Bleeding Edge (39 page)

“Listenna me, Fi, lose the perpetuity language, you’ll regret it.”

“It’s only boilerplate, Satjeevan says I can walk anytime I want.”

“You believe that? He’s a recruiter.”

“Now you’re acting like a jealous boyfriend.”

“Real mature, Fiona.”

Horst comes blinking into the apartment, has a look at Maxine. “Need a minute with yer ma here, guys,” lifts her by one wrist, gently steers her to the bedroom.

“I’m all right,” Maxine avoiding eye contact.

“You’re shaking, you’re whiter than Greenwich, Connecticut on a Thursday. It’s nothing to worry about, darlin. I talked to Zig’s instructor, just the standard New York creep that krav maga’s designed to deal with.” She knows what this honest never-to-be-wised-up face can change into, knows she better let this ride unless she wants to collapse under whatever it is, call it guilt, settles for nodding, distant, miserable. Let Horst have the standard-creep story. There are a thousand things in this town to be afraid of, maybe even two thousand, and there’s too much else he won’t likely ever know. All the silences, all the years, fraud-examiner infidelities without the fucking, plus unexpectedly some real fucking and now the other party is dead. No question of improvising
around what happened today, first thing Horst will go, this dead guy, you were seeing him? and she’ll flare up, you don’t know what you’re talking about, then he’ll blame her for putting the boys in danger, then she’ll go, so where were you when you should’ve been here for them, and so fuckin on and on, yes and it’ll be right back to the olden days. So best to just dummy up here, Maxine, once again, just, dummy, up.

•   •   •

NEXT DAY EMMA LEVIN CALLS
with news of an anonymous floral bouquet heavy on the roses delivered to her studio, with a note in Hebrew to the effect that all will be well.

“The BF, maybe?”

“Naftali knows flowers exist, he sees them at the corner market, but he still thinks they’re something to eat.”

“So maybe . . . ?”

“Maybe. Then again, nobody pays us to be Shirley Temple. Let’s wait and see.”

Still, maybe, at least, not such a bad sign? Meantime Avi and Brooke having just moved into a co-op near Riverside for a settling price whose obscenity is consistent with Avi’s salary at hashslingrz, Maxine now has a halfway-plausible excuse to stash the boys for a little while with their grandparents, whose building enjoys security arrangements rivaling any to be found in our nation’s capital. Horst goes for this eagerly, not least because he is rediscovering his quasi-ex-wife as an object of lust. “I can’t explain it . . .”

“Good, don’t.”

“It’s like committing adultery, only different?”

Mr. Elegant. Maxine guesses it is mysteriously not unconnected with loose-woman vibrations she is giving off like it or not, plus Horst’s insane suspicion of every man, ghost or whatever, who gets within ass-grabbing distance of her, and since it does not take too much shift in her own perversity level to feel flattered here, she lets him think what he’ll think, and the hardon situation does not suffer thereby.

Additionally, one day out of nowhere Horst hands her the keys to the Impala.

“Why would I need these?”

“Just in case.”

“Of . . .”

“Nothing solid, only a feeling.”

“A what, Horst?” She peers. He looks normal enough. “You’d be good with that? Given your ding-intolerance problem?”

“Oh, cost of body work, you’d have to pick that up o’ course.”

Which doesn’t mean he’s lounging around the house all the time. One night he and his runningmate Jake Pimento, who has moved out of Battery Park and up to Murray Hill, are out on an all-nighter with a posse of venture capitalists from across the sea newly interested in rare earths, which Horst by ESP has determined is the next hot commodity, and Maxine decides to stay over with her parents and the boys.

She crashes early but keeps waking up. Dream fragments, cycles she can’t exit. She looks in a mirror, a face appears behind her, her own face but full of evil intent. All night these vignettes keep sending her each time up into a vibrating hollowness of heart. At some point, enough. She rolls muttering from between the damp sheets. Somebody is blasting up and down upper Broadway in a car whose horn plays the first eight bars of Nino Rota’s
Godfather
theme. Over and over. This happens once a year, and tonight, apparently, is the night.

Maxine begins to prowl the apartment. The boys stacked in bunk beds, the door left a little open, she likes to think for her, knowing that someday their doors will be shut and she’ll have to knock. Ernie’s office, which he shares with a washer and dryer, an antique Apple CRT monitor on a desk, left on, Elaine’s dining-room museum of long-operating lightbulbs from this apartment, each in its little foam display holder, labeled with the dates of screw-in and burnout. Sylvania bulbs of a certain era seem to’ve lasted the longest.

Some kind of classical music coming from the TV room. Mozart. In these desperate stretches of early-morning programming, she finds
Ernie tubeside, his face transfigured in the ancient Trinitron glow, watching an obscure, in fact never-distributed Marx Brothers version of
Don Giovanni
, with Groucho in the title role. She tiptoes in barefoot and sits next to her father on the couch. There’s a big plastic bowl of popcorn, too big even for two people, which Ernie after a while nudges in her direction. During a recitative he fills her in. “They cut the Commendatore so there’s no Donna Anna, no Don Ottavio, this way, without the murder, it’s a comedy.” Leporello is being played by both Chico and Harpo, one for lines and one for sight gags, Chico fast-talking his way through the Catalogue Aria for example while Harpo runs around after Donna Elvira (Margaret Dumont, in the role she was born for), pinching, groping, and honking his bicycle horn, as well as later picking harp accompaniment for “Deh, vieni alla finestra.” Masetto is a studio baritone who is not Nelson Eddy, Zerlina is a very young, lip-synced and more-than-presentable Beatrice Pearson, later to portray another ingenue with a fatality for scoundrels opposite John Garfield in
Force of Evil
(1948).

When the opera’s over, Ernie hits the mute button and spreads his hands along with a half shrug, like a basso taking a bow. “So? First time I ever saw you sit through an opera.”

“Don’t know, Pop, must be the company.”

“I taped it for the boys too, seems like it’s up their alley.”

“Cultural exchange, I notice they’ve got you playing Metal Gear Solid these days.”

“Better than the TV garbage I used to find you and Brooke staring at.”

“Yeah, you really hated all those cop shows. If you caught us watching one, you’d turn it off and ground us.”

“It’s like they’ve gotten any better? What happened to private eyes, lovable criminals? lost in all that post-sixties propaganda, Orwell’s boot on the face, endless prosecution and enforcement, cop cop cop. Why shouldn’t we want to keep you girls away from that, protect your sensitive minds? See how much good it did. Your sister the Likudnik, you chasing down poor schmucks who’re only trying to pay the rent.”

“Maybe TV back then was brainwashing, but it could never happen today. Nobody’s in control of the Internet.”

“You serious? Believe that while you still can, Sunshine. You know where it all comes from, this online paradise of yours? It started back during the Cold War, when the think tanks were full of geniuses plotting nuclear scenarios. Attaché cases and horn-rims, every appearance of scholarly sanity, going in to work every day to imagine all the ways the world was going to end. Your Internet, back then the Defense Department called it DARPAnet, the real original purpose was to assure survival of U.S. command and control after a nuclear exchange with the Soviets.”

“What.”

“Sure, the idea was to set up enough nodes so no matter what got knocked out, they could always reassemble some kind of network by connecting up what was left.”

Here in the capital of insomnia, it is hours yet from dawn, and this is what innocent father-daughter conversations can drift into. Beneath these windows they can hear the lawless soundscape of the midnight street, breakage, screaming, vehicle exhaust, New York laughter, too loud, too trivial, brakes applied too late before some gut-wrenching thud. When Maxine was little, she thought of this nightly uproar as trouble too far away to matter, like sirens. Now it’s always too close, part of the deal.

“Were you ever in on that Cold War stuff, Pop?”

“For me? Too technical. But people at Bronx Science I ran with . . . Crazy Yale Jacobian, nice kid, we used to go downtown, make a little change playing Ping-Pong. He went off to MIT, got a job with the RAND Corporation, moved to California, We lost touch.”

“Maybe he didn’t work in the blowing–up-the-world department.”

“I know, I’m a judgmental person, sue me. You had to been there, kid. Everybody thinks now the Eisenhower years were so quaint and cute and boring, but all that had a price, just underneath was the pure terror. Midnight forever. If you stopped even for a minute to think, there
it was and you could fall into it so easily. Some fell. Some went nuts, some even took their own lives.”

“Pop.”

“Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there’s no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don’t think anything has changed, kid.”

Maxine goes sorting among semiexploded kernels for what little popcorn is left. “But history goes on, as you always like to remind us. The Cold War ended, right? the Internet kept evolving, away from military, into civilian—nowadays it’s chat rooms, the World Wide Web, shopping online, the worst you can say is it’s maybe getting a little commercialized. And look how it’s empowering all these billions of people, the promise, the freedom.”

Ernie begins channel-surfing, as if in annoyance. “Call it freedom, it’s based on control. Everybody connected together, impossible anybody should get lost, ever again. Take the next step, connect it to these cell phones, you’ve got a total Web of surveillance, inescapable. You remember the comics in the
Daily News
? Dick Tracy’s wrist radio? it’ll be everywhere, the rubes’ll all be begging to wear one, handcuffs of the future. Terrific. What they dream about at the Pentagon, worldwide martial law.”

“So this is where I get my paranoia from.”

“Ask your kids. Look at Metal Gear Solid—who do the terrorists kidnap? Who’s Snake trying to rescue? The head of DARPA. Think about that, huh?”

“Pop.”

“Don’t believe us, ask your friends in the FBI, you know, those kind policemen with their NCIC database? Fifty, a hundred million files? They’ll confirm, I’m sure.”

She understands this for the opening it apparently is. “Listen, Pop. I have to tell you . . .” Out it comes. The unrelenting vacuum of Windust’s departure. Edited for grandparental anxieties, natch, like no mention of Ziggy’s krav maga episode.

Ernie hears her through, “Saw something in the paper. Mysterious death, they described him as a think-tank pundit.”

“They would. Hit man, they say anything about that? Assassin?”

“Nope. But I guess FBI, CIA, that wouldn’t rule out assassin.”

“Pop, the petty-fraud community I get to work with, we have our own losers’ code, like loyalty, respect, don’t snitch till you have to. But that gang, they’re out shopping each other before breakfast, Windust was living on borrowed time.”

“You think he was done in by his own? I would’ve guessed revenge, all the seriously pissed-off Third Worlders this guy must have collected along the way.”

“You saw him before I did, you passed me his card, you could’ve said something.”

“More than what I was saying already? When you were little, I always tried to keep you as much as I could from joining in on all the brainless adoration of cops, but after a point you make your own mistakes.” Then, tentative as she’s ever seen him, “Maxeleh, you didn’t . . . ?”

Looking more at her knees than at her father, she pretends to explain, “All these penny-ante con artists, I never once cut slack for any of them, but the first major-league war criminal I run into, I’m starstruck, he tortures and murders people, always gets away with it, am I repelled, shocked? no, I’m thinking, he can turn. He can still turn away, nobody’s that bad, he has to have a conscience, there’s time, he can make up for it, except now he can’t—”

“Sh. Shh. It’s all right, kiddo,” reaching diffidently for her face. No, this doesn’t let her off the hook, she knows she’s being less than honest, hoping Ernie, either to protect himself or in true innocence she can’t bring herself to break, will only take it literally. Which he does. “You were always like this. I kept waiting for you to give it up, let it go, turn as
cold as the rest of us, praying all the time you wouldn’t. You’d come back from school, history classes, some new nightmare, the Indians, the Holocaust, crimes I hardened my heart against years ago, taught them but didn’t feel them so much anymore, and you’d be so angry, passionately hurting, your little hands in fists, how could anybody do these things, how could they live with themselves? What was I supposed to say? We handed you the tissues and said, it’s grown-ups, some act that way, you don’t have to be like them, you can be better. Best we could ever come up with, pathetic, but you know what, I never found out what we should have said. Think I’m happy about that?”

“The boys ask me the same things now, I don’t want to see them turn into their classmates, cynical smart-mouthed little bastards—but what happens if Ziggy and Otis start caring too much, Pop, this world, it could destroy them, so easily.”

“No alternative, you trust them, trust yourself, and the same for Horst, who seems to be back in the picture now . . .”

“For a while now, actually. Maybe never out of it.”