Bleeding Edge Read online

From the back room comes horrible panicked squawking, then silence. Maxine meantime is tilted back, eyelids aflutter, when— “Now we’ll just apply some of this,” wham! “. . . meat here, directly onto this lovely yet depleted face . . .”

  “Mmff . . .”

  “Pardon? (Easy, Morris!)”

  “Why is it . . . uh, moving around like that? Wait! is that a— are you guys putting a real dead chicken in my— aaahhh!”

  “Not quite dead yet!” Morris jovially informs the thrashing Maxine as blood and feathers fly everywhere.

  Each time she comes in here, it is something like this. Each time she exits the salon swearing it’s for the last time. Still, she can’t help noticing the crowds of Jennifer Aniston more-or-less look-alikes competing for dryer time lately, as if downtown is Las Vegas and Jennifer Aniston the next Elvis.

  “This is expensive?” Driscoll wonders, “what they do?”

  “It’s still what you guys would call in beta, so I think they should offer you a price.”

  The crowd has begun to sort into a mix of hackers and hacker grrrlz and corporate suits repackaged in somebody’s idea of barhopping gear, out looking for romance or cheap labor, whichever way the night develops.

  “The one element there ain’t so much of anymore,” Driscoll points out, “is the gold diggers of both sexes who thought there was all these nerd billionaires just about to come step out of the toilet and fiercely into their lives. Never was better than delusional back then, but these days even a hardcore techno-adventuress has to admit, it’s mighty slim pickings.”

  Maxine has noticed a pair of men at the bar who seem to be eyeballing her, or Driscoll, or both of them, with uncommon intensity. Though it’s hard to say what normal is around here, they don’t look too normal to Maxine, and it ain’t just the Zima talking.

  Driscoll follows her gaze. “You know those guys over there?”

  “No, uh-uh. Thought it was somebody you knew.”

  “It’s their first time in here,” Driscoll is pretty sure, “and they look like cops. Should this be freaking me out?”

  “Just remembered it’s my curfew,” snickers Maxine, “so I’m outta here. You stay. See which one of us they’re tailing.”

  “Let’s make a big deal about writing down our e-mail and phone numbers and shit, that way we don’t look so much like longtime associates.”

  Turns out it’s Maxine who’s their Person of Interest. Good news, bad news, Driscoll seems like a nice kid and doesn’t need these idiots, on the other hand it’s Maxine, now inside a lemon-lime alcopop haze, who has to try and shake them. She gets in a taxi headed down- instead of uptown, pretends to change her mind much to the driver’s annoyance, and ends up in Times Square, which for a few years now she has made a conscious effort not to go near if she can help it. The sleazy old Deuce she remembers from her less responsible youth is so no more, Giuliani and his developer friends and the forces of suburban righteousness have swept the place Disneyfied and sterile—the melancholy bars, the cholesterol and fat dispensaries and porno theaters have been torn down or renovated, the unkempt and unhoused and unspoken-for have been pushed out, no more dope dealers, no more pimps or three-card monte artists, not even kids playing hooky at the old pinball arcades—all gone. Maxine can’t avoid feeling nauseous at the possibility of some stupefied consensus about what life is to be, taking over this whole city without mercy, a tightening Noose of Horror, multiplexes and malls and big-box stores it only makes sense to shop at if you have a car and a driveway and a garage next to a house out in the burbs. Aaahh! They have landed, they are among us, and it helps them no end that the mayor, with roots in the outer boroughs and beyond, is one of them.

  And here they all are tonight, converged into this born-again imitation of their own American heartland, here in the bad Big Apple. Blending with this for as long as she can, Maxine finally seeks refuge in the subway, takes the Number 1 to 59th, changes to the C train, gets off at The Dakota, threads in and out of a busload of Japanese visitors snapping photos of the John Lennon assassination site, and next time she looks back, she can’t see anybody following her, though if they’ve had her on their radar since before she walked into the Bucket, then they probably also know where she lives.

  6

  Pizza for supper. What else is new?

  “Mom, this really crazy lady showed up at school today.”

  “And so . . . somebody, what, called the cops?”

  “No, we had assembly and she was the guest speaker. She graduated from Kugelblitz sometime back in the olden days.”

  “Mom, did you know that the Bush family does business with Saudi Arabian terrorists?”

  “Oil business, you mean.”

  “I think that’s what she meant, but . . .”

  “What”

  “Like there was something else. Something she wanted to say but not in front of a kid audience.”

  “Sorry I missed it.”

  “Come to the upper-school commencement. She’s gonna be guest speaker again.”

  Ziggy hands over a flyer with an ad for a Web site called Tabloid of the Damned, and “March Kelleher” autographed on it.

  “Hey, so you saw March. Well. In fact, well well.” The hashslingrz legend continues, here. March Kelleher happens to be Gabriel Ice’s mother-in-law, her daughter Tallis and Ice having been college sweethearts, Carnegie Mellon maybe. A subsequent coolness, pari passu with the dotcom billionaire’s revenue growth no doubt, is said to’ve developed. None of Maxine’s business of course, though she knows that March herself is divorced and that there are two other kids besides Tallis, boys, one is some kind of IT functionary out in California and another went off to Katmandu and has been postcard-nomadic ever since.

  March and Maxine go back to the co-opping frenzy of ten or fifteen years ago, when landlords were reverting to type and using Gestapo techniques to get sitting tenants to move. The money they offered was contemptuously little, but some renters went for it. Those who didn’t got a different treatment. Apartment doors removed for “routine maintenance,” garbage uncollected, attack dogs, hired goons, eighties pop played really loud. Maxine noticed March on a picket line of neighborhood gadflies, old lefties, tenants’-rights organizers and so forth, in front of a building over on Columbus, waiting for the union’s giant inflatable rat to show up. Picket-sign slogans included RATS WELCOME—LANDLORD’S FAMILY and CO-OP—CRUEL OFFENSIVE OUTRAGEOUS PRACTICES. Undocumented Colombians carried furniture and household possessions out to the sidewalk, trying to ignore the emotional uproar. March had the anglo crew boss cornered against a truck and was giving him an earful. She was slender, with shoulder-length red hair parted in the middle and then pulled back into a snood, as it turned out one of a wardrobe of these retro hair accessories, which had become her trademark around the neighborhood. On that particular day in late winter, the snood was scarlet, and March’s face seemed to Maxine silvery at the edges, like some antique photograph.

  Maxine was looking for a chance to get into a conversation with her when the landlord showed up, one Dr. Samuel Kriechman, a retired plastic surgeon, along with a small posse of heirs and assigns. “Why you miserable, greedy old bastard,” March cheerfully greeted him. “You dare to show your face around here.”

  “Ugly cunt,” replied the genial patriarch, “nobody in my profession would even touch a face like yours, who is this bitch, get her the fuck out of here.” A great-grandson or two stepped forward, eager to obey.

  March produced from her purse a 24-ounce aerosol can of Easy-Off oven cleaner and began to shake it. “Ask the eminent physician what lye can do for your face, kids.”

  “Call the cops,” ordered Dr. Kriechman. Elements of the picket line came over and began to discuss matters with Kriechman’s entourage. There was some, well, argumentative gesturing, extending to casual contact which the Post may have amplified slightly in the story it ran. Cops showed up. As light faded and deadlines approached, the crowd thinned out. “We don’t picket at nig
ht,” March told Maxine, “hate to step off the line personally, but then again I could use a drink about now.”

  The nearest bar was the Old Sod, technically Irish, though an aging gay Brit or two may have wandered infrequently in. The drink March had in mind was a Papa Doble, which Hector the bartender, previously only seen drawing beers and pouring shots, assembled for March as if he’d been doing it all week. Maxine had one too, just to keep her company.

  They discovered they’d been living only blocks from each other all this time, March since the late fifties when the Puerto Rican gangs were terrorizing the Anglos in the neighborhood, and you didn’t go east of Broadway after sunset. She hated Lincoln Center, for which an entire neighborhood was destroyed and 7,000 boricua families uprooted, just because Anglos who didn’t really give a shit about High Culture were afraid of these people’s children.

  “Leonard Bernstein wrote a musical about it, not West Side Story, the other one, where Robert Moses sings,

  Throw those Puerto

  Ricans out in the

  street— It’s just a

  slum, Tear it all

  d-o-o-own!”

  In a shrill Broadway tenor plausible enough to curdle the drink in Maxine’s stomach. “They even had the chutzpah to actually film West Side fuckin Story in the same neighborhood they were destroying. Culture, I’m sorry, Hermann Göring was right, every time you hear the word, check your sidearm. Culture attracts the worst impulses of the moneyed, it has no honor, it begs to be suburbanized and corrupted.”

  “You should meet my parents sometime. No love for Lincoln Center, but you can’t keep em away from the Met.”

  “You kidding, Elaine, Ernie? we go back, we used to show up at the same demonstrations.”

  “My mother demonstrated? What for, a discount someplace?”

  “Nicaragua,” unamused, “Salvador. Ronald Raygun and his little pals.”

  This was when Maxine was living at home, getting her degree, sneaking out into weekend club-drug mindlessness, and only noticing at the time that Elaine and Ernie seemed a little distracted. It wasn’t till years later that they felt comfortable about sharing their memories of plastic handcuffs, pepper spray, unmarked vans, the Finest doing what cops do best.

  “Making me the Insensitive Daughter once again. They must’ve picked up some some tell, some shortfall in my character.”

  “Maybe they were only trying to keep you clear of trouble,” March said.

  “They could have invited me along, I could have had their backs for them.”

  “Never too late to start, there’s enough to do God knows, you think anything’s changed? dream on. The fucking fascists who call the shots haven’t stopped needing races to hate each other, it’s how they keep wages down, and rents high, and all the power over on the East Side, and everything ugly and brain-dead just the way they like it.”

  “I do remember,” Maxine tells the boys now, “March was always sort of . . . political?”

  She sticks a Post-it on her calendar to go to graduation and see what the old snood-wearing mad dog is up to these days.

  • • •

  REG REPORTS IN. He’s been to see his IT maven Eric Outfield, who’s been down in the Deep Web looking into hashslingrz’s secrets. “Tell me something, what’s an Altman-Z?”

  “A formula they use to predict if a company will go bankrupt in, say the next two years. You plug numbers into it and look for a score below maybe 2.7.”

  “Eric found a whole folder of Altman-Z workups that Ice has been running on different small dotcoms.”

  “With a view to . . . what, acquiring?”

  Evasive eyeballs. “Hey, I’m just the whistle-blower.”

  “Did this kid show you any of these?”

  “We haven’t been meeting much online, he’s so paranoid,” yeah, Reg, “he only likes to meet face-to-face on the subway.”

  Today an insane white Christer at one end of the car was competing with a black a cappella group at the other. Perfect conditions. “Brought you something.” Reg handing over a disc. “I’m supposed to tell you it’s been personally blessed by Linus himself, with penguin piss.”

  “This is to make me have guilt now, right?”

  “Sure, that’d help.”

  “I’m on it, Reg. Just not too comfortable.”

  “Better you than me, frankly I wouldn’t have the cojones.” It has turned out to be a cannonball dive into strange depths. Eric is using the computer at the place he’s been temping, a large corporation with no IT chops to speak of, in the middle of a crisis nobody saw coming. Something a little different. Each time he surfaces from the Deep Web he’s a little more freaked, or so it seems to those in neighboring cubes, though so many of these spend their hours down in the mainframe room snorting Halon out of the fire extinguishers that they may lack some perspective.

  The situation is not as straightforward as Eric might have been hoping. The encryption is challenging, if not mad serious. Whereas Reg has been entertaining fantasies of a quick in and out, Eric has found the clerks at this 7-Eleven are packing assault rifles on full auto.

  “I keep running into this dark archive, all locked down tight, no telling what’s stashed there till I crack in.”

  “Limited access, you’re saying.”

  “Idea is to have a failsafe in case of a disaster, natural or man-made, you can hide your archive on redundant servers out in remote locations, hoping at least one’ll survive anything short of the end of the world.”

  “As we know it.”

  “If you want to be chirpy about it, I guess.”

  “Ice is expecting a disaster?”

  “More likely just wants to keep stuff away from inquiring minds.” Eric’s original tactic was to pretend to be a script kiddie out for a joyride, seeing if he could get in with Back Orifice and then install a NetBus server. A message came up immediately written in Leet characters along the lines of “Congratulations noob you think you made it in but all you’re really in now is a world of deep shit.” Something in the style of this response caught Eric’s attention. Why should their security be going to the trouble to make it so personal? Why not just brief and bureaucratic, like “Access Denied”? Something, maybe only its amused vehemence, reminded him of older hackers from the nineties.

  Are they playing with him? What sort of playmates are they likely to be? Eric figured if he was supposed to be just some packet monkey nosing around, he’d have to pretend he doesn’t know how heavy-duty, or even who, these guys are. So at first he goes after the password as if it might be something old-school like the Microsoft LM hash, which even retards can crack. To which Security replies, again in Leet, “Noob do you really know who you’re fucking with?”

  Reg and Eric were out in the middle of Brooklyn by this point, the doo-wop and Bible recitation long out the exits and Eric poised for flight. “You’re in and out of there all the time, Reg, you ever happen to run into any of their security people?”

  “Rumor I hear is that Gabriel Ice runs the department himself. There’s supposed to be some history. Somebody had a live terminal in a desk drawer and forgot to tell him.”

  “Forgot.”

  “Next thing anybody knew, there was all kinds of proprietary code out there for free. Took months to fix, cost them a big contract with the navy.”

  “And the careless employee?”

  “Disappeared. All this is company folklore, understand.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  No more dangerous than a chess game, it seems to Reg. Defense, retreat, deception. Unless it’s a pickup game in the park where your opponent turns violently psychopathic without warning, of course.

  “Paranoia, whatever, Eric’s still intrigued,” Reg reports to Maxine. “It’s dawning on him that this could be a kind of entrance exam. If it’s the Ice Man himself on the other end of this, if Eric’s good enough, maybe they’ll let him in. Maybe I should be telling him to run like hell.”

  “I heard it’s
a recruiting tactic over there, you might want to point that out. Meantime, Reg, you sound a lot less enthusiastic about your project.”

  “Actually, it’s a coastal thing you’re hearing, I don’t even know what I’m doing on this one anymore.”

  Uh-oh. Intuition alert. None of Maxine’s business, of course, but, “The ex.”

  “Same ol’ blues line, nothin important. Except now her and hubby, they’re making noises about moving out to Seattle. I don’t know, he’s some kind of corporate hotshot. Vice President in Charge of Rectal Discomfort.”

  “Ah, Reg. Sorry. In the old soap operas, ‘transferred to Seattle’ was code for written out of the script. I used to think Amazon, Microsoft, and them were started up by fictional soap-opera rejects.”

  “Keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, cute li’l announcement card from Gracie, ‘Hooray! we’re pregnant!’ Should be happening about now, right? So end the suspense already.”

  “You’d be OK with that?”

  “Better than some creep thinking my kids are his. Which gives me nightmares. Literally. Like he could be a fuckin abuser.”

  “C’mon, Reg.”

  “What. These things happen.”

  “Too much family television, bad for your brain, watch the after-midnight cartoons instead.”

  “Come on, how’m I supposed to deal with that?”

  “Not the sort of thing you can just let go, I guess.”

  “Actually, I had a li’l more proactive approach in mind?”

  “Oh no, Reg. You’re not . . .”

  “Packing? Bust a cap in the muthafucker’s ass, lovely fantasy ain’t it . . . but then Gracie I suppose would never talk to me again. The girls either.”

  “Hmm, maybe not.”

  “Also thought about a snatch-and-grab, can’t afford even that. Sooner or later I’d have to go to work, Social Security number and they’ve got me again, and it’s lawyers dealt into what’s left of my life. And ol’ Pointy-Hair gets the girls back anyway, and I’m forbidden ever to see them again. So my latest thinkin is, is maybe I should go out there and make nice instead.”