Bleeding Edge Read online

  “So you’ll call him back?”

  “You sound like what’s-her-name in there. No, Pop, I have no plans to do that.”

  • • •

  IT DOESN’T SEEM to be up to Maxine, however. Next day, evening rush hour, it’s just starting to rain . . . sometimes she can’t resist, she needs to be out in the street. What might only be a simple point on the workday cycle, a reconvergence of what the day scattered as Sappho said someplace back in some college course, Maxine forgets, becomes a million pedestrian dramas, each one charged with mystery, more intense than high-barometer daylight can ever allow. Everything changes. There’s that clean, rained-on smell. The traffic noise gets liquefied. Reflections from the street into the windows of city buses fill the bus interiors with unreadable 3-D images, as surface unaccountably transforms to volume. Average pushy Manhattan schmucks crowding the sidewalks also pick up some depth, some purpose—they smile, they slow down, even with a cellular phone stuck in their ear they are more apt to be singing to somebody than yakking. Some are observed taking houseplants for walks in the rain. Even the lightest umbrella-to-umbrella contact can be erotic.

  “If it’s the right umbrella, you’re saying,” Heidi once sought to clarify.

  “Picky Heidi, any umbrella, what would it matter?”

  “Airhead Maxi, it could be Ted Bundy.”

  Which this evening turns out to be something like that, actually. Maxine’s under some scaffolding waiting out a brief intensity in the downpour when she becomes aware of some kind of male presence. Umbrellas touch. Strangers in the night, exchanging— No wait, that’s something else.

  “Evening, Ms. Tarnow.” He’s holding out a business card, which she recognizes as a copy of the same one Ernie passed on to her last night. This one she doesn’t take. “It’s OK, no GPS chip or anything.”

  Oboy. The fucking voice, sonorous, overcoached, phony as a cold call on an answering machine. She flicks a sidelong glance. Fiftyish, midnight-brown shoes, Elaine’s idea of nice, trench coat with a high polyester content, ever since grade school exactly the kind of person everybody including herself has warned her to stay away from. So of course she starts in with the blurting.

  “Already have one of these. This is you in person, Nicholas Windust, I don’t suppose you carry a federal ID, warrant or something? just being a careful citizen, understand, trying to do my part to fight crime?” When will she learn to dummy up? No wonder the Borderline Personality folks keep after her, their seasonal noodges are in fact paranoia-calibration updates and she ignores them at her peril. So what’s wrong with me, she wonders, am I some kind of a make-nice compulsive? Am I as desperate as Heidi always tells me I am?

  He has flipped open meanwhile some pocket-size item of leather goods, flipped it shut again, it could be a Costco membership card, anything. “Look, you can really help us. If you wouldn’t mind coming down to the Federal Building, it shouldn’t take—”

  “Are you fuckin insane?”

  “OK, then how about La Cibaeña over on Amsterdam? I mean, you could still get drugged and abducted, but the coffee’s got to be better than it is downtown.”

  “Five minutes,” she mutters. “Think of it as speed interrogating.” Why is she even allowing him that much? Need for parental approval, thirty, forty years down the line? Swell. Of course Ernie still believes the Rosenbergs were innocent and loathes the FBI and all clones thereof, while Elaine suffers from undiagnosed OY, or Obsessive Yenta syndrome. Besides which, something about him, relentless as a car alarm, is screaming Not Acceptable. James Bond has it easy, Brits can always fall back on accents, where you got your tux, a multivolume set of class signifiers. In New York all you have really is shoes.

  At which point in her analysis the rain has let up a little and they’ve reached La Cibaeña Chinese-Dominican Café. This is my neighborhood, it belatedly occurs to her, what if somebody sees me here with this creep?

  “You might want to try the General Tso’s catibias, they’re highly spoken of.”

  “Pork, I’m Jewish, something in Leviticus, don’t ask.” Maxine is in fact hungry but orders only coffee. Windust wants a morir soñando and has a nice chat about this in Dominican dialect with the waitress.

  “Fantastic morir soñando here,” he informs Maxine, “old Cibao recipe, handed down through the family for generations.”

  Maxine happens to know it’s the owner going in the back and throwing Creamsicles in the blender. She considers letting Windust in on this and is instantly annoyed at how reflexively wiseassed it will sound. “So. This was about my brother-in-law? He’ll be back in a couple weeks, you can talk to him yourself.”

  Windust exhales audibly through his nose, more in regret than annoyance. “You want to know what’s been getting the security community all nervous lately, Ms. Tarnow? It’s a piece of software called Promis, originally designed for federal prosecutors, to share data among the district courts. It works regardless of what language your files are written in, even what operating system you’re using. The Russian mob have been selling it to the rugriders, and more to the point, Mossad have been generously traveling all over the world helping local agencies install it, sometimes throwing in a krav maga course as a sales incentive.”

  “And sometimes rugelach from the bakery, do I begin to detect a Jewphobic note here?” Something a little lopsided about his face, she notices, not sure what exactly, looks like it could have been in a couple of fights. A line or two, some nonnegotiable tension, the beginnings of that pitted texture men get sometimes. An unexpectedly precise mouth. The lips held together when he isn’t talking. No openmouthed expectancy around this one. His hair is still wet from the rain, cut short and plastered down, part on the right, going gray . . . Eyes that may have seen too much and should really be covered by shades . . .

  “Hello?”

  Not a good idea right now, Maxine, this drifting into thought. OK, “And because I’m Jewish, you figure I’ll want to hear about Jewish software? Some people-skills seminar they make you go to every review cycle perhaps.”

  “No offense,” his smirk indicating otherwise, “but what’s disturbing about this Promis software is that there’s always a backdoor built in, so anytime it gets installed on a government computer anywhere in the world—law enforcement, intelligence, special ops—anybody who happens to know about this backdoor can just slip in through it and make themselves at home—wherever—and all manner of secrets get compromised. Not to mention there’s a couple of Israeli chips, highly sophisticated, which Mossad have been known to install at the same time, without necessarily informing the client. What these chips do is scavenge information even while the computer’s turned off, hold it till the Ofeq satellite comes over, then transmit everything out to it in a single data burst.”

  “Oh, devious, these Jews.”

  “Israel doesn’t spy on us? Remember the Pollard case back in 1985? Even left-wing papers like the New York Times carried that story, Ms. Tarnow.”

  How right-wing, Maxine wonders, does a person have to be to think of the New York Times as a left-wing newspaper? “So Avram has been working on what then, the chips, the software?”

  “We think he’s Mossad. Maybe not a graduate of Hertzliya but at least one of their civilian sleepers, what they call sayanim. Holding down a day job out here in the Diaspora, waiting for a call.”

  Maxine looks at her watch, gathers her purse, and rises. “Not about to shop my sister’s husband. Think of it as a personal quirk. Oh and your five minutes were up a while ago.” She feels rather than hears his silence. “What. Such a face.”

  “One more thing, all right? People at my shop have learned of your interest, we assume professional, in the finances of hashslingrz.com.”

  “These are all public, the sites I use, nothing illegal, how do you know what I’m researching anyway?”

  “Child’s play,” sez Windust, “we like to think of it as ‘No keystroke left behind.’”

  “So let me guess, you people wa
nt me to back off of hashslingerz.”

  “No, actually, if there’s a fraud issue, we’d like to know about it. Sometime.”

  “You want to hire me? For money? Or were you planning to rely on charm?”

  He finds a pair of tortoiseshell Wayfarer clones in his coat pocket and covers his eyes. Finally. Smiles, with that precision mouth. “Am I that much of a bad guy?”

  “Oh. Now I’m supposed to help him with his self-esteem, Dr. Maxine here. Listen, a suggestion, you’re from D.C., try the self-help section at Politics & Prose—empathy, we’re all out of that today, the truck didn’t show up.”

  He nods, rises, heads for the door. “Hope I see you again sometime.” With the shades on, of course there is no telling what if anything this means. And he has stuck her, the cheapskate, with the check.

  Well. Should’ve been it for Agent Windust. So it doesn’t help that that very night, or actually next morning just before dawn, she has a vivid, all-but-lucid dream about him, in which they are not exactly fucking, but fucking around, definitely. The details ooze away as dawn light and the sounds of garbage trucks and jackhammers grow in the room, till she’s left with a single image unwilling to fade, this federal penis, fierce red, predatory, and Maxine alone its prey. She has sought to escape but not sincerely enough for the penis, which is wearing some strange headgear, possibly a Harvard football helmet. It can read her thoughts. “Look at me, Maxine. Don’t look away. Look at me.” A talking penis. That same jive-ass radio-announcer voice.

  She checks the clock. Too late to go back to sleep, though who would want to, necessarily? What she needs is to go in to the office and work on something nice and normal for a while. Just as she’s about to head out with the boys to school, the doorbell rings its usual Big Ben theme which somebody a hundred years ago figured would be appropriate to the grandiosity of the building. Maxine squints through the peephole and here’s Marvin the kozmonaut, dreads pushed up under his bike helmet, orange jacket and blue cargo pants, and over his shoulder an orange messenger bag with the running-man logo of the recently failed kozmo.com.

  “Marvin. You’re up early. What’s with the outfit, you guys folded weeks ago.”

  “Don’t mean I have to stop ridin. My legs are still pumpin, no mechanical issues with the bike, I can ride forever, I’m the Flyin Dutchmahn.”

  “Strange, I’m not expecting anything, you must have me mixed up with some other lowlife again.” Except Marvin has an uncanny history of always showing up with items Maxine knows she didn’t order but which prove each time to be exactly what she needs.

  This is the first time she’s ever seen him in the daylight hours. His shift used to begin at nightfall, and from then till dawn he’d be out on his orange fixed-gear track bike delivering donuts, ice cream, and videotapes, guaranteed to arrive within the hour, to the all-night community of dopers, hackers, instant-gratification cases who thought the dotcom balloon would ascend forever.

  “It was all these ritzy neighborhoods up here,” is Marvin’s theory, “I knew the minute we started deliverin north of 14th Street it was the beginnin of the end.”

  According to folklore, Mayor Giuliani, who hates all bike delivery people, is said to have declared a vendetta against Marvin personally, which along with his Trinidadian origins and single-digit employee number at kozmo have brought him iconic status in the track-rider community.

  “Missed you, Marvin.”

  “Lotta work. These days I’m all over the place, like Duane Reade. Don’t give me that banknote you’re wavin all around, it’s way too much and way too sentimental, oh and here, this is for you as well.”

  Producing some kind of high-tech gizmo in beige plastic about four inches long by an inch wide, which seems to have a USB connector on one end.

  “Marvin, what is it?”

  “Ah, Mizziz L, always makin with those jokes. I just deliver em my dear.”

  Time to seek the advice of an expert. “Ziggy, what is this thing?”

  “Looks like one of those little eight-megabyte flash drives. Like a memory card, only different? IBM makes one, but this is some Asian knockoff.”

  “So there could be files or something stored on this?”

  “Anything, most likely text.”

  “What do I do, just plug it in my computer?”

  “Yaahh! No! Mom! you don’t know what’s on it. I know some kids at Bronx Science—let them check it out in the computer lab up there.”

  “Sound like your grandma, Zig.”

  Next day, “That thumb drive? it’s OK, safe to copy, just a lot of text, looks semiofficial.”

  “And now your friends have seen it before I have.”

  “They . . . uh, they don’t read that much, Mom. Nothing personal. A generational thing.” Turns out to be a piece of Nicholas Windust’s own dossier, downloaded from some Deep Web directory for spooks called Facemask, and displaying the kind of merciless humor also to be found in high-school yearbooks.

  Windust does not after all seem to be FBI. Something worse, if possible. If there is a brother- or God forbid sisterhood of neoliberal terrorists, Windust has been in there from the jump, a field operative whose first recorded job, as an entry-level gofer, was in Santiago, Chile, on 11 September 1973, spotting for the planes that bombed the presidential palace and killed Salvador Allende.

  Beginning with low-level bagman activities, graduating to undercover surveillance and corporate espionage, Windust’s list of credits at some point turned sinister, perhaps as early as his move across the Andes to Argentina. Job responsibilities began to include “interrogation enhancement” and “noncompliant-subject relocation.” Even with her light grasp of Argentine history during those years, Maxine can translate this well enough. Around 1990, as part of a cadre of old Argentina hands, U.S. veterans of the Dirty War who then stayed on to advise the IMF stooges that rose to power in its aftermath, Windust was one of the founders of a D.C. think tank known as Toward America’s New Global Opportunities (TANGO). He has a thirty-year history of visiting-lecturer gigs, including at the infamous School of the Americas. Is surrounded by the usual posse of younger protégés, though he seems to be against cults of personality on principle.

  “Too Maoist for him, maybe,” is one of the less bitchy comments, and indeed colleagues seem to have struggled at length with doubts about Windust. Considering the money to be made off of troubled economies worldwide, his unexpected reluctance to grab a piece of the proceeds for himself soon aroused suspicions. Duked in, he’d’ve been a safely co-enabling partner in crime. To be motivated only by raw ideology—besides greed, what else could it be?—made him weird, almost dangerous.

  So, over time, Windust got pushed into a peculiar compromise. Whenever a government at the behest of the IMF sold off an asset, he agreed either to go in for a percentage or, later on, with more leverage, to buy it outright—but he never, the hippie nutcase, cashed anything in. A power plant goes private for pennies on the dollar, Windust becomes a silent partner. Wells that supply regional water systems, easements across tribal lands for power lines, clinics dedicated to tropical ailments unheard of in the developed world—Windust takes a modest position. If one day, untypically idle, he should pull out his portfolio to see what he’s got he’d find himself with controlling interests in an oil field, a refinery, an educational system, an airline, a power grid, each in a different newly privatized part of the world. “None of them especially grand in scale,” concludes one confidential report, “but considering the assembled set all together, by Zermelo’s Axiom of Choice, subject at times has effectively found himself in control of an entire economy.”

  By the same kind of thinking, it occurs to Maxine, Windust has acquired a portfolio of pain and damage applied to various human body parts that might have added up to hundreds—who knows, maybe thousands—of deaths on his karmic ticket. Should she tell somebody? Ernie? Elaine, who’s been trying to fix her up? They would so plotz.

  This is fucking appalling. How does it happen,
how does somebody get from entry-level foot soldier to the battered specimen who accosted her the other night? This is a text file, no pictures, but Maxine can somehow see Windust back then, a clean-looking kid, short hair, chinos and button-down shirts, only has to shave once a week, one of a globetrotting gang of young smart-asses, piling into cities and towns all over the Third World, filling ancient colonial spaces with office copiers and coffee machines, pulling all-nighters, running off neatly bound plans for the total obliteration of target countries and their replacement by free-market fantasies. “Need one of these on everybody’s desk by nine A.M., ¡ándale, ándale!” Comical Speedy Gonzales dialogue would’ve been standard among these generally eastern-seaboard snotnoses.

  Back in that more innocent day, the damage Windust caused, if any, all stayed safely on paper. But then, at some point, somewhere she thinks of as down in the middle of a vast and unforgiving flatland, he took a step. Hardly measurable in that immensity and yet, like finding and clicking on an invisible link on a screen, transported in the act over into his next life.

  Generally, all-male narratives, unless it’s the NBA, challenge Maxine’s patience. Now and then Ziggy or Otis will hustle her into watching an action movie, but if there aren’t that many women in the opening credits, she’ll tend to drift away. Something like this has been happening as she scans through Windust’s karmic rap sheet here, that’s until she gets to 1982–83, when he was stationed in Guatemala, ostensibly as part of an agricultural mission, in coffee-growing country. Helpful Farmer Windust. Here, as it turned out, he met, courted, and married—as his nameless biographers put it, “deployed into a spousal scenario with”—a very young local girl named Xiomara. For a minute Maxine imagines a wedding sequence out in the jungle, with pyramids, native Mayan rituals, psychedelics. But no, instead it was in the sacristy at the local Catholic church, everyone there already or about to become strangers . . .