Bleeding Edge (25 page)

Her thoughts go wandering off, and nobody tries to summon them back. Did Windust, once in a more sympathetic-juvenile day, actually hang out at the old 9:30 Club the way Maxine did at the Paradise Garage? Maybe on Stateside breaks from doing evil all around the world, maybe he caught Tiny Desk Unit and Bad Brains in their local-band period, maybe the smell of 9:30 Cologne is his last, his only link with the undercorrupted youth he was? Maybe Conkling is coming down with a seasonal allergy and his nose is a little off today? Maybe Maxine is sliding deeper into a sentimental idiocy attack? Maybe’s ass, OK? Circumstantial
schmircumstantial, Windust was there when Lester was taken out, and maybe he even did it.

Damn.

What happened to the chances for a giddy romantic episode today? Suddenly it looks a lot more like field research.

Meantime Conkling wants to talk about, who else, Princess Heidrophobia. By the time Maxine is able to get his unwholesomely obsessed ass back out the door, she’s left with a scant half hour to get put together for her, what would you call it, working rendezvous with Windust. Somehow she finds herself home, and immobile in front of the bedroom closet, and wondering why her mind has gone this blank. Polyvinyl chloride, something in bright red perhaps, though not inappropriate, is somehow absent from the inventory. Jeans are out of the question also. At length, deep in, at the event horizon of closet oblivion, she notices a chic cocktail-hour suit in a subdued aubergine shade, discovered long ago at the Galeries Lafayette going-out-of-business sale and kept for reasons that probably don’t include nostalgia. She tries to think of ways in which Windust might read it. If he reads it, if he doesn’t just grab and start ripping . . . Repeated messages from her Vertex, or does she mean Vortex, of Femininity are piling up unanswered.

T
he address is in a far-west-side piece of lower Hell’s Kitchen among trainyard and tunnel approaches plowed indifferently through a neighborhood whose disconnected fragments have been left to survive as they might, lofts, recording studios, pool-table showrooms, movie-equipment rental places, chop shops . . . Wised-up real-estate mavens of Maxine’s acquaintance assure her that this is the next hot neighborhood. Redevelopment is in the air. Someday the Number 7 subway will be extended over here and the Javits Center will have its own stop. Someday there will be parks and soaring condos and luxury tourist hotels. Right now it is still a windswept hard-to-get-to region that visitors from other planets, arriving in centuries to come after New York has been long forgotten, will assume was ceremonial, even religious, used for public spectacles, mass sacrifices, lunch breaks.

Today there is a huge gathering of police up and down 11th Avenue and seething all among the blocks over to Tenth. Maxine is just as happy not to be on foot at the moment. The cabdriver, whose problem this has become, thinks it might be a police exercise, based on a scenario where terrorists take over Javits Center.

“Why,” Maxine wonders, “would anybody want to?”

“Well, spoze it happened during the Auto Show. Then they’d have all those cars and trucks. They could sell off some of that for money to buy bombs and AKs and shit,” the driver clearly with a scenario of his own here, “keep the cool units like the Ferraris and Panozes, use the trucks for military vehicles, oh, and they’d also need to hijack a fleet of car carriers, Peterbilt 378s, somethin like that. And . . . and the really good vintage stuff, Hispano-Suizas, Aston Martins, they could hold them for ransom.”

“‘Give us ten million or we’ll trash this car’?”

“Bend the aerial at least, nothin that would seriously fuck with the resale value, understand.” All around them the Finest flock, swarm, stand guard, run in formation up and down the street. Above in the bright pre-autumnal sky, UFOs carry out their patient cloaked reconnaissance. Now and then a cop with a bullhorn will approach, glaring, and yell at the cab to move on.

Finally they pull up in front of the address, which seems to be a six-story rental building, unfashionable, forsaken, due someday for demolition and replacement by some high-rise condo scheme. At night maybe one lighted window per floor. It reminds her of her own part of town back in the eighties, when the neighborhood was being co-opped. Tenants who can’t or won’t move out. Developers who’re itching to tear the place down acting very unpleasant.

When she hits the buzzer, it seems like ten minutes of being stared and smirked at by a sudden gathering of half the neighborhood, before a shrill noise that could be anything comes out of the undersize speaker.

“It’s me—Maxine.”

“Nnggahh?”

She shouts her name again and peers through the unwashed glass. The door remains unbuzzed. Finally, just as she’s turning away, here comes Windust to open it.

“Buzzer doesn’t work, never has.”

“Thanks for sharing that.”

“Wanted to see how long you’d wait.”

Desolate corridors, unswept and underlit, that stretch on for longer than the building’s outside dimensions would suggest. Walls glisten unhealthily in creepy yellows and grime-inflected greens, colors of medical waste . . . Open to all sorts of penetration besides the squatters who now and then step out into a sight line and immediately back, like targets in a first-person shooter. Carpeting has been removed from the hallways. Leaks are not being fixed. Paint hangs. Fluorescent bulbs on borrowed time buzz purplishly overhead.

According to Windust, wild dogs live in the basement and begin to come out at sundown, to roam the halls all night. Brought in originally to intimidate the last tenants into moving out, left on site to fend for themselves as soon as the Alpo bill outgrew the relocation budget.

Inside the apartment, Windust doesn’t waste time. “Get down on the floor.” Seems to be in a sort of erotic snit. She gives him a look.

“Now.”

Shouldn’t she be saying, “You know what, fuck yourself, you’ll have more fun,” and walking out? No, instead, instant docility—she slides to her knees. Quickly, without further discussion, not that some bed would have been a better choice, she has joined months of unvacuumed debris on the rug, face on the floor, ass in the air, skirt pushed up, Windust’s not-exactly-manicured nails ripping methodically at sheer taupe pantyhose it took her easily twenty minutes in Saks not so long ago to decide on, and his cock is inside her with so little inconvenience that she must have been wet without knowing it. His hands, murderer’s hands, are gripping her forcefully by the hips, exactly where it matters, exactly where some demonic set of nerve receptors she has been till now only semi-aware of have waited to be found and used like buttons on a game controller . . . impossible for her to know if it’s him moving or if she’s doing it herself . . . not a distinction to be lingered on till much later, of course, if at all, though in some circles it is held to be something of a big deal . . .

Down on the floor, nose level with an electrical outlet, she imagines for a second she can see some great brightness of power just behind the parallel slits. Something scurries at the edge of her vision, the size of a mouse, and it is Lester Traipse, the shy, wronged soul of Lester, in need of sanctuary, abandoned, not least by Maxine. He stands in front of the outlet, reaches in, parts the sides of one slit like a doorway, glances back apologetically, slides into the annihilating brightness. Gone.

She cries out, though not for Lester exactly.

•   •   •

IN THE MELANCHOLY LIGHT,
Maxine scans Windust’s face for evidence of emotion. For a quickie, it was OK even if God forbid there should be anything like eye contact around here. On the other hand, at least he used a condom—wait, wait, junior-prom reflexes aren’t bad enough, she’s doing credits and debits on this now also?

Out the window, instead of a sweeping panorama of lights, each illuminating a different Big Apple drama, there’s a modest low-rise view, water tanks poised like antique skyrockets on rooftops whose last waterproofing got mopped on by immigrant hands generations dead, light from other windows mediated by nailed-up bedcovers, bookshelves full of wrecked paperbacks, the backsides of TV sets, shades pulled all the way down tenancies ago and never raised.

There is a kitchen of sorts in here, whose cupboards, in the tradition of accommodation addresses, are full of items some invisible long train of nameless reps and troubleshooters and traveling folk must have thought they needed to get through their stays, the nights they didn’t have the will or the permission to venture out in the streets . . . strange forms of pasta, cans with pictures in unfamiliar color processes of hard-to-identify foodstuffs, soups with unpronounceable names, snack products with official-looking waivers where the nutritional information is usually found. In the fridge all she sees is a single beet, sitting, one would have to say insolently, on a plate. There are suggestions of blue-green mold, interesting visually, but . . .

“Time for coffee?”

“It’s all right, I have to get back.”

“School night, of course. I should give Dotty a call myself.”

“Dotty, who would be . . .”

“My wife.”

Ha. With an internal double take at herself along the lines of, so what? And this makes how many wives now, two? and what’s it to you, Maxine? Finally, the underlying question, He’s deliberately waited till right now to mention a wife?

Windust has found a box covered in Japanese writing of what appear to be seaweed snacks, into which he now dives, with every appearance of an appetite. Maxine watches, not nauseous exactly, or not yet.

“Care for one of these, they’re . . . special. . . . And, Maxine . . . I’m not upset.”

Talk about romantic outbursts. Not upset, imagine. On the other hand, what about “set up”? Some uncharted gust of interior wind brings her the scent of 9:30, reminding her of The Deseret roof, and Lester Traipse again.

“I may be a little distracted today,” she sees no harm in mentioning, “there’s a case, technically not my area, but it’s been on my mind. Maybe you caught it on the news. A murder, Lester Traipse?”

Cold, cold customer. “Who?”

“It happened just down the street from me, at The Deseret. You’ve never been there, by any chance? I mean considering your deep interest in Gabriel Ice, who happens to own a piece of the building.”

“Really.”

She was expecting a courtroom-drama confession? He knows I know, she figures, so enough work for one day.

Once inside a cab he has not come downstairs to see her off in, headed uptown, What, she is just able to mentally inquire of herself, was I, the fuck, thinking? And the worst, or does she mean the best, part of it is that even right now it will take very little, yes, all pivoting here on
FDR’s silvery small cheekbone in fact, to lean forward, interrupt the call-in hatefest on the cabbie’s radio, and in a voice sure to be trembling ask to be brought back to the homicidal bagman in his dark savage squat, for more of the same.

•   •   •

SHE DOESN’T GET AROUND
to reading the folder Windust brought till later that evening. There are all these suddenly fascinating fringe chores to be done, sorting the sponges under the sink by size and color, running a head-cleaner tape through the VCR, going through the take-out menus for excess duplication. Finally she picks the thing up, with its faded punkrock aura. The cover is innocent of title, author, logo, any ID at all. Inside she finds a sort of mini-dossier in which we learn right away, and seemingly a big deal to whoever compiled this, that Gabriel Ice is Jewish, while also continuing to be instrumental in the illegal transfer of millions of $US to an account in Dubai controlled by the Wahhabi Transreligious Friendship (WTF) Fund, which, according to this anyway, is a known terrorist paymaster.

“Why,” the account wonders plaintively, “being Jewish, would Ice provide aid and comfort on this lavish scale to the enemies of Israel?” Possible theories include Simple Greed, Double Agency, and Self-Hating Jew.

There are a dozen pages on attempts to follow the money through the
hawala
setup Eric discovered, beginning with Bilhana Wa-ashifa Import-Export in Bay Ridge, thence via the re-invoicing of shipments into the U.S. of halvah, pistachios, geranium essence, chickpeas, several kinds of ras el hanout, and shipments outbound of mobile telephones, MP3 players, and other light electronics, DVDs, old
Baywatch
episodes in particular—these data, assembled by some committee of the clue-challenged, alarmingly unacquainted even with GAAP, all thrown together so haphazardly that after half an hour Maxine’s eyeballs are rotating in opposite directions and she has no idea if the document is meant as self-congratulation or some thickly disguised confession of failure.
Bottom line, they seem to know about the
hawala
—hey, awesome. What else? The last page is headed “Recommendations for Action” and runs down the usual list of sanctions against hashslingrz, withdrawal of security clearance, prosecution, cancellation of outstanding contracts, and a disturbing footnote, “Option X—Consult Manual.” Manual not, of course, included.

Why would Windust want to show her this? The probability of a setup continues to increase. Close to dawn, she finds herself in a dream rerun of
Now, Voyager
(1942) in which versions of Paul Henreid, as “Jerry,” and Bette Davis, as “Charlotte,” are about to take another smoke break. As always, “Jerry” suavely puts two cigarettes in his mouth and lights them both, but this time as “Charlotte” expectantly reaches for hers, “Jerry” keeps them both in his mouth, continuing to puff away, beaming pleasantly, sending up huge clouds of smoke, till there’s only a couple of soggy cigarette butts hanging off of his lower lip. In her reverse shots, “Charlotte” is seen to grow more and more anxious. “Oh . . . oh well . . . of course if you . . .” Maxine comes awake screaming, under the impression there is something in bed with her.

•   •   •

HAVING LATELY DISCOVERED
in the yuppie collectors’ market a credulity that may be limitless, a gang of cigar forgers have been working out of a smoke shop on West 30th, offering “smuggled” Cuban cigars for $20 a pop, an attractive price for the time, along with a line of “rare antique” cigars, including alleged selections from J. P. Morgan’s private stock, original chewed-on props from Groucho Marx movies, and cigar incunabula such as Christopher Columbus’s first Cuban, mentioned by de las Casas in
Historia de las Indias.
Incredibly, these fakes are all fetching their asking prices, and a boutique hedge fund in town has been paying these knockoff artists huge sums, writing it off to travel and entertainment, then taking what when the media get hold of it will be called Lavish Kickbacks. One morning a couple days later, Maxine is just getting comfortable with this perennially active ticket when Daytona comes in shaking her
head back and forth, with her eyes angled downward and to the right. Recalling a neurolinguistic workshop she once attended in Atlantic City, Maxine observes, “You’re talking to yourself again.”

“Don’t be playin that woowoo shit on me, call’s on line one. See if you can talk his ass down.”

Connected to the phone these days, thanks to her brother-in-law, Avi, Maxine now has a miraculous Israeli voice analyzer, whose algorithm is supposed to be able to tell the difference between “offensive” and “defensive” lying, plus Only Kidding Around. No telling what kind of routine Windust has been up to with Daytona, but whatever is bothering him today, it does not fall into the category of playful.

“You’ve read the material I left you?”

How about I had such a nice time the other day, haven’t been able to get you out of my mind, so forth? Terminate this fucking conversation forthwith, why don’t you. Instead, Miss Congeniality, “I knew most of it already, but thanks.”