Flood

31

Back on Seventh, which was relatively busy with bundled-up shoppers, it was as if the river incursion just a couple of blocks away wasn’t happening, as if the three of them had walked through some kind of portal from a parallel world of sinking and submergence.

They headed to Times Square, making for Broadway. The square’s giant billboards were dead, great black windows into emptiness-all save a couple of small panels shining red and white with Coke advertising, which must somehow have got around the city’s power restrictions, unless the display was for morale purposes. The square was eerie, a huge empty space, the traffic sparse and few people around. But music echoed out of loudspeakers suspended from posts, Ella Fitzgerald singing “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

At the intersection with 34th Street they passed Macy’s. The store was open, but blankets and towels hung drying out of the upper-story windows. A giant billboard proclaimed that the world’s largest department store was proud to host displaced New Yorkers in a time of crisis.

Piers Michaelmas was waiting for them, as promised, at the foot of the Empire State Building. He was in his British army uniform. He looked relaxed, his arms folded. “I knew you’d be late,” he said, eyeing Thandie. “Been skimming stones, have we?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Lily embraced him briefly.“You’re looking good, Piers. You’ve got to be the only man in NewYork in his dress uniform. How are you keeping your cuffs clean? My God, you’re even wearing polished shoes.”

“Oh, I always step carefully. One must look the part if one is attending meetings at the UN on behalf of HMG.”

Thandie glanced at her GPS map.“You’re working at the UN building? But there’s a flood from the UN Plaza to the river.”

“So there is, the whole area is a lagoon. You have to take a boat. But the upper floors are habitable; the organization is still working, though most of its functions are being mirrored in Geneva. There is a sense that one shouldn’t give up, you know. My father ran a small firm of quantity surveyors. Once he was blasted out of his premises, in Manchester, by an IRA bomb. The next morning he set up shop in a pub at the bottom of the road, and hung a sign outside the door saying ‘Business as usual.’”

Lily shook her head. “I never knew that about you, Piers. And I thought we’d talked each other dry in Barcelona.”

“How dull if that were true. Now then, I would recommend we cut east, actually, things get a bit trickier further downtown…”

Piers led the way now, striding between the puddles down Fifth until they got to the intersection with Broadway at the Flatiron Building. From there they continued down Broadway, heading southeast toward Union Square. Thandie peered into her map.

The three hostages, Gary, Piers and Lily, walked together. Impulsively Lily walked between the men and linked their arms.

Piers spoke of Helen.“I got word she’s in the US. She and her friend from the FO.”

“You’re kidding,” Lily said.“The last time I spoke to her they told me she was shuttling between Iran and Saudi.”

“Well, there was a failed coup in Saudi. I’m afraid we’re likely to see rather a lot of that sort of thing in the years to come. Said’s branch of the family tried to depose the King. It didn’t work, and when the whole thing threatened to unravel into all-out civil war the US military stepped in. They extracted Said and his colleagues, took them to the US compound in Baghdad, and then brought them here.”

“As what? Prisoners? Refugees?”

Piers smiled thinly. “I think that remains to be seen. Said has been asking for safe passage for his family.”

“Ah. Which might include Grace,” Gary said.

“Yes. I wouldn’t want to get hopes up. But I would have thought Helen’s chances of finding her child would be vastly increased if she and Grace are both in the US.”

Lily longed for that to be true. She wondered if she might get to speak to Helen, even meet her and Michael, before she had to leave the US again.

“It’s good of you to support this IPCC presentation of Thandie’s, Piers,” Gary said. “Nathan appreciates it.”

Piers grunted. “I’m sure he does. And I’m glad to have been able to facilitate things a little. But I don’t think my uniform is going to make much difference to the audience Thandie will face. Boffins! They’re all the same-constitutionally incapable of accepting authority.”

Gary laughed. “Actually that’s a pretty precise definition of a scientist’s core competence.”

“Well, perhaps it is, but it doesn’t make you buggers any easier to deal with, does it?”

“This is important, Piers,” Lily said. “If Thandie’s right-”

“If she’s right she must be heard, of course. But from what I hear, I still believe the chances are she’s not right, for all that Nathan Lammockson would like it to be so.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I owe him a huge debt; I owe him my life. But in my judgment Lammockson is the sort of chap who longs for the apocalypse-you know, for everything to be pulled down around him, so that he can save us and build it all up again. He longs to live in times that provide a challenge commensurate with the stature he sees in himself. That’s not to say Thandie is wrong. It’s just that a man like Lammockson is predisposed to believe her catastrophic predictions.”

Gary nodded.“Maybe. I do sometimes wonder if Nathan would keep the money flowing if Thandie’s results didn’t indicate that things are getting worse. Anyhow none of that proves she’s wrong.”

“No indeed,” Piers said.“But there is a danger that in dreaming of fantastic catastrophes, we could fall into the trap of ignoring what’s real.”

“Which is?”

He paused and glanced around; they were at the intersection with 4th Street. “Come this way and I’ll show you.” He cut west for three blocks, leading confidently, until they reached Washington Square Park.

It was another tent city, like Central Park. Smoke rose from fires, and every square meter as far as Lily could see was crammed with rows of grimy, mud-colored tents, broken up by the green monoliths of portaloos. There were hospital tents, food kitchens, shower blocks, water tankers; it looked like what it was, an exceptionally well-equipped refugee camp. But there was a strong police presence, with mounted cops patrolling the perimeter of the park, barbed-wire barriers everywhere. To the north a triumphal arch rose up above the huddled tents, a gesture from a more favored age. Flags flew from the arch, celebrating agencies such as Homeland Security, the NewYork City Department of Environmental Protection and the city’s Office of Emergency Management. A poster proclaimed free classes in DNA genealogy, which demonstrated that most Americans had a heritage containing a whole rainbow of ethnicity. A choir of NYPD officers stood under the arch, singing mournful Irish ballads.

There wasn’t a blade of grass to be seen; the whole park was churned to mud. The air was thick with the stench of smoke and sewage.

Thandie said slowly, consulting her GPS, “Just here we’re at a kind of neck in the flooding. To the west you have a pretty extensive lake covering much of Greenwich Village, running as far as 14th Street. The riverside development over there is drowned too. And to the east there’s another major incursion, where the East River has risen over East Village and Alphabet City, lapping in as far as Second Avenue, even Third.” She looked up. “Right here we’re squeezed in the middle.”

Piers said, “And this is where the refugees have come, the shopkeepers and restaurateurs and artists and writers and poets and whatnot from Greenwich from one direction, and the Puerto Ricans from Alphabet City from the other, along with a few wealthy white folk who colonized the gentrified areas west of Avenue B. Here they all are, living under canvas in Washington Square.”

Gary asked, “With the police keeping them apart?”

Piers said, “New York is a melting pot, they say. That’s being put to the test this year, I suppose. You can see they are running tolerance programs. Anyhow, do you see what I mean? Lily, we’ve discussed Nathan Lammockson and his grand gestures before. In my view this is the real work of the emergency, by doctors and nurses and firemen and police and immense numbers of volunteers, the endless task of providing shelter and food and warmth and averting disease-the task of preserving lives, one at a time. Why, I’m told this tent city has already seen a hundred births of its own, and more deaths, in the six weeks it’s been established. That’s what’s real. But this sort of project would never be glamorous enough for Nathan Lammockson to take an interest in. Well. Let’s walk on.”

He led them back east, but walked them now across Broadway and through NoHo to the Bowery, and then cut south again, through Little Italy and Chinatown.

Thandie said they were heading through another flooding bottleneck, with SoHo submerged to the west, and much of the Lower East Side to the east. Here there were no convenient green spaces to colonize and no obvious refugee camps, but the neighborhoods were quiet, tense. Piers said this had been the site of disorder when the river levels had breached ten meters, one catastrophic night before Christmas. Floods of East Side refugees, many of them first-generation immigrants, had poured into an area of a few blocks already crowded with an ethnically diverse community. Most of them had now been evacuated to the north.

Piers’s group cut down Park Row, and came to the Civic Center at the foot of the great ramp that led up to the Brooklyn Bridge. And here they found another urban shore, where the street dipped into the water.

“I guess that’s it,” Thandie said. She folded away the screen on her sleeve. “Nothing but floodwater from here on south.”

The sun was low now, and Lily had to shield her eyes to look at the crowding buildings of the Financial District, from the Gothic pinnacle of the Woolworth Building a few blocks away to the gleaming new World Trade Center towers to the southeast, dominated by the extraordinary wedge shape of the tallest of them all, the Freedom Tower. But though water pooled in the shadowed canyons at the feet of the tower blocks, lights showed in their faces, and there was much activity on the water, boats skimming back and forth between the buildings.

“So they’re still working in Wall Street,” Thandie said.

“Yes,” Piers said. “Much of it is shutdown, mothballing and transfer of functions. But it’s good for the corporate image to have a presence in the disaster zone you’re making a profit out of.”

Gary said, “And the Freedom Tower-”

“Is where Nathan has set up Thandie’s presentation to the IPCC,” Piers said. “Nathan is nothing if not a showman. Though the Memorial is flooded, of course.”

Thandie shaded her eyes. “It’s years since I was here. I’m sure that skyline looks different.”

“Every so often a building falls,” said Piers.“They’re all built on good Manhattan schist. But their sub-basements are undermined, and their foundations aren’t designed for continual immersion in saline water. And then a storm comes along, and-There are generally few casualties; there’s plenty of notice. When they give way they explode, you know; the steel cables within the reinforced concrete structures are under tension.”

Thandie asked, “So how do we get over there, swim?”

“There’s an AxysCorp boat. I’ll call for it.” He walked away, speaking into the air. As he did so the guard who had shadowed them all the way from Central Park emerged from a shadowed street, nodding at Piers.

A breeze ruffled Lily’s hair. She looked east, out toward the ocean. Clouds were scudding across the sky, a great dish of them spread along the horizon, and she remembered the storm that had diverted her plane.