Bleeding Edge Read online

  If government agencies were in-laws, Xiomara would’ve been less than acceptable on a number of counts. Politically her family was trouble waiting to happen, from old-school arevalista “spiritual socialists” on leftward, through activists with a history of nonnegotiable hatred for United Fruit, hardcore anarcho-Marxist aunts and cousins who ran safe houses and talked Kanjobal with the folks out in the country, plus assorted gun runners and dope dealers who just wanted to be left alone but were invariably described as Suspected Guerrilla Sympathizers, which seemed to mean everybody who lived in the region.

  So . . . what do we have here, true love, imperialist rape, a cover story to get in good with the indigenous? The record is less than forthcoming. No further mention of Xiomara or for that matter Windust in Guatemala. A few months later he surfaces in Costa Rica, but without the missus.

  Maxine scrolls onward but is now focusing more on why did Marvin bring her this in the first place, and what’s she supposed to do with it? All right, all right, maybe Marvin is some kind of otherworldly messenger, an angel even, but whatever unseen forces may be employing him at the moment, she’s obliged to ask professional questions, such as how in secular space might the data-storage gizmo have found its way to Marvin? Somebody wants her to see it. Gabriel Ice? Elements in the CIA or whoever? Windust himself?

  11

  A week or so later, Maxine’s in Vontz Auditorium again for eighth-grade graduation. After the usual interfaith parade of clergy, each wearing some appropriate outfit, which always reminds her of the setup to a joke, the Kugelblitz Bebop Ensemble plays “Billie’s Bounce,” Bruce Winterslow sets some kind of Guinness Book record for most polysyllabic words in a sentence, and then on comes the guest speaker, March Kelleher. Maxine is a little shocked at the effects of only a couple years—wait, she wonders with a sudden pulse of panic, how many years exactly? March now has gray not just coming in but putting its feet up and making itself at home, and she’s wearing oversize shades today that suggest a temporary loss of faith in eye makeup. She’s wearing desert-camo fatigues and her signature snood, today a sort of electric green. Her commencement speech turns out to be a parable nobody is supposed to get.

  “Once upon a time, there was a city with a powerful ruler who liked to creep around town in disguise, doing his work in secret. Now and then someone recognized him, but they were always willing to accept a small handful of silver or gold to forget all about it. ‘You have been exposed for a moment to a highly toxic form of energy,’ is his usual formula. ‘Here is a sum I trust will compensate you for any damage done. Soon you will begin to forget, and then you’ll feel better.’

  “At the time, out and about in the night, there was also an older lady, probably didn’t look too different from your grandmother, who carried a huge sack full of dirty rags, scraps of paper and plastic, broken appliances, leftover food, and other rubbish she collected off the street. She went everywhere, she had lived out in the city longer than anyone there, unprotected and in the open regardless of the weather, and she knew everything. She was the guardian of whatever the city threw away.

  “On the day she and the ruler of the city finally crossed paths, he got a rude surprise—when he offered his well-meant handful of coins, she angrily flung them back at him. They went scattering and ringing on the paving stones. ‘Forget?’ she screeched. ‘I cannot and must not forget. Remembering is the essence of what I am. The price of my forgetting, great sir, is more than you can imagine, let alone pay.’

  “Taken aback, somehow thinking he must not have offered enough, the ruler began to dig through his purse again, but when he looked up, the old woman had vanished. That day he returned from his secret tasks earlier than usual, in a queer state of nerves. He supposed now he’d have to find this old woman and render her harmless. How awkward.

  “Though he was not by nature a violent person, he had learned a long time ago that nobody held on to a job like his unless they were willing to do whatever it took. For years he had sought new and creative methods short of violence, which usually came down to buying people off. Stalkers of imperial celebrities were hired as bodyguards, journalists with nasal-length issues were redesignated ‘analysts’ and installed at desks in the state intelligence office.

  “By this logic the old woman with her sack of garbage should have become an environmental cabinet minister and someday get parks and recycle centers all across the realm named after her. But whenever anyone tried to approach her with job offers, she was never to be found. Her criticisms of the regime, however, had already entered the collective consciousness of the city and become impossible to delete.

  “Well, kids, it’s just a story. The kind of story you were likely to hear in Russia back in the days when Stalin was in power. People told each other these Aesop’s fables and everybody knew what stood for what. But can we in the 21st-century U.S. say the same?

  “Who is this old lady? What does she think she’s been finding out all these years? Who is this ‘ruler’ shes’s refusing to be bought off by? And what’s this ‘work’ he was ‘doing in secret’? Suppose ‘the ruler’ isn’t a person at all but a soulless force so powerful that though it cannot ennoble, it does entitle, which, in the city-nation we speak of, is always more than enough? The answers are left to you, the Kugelblitz graduating class of 2001, as an exercise. Good luck. Think of it as a contest. Send your answers to my Weblog, tabloidofthedamned.com, first prize is a pizza with anything you want on it.”

  The address gets her some applause, more than it would’ve at the snob academies east and west of here, but not as much as you might’ve expected a Kugelblitz alum to get.

  “It’s my personality,” she tells Maxine at the reception afterward. “The women don’t like the way I turn myself out, the men don’t like my attitude. Which is why I’m starting to cut back on the personal appearances and concentrate instead on my Weblog.” Handing Maxine one of the flyers that Otis brought home.

  “I’ll visit it,” Maxine promises.

  Nodding across the patio, “Who’s that you came in with, the Sterling Hayden look-alike?”

  “The what? Oh, that’s my ex. Well. Sort of ex.”

  “This is the same ‘ex’ as two years ago? It wasn’t final then, it isn’t final yet, what are you waiting for? Some Nazi name, if I remember right.”

  “Horst. Is this gonna be on the Internet now?”

  “Not if you do me a big favor.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Seriously, you’re a CFE, right?”

  “They pulled my certificate, I’m freelance now.”

  “Whatever. I have to pick your brain about something.”

  “Should we have lunch someplace?”

  “I don’t do lunch. Corrupt artifact of late capitalism. Breakfast maybe?”

  She’s smiling, however. It occurs to Maxine that contrary to the speech she just gave, March isn’t a crone, she’s a dumpling. With the face and demeanor of somebody who you know within five minutes of meeting them will be telling you to eat something. Something specific, which she will have on a spoon already on its way to your mouth.

  • • •

  THE PIRAEUS DINER on Columbus is littered, dilapidated, full of cigarette smoke and cooking odors from the kitchen, a neighborhood institution. Mike the waiter drops a couple of very heavy menus bound in cracked brown plastic on the table and stalks off. “I can’t believe this place is still here,” March says. “Talk about living on borrowed time.”

  “Come on, this joint, it’s eternal.”

  “What planet are you from again? Between the scumbag landlords and the scumbag developers, nothing in this city will ever stand at the same address for even five years, name me a building you love, someday soon it’ll either be a stack of high-end chain stores or condos for yups with more money than brains. Any open space you think will breathe and survive in perpetuity? Sorry, but you can kiss its ass good-bye.”

  “Riverside Park?”

  “Ha! Forget it. Central Park its
elf isn’t safe, these men of vision, they dream about CPW to Fifth Avenue solid with gracious residences. Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by. The only way to live here is not to get attached.”

  Maxine is hearing similar advice from Shawn, though not necessarily in terms of real estate. “I checked out your Weblog last night, March, so now you’re chasing dotcoms also?”

  “Real estate, easy to hate, these techies it’s a little different. You know what Susan Sontag always sez.”

  “‘I like the streak, I’m keeping it’?”

  “If there’s a sensibility you really want to talk about, and not just exhibit it yourself, you need ‘a deep sympathy modified by contempt.’”

  “I get the contempt part, but remind me about the sympathy?”

  “Their idealism,” maybe a little reluctantly, “their youth . . . Maxi, I haven’t seen anything like it since the sixties. These kids are out to change the world. ‘Information has to be free’—they really mean it. At the same time, here’s all these greedy fuckin dotcommers make real-estate developers look like Bambi and Thumper.”

  The coin-op washing machine of Intuition clangs on into a new cycle. “Let me guess. Your estranged son-in-law, Gabriel Ice.”

  “She’s a magician. You do birthday parties?”

  “Actually right at the moment, hashslingrz also happen to be causing a client of mine some agità. Sort of client.”

  “Yeah, yeah?” Eagerly, “Fraud maybe?”

  “Nothing forensic that’d hold up in court, or not yet anyway.”

  “Maxi, there is something really, really weird going on over there.”

  Mike shows up with a smoldering cigar gripped in his teeth. “Ladies?”

  “Not lately,” March beams. “How about waffles, bacon, sausage, homefries, coffee.”

  “Special K,” sez Maxine, “skim milk, some kind of fruit?”

  “Today for you, a banana.”

  “Some coffee too. Please.”

  March is shaking her head slowly. “Early-stage food nazi here. So tell me, you and Gabriel Ice, what?”

  “Just good friends, don’t believe Page Six.” Maxine gives her a quick rundown—the Benford Curve anomalies, the ghost vendors, the Gulfward flow of capital. “I’ve only got a surface picture so far. But there do seem to be a lot of government contracts.”

  March nods sourly. “Hashslingrz is as tight as it gets with the U.S. security apparatus, an arm of, if you like. Crypto work, countermeasures, heaven knows what-all. You know he’s got a mansion out in Montauk, just a morning jog down the trail from the old air base.” Funny look on her face, a strange mixture of amusement and doom.

  “Why would that—”

  “The Montauk Project.”

  “The . . . Oh, wait, Heidi’s mentioned that . . . She teaches it, some kind of . . . urban legend?”

  “You could say.” Beat. “You could also say, the terminal truth about the U.S. government, worse than anything you can imagine.”

  Mike shows up with the food. Maxine sits peeling her banana, slicing it over the cereal, trying to keep her eyes wide and unjudging while March digs in to her high-cholesterol eats and is soon talking with her mouth full. “I see my share of conspiracy theories, some are patently bullshit, some I want to believe so much I have to be careful, others are inescapable even if I wanted to escape. The Montauk Project is every horrible suspicion you’ve ever had since World War II, all the paranoid production values, a vast underground facility, exotic weapons, space aliens, time travel, other dimensions, shall I go on? And who turns out to have a lively if not psychopathic interest in the subject but my own reptilian son-in-law, Gabriel Ice.”

  “As another kid billionaire with a wacko obsession, you mean, or . . . ?”

  “Try ‘power-hungry little CIA-groupie jerkoff.’”

  “That’s if it’s real, this Montauk thing.”

  “Remember, back in ’96, TWA Flight 800? Blown out of the sky over Long Island Sound, a government investigation which got so cute that everybody ended up thinking it was them that did it. Montaukies say it was particle-beam weapons being developed in a secret lab under Montauk Point. Some conspiracies, they’re warm and comforting, we know the names of the bad guys, we want to see them get their comeuppance. Others you’re not sure you want any of it to be true because it’s so evil, so deep and comprehensive.”

  “What—time travel? Aliens?”

  “If you were doing something in secret and didn’t want the attention, what better way to have it ridiculed and dismissed than bring in a few Californian elements?”

  “Ice doesn’t strike me as an antigovernment crusader or a seeker after truth.”

  “Maybe he thinks it’s all real and wants to be duked in. If he isn’t already. He doesn’t talk about it at all. Everybody knows that Larry Ellison races yachts, Bill Gross collects stamps. But this, what Forbes would probably call, ‘passion’ of Ice’s, isn’t too widely known. Yet.”

  “Sounds like something you want to post on your Weblog.”

  “Not till I find out more. Every day there’s new evidence, too much Ice money going for hidden purposes in too many directions. Maybe all connected, maybe only part. These ghost payments you’ve been trying to follow, for example.”

  “Trying. They’re getting smurfed out all over the world to pass-through accounts in Nigeria, Yugoslavia, Azerbaijan, all finally reassembled in a holding bank in the Emirates, some Special Purpose Vehicle registered in the Jebel Ali Free Zone. Like the Smurf Village, only cuter.”

  March sits blinking at the food on her fork, and you can almost see those old-lefty gears being double-clutched into engagement and starting to spin. “Now, that I might want to post.”

  “Maybe not. I wouldn’t want to scare anybody off quite yet.”

  “What if it’s Islamic terrorists or something? Time might be of the essence.”

  “Please. I just chase embezzlers, what do I look like, James Bond?”

  “I don’t know, give us a macho smirk here, let’s see.”

  But something now in March’s face, some obscure collapse, starts Maxine wondering who else is going to cut her any slack. “OK look, my whistle-blower has a source, some kid übergeek, he’s been digging, trying to crack into some stuff that hashslingrz has encrypted. Whatever he finds, whenever that is, I could pass it on to you, OK?”

  “Thanks, Maxi. I’d like to say I owe you one, though at the moment, technically, I don’t. But if you’d really like me to . . .” She looks almost embarrassed, and Maxine’s mom ESP, cranking into action now, tells her this will not be unconnected with Tallis, the child March is not shy about admitting she once literally prayed to have, the one she misses most of all, living over on the Upper East Side, just across the park but it might as well be Katmandu also, society lady, a kid of her own that March seldom if ever sees—lost Tallis, bought and sold into a world March will never give up her hatred of.

  “Let me guess.”

  “I can’t go over there. I can’t, but maybe you could on a pretext, just to see how she’s doing. Really, just a secondhand report’s all I want. From what I can tell off the Internet, she’s the company comptroller at hashslingrz, so maybe you could, I don’t know . . .”

  “Just call up, say ‘Hi, Tallis, I think somebody at your company’s playing Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar, maybe you need a decertified CFE?’ Come on, March, it’s ambulance chasing.”

  “So . . . they’ll re-decertify you, what?”

  Carefully, “When’s the last time you saw her?”

  “Carnegie Mellon when she got her M.B.A. Years now. I wasn’t even invited, but I went anyhow. Even from where I was, way in the back, she was radiant. I lurked around the Fence there for a while hoping she’d come by. Kind of fuckin pathetic, looking back. That Barbara Stanwyck movie, without the bad fashion advice.”

  Provoking a r
eflex appraisal of March’s turnout choices today. Maxine notices how the snood matches her handbag. Sort of a vivid turnip purple. “OK, look, I can probably use the occasion to do a little social engineering. Even if she won’t take a meeting, even that’ll tell me something, right?”

  12

  Tallis is briefly back from Montauk and able to make some space for Maxine before work. Very early in the morning, through queasy summer light, Maxine first heads downtown to a weekly appointment with Shawn, who looks like he’s just pulled an all-nighter at a sensory-deprivation tank.

  “Horst is back.”

  “Is that, like,” air quotes, “‘back’? Or just back?”

  “I’m supposed to know?”

  Tapping a temple as if hearing voices from far away, “Vegas? Church of Elvis? Horst ’n’ Maxine take two?”

  “Please, this is what I’d hear from my mother, if my mother didn’t hate Horst so much.”

  “Too oedipal for me, but I can refer you to a really awesome Freudian, flexible rates, all that.”

  “Maybe not. What do you think would do?”

  “Sit.”

  After what seems like a good part of the hour has ticked away, “Um . . . sit, yes, and . . . ?”

  “Just sit.”

  • • •

  THE CABDRIVER ON THE WAY uptown has his radio tuned to a Christian call-in station, which he’s listening to attentively. This does not bode well. He decides to get on Park and take it all the way up. The biblical text being discussed on the radio at the moment is from 2 Corinthians, “For you suffer fools gladly, seeing you yourselves are wise,” which Maxine takes as a sign not to suggest alternate routes.

  Park Avenue, despite attempts at someone’s idea of beautification, has remained, for all but the chronically clue-free, the most boring street in the city. Built originally as a kind of genteel lid to cover up the train tracks running into Grand Central, what should it be, the Champs-Élysées? Sped through, at night, by stretch limo, let’s say, on the way to Harlem, it might register as just bearable. In broad daylight, however, at an average speed of one block per hour, jammed with loud and toxic-smelling traffic, all in advanced states of disrepair, whose drivers suffer (or enjoy) a hostility level comparable to that of Maxine’s driver here—not to mention police barricades, Form Single Lane signs, jackhammer crews, backhoes and front-end loaders, cement mixers, asphalt spreaders, and battered dump trucks unmarked by any contractor’s name let alone phone number—it becomes an occasion for spiritual exercise, though maybe more of the Eastern type than anything connected with this radio station, now blasting some kind of Christian hip-hop. Christian what? No, she doesn’t want to know.