“That CLK is working on revolutionary stuff. You knew their CEO from your PR days, right?”
Fred kept smiling. “Look, all I can say about CLK is they claim they’ve helped Vic Love vault out of a crowded Democratic primary to the front of the pack. Now, if you ask me, it’s because he’s the only sane candidate in a field packed with socialist yahoos who want to turn the States into 1960s Cuba. So CLK’s value—we’re investors, yes—but it’s still less than proven. What we’re trying to sell you on is our model.” Fred leaned forward and put his hands on his chest like he was scooping out his heart. “We’re cutting edge in highly unpredictable times.”
The waiter came, and we all paused, sitting in silence as the thin Bengali man scraped crumbs off the table and inquired in halting Italian if we’d like more coffee. Our tour guide had explained to us that most of Venice’s working class was from Bangladesh. They commuted in from mainland Italy where rents were affordable and made their living selling vegetables and knockoff sunglasses to tourists. They took up pizza-making and tossed the dough like they’d grown up in Napoli and played the violin for restaurant diners. He finally left. Nate’s shirt lifted as he craned back, and he scratched his hairy belly. “I don’t know, man, you’ve got a bunch of the SJW left swinging for a guy who was a radical right-winger a decade ago. How’s Love pulling that off?”
Archie cocked an eyebrow. “His scandals are piling up. There’s apparently a tape of him in 2022 saying to his buddies, ‘The next time we storm the capitol, we plan to hold it.’ ”
Fred laughed. “And you think CLK’s stemming the fallout from that somehow? Love came out of the closet. He has a husband. People love a redemption story. The States have a thousand billionaires who all stomp their feet because they want to play kingmaker. Folks have tried to guarantee themselves candidates since the advent of democracy. Trust me, it never quite works out.”
Aleotti, who’d been concentrating on understanding the conversation, broke in.
“Yes, but you see, we have a saying in Italy: There are only three type of the people.” Aleotti’s fingers sprang up with each type. “The edible, the inedible, and the fed. Fred Wimpel I hear is the fed.”
“Well, I hope so,” said Fred, chuckling.
“Chopped liver over here, speaking up now,” said Peter because it was, after all, his fund. “We’ve got a huge array of bets in a number of different sectors. If you look through those reports Jackie handed you, you won’t be disappointed. We’re in corners of the world where no one else is even looking yet.”
“Depending on who wins the election,” said Nate. “If Jen Braden wins…”
“We’re hedged on beef jerky and water filtration devices,” Peter quipped, and this got a good laugh out of the group.
Later that night, Fred and I met Peter for drinks near the Piazza San Marco. My sister had been calling me all afternoon, but I’d ignored her. Whatever “emergency” she wanted me to deal with could wait.
Peter said, “We’ll get $260 million from the Italian stallion Aleotti, the Venetian creation—”
“Those words don’t rhyme,” I said, laughing.
“Maybe another hundo out of Nate, but I think Miss Archie’s only in for a dozen mil.”
“She plays tight,” said Fred.
“She’s also not that rich,” I added.
“Still, not bad for a morning’s work,” said Fred. The three of us cheersed.
“Why was everyone so worked up about CLK?” I asked, and Fred rolled his eyes.
“Who knows where that came from. Everyone thinks one of these data firms is going to crack the code of the next level of psychometric manipulation for advertising, but it’s all malarkey if you ask me. Our stake in them isn’t even worth all that much. Are you staying on in Venice, Peter?”
“Got to. It’ll probably be gone by the next time I have a chance to get here.” We all laughed at this. “I’ve got a lady coming in from London. Black British chick—extinction-level hot. Just a total asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs. Fred told me about your romantic week and I got so jealous I chartered a fucking plane for a date. You guys sticking around?”
“We are.” Fred nodded at me. “We need a bit more of this.”
Our plan was to stay for the rest of the month, but two days later, my sister called. On FaceTime, she looked even more crazed than usual, her urgency full of inferences and histories of our childhood.
“Mom’s not answering at all.” She had her hair pulled back and her face, puffed, red, and fleshy, strained into her phone’s camera.
“Okay, so she’s not answering. Sometimes she doesn’t answer.”
“It’s been two days, and we don’t know if she got out.”
“Got out of what?”
“Did you even look at my messages?”
I gained nothing from being pulled into an argument with her. I had to be the reasonable one and never let her encyclopedia of accusations faze me. Sometimes this meant not answering the question.
“What does Erik think?”
Her eyes bugged in disbelief. “Erik’s here. We’re at Erik’s.”
She thrust the phone, and there was my brother, staring at the table, a malingering beer held by the neck between thumb and forefinger. He looked heavy and old. It was the first time I’d seen him since his divorce. Allie thought he suffered from depression, but when I checked his social media he seemed to be having all the fun with friends in his new place in the Tampa burbs: grilling out, football games, beer after beer in his stupid koozie that read GO BIG OR GO HOME. My theory was that he was just a selfish alcoholic. Ask his kids, who only saw him once a month, and who could probably tell that their father was fine with the arrangement.
Erik gave me a bored little salute. “Hey, Jack.”
“What are you doing down there?” I asked.
“The floods. We live by the Mississippi,” said Allie. “Did you even read my messages?”
It was the guilt of not doing so coupled with the sensation one gets from having missed anything in our saturated-media age. There was a shooting where? This politician did what? This ignorance presaged a loss of moral and intellectual status: Do you not have CNN updates in your glasses?
“Just tell me what’s happening, Allie. I’ve been busy with work.”
She took the phone off my brother.
“The flooding! All over the goddamn Midwest and East Coast. We had to leave Saint Louis because the Mississippi was spilling into the suburbs! And now I’ve been looking at the FEMA site and Amber’s right in the flood zone of the Wapsipinicon River, and Mom’s not answering.”
With each breathless word, I felt a tiny surge of discomfort in the center of my head, and now I tried to massage it away. “Okay, Al, what do you want me to do, I’m in Venice.”
“Italy?”
“Yes, Italy.”
There was a pause, and the phone angled so that her face was off-center. She was rubbing her head just like me, in the exact same way.
“We have the kids, and none of us can get back up there right now.” She started crying. “I know, I know, I should’ve checked in with Mom before we left, but it all happened so fast, you know? Like we got the evacuation notification but it didn’t occur to me that Mom and the house would be in any trouble…”
“Okay, okay,” I said to stop her from cry-rambling. “I was just there. Mom’s fine. She’s going to be fine. I’ll call her. You take a break, okay? If she hasn’t gotten back to either of us in a day or so, I’ll fly back? Honestly, Allie, even if the house got flooded, she probably left and just forgot her phone. Simplest answer’s always the right answer, you know?”
Through her tears, my sister nodded.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. Just when I’d gotten adjusted to Central European time, I found myself up and on my laptop, reading and watching videos of the flooding back in the States. The East Coast and much of the Midwest had been pummeled by heavy winter snowfall. The lethal supercell storm that soaked Indianapolis had been accompanied by forty-three tornadoes in the past week, one of the deadliest outbreaks of severe weather in the past century, but the larger issue was rain. With the ground saturated and a series of heavy spring storms dropping record-breaking precipitation, the water had nowhere to go. River systems along the entire eastern half of the country were swollen, roaring, and dangerous. No estimate yet on how many people had been killed and how much property had been destroyed, but the Times assured that it would break records when all was said and done. Nearly 200 million people across twenty-five states were affected. I watched video of choked floodwaters surging across roads and washing away vehicles, homes wrecked and collapsed. Whole towns turned into lakes; highways swallowed so that only the tops of the trees along the roadways poked above the water. Broken dams losing chunks of concrete as their imprisoned waters fought over the top. Correspondents splashed through in rain boots, clutching microphones and making authoritative pronouncements about the dangers to residents. Boats of all varieties chugged up and down city streets turned to rivers. From Charleston to Minneapolis, Philadelphia to Lake Charles, levees were breached, and floodwaters surged into homes, businesses, farms, towns, cities, and highways, drowning vehicles, bridges, buildings, sandbags, and people.