Bleeding Edge Read online

  Cornelia pretending to gasp, faux paranoid, “Please don’t tell anyone, but I have actually now and then . . . discussed the price of an item in a shop. Yes, sometimes—incredibly—they’ve even brought it down. Ten percent. Nearly thirty once, but that was only the one time, at Bloomingdale’s back in the eighties. Though the memory is still vivid.”

  “So . . . as long as we don’t rat each other out to the ethnic police . . .”

  They emerge from the ladies’ to find the company grown noticeably rowdier, Soju Wallbangers in glasses and pitchers everywhere, Koreans horizontal on couches or, when vertical, singing with their ankles crossed, teenage obsessives with laptops playing Darkeden over in the corner, Cohiba smoke hanging in strata, waitresses laughing louder and cutting more slack for borderline lechery, Rocky at some point deeply invested in “Volare,” having located the old kinescope of Domenico Modugno on Ed Sullivan back in ’58, when the song was charting number one in the States week after week, and from this blurry video learning all Domenico’s inflections and moves.

  And who, really, is so fancy-schmancy they can’t appreciate “Volare,” arguably among the greatest pop tunes ever written? Young man dreams he’s flying in the sky, above it all, defying gravity and time, like having midlife early, in the second verse he wakes up, back on earth, first thing he sees is the big blue eyes of the woman he loves. And that will turn out to be sky enough for him. All men should grow up so gracefully.

  Sooner than expected, that phase of the evening arrives when Toto finds its way overwhelmingly onto the song queue.

  “Spud, I don’t think it’s ‘I left my brains down in Africa.’”

  “Huh? But that’s what it says on the screen.” Where if you were expecting herds on the Serengeti, instead here’s silent clips from the second season of the Korean TV hit Gag Concert. Mugging, studio-audience laughter. Enough smoke in the room now that images on the screen are pleasantly smeared.

  Maxine has been in a lengthy though inconclusive discussion with one of the strayed Korean bus passengers about the number 18 in the name of this noraebang.

  “Bad number,” leers the Korean. “Sip pal. Means ‘sell pussy.’”

  “Yes, but if you’re Jewish,” Maxine unperturbed, “it’s good luck. Bar mitzvah money, for instance, you should always give it in multiples of 18.”

  “Sell pussy? for bar mitzvah?”

  “No, no, in gematria, kind of . . . Jewish code? 18 computes to chai or life.”

  “Same thing with pussy!”

  This intercultural dialogue is disrupted by commotion from the men’s room. “Excuse me a moment.” She has a look in and finds Lester Traipse in the thick of some Web-design discussion, or actually insane screaming match, with an oversize nerd impersonator who may actually, Maxine fears, be in some quite different line of work. Drowning out even the piped-in karaoke music, the row ostensibly has to do with tables versus CSS, a controversial issue of the time, which has always, given its level of passion, struck Maxine as somehow religious. She imagines it will be difficult, no matter which side prevails, to appreciate, ten years from now, the all-consuming nature of the dispute. But here, tonight, it isn’t exactly what’s going on. Content is not, in this toilet at the moment, king. The fake nerd, for one thing, shows too much criminal potential.

  Naturally Maxine has brought only an evening purse tonight, with no room for a Beretta Tomcat, hoping for the soiree to pass pleasantly enough to keep everybody off of the front page of the Daily News with a headline such as NORAE-BANGBANG. Packing or not, her duty is clear. She goes wading into the tempest of testosterone and manages to drag Lester to safety by a peculiar necktie with multiple images of Scrooge McDuck color-separated into burnt orange and electric orchid.

  “One of Gabriel Ice’s badass entourage,” Lester breathing heavily, “mutual history. Sorry. Felix is supposed to be keeping me out of trouble.”

  “Where’d he get to?”

  “That’s him singing ‘September.’”

  After politely allowing eight more bars of Earth, Wind, Fire and Felix, whom you could call Fog, to occur, as if casually, “Known Felix long?”

  “Not long. We kept showing up in the same outer offices to pitch the same VCs, found we had a common interest in phantomware, or more like I was at loose ends and got fascinated and Felix was looking for somebody with search-engine-promotion skills, so we figured we’d team up. Better than my old arrangement anyway.”

  “Sorry about hwgaahwgh.com.”

  “Me too, but the partners were all morphing into CSS nazis like that specimen in the toilet, and I’m just an old die-hard tables person, as you see—gray, left-justified, no apologies, there have to be dinosaurs or the little kids won’t have nothing to look at in the museum, right?”

  “So you’re happy to be out of Web design for a while?”

  “Why linger? On to whatever’s next in the queue, just got to remember to keep clear of Gabriel Ice—unless of course he’s a dear friend of yours, in which case oops.”

  “Never met him, but I hear very little good spoken. What’d he do, try to get cute with the term sheet?”

  “No, strangely enough, that was all legit.”

  “The money was good?”

  “Maybe too good.” With some telltale fidgeting of the Florsheims indicating there’s more, much more. “That was always a puzzler. We were way too narrowband, too slow, even you could say too Third World, for hashslingrz. CSS or whatever, bandwidth never came up as much of an issue with us. Whereas Ice, he’s a bandwidth hog. Buying up all the budget-priced infrastructure he can find. Dotcoms that overbuilt their fiber networks, went broke doing it, their loss, Ice’s gain.”

  Somebody who isn’t Felix is now channeling Michael McDonald on “What a Fool Believes,” and several people in the room are singing along. In this festive setting, the subtext of bitterness Maxine’s hearing in Lester’s story is so noticeable that her post-CFE/ESP alarm begins to beep. What can this mean?

  “So your job for Ice . . .”

  “Old-school HTML pages, in this case ‘He’s Taking More Lithium,’ everything encrypted, nothin any of us knew how to read. Ice wanted robot meta tags on everything. NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, no nothin. It’s supposed to be for keeping pages away from Web crawlers, stashed deep enough down to be safe. But anybody could’ve done that in-house, there was more nerd delinquents hanging around that place than a Quake server.”

  “Yeah, I heard Ice was also running a sort of rehab clinic for ankle-biters. You’ve physically been to visit the hashslingrz HQ?”

  “Shortly after he bought hwgaahwgh, Ice summoned me in for an audience. I thought at least I’d get lunch, which instead turns out to be instant coffee and health-food tortilla chips in a bowl. No salsa. No salt, even. All he does is sit there and eyeball me. We must have talked, but I can’t remember about what. I still have nightmares. Not about Ice so much as his posse. Some of them ex-jailbirds. I’d bet on it.”

  “And I guess they made you sign some nondisclosure agreement.”

  “Not that anything was ever gonna be disclosed around there, nobody was exactly opening their kimono, even now, with hwgaahwgh .com liquidated, the NDA stays in force till the foreseeable end of the Universe or Daikatana finally comes out, whichever happens first. Totally their call—having a bad day, little stomach episode, they can come take it out on me whenever they want.”

  “And so . . . that discussion in the gentlemen’s lounge . . . may not have really been about Web design?”

  He gives her one of those eyes-up glances that find enough light in the near distance to flash a specular warning. Like, I can’t go there, and you better not either.

  “Only,” noodging, “that that guy in there doesn’t fit the usual nerd profile.”

  “You’d think Ice would show more confidence, wouldn’t you?” with a look both faraway and fearful, as if seeing something approach from a close-enough perimeter. “Him with his high-level connections. Instead here he is insecure, an
xious, angry, like some loan shark or pimp who’s just learned he can’t depend for help on the cops he’s paying off, or even on the higher levels he has to report to—no SEC to hear his sad complaint, no Fraud Unit, he’s alone.”

  “So what you guys were really arguing about in there was somebody leaking information?”

  “I should be so lucky. When information wants to be free, blabbing never counts as worse than a misdemeanor.”

  With something else then in the next sentence, just about to drop, which is when Felix shows up, just short of suspicious, as if he and Lester might have their own nondisclosure arrangements.

  Lester has been trying to compose his face into an innocent blank, but some tell must’ve slipped through, because Felix now throws Maxine one of those “You better not be fucking anything up, here, eh?” sorts of look, grabs Lester, and hustles him off.

  She is once again, as with the make-believe nerd in the men’s toilet, visited by a strong hint of secret intention. As if customizing cash registers may all along have been a cover story for what Felix is really up to.

  While for some the night is growing blurry, for Maxine it’s turning staccato, breaking up into small microepisodes separated by pulses of forgetting. She remembers looking at the sign-up sheet and seeing she has apparently, not fully knowing why, called Steely Dan’s up-tempo ballad of memory and regret, “Are You with Me Dr. Wu.” Next thing she knows she’s up at the mike, with Lester unexpectedly stepping in to sing harmony on the hook. During the saxophone break while Koreans holler “Pass the mike,” they find themselves doing disco moves. “Paradise Garage,” Maxine sez. “You?”

  “Danceteria mostly.” She risks a quick look at his face. He carries a furtive fantasizing gaze she’s seen too many times before, an awareness of living not only on borrowed money but on borrowed time also.

  Then she’s out in the street and everybody is scattering, the Korean tour bus has shown up and the driver and hostesses are in a lively screamfest with their haewoned passengers, Rocky and Cornelia are waving and air-kissing their way into the back of a rented Town Car, Felix is talking earnestly into a mobile phone, and the disguised heavy from the men’s toilet removes his thick plastic frames, puts on a ball cap, adjusts an invisible cloak, and vanishes halfway down the block.

  Leaving behind them in the Lucky 18 an empty orchestra playing to an empty room.

  15

  Around 11:30 in the morning, Maxine spots a substantial black vehicle which reminds her of a vintage Packard only longer, parked near her office, disregarding the signs that say no parking for an hour and a half on that side to allow for street sweeping. Usual practice is for everybody to double-park on the other side and wait for the sweeper to come through, then move back in in its wake and park legally again. Maxine notices that nobody is waiting anywhere near the mystery limo and that, even more curiously, parking enforcement, usually found in this neighborhood like cheetahs at the fringes of antelope herds, is mysteriously absent. Here, in fact, even as she watches, comes the sweeper, wheezing noisily around the corner, then, catching sight of the limo, pausing as if to consider its options. Procedure would be for the sweeper to pull up behind the offending vehicle and wait for it to move. Instead, creeping nervously on up the block, it swerves apologetically around the lengthy ride and hastens to the corner.

  Maxine notices a Cyrillic bumper sticker, which as she is shortly to learn reads MY OTHER LIMO IS A MAYBACH, for this vehicle here turns out, actually, to be a ZiL-41047, brought over piece by piece from Russia, reassembled in Brooklyn, and belonging to Igor Dashkov. Maxine, peering through the tinted glass, is interested to find March Kelleher inside, deep in confabulation with Igor. The window cranks down, and Igor puts his head out, along with a Fairway bag which appears to be stuffed with money.

  “Maxi, kagdila. Madoff Securities advice was excellent! Just in time! My associates are so happy! Over moon! They took steps, assets are safe, and this is for you.”

  Maxine recoils, only partly out of the classic accountant’s allergy to real folding money. “You fuckin insane?”

  “Amount you saved them was considerable.”

  “I can’t accept this.”

  “Suppose we call it retainer.”

  “And who’d be hiring me exactly?”

  Shrug, smile, nothing more specific.

  “March, what’s with this guy? And what are you doing in there?”

  “Hop in.” As she does so, Maxine notices that March is sitting there counting a lapful of greenbacks of her own. “No and I’m not the GF either.”

  “Let’s see, that leaves what . . . dope dealer?”

  “Shh-shh!” grabbing her arm. For as it turns out, March’s ex-husband Sid has in fact been running substances in and out of the little marina up at Tubby Hook, at the river end of Dyckman Street, and Igor here it seems is one of his clients. “I emphasize ‘running,’ March explains. “Sid, whatever the package might be, he’s just the deliveryperson, never likes to look inside.”

  “Because inside this package he doesn’t look in . . . ?”

  Well, for Igor it’s methcathinone, also known as bathtub speed, “The bathtub in this case being, my guess is it’s over in Jersey.”

  “Sid always has good product,” Igor nods, “not this cheap kitchen-stove Latvian shnyaga which is pink from permanganate they don’t get rid of, before long you are deeply fucked up, like you don’t walk right, you shake? Latvian dzhef, do me a favor, Maxine! don’t go near it, it ain’t dzhef! it’s govno!”

  “I’ll try and remember.”

  “You had breakfast? We got ice cream here, what kind you like?”

  Maxine notices a sizable freezer under the bar. “Thanks, little early in the day.”

  “No, no, it’s real ice cream,” Igor explains. “Russian ice cream. Not this Euromarket food-police shit.”

  “High butterfat content,” March translates. “Soviet-era nostalgia, basically.”

  “Fucking Nestlé,” Igor rooting through the freezer. “Fucking unsaturated vegetable oils. Hippie shit. Corrupting entire generation. I have arrangements, fly this in once a month on refrigerator plane to Kennedy. OK, so we got Ice-Fili here, Ramzai, also Inmarko, from Novosibirsk, very awesome morozhenoye, Metelitsa, Talosto . . . today, for you, on special, hazelnut, chocolate chips, vishnya, which is sour cherry . . .”

  “Can I maybe just take some for later?”

  She ends up with a number of half-kilo Family Packs in an assortment of flavors.

  “Thanks, Igor, this all seems to be here,” March stashing the currency in her purse. She’s planning to go uptown tonight to meet Sid and pick up his delivery for Igor. “You ought to come along, Maxi. Just a simple pickup, come on, it’ll be fun.”

  “My grasp of the drug laws is a little shaky, March, but last time I checked, this is Criminal Sale of a Controlled Substance.”

  “Yes, but it’s also Sid. A complex situation.”

  “A B felony. You and your ex—I gather you’re still . . . close?”

  “Don’t leer, Maxi, it causes wrinkles,” climbing out of the ZiL, waiting for Maxine. “Remember to count what’s in your Fairway bag, there.”

  “Why, when I don’t even know how much it’s supposed to be to begin with, see what I’m saying.”

  There’s a cart with coffee and bagels on the corner. It’s warm today, they find a stoop to sit on and take a coffee break.

  “Igor says you saved them a shitload of money.”

  “You think that ‘them’ includes Igor himself?”

  “He’d be too embarrassed to tell anybody. What was going on?”

  “Some kind of pyramid racket.”

  “Oh. Something a little different.”

  “You mean for Igor? like he has some history with—”

  “No, I meant late capitalism is a pyramid racket on a global scale, the kind of pyramid you do human sacrifices up on top of, meantime getting the suckers to believe it’s all gonna go on forever.”

 
“Too heavy-duty for me, even the scale Igor’s on makes me nervous. I’m more comfortable with people who hang around at ATMs, that level.”

  “So later for the gritty street drama, come on uptown for some high fantasy, these Dominican guys, you know?”

  “Hmmm. I could manage some old-school merengue maybe.”

  • • •

  MARCH IS MEETING SID at Chuy’s Hideaway, a dance club near Vermilyea. The minute they step off the subway, which up here runs elevated high over the neighborhood, they can hear music. They go sashaying more than schlepping downstairs to the street, where salsa pulses deeply from the stereo systems of double-parked Caprices and Escalades, from bars, from shoulder-mounted boom boxes. Teenagers knock each other around good-naturedly. Sidewalks are busy, fruit stands open, arrays of mangoes and star fruit, ice-cream carts on the corners doing late business.

  At Chuy’s Hideaway behind a modest storefront, they find a deep lounge, bright, loud, violent, that seems to run all the way through to the next block. Girls in very high spike heels and shorts shorter than a doper’s memory are gliding around with low-buttoned young men in gold chains and narrowbrim hats. Weedsmoke inflects the air. Folks are drinking rum and Cokes, Presidente beer, Brugal Papa Dobles. Deejay activities alternate with live local bachata groups, a bright, twangly mandolin/bottleneck sound, an impossible-not-to-want-to-dance-to beat.

  March is in a loose red dress and eyelashes longer than Maxine recalls, a sort of Irish Celia Cruz, with her hair all the way down. They know her at the door. Maxine inhales deeply, relaxes into sidekick mode.

  The floor is crowded, and March without hesitating disappears onto it. Some possibly underaged cupcake who says his name is Pingo appears from nowhere, grabs Maxine in a courtly way, and dances off with her. At first she tries to fake it with what she can remember from the old Paradise Garage, but soon enough moves begin to drift back as she is taken into the beat . . .

  Partners come and go in amiable rotation. Every now and then in the ladies’ room, Maxine will find March regarding herself in the mirror with less than dismay. “Who sez Anglo chicks can’t shake it?”