Flic being what they were, and this, after all, still being France at least in a cultural sense, the response was a Gallic shrug, and a suggestion that gallantry indeed required Bad Boys to come to the rescue of these Ladies of the Evening in distress. But do not be so obvious about it as to force us to investigate such a public service. Which we would be compelled to do for the sake of our own morale if it appeared that a police official had actually been murdered.

Thus had Prince Eric Esterhazy been offered the opportunity to
do the good deed and been provided with the ridiculous instrument presently distending the drape of his jacket in such an unfortunate manner.

Contrary to hoary folklore, this had not been an offer he could not refuse. As a citizen-shareholder in Bad Boys, one might enhance one’s career progress and secure large bonuses in return for occasional special services rendered.

Well, actually one.

Alas, the time had not yet passed when the removal of certain recalcitrant individuals was essential to the fiduciary health of the syndic cause. But the syndic charter forbade wage employment, and granting citizen-shareholder status to full-time professional killers did not seem like a swift idea.

Much better to be able to call upon citizen-shareholders engaged in other full-time occupations to perform the occasional special service.

Once or twice a year at the most, Eric. And you can refuse any contract you feel violates your moral or political principles with no hard feelings, we can always give it to someone who would find it more fulfilling. No more than one hit a year had ever been required of him, and when he turned down the occasional contract on moral or esthetic grounds, there were indeed no unpleasant repercussions.

So it might fairly be said that because the esthetics of the manner in which he was constrained to fulfill this one left so much to be desired, preventing the dishonorable and odious M. Gauldier from further disturbing the commerce of this fair pleasure garden and the harmonious relationship between Bad Boys and Force Flic would be an act of righteous self-sacrifice.

Noblesse oblige.

He was, after all, a prince, was he not?

MONIQUE CALHOUN TOOK THE ELEVATOR DOWN and strode through the lobby out onto Seawall Avenue, the boulevard atop the dikework that ran around Manhattan, the only real New York, the city she hated to love and loved to hate.

This, of course, made her a true New Yorker.

This in itself was part of the
attitude
.

Her cramped studio apartment on the eleventh floor of a Seawall Avenue tower might hardly be a candidate for anyone but a New Yorker’s object of affection, but those favored by a crepuscular rendezvous therein, who didn’t have to live there, seldom failed to express their envy.

For the westward view through the picture window at sunset was heart stoppingly glorious on a good day, the blazing ball of the sun bronzed by the haze over the New Jersey shore as it sank majestically behind the silhouetted filigreed fairyland landscape of the Palisades, painting the sky mauve and purple and orange, turning the Hudson River into a brilliant mirror of rippling light.

The cold cruel light of morning at seawall level, however, presented a somewhat less romantic vista. The Palisades skyline was
starkly revealed as a hodgepodge of factories, apartment blocks, windmills, tank farms, and solar arrays.

Houseboats, barges, sampans, and fishing boat docks, with their connecting chaotic network of rotting gangways, formed an amoeboid floating favela outside the seawall, spreading five hundred meters and more out across the Hudson along as much of the length of Manhattan as the eye could see. And while from the eleventh floor she didn’t get much of the smell, even with the sun just beginning to steam the aroma off River City, she got a good dose of cookfire smoke and frying fish and better-you-don’t-ask from here.

If the Paris of her girlhood was favored by fortune and the Lands of the Lost of Monique Calhoun’s guilty professional day-tripping were the victims of the roll of the climatological dice, New York was somehow both Blue and Green and yet neither.

New York was energized by its perfect winters, the clear blue skies, the tangy air just a shade too warm to be called brisk. New York basked in its golden tropical springs and autumns, when it wasn’t being drenched with their monsoon rains.

New York broasted in its horrendous summers, when you could fry an egg on the pavement and steam one in the supersaturated air if you could keep the mosquitoes and flies from devouring it first, when orbital mirrors had to burn away the inversion layer every other day to keep the air more or less breathable.

The swamping of so much of the shorelines of Brooklyn and the Bronx and Long Island might have provided the breeding grounds for vast hordes of mosquitoes, flies, and swamp rats—and alligators and water moccasins and cockroaches the size of cats or so the legends went—but it had also created the habitat for the rich profusion of crabs, lobsters, shrimp, crayfish, catfish, carp, and shellfish which made seafood so cheap locally and had created the aquaculture and fishing industry in which, one way or another, most of the refugees from the Southeast Asian littorals and Pacific islands found gainful employ.

Are we Blue? Are we Green?

The Hot and Cold War? Which side are we on?

On
our
side, whose else, buster?

And we intend to keep it the side that’s winning.

In place of politics, New York had
attitude
.

Winners and losers?

Do what it takes.

Ocean rising gonna drown the Apple?

So hire the Dutch to dike it in.

It’s gonna cost a bundle.

So tough shit.

Brooklyn and the Bronx and Long Island gone to feed the fishes?

So eat as much as you can digest of lobster Newburg and bouillabaisse and linguine marinara and peddle what’s left to the rubes west of the Hudson at fancy prices.

Attitude.

Monique just didn’t get it when she arrived in New York as a college freshman straight off the plane from Paris and into a city that seemed to be on another planet.

Paris might not exactly be the bargain-basement capital of Europe, but not even Novosibirsk or Zekograd could have prepared her for the prices here. Building the seawall that had saved New York from an ocean of water had inundated the city in an ocean of bond debt, the result being that there were sky-high taxes on everything, including, it would seem, taxes on taxes. As a result, the prices in the shopwindows were unreal, and what would rent you a decent forty meters in Paris got you the equivalent of a maid’s room here. The metro had long since been inundated, the trams were expensive and unreliable, the motorized taxis were only for the rich.

How do people
live
here?

What am I
doing
here?

New York speedily enough taught Monique its answer to the first question. You did not waste time and energy bitching and moaning about taxes or the climate or the injustice of it all or your crappy broom closet of an apartment except when you had the leisure to indulge in New York’s favorite parlor game.

You survived.

Columbia University had dormitory studios students could afford at three per room. The street food was plentiful and varied and cheap. The gray-market pedicabs and rickshaws got you around at cut-rate untaxed prices to be negotiated. Tax-free secondhand machine-made or first-hand-crafted clothing was inexpensive once you developed the
street smarts to find the black markets. You wore a mosquito repeller in the summer and sprung for sonic cockroach guard and air-conditioning no matter what it took.

You developed the
attitude
.

Or else.

It took a bit longer for New York to teach her to fully appreciate the irony of the answer to the second question, though she had known it even before she left Paris.

Monique had been dispatched to New York to develop a True Blue social conscience. It had been a negotiated compromise to bring about a truce in the familial Hot and Cold War.

Mother had grown up in balmy palmy Paris as the daughter of Cajun refugees who ran a restaurant in the Marais called Bayous et Magnolias.

Father was the son of a French architect who had made his pile building mansions for the movers and shapers of booming Siberia and the American public-relations consultant he had met there doing likewise with their rough-and-ready images. Having made their fortune in the Wild East, they had repaired to Paris to enjoy it.

In Paris, however, an American PR lady with limited French hardly commanded the salary to which she had become accustomed in Siberia the Golden. Nor was an architect who had specialized in neo-Las Vegas mansions for the Siberian nouveau plutocracy in hot demand in the City of Halogen Light.

So by the time Monique’s father married her mother, her paternal grandparents had been constrained to sell off their Paris apartment and retire to a farmstead in Var, where they could afford to live off their capital and from which reduced economic vantage they could not afford to look down their noses at the daughter of modest restaurateurs as economically below their son’s station.

The Blue and the Green of it, however, was a cat-and-dog matter.

Mother’s family wore their Blue on their sleeves, not to mention the decor and menu of their restaurant. Pining for Lost Louisianne was their stock-in-trade, and you couldn’t eat oysters bienville and crayfish gumbo from their kitchen without a dripping garnish of Spanish moss and True Blue climatological revanchism.

Father’s folks, on the other hand, having been enriched by the
warming of Siberia and the consequent boom times to the point of being able to live off it through decades of permanent midcareer crisis, had their own class self-interest in viewing the brave and balmy new world through Green-colored glasses.

Nor was the conflict ameliorated when Father—under the baleful Blue influence of Mother and her family, or so
his
family saw it—chose the career of climatech engineer, spiting one’s parents and impressing one’s girlfriend by declaring oneself an enemy of their class being a youthful mode never likely to go out of fashion.

Thus, when Monique’s two sets of grandparents
did
speak to each other, they did it at the top of their lungs, and often enough with the destiny of their darling granddaughter as the dialectical shuttlecock.

Given this girlhood, it was not without her own enthusiastic consent that Monique’s parents, when the time came, decided to extract her from this ideological battleground by sending her to university in America. Nor was it without political cunning.

Her maternal grandparents approved on nostalgic Blue grounds and recommended Tulane, which had been re-established on suitably muggy swampland in bayou suburbs of St. Louis.

Her paternal grandparents concurred on practical career grounds—an Anglophone higher education was essential, even the mighty Siberians were constrained to interface with the rest of the world in English—but assumed it would be Berkeley or Stanford or one of those Newer Age universities endowed by the major syndics headquartered in the lotus land of the Pacific Northwest.

Instead, it was Columbia, in New York, a city whose political hue was ambiguous enough to leave both sets of grandparents equally dissatisfied. A city far more hard-edged than climatologically blessed Paris, where, or so her parents hoped, Monique would herself gain a keener appreciation of the unfortunate fact that there were people for whom the warming was not all palm trees and long golden afternoons in the Jardin des Plantes without being exiled to durance vile and a third-rate education in some truly grim Land of the Lost metropolis.

Monique shuddered a little inside as she began to descend the stairs leading down to the pedicab stand on West End Avenue. She knew it was irrational, but she also knew it would be unnatural ever to get used to
this
.

Seawall Avenue was about five meters above the Hudson, and from this perspective, when she looked west, the surface of the river seemed more or less at eye level. But West End Avenue was not just east of Seawall Avenue, it was
down
.

Ten meters down.