Bleeding Edge (43 page)

And I know of a place, she’s careful not to add, where you dowse across an empty screen, clicking on tiny invisible links, and there’s something waiting out there, latent, maybe it’s geometric, maybe begging like geometry to be contradicted in some equally terrible way, maybe a sacred city all in pixels waiting to be reassembled, as if disasters could be run in reverse, the towers rise out of black ruin, the bits and pieces and lives, no matter how finely vaporized, become whole again . . .

“Hell doesn’t have to be underground,” Xiomara looking up at the vanished memory of what had stood there, “Hell can be in the sky.”

“And Windust—”

“Dotty said he came here more than once after 11 September, haunting the site. Unfinished business, he told her. But I don’t think his spirit is here. I think he’s down in Xibalba, reunited with his evil twin.”

The condemned ghost structures around them seem to draw together, as if conferring. Some patrolman from the karmic police is saying move along folks, it’s over, nothing to see here. Xiomara takes Maxine’s arm, and they glide off into a premonitory spritzing of rain, a metropolis swept by twilight.

Later, back in the apartment, in a widowlike observance, Maxine finds a moment alone and switches off the lights, takes the envelope of cash, and snorts the last vestiges of his punk-rock cologne, trying to summon back something as invisible and weightless and inaccountable as his spirit . . .

Which is down in the Mayan underworld now, wandering a deathscape of hungry, infected, shape-shifting, lethally insane Mayan basketball fans. Like Boston Garden, only different.

And later, next to snoring Horst, beneath the pale ceiling, city light diffusing through the blinds, just before drifting downward into REM, good night. Good night, Nick.

T
here is a particular weirdness to be found on weekends in the evening in NYC health and fitness clubs, especially when economic times are sluggish. Unable anymore to bring herself to swim in The Deseret pool, which she believes to be cursed, Maxine has joined her sister Brooke’s state-of-the-art health club Megareps around the corner but isn’t quite used yet to this nightly spectacle of yups on treadmills, plodding to nowhere while watching CNN or the sports channels, laid-off dotcommers who aren’t at strip clubs or absorbed into massively multiplayer online games, all running, rowing, lifting weights, mingling with body-image obsessives, folks recuperating from dating disasters, others desperate enough tonight actually to be looking for company here instead of in bars. Worse, hanging around the snack section, which is where Maxine, coming in out of the strange kind of late-winter rain that you can hear rattling lightly off your umbrella or raincoat but when you look, nothing is getting wet, finds March Kelleher, busy on her laptop, surrounded by muffin debris and a number of paper coffee cups she’s using, much to the annoyance of the rest of the room, for ashtrays.

“Didn’t know you were a member here, March.”

“Walk-in, just using the free Internet, hot spots all over town, haven’t been in this one for a while.”

“Been following your Weblog.”

“I had an interesting tip about your friend Windust. Like he’s dead, for example. Should I post it? Should I be offering condolences?”

“Not to me.”

March puts the screen to sleep and regards Maxine with a level gaze. “You know I never asked.”

“Thanks. You wouldn’t have found it entertaining.”

“Did you?”

“Not sure.”

“Long sad career as a mother-in-law, only thing I ever learned is don’t advise. Anybody needs advice these days, it’s me.”

“Hey, more than happy to, what’s up?”

A sour face. “Worried sick about Tallis.”

“This is news?”

“It’s all getting worse, I can’t just stand by anymore, I have to be the one to take the step, try to get to see her somehow. Fuck the consequences. Tell me it’s a bad idea.”

“It’s a bad idea.”

“If you mean life is too short, OK, but around Gabriel Ice, as you must know, it can get even shorter.”

“What, he’s threatening her?”

“They’ve split. He’s kicked her out.”

Well. “So good riddance.”

“He won’t leave it at that. Something I can feel. She’s my baby.”

All right. The Code of the Mom stipulates you don’t argue back at this kind of talk. “So,” nodding, “can I help?”

“Lend me your handgun.” Beat. “Just kidding.”

“Yet another license pulled, would be the thing . . .”

“Only a metaphor.”

OK, but if March, already on the fly, living with her own danger
levels, sees Tallis in this much trouble . . . “Can I do some recon first, March?”

“She’s innocent, Maxine. Ah. She’s so fuckin innocent.”

Running with Gulf Coast gangsters, party to international money laundering, any number of Title 18 violations, innocent, well . . . “How’s that?”

“Everybody thinks they know more than her. The old sad delusion of every insect-free know-it-all in this miserable town. Everybody thinks they live in ‘the real world’ and she doesn’t.”

“So?”

“So that’s what it is, to be an ‘innocent person.’” In the tone of voice you use when you think somebody needs to have it explained.

•   •   •

TALLIS,
booted out of the East Side stately home she and Ice were sharing, has found a utility closet converted to residential use in one of the newer high rises on the far Upper West Side. Looks like a machine more than a building. Pale, metallic, highly reflective, someplace up in the mid–two figures with respect to floors high, wraparound balconies that look like cooling fins, no name, only a number hidden so discreetly not one in a hundred locals you ask can even tell you it. Keeping Tallis company this evening are enough bottles to stock an average Chinese-restaurant bar, from one of which she is drinking directly something turquoise called Hypnotiq. Neglecting to offer any to Maxine.

Out here at the far ancient edge of the island, this all used to be trainyard. Deep below, trains still move through tunnels in and out of Penn Station, horns chiming in B-major sixths, deep as dreams, while ghosts of tunnel-wall artists and squatters the civil authorities have no clue what to do about—evict, ignore, re-evict—go drifting past the train-car windows in the semidark, whispering messages of transience, and overhead in this cheaply built apartment complex tenants come and go, relentlessly ephemeral as travelers in a nineteenth-century railroad hotel.

“First thing I noticed,” not complaining to Maxine so much as to
anybody who’ll listen, “is I was getting systematically cut off from the Web sites I usually visit. Couldn’t shop online, or chat in chat rooms, or after a while even do normal company business. Finally, wherever I tried to go, I ran into some kind of wall. Dialogue boxes, pop-up messages, mostly threatening, some apologizing. Click by click, forcing me away into exile.”

“You discussed this with CEO-and-hubby?”

“Sure, while he was screaming, throwing my stuff out the window, reminding me how badly I’m expected to come out of this. A nice adult discussion.”

Matrimonials. What is there ever to say? “Just don’t forget about the loss carry-forwards and all that, OK?” Running a quick EHA or Eyeball-Humidity Assessment, Maxine thinks for a minute Tallis is about to go all mushy, but instead she’s relieved to see, as if jump-cut to, the reliably annoying Fingernail, cycling toward and away from her lips,

“You’ve been discovering secrets about my husband . . . any you’d like to share?”

“There’s no proof of anything yet.”

An unsurprised nod. “But he is, I don’t know, a suspect in something?” Gazing toward a neutral corner, voice softening to edgelessness, “
The Geek That Couldn’t Sleep
. A make-believe horror movie we used to pretend we were in. Gabe was really such a sweet kid, a long time ago.”

Off she goes goes on the time machine, while Maxine investigates the liquor inventory. Presently Tallis is recalling one of several memorial services after 11 September she was at representing hashslingrz, standing there among a delegation of dry-eyed wisefolk who looked like they were waiting for it to be over so they could get back to which stock to short next, when she observed one of the bagpipe players, improvising grace notes on “Candle in the Wind,” who seemed to her dimly familiar. It turned out to be Gabriel’s old college roommate Dieter, now in business as a professional bagpiper. There were catered eats afterward, over which she and Dieter got into conversation, trying to avoid kilt jokes, though whatever he’d grown into, it wasn’t Sean Connery.

Demand for bagpipers was brisk. Dieter, filing as an S-corporation these days, teamed up with a couple of other classmates from CMU, had been swamped since 11 September with more gigs than he knew what to do with, weddings, bar mitzvahs, furniture-store openings . . .

“Weddings?” sez Maxine.

“He sez you’d be surprised, a funeral lament at a wedding, gets a laugh every time.”

“I can imagine.”

“They don’t do cop funerals so much, the cops apparently have their own resources, most of it’s private functions like this one we were at. Dieter grew philosophical, said it got stressful from time to time, he felt like a branch of emergency services, being held in readiness, waiting for the call to come in.”

“Waiting for the next . . .”

“Yeah.”

“You think he might be some kind of a leading indicator?”

“Dieter? Like bagpipe players would get a heads-up before the next one happens? That would be so weird?”

“Well, after that—did you and your husband get together socially with Dieter?”

“Uh-huh? He and Gabe might have even done some business.”

“Natch. What are ex-roomies for?”

“It looked like they were planning some project together, but they never shared it with me, and whatever it was, it didn’t show up on the books.”

A joint project, Gabriel Ice and somebody whose career depends on widespread public bereavement. Hmmm. “Did you ever invite him out to Montauk?”

“As a matter of fact . . .”

Cue the theremin music, and you, Maxine, get a grip. “This split could all turn out to be a blessing in disguise for you, Tallis, and meantime, you . . . have called your mother.”

“Do you think I should?”

“I think you’re overdue.” Plus a related thought, “Listen, it’s none of my business, but . . .”

“Is there a fella. Of course. Can he help, good question.” Reaching for the Hypnotiq bottle.

“Tallis,” trying to keep as much weariness as she can out of it, “I know there’s a boyfriend, and he’s nobody’s ‘fella’ except maybe your husband’s, and frankly none of this is as cute as you’re hoping . . .” Giving her the abridged version of Chazz Larday’s rap sheet including his wife-sitting arrangements with Ice. “It’s a setup. So far you’re doing exactly everything hubby wants you to.”

“No. Chazz . . .” Is the next part of this going to be “. . . loves me?” Maxine’s thoughts wander to the Beretta in her purse, but Tallis surprises her. “Chazz is a dick with an East Texan attached to it, one being the price of the other, you could say.”

“Wait a minute.” Out at the edge of Maxine’s visual field, something’s been blinking for a while. It turns out to be an indicator light on a little CCTV camera up in one dim corner of the ceiling. “This is a motel, Tallis? Who put this thing in here?”

“It wasn’t in here before.”

“Do you think . . . ?”

“It would figure.”

“You got a stepladder?” No. “A broom?” A sponge mop. They take turns banging at it, like an evil high-tech piñata, till it comes crashing to the floor.

“You know what, you should be someplace safer.”

“Where? With my mom? One step away from a bag lady, never mind me, she can’t help herself.”

“We’ll figure out where, but they just lost their picture, they’ll be coming here, we need to be gone.”

Tallis throws a couple of things in an oversize shoulder bag and they proceed to the elevator, down twenty floors, out through the gold-accented Grand Central–size lobby, with its four-figures-per-day floral arrangements—

“Mrs. Ice?” The doorman, regarding Tallis with something between apprehension and respect.

“Not for long,” Tallis sez. “Dragoslav. What.”

“These two guys showed up, said they’ll ‘be seeing you soon.’”

“That’s it?” A puzzled frown.

Maxine gets a brain wave. “Doing Russian rap lyrics, by any chance?”

“That’s them. Please be sure and tell them I gave you the message? Like, I promised?”

“They’re nice guys,” sez Maxine, “really, no need to worry.”

“Worry, excuse me, does not begin to describe.”

“Tallis, you haven’t been . . .”

“I don’t know these guys. You however seem to. Anything you’d like to share?”

They have wandered out onto the sidewalk. Light draining away over Jersey, no cabs around and miles to the subway. Next thing they know, around the corner on apparently new hydraulics and up the block comes, yes, it’s Igor’s ZiL-41047, gussied up tonight into a full-scale
shmaravozka,
gold custom spinner rims with blinking red LEDs, high-tech antennas and lowrider striping—screeches to a pause next to Tallis and Maxine and out leap Misha and Grisha, wearing matching Oakley OvertheTop shades and packing PP-19 Bizons, with which they gesture Tallis and Maxine into the back of the limo. Maxine gets a professional if not exactly courtly patdown, and the Tomcat in her purse goes on the unavailable list.

“Misha! Grisha! And here I thought you were such gentlemen!”

“You’ll get your
pushka
back,” Misha with a friendly stainless grin, sliding behind the wheel and pimpmobiling away from the curb.

“Reducing complications,” Grisha adds. “Remember
Good, Bad and Ugly
, three-way standoff? Remember how much trouble even to watch?”

“You don’t mind my asking, guys, what’s going on?”

“Up till five minutes ago,” sez Grisha, “simple plan, put snatch and grab on cute Pamela Anderson here.”

“Who,” inquires Tallis, “me?”

“Tallis, please, just— And now the plan’s not so simple?”

“We weren’t expecting you too,” Misha sez.

“Aw. You were gonna kidnap her and ask Gabriel Ice for ransom money? Let me just roll on the floor here a minute, you guys. You want to tell them, Tallis, or should I?”

“Uh-oh,” go the gorillas in unison.

“You didn’t hear, I guess. Gabe and I are about to get into a really horrible divorce. At the moment my ex-to-be is trying to delete me, my existence, from the Internet. I don’t think he’ll even spring for gas money, guys, sorry.”

“Govno,”
in harmony.

“Unless he’s really the one who hired you, to get me out of the way.”

“Fucking Gabriel Ice,” Grisha indignant, “is oligarch scum, thief, murderer.”

“So far,
nichego,
” Misha cheerfully, “but he’s also working for U.S. secret police, which makes us sworn enemies forever—we have oath, older than
vory,
older than gulag, never help cops.”

“Penalty for violation,” Misha adds, “is death. Not just what they’ll do to you. Death in spirit, you understand.”

“She’s nervous,” Maxine hastily, “she means no disrespect.”

“How much did you think he was gonna pay?” Tallis still wants to know.

An amused exchange in Russian that Maxine imagines going something like “Fucking American women only care about price they bring on market? Nation of whores.”

“More like Austin Powers,” Misha explains— “telling Ice, ‘Oh, behave!’”

“‘Shagadelic!’” cries Grisha. They high-five.

“We have something to do tonight,” Misha continues, “and holding Mrs. Ice was only supposed to be for insurance, in case somebody gets cute.”

“Looks like it ain’t gonna work,” sez Maxine.

“Sorry,” sez Tallis. “Can we get out now?”