Bleeding Edge (37 page)

“Your envelope.”

Instead of counting the bills like a normal person, Windust with a
small practiced hand move hefts the envelope, the sort of thing that over time, for a career bagman, gets to be automatic.

“Thanks, angel. Don’t know when—”

“Reimburse when you can, something I don’t have to declare as income. Maybe from the street floor at Tiffany’s— no, wait, what’s her name, Dotty? Nah, you wouldn’t want her finding out.”

He’s examining her face. “Earrings. Simple diamond studs. With your hair up . . . .”

“Actually, I’m a Eurowire type gal.” She has barely time to think about adding, “How squalid is this?” when the round comes in, invisible, silent till it hits a piece of wall, whereupon it finds its voice and ricochets droning brightly off into Chinatown, by which time Windust has grabbed Maxine and pulled her down behind a skip full of construction debris.

“Holy shit. Are you—”

“Wait,” he advises, “just give it a minute, I’m not sure about the angle, it could’ve come from anyplace. Up in any of those,” gesturing with his head at the upper stories surrounding them. They watch the pavement fragment further into what will later be taken for only a few more city potholes. The people across the street don’t seem to notice. On the incoming breeze, a distant slow stammering. “Somehow I’ve been expecting three-round bursts. This sounds more like an AK. Hold steady.”

“I knew I should’ve worn the Kevlar outfit today.”

“Among your friends in the Russian mob, distance equals respect, so we should consider assassination by AK-47 an honor.”

“Gee, you must be some hot shit.”

“In fifteen seconds,” glancing at his watch, “I plan to disappear and get on with my day. You might want to wait here for a bit before resuming your own.”

“Class act, I figured you’d grab my arm and we’d run someplace, like in movies? Chinese people jumping out of the way? Or was I
supposed to be blond?” Scanning upper windows meantime, reaching into her purse, bringing out the Beretta, thumbing off the safety.

“Good,” Windust nodding like it’s about time. “You can cover me.”

“That one there, the one that’s open, that look good to you?” No reply. Already, as the Eagles say, gone. She crab-steps out from behind the skip anyway and lets go a couple of double taps at the window, screaming, “Motherfuckers!”

Goodness, Maxine, where’d that come from? Nobody’s returning fire. The people waiting for the bus begin to point and pass remarks. Keeping an eye on the street traffic, she waits for a vehicle tall enough to take cover behind, which turns out to be a moving van with
MITZVAH MOVERS
in mock-Hebrew lettering and a cartoon of what appears to be an insane rabbi with a piano on his back, and vacates the area.

Well, as Winston Churchill always sez, there is nothing more exhilarating than getting shot at without result, though for Maxine there is also a flip side or payback, which arrives a few hours later, on the after-school stoop at Kugelblitz, in front of an assortment of Upper West Side moms whose life skills include an eye for the slightest uptick in the distress of others, not that Maxine quite collapses in tears, though her knees feel unreliable and she may be experiencing a certain lightness of head . . .

“Everything all right, Maxine? you look so . . . inexplicable.”

“One of those having-it-all moments, Robyn, and yourself?”

“Going crazy with Scott’s bar mitzvah, you have no idea, the work, caterers, deejay, invitations. And Scott, his aliyah, he’s still struggling to memorize it, with the Hebrew running the other way we’re worried now it’s making him dyslexic?”

“Well,” in the most rational voice available to her at the moment, “why not go off-Torah and choose a passage from, I don’t know, Tom Clancy? not really that traditional, true, not even I guess Jewish, but something with, you know, maybe Ding Chavez in it?” noticing after a short time lag that Robyn is looking at her funny and people are beginning to edge away. Providentially at this point, the kids all come charging out of the lobby and onto the stoop, and parental subroutines kick in,
carrying her and Ziggy and Otis down the steps and into the street, where she notices Nigel Shapiro busy poking with a little stylus at the tiny keyboard of a wavy-shaped pocket-size green-and-purple unit. Doesn’t look like a Game Boy. “Nigel, what is that?”

Looking up after a while, “This? it’s a Cybiko, my sister gave itta me, everybody at La Guardia has em, the big selling point is the silence. It’s wireless, see, you can send text messages back and forth in class and nobody hears you.”

“So if Ziggy and I each had one, we could message back and forth?”

“If you’re in range, which is only like a block and a half. But trust me, Mizzus Loeffler, it’s da wave o’ da fyootch.”

“You’ll be wanting one, I imagine, Ziggy.”

“Already got one, Mom.” And who knows who else. Maxine has a moment of eyebrow oscillation. Talk about private networks.

•   •   •

THE OFFICE PHONE LETS LOOSE
with some robotic theme, and Maxine picks up. It’s Lloyd Thrubwell, in some agitation. “The subject you inquired after? I’m so sorry. There’s not much further I can take this.”

Yeah let me look in my Beltway-to-English phrasebook here . . . “You’re being ordered to back off of it, right?”

“This person has been the topic of an internal memo, several actually. I can’t say any more than that.”

“You probably heard already, but Windust and I got shot at yesterday.”

“His wife,” only having a spot of fun, “or your husband?”

“I’ll take that as WASP for ‘Thank God you’re both all right.’”

Muffled mouthpiece passage. “Wait, I’m sorry, it’s a serious event, of course. We’re already looking into it.” A beat of silence, which on Avi’s stress analyzer is clearly registering far over in the Lying Through Ass range. “Do either of you have any theories as to the shooter’s identity?”

“Out of all the enemies Windust has made during a long career doing his country’s shitwork, jeepers Lloyd, personally, any thoughts on that would so be a chore.”

More muffled yakking. “No problem. If you have any contact with the subject, however indirect, we would strongly advise against continuing it.” The display on Avi’s gizmo has now turned a vivid cadmium red and begun to blink.

“Because they don’t want me meddling in Agency business, or something else?”

“Something else,” Lloyd whispers.

The sound background changes as an extension is picked up, and another voice, one she has never heard, at least not in the waking world, advises, “He means your personal safety, Ms. Loeffler. The assessment here on Brother Windust is that he’s a highly educated asset, but doesn’t know everything. Lloyd, that’s all, you can get off the line now.” The connection goes dead.

S
ome holiday season someday, Maxine would like to find featured on the tube a revisionist
Christmas Carol
, where Scrooge is the good guy for a change. Victorian capitalism has hustled him over the years for his soul, turning him from an innocent entry-level kid into a mean old man who treats everybody like shit, none worse than his apparently honest bookkeeper Bob Cratchit, who in reality has been systematically skimming off of poor haunted and vulnerable Scrooge, cooking the books, and running off periodically to Paris to squander what he’s stolen on champagne, gambling, and cancan girls, leaving Tiny Tim and the family in London to starve. At the end, instead of Bob being the instrument of Scrooge’s redemption, it turns out to be by way of Scrooge that Bob is ransomed back to the side of humanity again.

Every year when Christmas and Hanukkah roll around, this story begins to slop over into work. Maxine finds herself reversing polarities, overlooking obvious Scrooges and zooming in on secretly sinful Cratchits. The innocent are guilty, the guilty are beyond hope, everything’s on its head, it’s a Twelfth Night of late-capitalist contradiction, and not especially relaxing.

Having listened through the window to the same heartfelt
street-trumpet rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” a thousand times, each identical, note-for-note, finding this at last, what’s the phrase—fucking tiresome, Maxine, Horst, and the boys decide to take a break together and roll a couple of frames down at the Port Authority bus terminal, which houses the last unyuppified bowling alley in the city.

At the terminal, on the way upstairs, amid the swarm of travelers, hustlers, shoulder surfers, and undercover cops, Maxine notices a sprightly figure beneath a gigantic backpack, possibly bound for someplace he thinks has no extradition treaty with the U.S. “Be right with you guys.” She makes her way through the traffic and brings out the sociable smile. “Why, Felix Boïngueaux,
ça va
, heading back up to Montreal, are we?”

“This time of year, are you crazy? Heading for sunshine, tropical breezes, babes in bikinis.”

“Some friendly Caribbean jurisdiction, no doubt.”

“Only going as far as Florida, thanks, and I know what you’re thinking, but that’s all in the past, eh? I’m a respectable businessman now, paying for employee health insurance and everything.”

“Heard about your bridge round from Rocky, congratulations. Haven’t seen you since the Geeks’ Cotillion, recall you being into some deep discussion then with Gabriel Ice. Were you able to drum up any business?”

“Maybe a little consulting work.” No shame. Felix is now an account payable of the guy who may have whacked his former partner. Maybe has been all along.

“Tell you what, get a Ouija board and ask Lester Traipse what he thinks about that. You told me once, you strongly implied, you knew who did Lester —”

“No names,” looking nervous. “You want it to be uncomplicated, but it’s not.”

“Just one thing—total honesty, OK?” Looking for furtive eyeballs with this one? forget it. “After Lester was hit—did you ever have any reason to think there was somebody after you too?”

Trick question. Saying no, Felix admits he’s being protected, which makes the next question “Who by?” Saying yes leaves open the possibility he’ll produce documentation, however embarrassing, if the price is right. He stands there processing this, stolid as a take-out container of poutine, amid the swarm of holiday travelers, fake Santas, children on leashes, drink-sodden victims of lunchtime office partying, commuters hours late and days early, “Someday we’ll be friends,” Felix shifting his backpack, “I promise.”

“I so look forward. Bon voyage. Have a frozen mai tai in memory of Lester.”

“Who was that, Mom?”

“Him? Uh, one of Santa’s elves, down here on a business trip from Montreal, which is like a regional hub for North Pole activities, same weather conditions and so on?”

“Santa’s elves don’t exist,” proclaims Ziggy, “In fact—”

“Dummy up, kid,” mutters Maxine, about the same time Horst advises, “That’s enough.”

Seems various NYC junior know-it-alls of Otis and Ziggy’s acquaintance have been putting around the story there’s no Santa.

“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” sez Horst.

The boys squint at their father. “You’re what, forty, fifty years old, and you believe in Santa Claus?”

“I do indeed, and if this miserable city is too wised up to deal with it, then they can shove it up their own,” looking around dramatically, “butthole, which last time I checked was someplace over on the Upper East Side.”

While they check in at Leisure Time Lanes, get bowling shoes, examine the fried-food inventory and so forth, Horst goes on to explain that just like the Santa clones out on the street corners, parents are also Santa’s agents, acting in loco Santaclausis, “Actually, as it gets closer to Christmas Eve, just loco. See, the North Pole is not so much about fabrication anymore, elves have gradually moved out of the workshop and into fulfillment and delivery, where they’re busy outsourcing and
routing toy requests. Pretty much everything these days is transacted via Santanet.”

“Via what?” Ziggy and Otis inquire.

“Hey. Nobody has any trouble believing in the Internet, right, which really is magic. So what’s the problem believing in a virtual private network for Santa’s business? It results in real toys, real presents, delivered by Christmas morning, what’s the difference?”

“The sleigh,” Otis promptly. “The reindeer.”

“Only cost-efficient in snow-covered areas. As the planet warms up, and Third World markets become more important, North Pole HQ has to start subcontracting delivery out to local companies.”

“So this Santanet,” Ziggy relentless, “there’s passwords?”

“Kids aren’t allowed,” Horst beyond ready to change the subject, “it’s like they don’t let you guys watch pirate movies either?”

“What?”

“Pirate movies? Why not?”

“’Cause they’re rated Ahrrrh. Look, somebody want to help me program this scoreboard, I get a little confused . . .”

They’re happy to oblige, but Maxine understands, with one of those joys-of-the-season twinges, as a reprieve it’s all too temporary.

•   •   •

MARCH KELLEHER MEANTIME
has become even more problematic to get hold of. None of the doorstaff at the St. Arnold now has ever heard of her, none of her phones is even defaulting to an answering machine anymore, just ringing on and on into enigmatic silence. According to her Weblog, the attention from cops and cop affiliates public and private has reached alarming levels, obliging her to roll up her futon every morning, hop on a bicycle, and relocate someplace new, trying not to sleep in the same place too many nights in a row. She has a network of friends who warbike around town with compact PCs and provide her with a growing list of free Wi-Fi hotspots, which she likewise tries not to use the same one of too often. She carries an iBook clamshell in a shade
known as Key Lime and logs in from wherever she can find free Internet access.

“It’s getting weird,” she admits on one of her Weblog entries. “I’m keeping a step or two ahead so far, but you never know what they’ve got, how state-of-the-art it might be, who works for them and who doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I love them nerds, in another life I would’ve been a nerd groupie, but even nerds can be bought and sold, almost as if times of great idealism carry equal chances for great corruptibility.”

“After the 11 September attack,” March editorializes one morning, “amid all that chaos and confusion, a hole quietly opened up in American history, a vacuum of accountability, into which assets human and financial begin to vanish. Back in the days of hippie simplicity, people liked to blame ‘the CIA’ or ‘a secret rogue operation.’ But this is a new enemy, unnamable, locatable on no organization chart or budget line—who knows, maybe even the CIA’s scared of them.

“Maybe it’s unbeatable, maybe there are ways to fight back. What it may require is a dedicated cadre of warriors willing to sacrifice time, income, personal safety, a brother/sisterhood consecrated to an uncertain struggle that may extend over generations and, despite all, end in total defeat.”

She’s going crazy, Maxine thinks, this is Jedi talk. Or maybe that graduation speech last summer at Kugelblitz really was prophecy, and now it’s coming true. For all Maxine knows, March is sleeping in the park by now, her possessions in Zabar’s bags, hair growing out wild and gray, no hot baths anymore, depending for showers on the winter rains. How guilty is Maxine supposed to feel about passing her Reg’s video?

•   •   •

VYRVA COMES OVER ONE MORNING
after leaving the kids off at school. It isn’t that a coolness has grown between her and Maxine, exactly. Among the underlying rules of the fraud-investigation universe is that on any given Saturday night anybody may be playing canasta with anybody, who in particular seldom being as important as what’s on the score sheet.

Nose in her coffee cup, Vyrva announces, “It finally happened. He dumped me.”

“Why, the li’l rat.”

“Well . . . I sort of provoked it?”

“And he didn’t . . .”

“Take revenge because DeepArcher went open source? Hell no, he’s delighted, means he’s got it for free, saves him a purchase price that could have put Fiona, Justin, and me in any twelve-room penthouse in town.”

“Oh?” Real estate, now there’s a return to mental health. “You guys’ve been looking?”

“I have. Still got to talk Justin into it, ’course, he’s homesick for California.”

“You’re not.”

“Remember a movie called
Lawrence of Arabia
(1962), guy from England goes out in the desert, suddenly realizes he’s home?”

“You remember a movie called
The Wizard of Oz
(1939), where—”

“All right, all right. But this is the version where Dorothy gets heavily into Emerald City residential property?”

“After an inappropriate relationship with the Wiz.”

“Who’s done with me in any case, tossed me aside, a fallen woman but I live with my guilt, yes I’m free, free I tell you.”

“So why the face?” Maxine allows herself once a year to do her Howard Cosell impression, and today’s the day. “Vyrva, you are wallowing in lachrymosity.”

“Oh, Maxi, I feel so totally, like, used?”

“What, you’re a decent-looking enough broad, at least when you’re not blubbering, what if it wasn’t only business intrigue, what if it really was lust he felt,” is she really saying this? “true and simple lust, all along.”

Which turns the spigot on full blast. “That sweet little guy! I told him to just fuck off, I hurt him, I’m such a bitch . . .”

“Here, a tip.” Sliding over a roll of paper towels. “From one who has been there. Absorbs better than tissues, you don’t use as many cubic feet, less to clean up later.”

•   •   •

DAYTONA, AS IF HAVING MADE
some year-end resolution, suspends her comical-Negro shtick for a minute. “Mrs. Loeffler?”

“Uh-oh.” Checking the area for vengeance seekers, bill collectors, cops.

“No, it’s only about that Ehbler-Cohen ticket? With the weird-ass defined-benefit plan? They were hiding it in the spreadsheets. Look.”

Maxine looks. “How did you—”

“It was luck, really, I happened to take my reading glasses off, and suddenly, blurry but there it was, the pattern. Just way too many them damn empty cells.”

“Walk me through this idiot style, please, I’m hopeless at spreadsheets, people say Excel, I think they’re talking about a T-shirt size.”

“Look, you pull down Tools, click on Auditing, and that lets you see everything that’s going into the formula cells, and . . . dig it.”

“Oh. Wow.” Following along, “Sweet.” Nodding appreciatively, like it’s a cooking show. “Nice going, I would never have caught that.”

“Well, you were out working on some other thing, so I took the liberty . . .”

“Where’d you pick this stuff up, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Night school. All this time you thought I was at rehab? Ha, ha. I’ve been taking CPA classes. Going for my license next month.”

“Daytona! This is wonderful, so why keep it such a secret?”

“Didn’t want you be thinkin
All About Eve
and shit.”

•   •   •

CHRISTMAS COMES AND GOES,
and maybe it isn’t Maxine’s holiday but it is Horst’s and the kids’, and this year it seems less of an effort for her to
be a sport, though she does predictably find herself the night before Christmas screaming desperate in Macy’s at midnight, her brain the usual Sno-Kone with convolutions, up on the mezzanine rejecting one gift idea after another, suddenly here’s a warm and friendly tap on her shoulder—aaahh! Dr. Itzling! Her dentist! This is what it’s come to!

But somewhere in the tinsel dazzle, there are also fragrances from weeklong oven exercises, Horst and his possibly toxic Old-Time Eggnog recipe, the coming and going of friends and relatives including the distant in-law who always ends up telling mohel jokes,
A
Beast Wars Family Christmas
at Radio City Music Hall, with Optimus Primal, Rhinox, Cheetor, and the gang helping a middle school with its Christmas pageant by doing singing cameos as manger animals, the boys, overindulged, sitting among an early-morning mountain of unreusable wrapping paper and packaging, out of which have emerged game platforms, action figures, DVDs, sporting equipment, clothes they may or may not ever wear.

During this occur odd moments of slack, reserved for visits more spectral, from those who cannot or would not ever be here—among them, at a typically uneasy distance from the jollification, Nick Windust, from whom there’s been not a word, though why should there be. Out somewhere in that nomad’s field of indifference, riding the Chinese bus into a futurity of imprecise schedules and reduced options. How long does that go on?