Bleeding Edge Page 7

  “Uh huh and . . . they’re expecting you?”

  “Maybe I’ll find a job first, then surprise everybody. Just don’t want you thinkin too badly of me. I know it looks like I’m running away from something, but New York is really where I’ve been running away, and now there’s about to be a whole continent between me and my kids. Too far.”

  • • •

  IT IS MAXINE’S practice when checking into little start-ups like hwgaahwgh.com to also have a look at any investors in the picture. If somebody stands to lose money, there’s always a chance, emergency-vehicle exhaust-fume issues or whatever, they’ll want to hire Maxine. The name that keeps popping up in connection with hwgaahwgh is a VC down in SoHo, doing business as Streetlight People. As in “Don’t Stop Believing,” Maxine imagines. Among whose listed clients—coincidence, no doubt—also happens to be hashslingrz.

  Streetlight People is located in a cast-iron-front ex-factory space somewhat off the major shopping routes around SoHo. Karmic echoes of the sweatshop era long smoothed away by portable soundbreaks, screens and carpeting, passed into a neutral, unhaunted hush. Buddy Nightingale seating in a spectrum of hesitant aquas, daffodils, and fuchsias, brushed-nickel workstations custom-designed by Zooey Chu, punctuated now and then with black leather bosses’ chairs by Otto Zapf.

  If asked, Rockwell “Rocky” Slagiatt would explain that losing the vowel at the end of his name was the price of smoothness and rhythm in doing business, like lyrics in an opera. Actually he thought it would sound more Anglo, though for special visitors, of whom Maxine today seems to be one, he is known to suddenly flip polarity and become disingenuously ethnic again.

  “Hey! You want sum’na eat? Peppuhvr-n-egg sangwidge.”

  “Thanks, but I just—”

  “My mothuh’s peppuhvr-n-egg sangwidge.”

  “Well, Mr. Slagiatt, that depends. Do you mean it’s your mother’s recipe? or, it’s, like, her personal pepper-and-egg sandwich, that for some reason she keeps in that credenza there instead of a fridge where it should be?” From her studies with Shawn, Maxine is trained in the exotic Asian technique known as “False Eating,” so if it comes to it, she’ll only have to make believe eat the pepper-and-egg sandwich, which despite its authentic appearance could be poisoned with almost anything.

  “’t’s ahright!” grabbing back the object, now seen actually to have an unnatural wobble to it. “It’s plastic!” throwing it in a desk drawer.

  “Little hard to chew.”

  “You’re a sport, Maxi, it’s OK I call you that, Maxi?”

  “Sure. OK if I don’t call you Rocky?”

  “Your choice, no rush,” suddenly, for a moment, Cary Grant. What? Somewhere on Maxine’s perimeter, long-disused antennas quiver and begin to track.

  He picks up the phone. “Hold my calls, OK? What? Talk to me . . . Nah. Nah, the drag-along is set in cement. The full ratchet, maybe doable, but see Spud on that.” Ringing off, summoning a file onto his screen. “OK. This is about the recently belly-up hwgaahwgh dotcom.”

  “For whom you are, or should I say were, their VC.”

  “Yeah, we did their Series A. Since then we been tryin to evolve to more of a mezz posture here, early stages are way too easy, the real challenge,” busy tapping keys, “comes in structuring the tranches . . . valuing the company, where you get the Wayne Gretzky Principle of where the puck is gonna be instead of where it is now, see what I’m saying.”

  “How about where it was?”

  Squinting at the screen, “Part of the doo-doo diligence is, is we keep these daily logs, it all gets archived, impressions, hopes and fears . . . Looks like . . . even back puttin together the term sheet, these guys were being way too picky about liquidation preferences. Took days more than it should. We ended up with a 1-X multiple on only a little tiny position, so . . . without wishing to pry, why you come zoomin in on us about this?”

  “Are you upset by unwelcome attention, Mr. Slagiatt?”

  “Ain’t like we’re loan sharks here. Look up on that shelf.”

  She looks. “You . . . have a company bowling team.”

  “Industry awards, Max. Since that thing with the Wells notice in ’98? our wake-up call,” earnest as a victim on a talk show, “we all went up to Lake George on retreat, shared our feelings totally, took a vote, cleaned up our act, those days are behind us now.”

  “Congratulations. Always a plus to find a moral dimension. Maybe it’ll help you appreciate some funny numbers I found.”

  She fills him in on the Benford-curve and other discrepancies at hashslingrz. “Prominent among payees of these fishy expenditures is hwgaahwgh.com. What’s strange is that after the company is liquidated, the amounts paid to it grow dramatically even more lavish and it all seems to be disappearing someplace offshore.”

  “Fuckin Gabriel Ice.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “The book on this guy is he takes a position, typically less than five percent, in each of a whole portfolio of start-ups he knows from running Altman-Z’s on them are gonna fail within a short-term horizon. Uses them as shells for funds he wants to move around inconspicuously. Hwgaahwgh seems to be one of these. Where to and what for, ya got to wonder, huh?”

  “Working on that.”

  “Mind if I ask, who got you onto this?”

  “Somebody who’d rather not be involved. Meantime, I see from your client list you also do some business with Gabriel Ice.”

  “Not me directly, not for a while.”

  “No schmoozing with Ice in any social way? you and maybe even . . .” head-gesturing at a framed photo on Rocky’s desk.

  “That would be Cornelia,” nods Rocky.

  Maxine waves at the picture. “How do you do, I’m sure.”

  “Not only a looker as you can see, but a elegant hostess from the old school. Equal to any social challenge.”

  “Gabriel Ice, he’s . . . challenging?”

  “OK, we been out to dinner, once. Twice maybe. Places on the East Side a guy comes by with a grater and a truffle, grates it all over your food till you say stop? Vintage dates on the Champagne, so forth—with ol’ Gabe it’s always about the price . . . Ain’t seen either of them since maybe last summer out in the Hamptons.”

  “The Hamptons. It figures.” Glittering rat hole and summertime home to America’s rich, famous, and a vast seasonal inflow of yup wannabes. Half Maxine’s business sooner or later tracks back to somebody’s need for the diseased Hamptons fantasy, which is way past its sell-by date by now, in case nobody’s noticed.

  “More like Montauk. Not even on the beach, back in the woods.”

  “So your paths . . .”

  “Cross now and then, sure, couple times in the IGA, enchiladas at the Blue Parrot, but the Ices are running in way different circles these days.”

  “Had them figured for Further Lane at least.”

  Shrug. “Even out on the South Fork, my wife tells me, there’s still resistance to money like Ice’s. One thing to build a house with its foundation in the sand, right, somethin else to pay for it with money not everybody believes is real.”

  “I Ching talk.”

  “She noticed.” The semimischievous look again.

  Uh, huh, “A boat, how about a boat, they own a boat?”

  “Lease one maybe.”

  “Oceangoing?”

  “What am I, Moby Dick? You’re that curious, go out there and see.”

  “Yeah, right, who springs for the jitney, where’s the per diem, see what I’m saying.”

  “What. You doin this on spec?”

  “So far it’s a buck and a half for the subway down here, that I can probably absorb. Beyond that . . .”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem.” Picking up the phone, “Yes Lupita mi amor, could you cut us a check, please, for . . . uh,” raising his eyebrows at Maxine, who shrugs and holds up five fingers, “five thousand U.S., payable to—”

  “Hundred,” sighs Maxine, “Five hundred, jeez all right I’
m impressed, but it’s only enough so I can start a ticket. Next invoice you can be Donald Trump or whatever, OK?”

  “Just tryin to help, not my fault I’m a giving generous type of guy, is it? Lemme at least buy yiz lunch?”

  She risks a look at his face, and sure enough—the Cary Grant beam, the Interested Smile. Aahh! What would Ingrid Bergman do, Grace Kelly? “I don’t know . . .” Actually, she does know, because she has this built-in fast-forward feature in her brain that can locate herself, a day or two from now, glaring into the mirror going, “What, in the fuck, were you thinking?” and right at the moment it’s coming up No Signal. Hmm. Maybe it’s just that she can do with some lunch.

  They go around the corner to Enrico’s Italian Kitchen, which she recalls getting raves in Zagat, and find a table. Maxine heads for the ladies’ toilet, and on the way back, in fact while she’s still in there, she can hear Rocky and the waiter arguing. “No,” Rocky with a sort of evil glee Maxine has noticed also in certain children, “not ‘pas-ta e fa-gio-li,’ I think what I said was pastafazool.”

  “Sir, if you’ll look on the menu, it’s clearly spelled,” pointing helpfully at each word, “‘pasta, e, fagioli’?”

  Rocky gazes at the waiter’s finger, deciding on how best to remove it from its hand. “But ain’t I a reasonable person? of course I am, so let’s go to the classical source here, tell me, kid, does Dean Martin sing ‘When the stars make-a you droli / Just-a like-a pasta e fagioli’? no. No, what he sings is—”

  Maxine sits quietly, attending to her eyeblink rate, as Rocky, far from sotto voce but on pitch, makes with his Dean Martin impression. Marco the owner sticks his head out of the kitchen. “Oh, it’s you. Che si dice?”

  “Would you explain to the new guy?”

  “He bothering you? five minutes, he’s in the dumpster with the scungilli shells.”

  “Maybe just change the spelling on the menu for him?”

  “You sure? Got to go in the computer for that. Be easier to just whack him.”

  The waiter, whose credits include a couple of Sopranos episodes, recognizing this for what it is, stands by, trying not to roll his eyes too much.

  Maxine ends up having the homemade strozzapreti with chicken livers, and Rocky goes for the osso buco. “Hey, what kinda wine?”

  “How about a ’71 Tignanello?— but then again with all the wiseguy dialogue, maybe just, uh, li’1 Nero d’Avola? small glass?”

  “Readin my mind.” Not exactly doing a double take at the pricey supertuscan, but a certain gleam has entered his eye, which is what she may have been looking to provoke. And why would that be, again?

  Rocky’s mobile phone goes off, Maxine recognizing the ringtone as “Una furtiva lagrima.” “Listen my darling, here’s the situation— Wait . . . Un gazz, I’m talkin to a robot here, right? Again. So! uh-huh! how you doing? how long you been a robot . . . You wouldn’t be Jewish, by any chance? Yeah, like when you were thirteen, did your parents give you a bot mitzvah?”

  Maxine scrolls the ceiling, “Mr. Slagiatt. Mind if I ask you something? Just professional interest—the seed money for hashslingrz, do you happen to know who put it up originally?”

  “Speculation at the time was lively,” Rocky remembers, “usual suspects, Greylock, Flatiron, Union Square, but nobody really knew. Big dark secret. Could’ve been anybody with the resources to keep it quiet. Even one of the banks. Why?”

  “Trying to narrow it down. Angel money, some eccentric right-winger out in a Sunbelt mansion with central air? Or a more institutional type of evil?”

  “Wait—what are you attempting to imply, as my wife might say?”

  “What with you folks,” Maxine deadpan, “and your longtime GOP connections . . .”

  “Us folks, ancient stuff, Lucky Luciano, the OSS, please. Forget it.”

  “No ethnic slurs intended of course.”

  “Should I bring up Longy Zwillman? Welcome to Streetlight People,” raising his glass and tapping hers lightly.

  She can hear from inside her purse the as-yet-undeposited check laughing at her, as if she has been the butt of a great practical joke.

  The Nero d’Avola on the other hand is not bad at all. Maxine nods amiably. “Let’s wait till my invoice.”

  7

  Maxine finally gets over to Vyrva’s one evening to have a look at the widely coveted yet ill-defined DeepArcher application, bringing along Otis, who disappears immediately with Fiona into her room, where along with the Beanie Baby overpop she keeps a Melanie’s Mall, with which Otis has become strangely intrigued. Melanie herself is a half-scale Barbie with a gold credit card she uses for clothes, makeup, hairstyling, and other necessities, though the secret identity Otis and Fiona have given her is a bit darker and requires some quick costume changes. The Mall has a water fountain, a pizza parlor, an ATM, and most important an escalator, which comes in handy for shoot-out scenarios, Otis having introduced into the suburban girl idyll a number of four-and-a-half-inch action figures, many from the cartoon show Dragonball Z, including Prince Vegeta, Goku and Gohan, Zarbon, and others. Scenarios tend to center on violent assault, terrorist shoplifting sprees, and yup discombobulation, each of which ends in the widespread destruction of the Mall, principally at the hands of Fiona’s alter ego the eponymous Melanie, in cape and ammo belts, herself. Among fiercely imagined smoke and wreckage, with generic plastic bodies horizontal and disassembled everywhere, Otis and Fiona kiss off each episode by high-fiving and singing the tag from the Melanie’s Mall commercial, “It’s cool at the Mall.”

  Justin’s partner Lucas, who lives down in Tribeca, shows up a little late this evening, having been chasing his dealer through half of Brooklyn in search of some currently notorious weed known as Train Wreck, wearing a green glow-in-the-dark T-shirt reading UTSL, which Maxine at first takes for an anagram of LUST or possibly SLUT but later learns is Unix for “Use The Source, Luke.”

  “We don’t know what Vyrva’s told you about DeepArcher,” sez Justin, “it’s still in beta, so don’t be surprised at some awkwardness now and then.”

  “Should warn you, I’m not too good at these things, drives my kids crazy, we play Super Mario and the little goombas jump up and stomp on me.”

  “It’s not a game,” Lucas instructs her.

  “Though it does have forerunners in the gaming area,” footnotes Justin, “like the MUD clones that started to come online back in the eighties, which were mostly text. Lucas and I came of age into VRML, realized we could have the graphics we wanted, so that’s what we did, or Lucas did.”

  “Only the framing material,” Lucas demurely, “obvious influences, Neo-Tokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima, or as he’s known around my crib, God.”

  “The further in you go, as you get passed along one node to the next, the visuals you think you’re seeing are being contributed by users all over the world. All for free. Hacker ethic. Each one doing their piece of it, then just vanishing uncredited. Adding to the veils of illusion. You know what an avatar is, right?”

  “Sure, had a prescription once, but they always made me a little, I don’t know, nauseous?”

  “In virtual reality,” Lucas begins to explain, “it’s a 3-D image you use to represent yourself—”

  “Yeah, actually, gamers in the house forever, but somebody told me also that in the Hindu religion avatar means an incarnation. So I keep wondering—when you pass from this side of the screen over into virtual reality, is that like dying and being reincarnated, see what I’m saying?”

  “It’s code,” Justin a little bewildered, maybe, “just keep the thought, couple geeks up all night on cold pizza and warm Jolt wrote this, not exactly in VRML but something hypermutated out of it, ’s all it is.”

  “They don’t do metaphysical,” Vyrva flashing Maxine a smile falling noticeably short of fond amusement. She must see a lot of this.

  Justin and Lucas met at Stanford. Kept running into each other within a tight radius of Marga
ret Jacks Hall, which in that day housed the Computer Science department and was affectionately known as Marginal Hacks. They primal-screamed their way together through one finals week after another, and by the time they graduated, they’d already put in weeks of pilgrimage up and down Sand Hill Road, pitching to the venture-capital firms which lined that soon-to-be legendary thoroughfare, arguing recreationally, trembling in performance anxiety, or, resolved to be Zenlike, just sitting in the traffic jams typical of that era, admiring the vegetation. One day they took a wrong turn and wound up caught in the annual Sand Hill soapbox derby. The roadside was lined with bales of hay and spectators who numbered up in the low five figures, watching a streetful of homemade racers barreling downhill at top speed toward the Stanford tower in the distance, allegedly powered by nothing but the earth’s gravity.

  “That kid over there who just spun out in the fifties spaceship rig,” Justin said.

  “That’s no kid,” said Lucas.

  “Yeah I know, isn’t it that Ian Longspoon dude? The VC we had lunch with last week? drinks Fernet-Brancas with ginger-ale chasers?” Another of their regrettable lunch dates. Most likely at Il Fornaio in the Garden Court Hotel in Palo Alto, though neither could remember now, everybody got kind of hammered. Toward the end of it, Longspoon had actually begun to make out a check but seemed unable to stop writing zeros, which soon ran off the edge of the document and continued onto the tablecloth, on which presently the VC’s head came to rest with a thump.

  Lucas reached stealthily for the checkbook and saw Justin making for the exit. “Wait, hey, maybe somebody’ll cash this, where you going?”

  “You know what’ll happen when he wakes up. We’re not gonna get stuck paying for another lunch we can’t afford.”

  It wasn’t their most dignified moment. Waiters began hollering urgently into little lapel mikes. Beach-tanned technocuties at distant tables who’d scanned them with interest when they came in now turned away scowling. Truculent busboys splashed uneaten soup on them as they sped past. Chuchu in the parking lot, briefly having considered keying Justin’s ride, settled for spitting on it.