“They never go. Only the names change. Some other sonofabitch will take over the territories.”
“But there’ll be a gap, a moment when no one is in charge. That’s your moment, that’s when you get her out.”
“Sam wouldn’t even want me talking to you like this,” she said uncertainly.
“And that’s the problem. This life she’s in, it’s a drug. She can’t break it by herself. But you can.”
Karoline let out a long sigh and gripped Samantha’s limp hand. “Rayner wanted a message delivered. A clear one.”
She didn’t even have to say that; Alik understood the culture perfectly. Messages. Threats. It was all a variant of the old rackets when the shitty words were peeled away. What it boiled down to was the power the likes of Javid-Lee and Rayner could exert over others, enforced by either money or fear. Nobody ever backed down; they had too much dumb pride. To lose face among the gangs was to lose everything.
“What message?” Salovitz asked.
“To back off,” she replied. “That’s all. This woman, she’d got some kind of dispute going with one of Rayner’s relatives. So Sam finds out when the woman visits her spa, a real fancy uptown one. She goes every couple of days, gets the whole treatment—hair, face, full-body skin cleanse. And she always has a massage, too, some fancy one, with warm stones or some shit. Thing is, even with an ordinary massage, you’re mostly naked. Did you know just taking your clothes off makes people feel vulnerable, never mind lying there with someone standing over you, someone you suddenly find isn’t who you thought they were?”
“Sam gave her the massage,” Alik said.
“Goddamn right. But Sam never hurt her, never did anything like that fucking animal Riek. She just scared the crap out of her. Exactly what Rayner wanted.”
Alik already knew the answer, but asked the question anyway. “This woman she warned, what was her name?”
“Rose Lorenzo.”
—
Bietzk called just as Alik stepped out of the hospital. In front of him a long line of pine and oak trees stretched the whole length of the Van Wyck, a sweet stretch of parkland cutting through the slowly depopulating urban wilderness. The progressive idea behind converting the old major routes through the city was to soften the environment, and through that make the lives of the citizens that bit more positive and pleasant. All very admirable and worthy.
He knew at its heart it was all bullshit. There had always been gangsters like Javid-Lee and Rayner right from when the city was founded, and there probably always would be. Poverty attracted a certain type—violent, without a conscience—and where there was poverty was its evil twin: exploitation. For all the money locked away in vaults uptown, the city retained a very old-style notion of equitable distribution. A bunch of long, skinny parks wouldn’t change the attitude of any New Yorker; the eternal buildings and institutions kept them captive in the same old economic cycle as surely as any jail. The only way people growing up inside the projects and low-rent tenements could break their old ways was to leave and immerse themselves in something else, something new and different, such as an asteroid habitat or a terraformed world, Universal or Utopial. But Alik had seen the statistics, always slipped into the appendix of the innumerable reports on urban crime commissioned by state senators calling for “action.” Depressingly few kids would leave the world they knew, no matter what opportunity was promised by slick government policy advertising. It wasn’t a surprise; nobody in a shiny clean habitat wanted a New York punk to screw up the perfect conformity they’d woven to hold their neocorporate lives together. And ever since New Washington was successfully terraformed back in 2134, opening its endless verdant prairies to American settlers, New York’s population hasn’t reduced by more than ten percent. Most American cities were down fifteen to twenty percent from their peak twenty-first-century levels, as people, especially the wealthier young, flooded out for that mythical Fresh Start.
As Alik stood in the biting cold listening to Bietzk, his gaze tracked along the Van Wyck’s trees with their mantle of thin, prickly ice, as if they’d grown thorns to protect themselves through the winter: a mirror of the citizens who walked among them, bristling with hostility and rooted in the structure of the past.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Bietzk said.
Alik and Salovitz exchanged a glance.
“Go on,” he said.
“Connexion sent us the logs for Delphine Farron. She and her boy Alphonse walked out of Central Park West hub fifty-two minutes before the Lorenzo family came home. The civic surveillance video shows them walking into the apartment block.”
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Salovitz exclaimed. “They were both at the portalhome? Where the fuck did they all go?”
“Bietzk,” Alik said, “I need you to get on to the developer. Find out if they built a safe room into the portalhome.”
“I’m on it.”
“Come on,” he said.
“Where are we going?” Salovitz asked.