5 Days to Landfall

by Robert Roy Britt

  A developer had recently put up a sixteen-floor apartment complex next to Chez Henri, and Juan Rico was first on the list of buyers. He moved in even before the building was completely finished—the construction elevator was still attached to the north wall, towering over Chez Henri.

  Meanwhile, an even taller building was going up next to Rico’s, across the street to the south. Planned to be twenty-four stories, the building was so far no more than twenty-two stark slabs of concrete and a wooden platform on top that awaited another batch of concrete. Every single apartment in the unfinished building was already sold.

  Tribeca, like much of New York, was booming.

  He went into the restaurant, into the tall, dark room whose luxurious wood-paneled walls made the place feel like you’d been there before, made you want to curl up and spend the afternoon. He found Amanda at a table by the window.

  “Eat with a cripple?”

  Amanda looked up, smiled, and shook her head yes. “You look half dead.”

  “Thanks a heap,” Rico said. He sat down and looked around the room.

  Most of the sturdy wood tables were occupied, a few of them with older men Rico recognized. Rico saw the old drunk with the incorrigible white hair, red cheeks, purple nose, sitting in his usual spot at the bar, smoking his pipe. Nobody ever listened to the old drunk, who had a penchant for stating the obvious. “Well, looks like it’s Tuesday again,” he would say. Or, “I see you’re having a martini.” It was hard to know what to say to him, but he was a fixture in the place and on the rare day that he was not in his seat, Rico felt that Chez Henri was a different place altogether.

  “Keep this shit up and I’ll be like that old guy someday,” Rico said to Amanda, pointing with his head.

  “Oh, c’mon. You’re not a drunk.”

  “Got no wife, no kids, nobody to take care of me when I’m old. I’ll become one.”

  “I’ll take care of you,” Amanda said playfully.

  Rico half wished she were serious. Though Amanda was too good a friend to consider getting romantic with, she was the only woman he knew who could fill the giant hole in his life. His mind withdrew to a place where he kept gauzy memories of the woman he had loved, the woman he had thought he would spend his life with. It had been two years now since she left him; it still hurt like it was yesterday. He wanted to talk to Amanda about her, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t even say her name. The pain was too great.

  Henri Mouchet himself, who always greeted Rico, came to the table.

  “How is my favorite customer today?” Henri’s graying hair was pulled back into a ponytail, revealing a full, dark, creased face and a warm, perpetual smile. He saw Rico’s cast. “Ooh, not so good, I see.”

  Rico’s mind returned to the present, and he half-smiled. Henri Mouchet was the other thing Rico loved about the neighborhood. “Why you always so damn happy?” Rico asked.

  “Friendly people like you,” Henri said. “What happened?”

  “Got in a fight with a woman,” Rico said.

  “Not this beautiful Mademoiselle, I trust.”

  “Nope. Lady named Gert. Real bitch.”

  “You should learn to defend yourself,” Henri said.

  Rico rolled his eyes and pretended to ignore Henri, who smiled and drifted politely to another table. A waiter appeared, Rico and Amanda ordered, and the waiter disappeared. A bus boy brought water.

  “How’s your arm feel?” Amanda asked.

  “Fuckin’ hurts. Sorry.” Rico dropped his eyes. He hated talking like that to Amanda. “But I guess I’m lucky.” He thought for a second. “Amanda, no offense, but we messed up last night.”

  “I know.”

  “And I didn’t get the shot. I’m gonna quit this shit.”

  “No you won’t. You’ll keep trying to get the shot until it kills you.”

  “Yeah, I’m probably that stupid. But last night, well, it was a bust.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know. It’s not your fault, though. I chose to be there. I got to quit listenin’ to Jack Corbin, is the thing.”

  It was exhilarating, but it also scared the shit out of me, Rico thought. He wondered how fine the line was between those two sensations. I almost died. That’s the line.

  Rico changed the subject: “Where’s Jack?”

  “Went to the newsroom.”

  “Oh yeah, has to file. Is all he thinks about. He gonna make time for you today?”

  Amanda almost spit her water out. “What?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. You two were practically falling over each other all day yesterday, walks on the beach together, you savin’ his life just so you can look good and shit. C’mon, Amanda, don’t play dumb with me. You like him.”

  Amanda pressed her fingers to her temples, as though he’d just given her a headache. “I do like him,” she said. “I just don’t have the time or the energy right now. With my father in the nursing home and Sarah at her father’s and…”

  “Screw Sarah’s father. Find time. Take it from me. I messed up and lost the woman I should be with.”

  “I’m sorry, Juan.”

  Rico shook his head to get rid of the thought. “Jack’s a good guy. You two need each other. You know, you’re the first woman I’ve seen him go gaga over in a long time. He gave me the same shit, talked about being too busy. Load a crap.”

  “You guys were talking about me?”

  “Course. He been wanting to see you again since Andrew. He think I don’t know that. Hah. Anyway, his knees go all Jell-O when he sees you. So, my question? He make time for you today?”

  “He asked me if we could meet here this evening and talk about Harvey.”

  “Talk about Harvey.” Rico intoned his disbelief. “Hmph.”

  “Join us, if you like. Around six.”

  Rico looked at his watch. “Four hours. Guess I could get hungry again.”

  Rico worked on a thick T-bone. He thought about Amanda and Sarah, of Jack maybe joining them to make a family again. It bothered him sometimes, that he had no family. He was used to it, but he wondered what it might be like to stuff stockings for kids at Christmas, or teach them how to ride bikes, or go to ballet class. Unless she came back—and he knew he would always take her back—there would be no family.

  He pulled his vacant stare in from the window and looked at Amanda. Her eyes were closed as she savored a bite of her quail, which sat on a bed of leaf lettuce and rice, surrounded by fresh fruits and sautéed vegetables.

  “Question for you,” he said. “I been thinking. What if one like Gert did come here? What if Harvey does?”

  “Lots of places will be underwater,” Amanda said. “World Trade Center entrance, tunnel entrances…”

  “Which ones?”

  “Battery, Lincoln and Holland. Most of them.”

  “The Holland Tunnel. Now that’s the shot.” Rico looked out the window, east toward the tunnel entrance, just three blocks away. “What else?”

  “The South Ferry Subway station entrance.”

  Rico raised his eyebrows. “Subways would flood too?”

  “Lots of them. In some cases, the water would come in through the street vents. Fourteenth Street, Lexington Avenue. Other places it would come right down the stairs.”

  Rico frowned. He thought of the people he had photographed down there. He saw some of them now and then, the ones who were still alive. It wasn’t easy to stay alive when you lived in a dank, eternal darkness among rats, cockroaches and construction dust. Now they had another enemy. “You know ’bout the moles?”

  “The what?”

  “Mole people,” Rico said. “Folks who live under the City.”

  “Like the homeless people and the musicians?”

  “No. The mole people make homes down there in abandoned tunnels, shafts, crawl spaces, wherever they can be left alone. You don’t usually see them. Pretty nice places, some of ’em. You know, considering. Furniture, shelves made of scrap wood, even paintings
on the walls.”

  “Oh God.” Amanda winced.

  He wasn’t surprised by Amanda’s concern. He knew that most people didn’t give a rat’s ass about the mole people, whom they considered dangerous, a perception that was sometimes true, sometimes false. Outcasts, they were labeled. They want to live down there, so why should we care? But Amanda wasn’t like that. Somebody was in trouble, Amanda cared, tried to do something about it.

  “They in danger?” Rico asked.

  Amanda had pushed her unfinished quail away. She wiped her mouth, then dropped the red cloth napkin on her plate and slumped in her chair. “When one vent floods, we don’t even really know what the effect will be. Most of the subways are thirty to fifty feet below the surface. Some are more than a hundred feet down. The whole system is interconnected, so depending on how much water gets in, it can flow through the network to God knows where. We know water would fill Grand Central, Penn Station, the PATH system and the subway system from down at the Battery at least back to 14th Street. And that’s just Manhattan. We haven’t even studied the effects on some of the other boroughs. Thing is, I’ve been worrying about people from above ground taking refuge in a subway station during a hurricane. I didn’t know there were people living down there. How many are we talking about?”

  “Back in the eighties there were, like, five thousand of ’em. Train cops kicked ’em out. Jack and I did a story on them a couple years ago. He reported that there’s about a thousand now, but nobody really knows.”

  Amanda stared over his shoulder, lost in thought. “Can you take me down there?” she asked.

  Rico rocked forward nervously. It wasn’t that simple. These people were not used to visitors. But he knew she would go, with or without him.

  “I know one place we might be able to get into, but I gotta check it out first.”

  “Get me in, Juan. Today. I fly back to Miami tonight.”

  CHAPTER 10

  OUTSIDE SANTO DOMINGO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

  2:05 P.M.

  A warm breeze fanned the leaves of the palms around the pool and kept the day from becoming unbearable. Even so, Maximo was sweating. He considered the tens of millions of dollars he had stashed in various banks around the world. The $5 million he’d wagered on a hurricane was no drop in the bucket, but neither could it break him if he lost it. Still, Maximo always sweated about money.

  The stock of Global Insurance Company had been drifting lower since the opening bell in a lackluster day on Wall Street. By noon it had dropped from fifty-six dollars a share to less than fifty-five.

  Maximo had expected a steeper drop. He was in a sour mood when Terese emerged from his sprawling hacienda. He’d sent everyone else inside for the time being. He watched Terese’s sensuous body dictate the swishes of a long silk robe as she walked purposefully toward the pool and handed Maximo his laptop computer. She set two cordless phones and a glass of rum down on the small table next to him, then turned to go. Maximo grabbed her robe, pulled her back.

  “Stay,” he said. “I may need your advice.”

  Terese nodded. Maximo fired up his computer and connected to the Internet via satellite. He typed GLIC, the company’s NASDAQ ticker symbol, into the quote server of his online brokerage account. Trading volume was 200,000 shares. The last trade was at less than fifty-four. Maximo’s short sell was looking good, though far from what he’d hoped.

  “It’s a strange custom,” he said. “You sell a stock you do not even own, banking on the price going down, and then you buy it back at a lower price.” Maximo had never done any short selling himself. One of his brothers played front man on schemes like this. Maximo just made the decisions and provided the funds.

  “Who sells them to you?” Terese asked.

  “The broker. And we do it all via a company in Bermuda. I tell you, you Americans have devised a complicated financial system. Too complicated. I think no one person understands how it all works.”

  “Then it is a good system for people who are not so honest,” she said.

  “Yes.” Maximo chuckled, amazed again how Terese could change his mood, and how much she understood about the world.

  The phone rang, right on time. Terese handed him one of the phones. She reclined on the lounge chair next to his. Maximo answered in his stern voice: “Nombre?”

  “Octopus.”

  “It does not look so good yet,” Maximo said. He nodded at Teresa and she picked up the other phone.

  “It’s perfect,” the Octopus said. “Price is sliding, volume is only slightly ahead of normal. That’s good. Means the market hasn’t figured this out yet. Probably just some insiders selling right now.”

  “Why is that good?”

  “Because we have bigger fish to fry.” The Octopus sounded awfully confident.

  “Oh?”

  “Harvey has become a delicious monster since we spoke yesterday. Official forecast is still Charleston, but the odds for New York are up.”

  “I don’t think I see the point. I have a rather large short position in GLIC right now. I don’t give a damn about Harvey.”

  “Don’t worry about GLIC. It will fall. Somebody is going to find out what you already know, and they’re going to find out soon. When they do, the game will be up. Everybody will start bailing out of insurance companies that have heavy hurricane exposure. The exodus will ruin your chances to place a bet on Harvey, so I hope it doesn’t start for a few days.”

  “What makes you so sure I will make another investment before my first one pays off?”

  “I think you believe the scheme will work. And I know you’re greedy.”

  Maximo laughed deeply. “Perhaps you are right on the first point. You flatter me with the second. What do you have for me?”

  “I have two more insurance companies. I’ll fax the details over after we talk.”

  “Give me the—how do you say it?—upshot.”

  “Clarion Mutual is overexposed from South Carolina through Florida,” the Octopus said. “If Harvey heads there, you could turn a tidy profit.”

  “And the other company?”

  “My favorite. PrimeCo Insurance. They don’t do much south of Delaware, but their overexposure in Jersey and New York is a glaring oversight. Mostly commercial properties, shipping and trucking, things like that. Lots of vulnerable multi-story buildings along the water in Brooklyn, too. PrimeCo’s reinsurance program is poor, and they have staunchly refused to issue catastrophe bonds.”

  “Catastrophe bonds?”

  “Basically the equivalent of reinsurance. An insurance company sells its risk to other investors by issuing catastrophe bonds. If a hurricane hits the East Coast within the specified life of the bond, the company doesn’t have to pay the investors back.”

  “A risky holding for the investor.”

  “High risk, high reward. The payoff is large for the investor if the catastrophe doesn’t happen. But I’ll tell you, the Northeast is overdue for a big one. The shoreline has really been built up in the past couple of decades. If Harvey hits New York, the damage could exceed a hundred billion. The effect on the insurance industry would be devastating. I think it could ripple through the whole financial market. For starters, the storm itself would grind business to a halt for days—weeks or more for the shipping ports. And it could be months before the tunnels are reopened. No trains, no cargo. Gridlock. And lots of large companies—not just insurance companies—have been snapping up these catastrophe bonds for the high rate of return. They’ll feel the pinch.”

  “A lot of ifs,” Maximo said.

  “The only if is if it hits. Just think of all the lawsuits. The more deaths, the better. And I can make sure there are more deaths.”

  “I know what you can do. But we’re talking about a lot of my money. I want to be assured the situation at Goddard is under control. How did our little test go?”

  “Splendidly. We’re ready there.”

  Maximo liked what he’d heard. Before committing, though, he wanted to k
now what Terese had to say. He covered the phone. She did the same, looked out beyond the pool and into the dense vegetation that tumbled into a lush valley. After some time she spoke with her characteristic American irreverence, and without looking at him.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, dealing with these insurance companies, and that pig of a man?”

  “I’m confident in the scheme, yes. The pig you speak of is devoted to me.”

  “What about the illegality of it?”

  Maximo bristled. “It is business as usual,” he said. “So long as I control the local officials I can do anything. Santino is in my pocket. He would not arrest me if I raped and killed his own daughter.”

  Terese wasn’t convinced. “But this isn’t some underfunded foreign drug agency that would come after you. This is Wall Street. Big money, big power.”

  “And I would fight with big money, big power.”

  Terese turned her head toward him, pulled her sleek sunglasses down her thin nose and gave a businesslike stare with cunning eyes as blue as the pool.

  “Be careful, darling,” she said. “This is new territory, and you sound awfully confident. We don’t want you getting caught, now.” Her eyes turned playful. “I couldn’t bear having to work for a living.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Maximo said. “Perhaps I’ll take out a little insurance of my own against the Octopus.”

  Terese nodded, satisfied. She set the phone down, stood up and untied her robe. Maximo watched the robe fall to the deck. His heart quickened as she walked naked to the edge of the pool and dove in.

  He had to shake his head to regain interest in the conversation with the Octopus. He was still curious about how a hurricane could affect the financial markets—and benefit him. “Now, then,” he said. “Tell me more about the financial impact on this PrimeCo.”