“I fear I cannot,” replied Yussef Mansour, equally serious of mien. “But rest assured, this project will tax your abilities to the utmost, and the rewards will be beyond your wildest expectations. I will arrange for all the necessary financing, and you will have total autonomy in the execution of the project. And we will share the profits equally.”
“Uh-huh. But will the government rent us the First Marine Division to knock off Fort Knox?”
Mansour nodded patiently. “Mr. Forte, I analyze everything in which I anticipate involving myself. I have studied this project and determined its feasibility in consultation with some of the most august authorities in the world. And I have studied you, from your days as a junior high school dropout to your present precarious situation as head of the Yellow Rose Oil Company. I know you have a preference for tall women, preferably leggy, darkeyed, dark-skinned. I know you once beat a foreman half to death for making a remark about your late father’s handicap. I know your taste in literature–Gibbon, Orwell, Henry Cecil, J.H. Parry, and Beryl Markham–and in music–Bach, Telemann, Berlioz, and Brahms. I know that you have $331 in your personal checking account as of this morning. And I know that you are going to tell me no–that you built this oil company and that, by God, you’re going to run it as you please.”
Forte smiled woodenly. “Right. On all counts.”
“Wrong. On one. You no longer own the Yellow Rose Oil Company.”
“That so?” said Forte, feeling the stirring of premonition in the pit of his stomach. “Then who does?”
“I do. I bought your notes–at a premium, I confess– from Boston Federal, the Fourth First National Bank of Houston, and the Bank of Chicago. I likewise bought the 15 million shares outstanding of the Yellow Rose Oil Company which you deposited with those banks as collateral for your long series of loans. Yesterday I took possession of the Yellow Rose as a result of your default in interest. You will receive official notification in the next mail.”
Forte rose from his chair, his face suffused.
“You wouldn’t do that,” he said, his voice tight and menacing. “You say you know all about me. Then you know I’d kill anyone who tried to steal my company, destroy everything I’ve built these last six years.”
“Nevertheless I did,” replied Mansour.
Mansour didn’t move as Forte advanced across the salon, his hands opening and closing, his eyes a little crazy.
Forte reached down and grabbed Mansour by the neck. With one arm he shoved the little Lebanese up against the bulkhead. He squeezed. A shirt button popped. He squeezed some more, and Mansour’s eyes popped. He squeezed harder. Mansour’s eyes rolled up, and he passed out.
Forte had never learned to kill a defenseless man. His grip around the man’s neck eased, and the little financier crumpled to the floor, his face still cyanotic.
Forte nudged him ungently with the sharp toe of a size12 1/2 cowboy boot.
“Quit faking and get up, you little son of a bitch. You and me got things to talk about.”
5. CHAOS
2 DECEMBER 2004.
ON DECEMBER 2, 2004, CITY TUNNEL No. 1 COLLAPSED just south of Hillview Reservoir. Supplying Manhattan and the Bronx, it was one of two trunk tunnels funneling water from northern tributaries of the Hudson and Delaware rivers. Together they constituted the five boroughs’ sole source of water. And more than half of it had suddenly vanished.
The loss was catastrophic. The system transported 1.7 billion gallons of water daily, enabling each man, woman, and child in New York to use an average of 230 gallons a day. Most went for manufacturing.
The steel in one washing machine took 4,500 gallons to fabricate. The refinery that produced sugar for New Yorkers’ morning coffee gulped down 4,000,000 gallons per day. A ton of cement required 1,125 gallons. A cannery used 10 gallons for each can of beans or corn produced. The paper in the Bible, took 185,000 gallons per ton to manufacture. The rayon in an ordinary living room carpet cost 50,000 gallons to synthesize. A single plant that brewed beer gulped down 15,000,000 gallons a day.
In homes, a five-minute shower consumed 12 gallons, ten minutes of lawn watering 100 gallons. A total of 90 gallons a day flowed through the average family’s faucets. That same family of four consumed twenty-four pounds of food daily, but the food itself cost 3,200 gallons–thirteen tons–of water to grow. That was enough to fill the backyard swimming pool every day.
The collapse of City Tunnel No. 1 was no accident, the result of the explosion of a ten-kilo charge of TNT. The previously unknown Freedom for Puerto Rico Militant Action Group claimed responsibility. City engineers estimated that it would take at least ten days before the flow could be fully restored.
Mayor Nancy Meyer immediately convened an emergency meeting of the city council. She proposed, and it ratified, draconian measures to ensure that Manhattan and the Bronx would survive with minimum inconvenience. Car washes were shut down. Block watches were organized for early detection of fires, cutting down on the use of water by the fire companies. Manufacturers were ordered to recycle water when possible. In the Bronx and Manhattan water was rationed–what water was available trickled in from cross conduits linking City Tunnel No. 1 with City Tunnel No. 2, serving Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Homes and apartments were limited to thirty-minutes of water daily.
Rationing meant an end to steam heating. Tempera tures in apartments all over Manhattan and the Bronx fell below freezing, only a few degrees above the bitter cold outside. Water pipes froze and burst. Huddled beneath bedclothes to stave off the freezing cold, New Yorkers upon whom their fellow citizens were dependent for food, transportation, and other essential services called in sick. The streets were half empty, the roar of city traffic stilled, and an air of desperation settled over the city.
A brownout was decreed: Consolidated Edison’s coalpowered electricity-generating facilities alone used up nine hundred gallons of water for every kilowatt hour of energy produced. This water could no longer be spared.
At night the city was dark, as if war had come. The use of cars was forbidden to all but physicians and emergency workers, and those of violators were confiscated. To conserve electricity, elevators were run for but five minutes every hour. Unused to such hardships, during the next five days an estimated 470,000 New Yorkers decided to take their Christmas vacations early. Since many were professionals and executives around whom much of New York’s economic life revolved, business in Manhattan ground almost to a standstill.
On December 9, 2004, catastrophe became chaos: at 2 A.M., City Tunnel No. 2 was blown up.
The detonation slightly injured two New York national guardsmen of the four thousand called up by New York’s governor to patrol the length of the pipeline, the shores of the larger reservoirs, the banks of the tributaries, pumping plants and water treatment facilities, and the electric generation grid supplying power to bring water into the city.
Water, which before December 2 had been so taken for granted that it wasn’t even metered by the municipality–billing was on the basis of the street frontage a building occupied–suddenly became a valued commodity. During the first week, the price of water rose from twenty-five cents to a dollar a gallon. The watershed, so to speak, came after the second explosion, when quarts, not gallons, became the medium of exchange–and the price of a quart ranged from one to three dollars.
Providentially, snow blanketed the streets on December 11. In most places it didn’t last long enough to turn to slush. The city dwellers scooped up the stuff by the shovelful, potful, even spoonful, and rushed indoors to melt it on kitchen stoves and before fireplaces.
All traffic into the city was halted except for vehicles carrying food, emergency supplies for hospitals, and water, brought in by tank truck from as far away as Wilmington, Delaware. Supplies were dispensed–at first free, then for one dollar a gallon, one gallon per customer–on a first-come, first-served basis. Tank trucks were stationed at principal intersections throughout the city. Pressed against the walls of buildings to shelter from the wind and snow, the queues were reminiscent of breadlines in Soviet Russia. Some entrepreneurs made queuing and water scalping a full-time occupation. The price per scalped gallon shot to a high of $23 around Wall Street, and those who managed to stand up to eighteen hours a day in line were making more money than stockbrokers.
Others drove to neighboring cities, brought back cases of Clorox, and went into the business of disinfecting water from the Hudson or East rivers and selling it by the jerry can.
As great as was the turmoil in the city, the country scarcely noticed it amid the convulsions that had seized Wall Street and America’s other financial markets. The exodus from New York had included so many brokers, financiers, bankers, and computer operators that the financial center had virtually ceased to function. At the Chicago, San Francisco, and lesser exchanges, the disaster had been a signal to unload one’s holdings at any price, for if Wall Street went down in flames, the heat would consume all other American financial institutions along with it. The panic quickly spread to foreign markets. There American shares tumbled, the dollar fell to its lowest value in thirty-seven years, and the price of gold went over the moon.