Bleeding Edge (9 page)

N
ow and then a taxing entity like the NYC Finance Department will hire an outside examiner, especially when there’s a Republican mayor, given that party’s curious belief that private sector always equals good and public bad. Maxine gets back to the office in time for a call from Axel Quigley down at John Street, with the latest on another heartrendingly sad case of sales-tax evasion, taking it personally as always, even though it’s been going on for a while. Axel’s whistle-blowers tend to be disgruntled employees, he and Maxine in fact met at a Disgruntled Employee Workshop led by Professor Lavoof, generally acknowledged godfather of Disgruntlement Theory and developer of the influential Disgruntled Employee Simulation Program for Audit Information and Review, aka DESPAIR.

According to Axel, somebody at a restaurant chain called Muffins and Unicorns has been using phantomware to falsify cash-register receipts. Sales-suppression devices are either factory-installed in the cash registers themselves or being run off of a custom application known as a zapper, kept externally on a CD. Evidence points to a high-level manager, maybe owner. Axel’s most likely suspect is Phipps Epperdew, better
known as Vip because he always looks like he’s just emerged from a Lounge or flashed a Discount Card with that acronym on it.

The interesting thing for Maxine about zapper fraud is the face-to-face element. You don’t learn it from a manual, because there’s nothing in print. Features written into the software that you don’t find in the manual are meant instead to be passed on in person, orally, from cash-register vendor to user. The way certain kinds of magical lore go from rogue rabbis to apprentices in kabbalah. If the manual is scripture, phantomware tutorials are the secret knowledge. And the geeks who promote it—except for one or two little details, like the righteousness, the higher spiritual powers—they’re the rabbis. All strictly personal and in a warped way even romantic.

Vip is known to be doing business with shadowy elements in Quebec, where the zapper industry is flourishing at the moment. Back in the dead of last winter, Maxine got added to a city budget line, on the QT as always, and flown to Montreal to
chercher le geek
. Manifested into Dorval, checked in to the Courtyard Marriott on Sherbrooke, and went schlepping around the city, one fool’s errand after another, down into random gray buildings where many levels below the street and down the corridors you’d hear cafeteria sounds, round a corner and here’d be
le tout Montréal
having lunch in a lengthy series of eating rooms, strung in an archipelago across the underground city, which in those days seemed to be expanding so rapidly that nobody knew of a reliable map for it all. Plus shopping enough to challenge Maxine’s nausea threshold, back ends of Metro stations, bars with live jazz, crepe emporia and poutine outlets, vistas of sparkling new corridor just about to be tenanted by even more shops, all without any need to venture up into the snowbound subzero streets. Finally, at a phone number obtained off a toilet wall at a bar in Mile End, she located one Felix Boïngueaux, who’d been working out of a basement apartment, what they call a
garçonnière,
off of Saint-Denis, for whom Vip’s name didn’t just ring a bell but threatened to kick the door in, since there were apparently some late-payment
issues. They arranged to meet at an Internet-enabled laundromat called NetNet, soon to be a legend on the Plateau. Felix looked almost old enough to drive.

Once they were past
enchantée,
like everybody else in town Felix had no problem shifting clutchlessly into English. “So you and Mr. Epperdew, you’re colleagues?”

“Neighbors, actually, in Westchester.” Pretending to be another bent businessperson interested in the “hidden delete options” for her point-of-sale network, only out of technical curiosity, of course.

“I might be down your way soon, looking for financing.”

“I think in the States there might be a legal problem?”

“No, actually it’d be for starting up a PCM project.”

“Some, ah, recreational drug?”

“Phantomware countermeasures.”

“Wait, you’re supposed to be pro-phantomware, what’s with this ‘counter’?”

“We build it, we disable it. You’re frowning. We’re beyond good and evil here, the technology, it’s neutral, eh?”

Back to Felix’s basement pad in time for the evening movie on the Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network, whose film library contained every Keanu Reeves movie ever made, including, that night, Felix’s personal favorite,
Johnny Mnemonic
(1995). They smoked weed, ordered in Montreal pizza topped with little-known forms of sausage, grew absorbed in the movie, and Nothing, as Heidi would put it, Happened, except that a couple days later Maxine flew back to New York with a file on Vip Epperdew chunkier by far than what she’d flown off with, and the tax office figured their money was well spent.

Then, for months, silence from them, till now suddenly here’s Axel again. “Just wannit to let you know, Vip’s ass is grass and the Finance lawn mower’s about to make its pass.”

“Thanks for the bulletin, I’ve been losing sleep.”

“The DA’s office is initiating the paperwork as we speak. All we still
need to have is a couple of details. Like where is he. You wouldn’t happen to know.”

“Vip and I don’t exactly schmooze, Axel. Gee. A girl smiles even once at a material witness and everybody starts getting ideas.”

•   •   •

TONIGHT’S DESCENT INTO SLEEP
is helical and slow. As insomniacs revisit certain melodies and lyrics of their youth, so Maxine keeps circling back to Reg Despard, back on board the
Aristide Olt,
that thin twinkling kid, so resolutely smiling through the miserable day-to-day of the underconnected indie moviemaker. To hope that this hashslingrz project of his will not turn too horrible on him is to wallow in a warm tub of denial. Something else is up, Reg knew exactly who to bring this ticket to, he read Maxine correctly, knew she could feel something like his own alarm at the perimeters of ordinary greed overstepped, the engines of night and contrived oblivion, out on the tracks, cranking up to speed . . .

At which point, just before the transition to REM, the phone rings and it’s Reg himself.

“It ain’t a movie anymore, Maxi.”

“How early tomorrow you planning to be up, Reg?” Or to put it another way, it’s the middle of the fucking night here.

“Not going to sleep tonight.”

Meaning Maxine’s not likely to either. So they meet for very early breakfast at a 24-hour Ukrainian joint in the East Village. Reg is over in a corner in back, picking away at his PowerBook. It’s summertime, not too humid or horrible yet, but he’s sweating.

“You look like shit, Reg, what happened?”

“Technically,” moving his hands away from the keyboard, “I’m supposed to have free run of hashslingrz, right? Except I always knew I didn’t. And, well, yesterday, finally, I walked through the wrong door.”

“You’re sure you didn’t find it locked and jimmy it?”

“Well, it shouldn’t’ve been locked, sign on the door said ‘Toilet.’”

“So you entered illegally . . .”

“Whatever. Here’s this room, no porcelain in sight, looks like a lab, test benches, equipment and shit, cables, plugs, parts and labor for some job order I quickly realize I don’t want to know nothin about. Plus then’s when I notice there’s all these jabberin A-rabs around, who the minute I come through the door they all dummy up.”

“How do you know it’s Arabs, they’re wearing outfits, there’s camels?”

“Sounded like that’s what they were talking, they weren’t Anglos, or Chinese, and when I waved at them like ‘Yo my sand niggas, what up—’”

“Reg.”

“Well, more like
Ayn al-hammam,
where’s the toilet, and one of them comes right over, cold, polite, ‘You are looking for toilet, sir?’ There is some muttering, but nobody shoots at me.”

“Did they see the camera?”

“Hard to say. Five minutes later I’m summoned to the office of the Big Ice Pick himself, first thing he wants to know is did I get any footage of the room or the guys in it. I tell him no. I’m lying of course.

“And he’s like, ’Cause if you did get footage, you would need to give that to me.’ It was that ‘need,’ I think, like when the cops tell you you ‘need’ to step away from the car. That’s when I started to get scared. Second thoughts about the whole fuckin project, frankly.”

“What were these guys doing? Assembling a bomb?”

“I hope not. Way too many circuit cards layin around. Any bomb with that much logic attached to it? Trouble down the line.”

“Can I look at the footage?”

“I’ll put it on a disc for you.”

“Has Eric seen it?”

“Not yet, he’s been out on patrol, as we speak someplace in the Brooklyn-Queens border country, pretending to be a doper looking for qat. But really looking for Ice’s
hawaldar.
”

“How’d he get so motivated all of a sudden?”

“Think it’s about scoring, but I try not to ask.”

•   •   •

SHE’S IN THE SHOWER
trying to get lucid when somebody sticks their head around the curtain and begins making with the shrill ee-ee-ee shower-scene effects from
Psycho
(1960). Time was she would have screamed, had some kind of episode, but now, recognizing the idea of merriment here, she only mutters, “Evening, honeybunch,” for it is who but the of course nowhere-near-history Horst Loeffler, showing up, like Basil St. John in the life of Brenda Starr, unannounced, another year’s worth of lines deepening on his face, poised already for departure, while in the reverse shot the little polarized tear flashes, right on cue, appear along the edges of Brenda Starr’s eyelids.

“Hey! I’m a day early, you surprised?”

“No and also try to quit leering, Horst? I’ll be out of here in a minute.” Is that a hardon? She has retreated into the shower too quick to tell.

She arrives in the kitchen, steam-rosy and damp, hair twisted up in a towel, wearing a terry-cloth robe stolen from a spa in Colorado where they once passed a couple of weeks, back when the world was romantic, to find Horst humming, for some reason she will never ask about, the
Mister Rogers
theme, “It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood,” while rooting around in the freezer. Commenting on different pieces of frost-covered history. Slim pickings on the airplane, no doubt.

“Here it is.” Horst, with a dowser’s gift specific to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, brings out a semicrystallized quart of Chunky Monkey, sits down, takes an oversize spoon in each hand, and digs in. “So,” after a while, “where are the boys?”

The extra spoon, she has learned, is for mooshing it up. “Otis is having supper at Fiona’s, Ziggy’s over at school, rehearsing. They’re putting on
Guys and Dolls
Saturday night, so you’re just in time, Ziggy’s gonna be Nathan Detroit. Got some on your nose there.”

“Missed you guys.” Something peculiar in his tone suggests, not for the first time, that if Maxine chooses to, she might concede that, far
from demanding a self-obsessed chase around the world after black-orchid serum, in fact and scarcely known to Horst himself, what his immune system is really not handling too well these days is the dreaded Ex-Husband Blues.

“We’re probably ordering in, soon as Ziggy gets back, if you’re interested.”

Which is about when Ziggy comes strolling in. “Mom, who’s the sleazebag, lemme guess, another blind date?”

“What,” Horst with the once-over, “you again.”

Embracing, it seems to Maxine out the corner of her eye, a little longer than you’d expect.

“How’s ’at Jewish asskicking?”

“Oh, comin along. Killed an instructor last week.”

“Awesome.”

Maxine pretending to look through a pile of take-out menus, “What do you guys want to eat? Besides something that’s still alive.”

“Long ’s it ain’t none that macro wacko hippie food.”

“Ah, come on, Dad—Sprout Loaf? Organic Beet Fritters? mmm-mmm!”

“Gets a man droolin just thinkin about it!”

They are presently joined by Otis, the really picky one, still hungry because Vyrva’s recipes tend toward the experimental, so even more take-out menus are added to the pile and negotiations threaten to run well into the night, further complicated by Horst’s Rules of Life, such as avoid restaurants with logos where the food has a face or wears a whimsical outfit. They end up as always ordering in from Comprehensive Pizza, whose menu of toppings, crusts, and formatting options runs to about the thickness of a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog at holiday time and whose delivery area arguably does not even include this apartment, requiring the usual Talmudic telephone discussion over whether they will bring food to begin with.

“Long as I’m tubeside by nine,” Horst being a devoted viewer of the BPX cable channel, which airs film biographies exclusively, “U.S. Open
coming up, golfer biopics all this week, Owen Wilson as Jack Nicklaus, Hugh Grant in
The Phil Mickelson Story
 . . .”

“I was planning to watch a Tori Spelling marathon on Lifetime, but I can always use the other TV, please, make yourself right at home here.”

“Mighty accommodating of you, my lit-tle everything bagel.”

The boys are rolling their eyes, more or less in sync. The pizzas arrive, everybody starts grabbing, turns out this trip Horst plans on staying in New York for a while. “I took a sublet on some office space down at the World Trade Center. Or should I say up, it’s the hundred-and-something floor.”

“Not exactly soybean country,” Maxine remarks.

“Oh, it don’t matter where we are anymore. The open-outcry era’s coming to an end, everybody’s switching over to this Globex thing on the Internet, I’m just taking longer to adjust than most, trading don’t work out, I can always be an extra in dinosaur movies.”

Very late, managing to detach herself from the complexities of the hashslingrz ticket, Maxine is drawn to the spare bedroom by a voice from the TV set there, speaking with a graceful derangement of emphasis, almost familiar—“I respect your . . . experience and intimacy with the course but . . . I think for this hole a . . . five-iron would be . . . inappropriate . . . ” and sure enough, here’s Christopher Walken, starring in
The Chi Chi Rodriguez Story.
And Ziggy and Otis and their father all on the bed snoozing in front of it.