Gun Machine

The report noted that the weapon had been extensively modified. Again, his guy had taken a gun that no sane person would use for a killing and rebuilt and restored it until it would guarantee a result. Which indicated that, again, the use of this particular gun had meant something to his guy. But a Lorcin? What was he missing about a Lorcin?

“No sane person,” Tallow said to himself, and gave a little joyless half-laugh.

Chewing his lip, he put the make of the gun into the search on his tablet and skimmed the results. One sentence leaped out at him. A common street handgun, due to legendarily poor security at the manufacturing plant over a number of years. Tallow knew that—Rosato had once told him that, in fact—but seeing it there put it into a new context for him.

Tallow read down and discovered that Daniel Garvie, found on Avenue A with a bullet in the back of his head in 1999, was a previous customer of the New York Police Department. Convictions for petty theft.

Tallow sat back and told himself a little story.

A stolen gun to kill a thief.

Tenuous.

But it sort of fit the fiction he’d started assembling around the case today.

Gun three: Ruger nine-millimeter, scarred firing pin, Marc Arias, Williamsburg, 2007, unsolved. Tallow wished he knew more about guns. He wished he knew whom the flintlock had killed.

Gun four: a Beretta M9. Didn’t mean a thing to Tallow.

He put the tablet to sleep, and then put the laptop to sleep, and then dropped his clothes like a trail of dead and put himself to sleep.

Eighteen

[show direct message conversation]

D MACHENV: CALL ME ON A CLEAN PHONE RIGHT NOW

D WESTO911: clean phone? what am i stringer fucking bell?

D MACHENV: DO IT. I JUST HAD A VISIT FROM AN OLD FRIEND

D WESTO911: oh shit.

BBMessage [timestamp]

[JW] Call me now

[AT] Am at dinner w commish and wacko wanda among others. May have to talk about her!

[JW] We have an issue with that

[AT] wtf

[JW] I’m heading downtown. Get out of there now

Blog entry [user: emilyw] [locked]

ANY INTEREST in finance becomes an interest in power, and an interest in place, I think. When I started working on Wall Street, I was interested first and foremost in doing a good job in a high-pressure environment. But it became apparent to me, quite quickly, that I would do my job better if I took notice of the real flows of currency, and the actors and locations they gravitated to and spun around. And I think—it might even be too obvious to state!—that that leads you to a study of history.

There I was, routing around financial meltdowns the world over, not realizing that I was standing on the site of the original American financial meltdown. Wall Street itself, named for the wall the Dutch put up to fortify the New Amsterdam settlement against the natives, a wall that eventually extended out to what is now Pearl Street, the old shoreline. It was here on Wall Street that the smart operators of the 1600s looked to do business with the locals, the people of Werpoes and the other Lenape villages of what they called Mannahatta.

The Europeans had noticed that the Native Americans seemed to place great value on something called wampum, or “white strings.” These were lengths of beading made from shells and woven together into strips or belts. They had many uses. The relative complexity afforded by shape and color meant that wampum could be used as a communications medium and as a record of events, not unlike a simple tapestry. There are surviving photos of wampum belts constructed to seal and commemorate treaties. They were used as devices to preserve and tell stories from one generation to the next, a crucial cultural aid in otherwise oral societies. Wampum had myriad other social functions. In short, there was perceptible value to wampum in Native American society.

When the Europeans arrived, they immediately looked for ways to open commerce with the natives, and when they saw the traffic of wampum, they felt sure that they’d found it. Therefore, they began to produce their own wampum. It must have been difficult at first, essentially trying to forge a currency without really understanding it, but the Europeans had one important advantage. The natives of Mannahatta were a preserved Stone Age culture. These seventeenth-century Europeans had metal tools and all the advantages of coming from a world poised less than a century from the top of the Industrial Revolution.

The natives, at first, must have found it to be some weird way of reaching out. The Europeans making wampum, rich with cultural memory and meaning, and wanting to hand it over in exchange for furs and food. I wonder if the natives felt beholden; if they felt they had to take this strange, useless wampum and exchange it for the goods the Europeans needed to survive.