Bleeding Edge

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Long as I’m picking your brain here, somebody also told me about a computer chip, some Israeli vendor, maybe you’ve run across it, sits quietly in a customer’s machine absorbing data, from time to time transmitting what it’s gathered out to interested parties?”

  Not that he jumped or anything, but his eyes have begun to roam the room. “Elbit makes one that I know of.”

  “Ever run across one, like, physically?”

  He finally meets her gaze and then sits staring at her, as if she’s some kind of a screen, and she figures the point of diminishing returns has arrived.

  Soon Brooke and Elaine come back from downtown with a number of Century 21 bags plus a strange vegan p’tcha into whose crystalline depths one can gaze with growing albeit perplexed fascination. “Lovely,” according to Elaine, “like a three-dimensional Kandinsky. Perfect with the tongue.”

  Tongue Polonaise is a childhood favorite around here. Maxine used to think it meant some classical-piano novelty act. All day, a pickled beef tongue has been out in the kitchen simmering in an elaborate tsimmis of chopped apricots, mango puree, pineapple chunks, cherries with the pits out, grapefruit marmalade, two or three different varieties of raisin, orange juice, sugar and vinegar, mustard and lemon juice, and of the essence, for reasons lost in some snoozy nimbus of tradition, gingersnaps—Nabisco by default, since Keebler dropped the old Sunshine variety a couple of years back.

  “She forgets the gingersnaps again,” Ernie likes to pretend to growl, “you’re gonna read about it in the Daily News.”

  The sisters warily exchange a hug. The conversation avoids all contact with the controversial until onto the living-room tube comes a Channel 13 yakker hosted by Beltway intellectual Richard Uckelmann called Thinking with Dick, whose guests today include an Israeli cabinet official Brooke and Avi used to run into at parties. Under discussion is the always-lively topic of West Bank settlements. After a minute and a half, though it seems longer, of government propaganda, Maxine blurts, “This guy didn’t try to sell you any real estate, I hope.”

  Just what Brooke has been waiting for. “Miss Smartmouth,” a little screechy, “always with a remark. Try going out on night patrol sometime, arabushim throwing bombs at you, see how far that mouth gets you.”

  “Girls, girls,” murmurs Ernie.

  “You mean ‘girl, girl,’ I think,” Maxine sez, “I’m the one suddenly being trashed here.”

  “Brooke only means she’s been to a kibbutz and you haven’t,” Elaine soothingly.

  “Right, all day long at the Grand Canyon Mall in Haifa, spending her husband’s money, some kibbutz.”

  “You, you don’t even have a husband.”

  “Oh, look, a screamfest. Just what I came over here for.” She blows a kiss at the p’tcha, which seems to wobble in reply, and looks around for her purse. Brooke stomps off to the kitchen. Ernie goes after her, Elaine gazes sorrowfully at Maxine, Avi pretends to be absorbed in the television.

  “All right, all right, Ma, I’ll behave, just… I was gonna say do something about Brooke, but I think that moment passed thirty years ago.” Presently, Ernie comes out of the kitchen eating a gingersnap, and Maxine goes in to find her sister shredding potatoes for latkes. Maxine finds a knife and starts chopping onions and for a while they prep in silence, neither willing to be the first to talk, God forbid it should be anything like “I’m sorry.”

  “Hey, Brooke?” Maxine eventually. “Pick your brain a minute?”

  A shrug, like, I’ve got a choice?

  “I was out on a date with a guy who says he’s ex-Mossad. I couldn’t tell if he was bullshitting me or what.”

  “Did he take off his right shoe and sock and—”

  “Hey, how’d you know?”

  “Any given night in any singles bar in Haifa, you can always find some loser who’s taken a Sharpie and put three dots on the bottom of his heel. Some old folklore about a secret tattoo, total bullshit.”

  “And there are still girls who fall for it?”

  “Didn’t you ever?”

  “Come on, Jews and tattoos? I’m desperate, but not unobservant.”

  Everybody makes nice for the rest of the evening. The Tongue Polonaise comes in on a Wedgwood platter Maxine only remembers seeing at seder. Ernie dramatically sharpens a knife and begins carving the tongue as ceremoniously as if it’s a Thanksgiving turkey.

  “So?” inquires Elaine, after Ernie takes a bite.

  “A time machine of the mouth, my darling, Proust Schmoust, this takes a man straight back to his bar mitzvah.” Singing a couple bars of “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” just to prove it.

  “It’s his mother’s recipe,” clarifies Elaine, “well, except for the mangoes, they hadn’t been invented yet.”

  • • •

  EDITH FROM YENTA EXPRESSO is out in the hallway, lounging in front of her door as if soliciting customers. “Maxine, some guy was here the other day looking for you? Daytona was out also, he asked me to tell you he’d be back.”

  “Uh-oh,” having one of those intuitive flashes. “Nice shoes?”

  “High three figures, Edward Greens, snakeskin, appropriately enough. You might want to be careful though, he’s problematic.”

  “Client?”

  “Known to the community. Don’t get me wrong, lonely is OK, it’s my bread and butter, I’m down with lonely, I’m down with desperate. But this guy…”

  “Not that look, Edith please. This isn’t romantic.”

  “I’m in the business thirty years, trust me, how romantic is it? As romantic as it gets.”

  “Creeping me out here. You’re saying I should expect him back?”

  “Don’t worry, I already gave them a heads-up at the Times, they’ll spell your name right.”

  • • •

  SO, SURE ENOUGH, as if Edith’s wearing a wire, a phone call from Nicholas Windust. He wants to do brunch at some faux-Parisian brasserie over on the East Side. “Long as you’re springing,” Maxine shrugs, thinking of it as a modest federal tax rebate.

  Windust seems to think it’s a date. He is done up, otherwise inexplicably, in somebody’s idea of hipster gear—jeans, vintage sharkskin sport coat, Purple Drank T-shirt, enough dress-code violations to get him thrown off the L train. Maxine peers at this for as long as she has to, shrugs, “It’s a look.”

  He wants to sit inside, Maxine feels safer close to the street and it’s nice out today, so, cozy schmozy, outside it shall be. Windust orders a soft-boiled egg and a Bloody Mary, Maxine wants half a grapefruit and coffee in a bowl. “Amazed you could find the time, Mr. Windust,” with a smile of shameless bogosity, “So! my brother-in-law’s back in the USA now, I can’t imagine what else this could be about.”

  “We were intrigued to learn he’s hired on at hashslingrz.com. Like your turnout by the way, Armani, isn’t it?”

  “Just some schmatte from H&M, but how nice of you to notice.” And what is with the getting cute here, stop, stop, Maxine when will you…?

  “Suggesting an interesting hookup of interests, if Avram Deschler is, as we suspect, a Mossad sleeper.”

  Maxine makes with a Blank Stare she has learned from Shawn and often found useful. “Too academic for me.”

  “Play dumb if you like, but I ran a search on you, you’re the little lady who sent Jeremy Fink up the river. Busted the Manalapan Ponzoids gang over in Jersey. Went down to Grand Cayman disguised as a reggae backup singer, firebombed ten and a half billion in physical Swiss francs, and exfiltrated in the perps’ own Gulfstream jet.”

  “That was Mitzi Turner, actually. They’re always getting us confused. Mitzi’s the asskicker, I’m just a working mom.”

  “Regardless, given the number of U.S. government contracts hashslingrz is involved with—”

  “Look, either Avi’s some fantasy of yours, darkside hacker-saboteur, Mossad assassin, or he’s just another standard-issue geek trying to get through like the rest of us here outside the Beltway—whatever, I still don’t see how I c
ome into it.”

  Windust opens and reaches into an aluminum attaché case which he seems to be living out of, judging from the shaving kit and changes of underwear inside, and finds a folder. “Before his next tête-à-tête with Gabriel Ice, here’s something you might want to look over.”

  Without being able to see his eyes, she watches his mouth for, what, some footnote? but no, he’s only smiling at her not even in a sociable way, more like he’s holding some winning hand, or a weapon aimed at her heart.

  Though unenthusiastic about touching anything that’s been in contact with Windust’s intimate apparel, she’s also a fraud investigator whose prime directive is You Never Know, so she takes the folder gingerly and stashes it in her Kate Spade satchel.

  “On the clear understanding,” Maxine quickly adding, “as Deborah Kerr, or Marni Nixon, might say, or actually sing—that this is none of my—”

  “Am I making you nervous?”

  She risks a fast sideways peek and is astonished to catch on his face now a look that would not be out of place in a pickup joint south of 14th Street, some late Saturday night when the hotter inventory has been squired away out the door and the pickings have grown unhelpfully slimmer. What’s up with this? She is not about to react to such a face. A silence arises, and lengthens, and not only a silence, as her glance, inadvertently wandering to that other indicator of the inward, confirms. It’s in fact a hardon of some size, and worse, he’s caught her looking.

  “That’s it, back to work,” is what, in heedless idiocy, she finds herself unable to much more than croak. But doesn’t move, doesn’t even reach for her bag.

  “Here, maybe this’ll be easier,” writing something on a napkin. In a more wholesome, or maybe only earlier, era it might have been the name of a good restaurant, or an idea for a start-up. Today the best you can call this is an invitation to step into airheadedness and error. An address inconvenient to the subway, she notices. “Say about rush hour, better chances for invisibility, that work for you?”

  Among many things she hasn’t picked up before is this note in his voice, demanding, not what you’d call especially seductive. And yet still not a deal killer. And what would that have to be, she wonders. He gets up, nods, and splits leaving her with the check. After saying he’d pay for it. What is she thinking, again?

  • • •

  AS IF HE’S A KINDLY angel bringing a last chance to act responsibly, Conkling materializes in the waiting room unannounced, the way he usually does. “Whoo,” Daytona with a dramatic flinch, “scared the shit out of me, what you be lettin all these ghetto-ass g’s walk in here all the time?” Conkling meantime has gone all weird, for his own reasons.

  “What. You smell something.”

  “That masculine again–9:30 Cologne for Men. Something here is giving off indicia.” Like a hound dog in a jailbreak movie, Conkling follows the sillage into Maxine’s office, zeroing in on her purse. “Pretty slow drydown on this stuff, so it’s from sometime in the last couple hours.”

  Oh, what else. Windust. She digs in her bag, brings out the folder he gave her. Conkling riffles the pages. “This is it.”

  “Guy I, hmm, just had brunch with, he’s in from D.C.”

  “You’re sure there’s no connection here with Lester Traipse?”

  “Just somebody I went to college with,” Oh? what’s this, a sudden reluctance to share information with Conkling about Windust? For some reason? That she doesn’t want to get into right now? “Works in middle management now at the EPA, maybe the stuff is on some list of toxic pollutants?”

  Her thoughts go wandering off, and nobody tries to summon them back. Did Windust, once in a more sympathetic-juvenile day, actually hang out at the old 9:30 Club the way Maxine did at the Paradise Garage? Maybe on Stateside breaks from doing evil all around the world, maybe he caught Tiny Desk Unit and Bad Brains in their local-band period, maybe the smell of 9:30 Cologne is his last, his only link with the undercorrupted youth he was? Maybe Conkling is coming down with a seasonal allergy and his nose is a little off today? Maybe Maxine is sliding deeper into a sentimental idiocy attack? Maybe’s ass, OK? Circumstantial schmircumstantial, Windust was there when Lester was taken out, and maybe he even did it.

  Damn.

  What happened to the chances for a giddy romantic episode today? Suddenly it looks a lot more like field research.

  Meantime Conkling wants to talk about, who else, Princess Heidrophobia. By the time Maxine is able to get his unwholesomely obsessed ass back out the door, she’s left with a scant half hour to get put together for her, what would you call it, working rendezvous with Windust. Somehow she finds herself home, and immobile in front of the bedroom closet, and wondering why her mind has gone this blank. Polyvinyl chloride, something in bright red perhaps, though not inappropriate, is somehow absent from the inventory. Jeans are out of the question also. At length, deep in, at the event horizon of closet oblivion, she notices a chic cocktail-hour suit in a subdued aubergine shade, discovered long ago at the Galeries Lafayette going-out-of-business sale and kept for reasons that probably don’t include nostalgia. She tries to think of ways in which Windust might read it. If he reads it, if he doesn’t just grab and start ripping… Repeated messages from her Vertex, or does she mean Vortex, of Femininity are piling up unanswered.

  24

  The address is in a far-west-side piece of lower Hell’s Kitchen among trainyard and tunnel approaches plowed indifferently through a neighborhood whose disconnected fragments have been left to survive as they might, lofts, recording studios, pool-table showrooms, movie-equipment rental places, chop shops… Wised-up real-estate mavens of Maxine’s acquaintance assure her that this is the next hot neighborhood. Redevelopment is in the air. Someday the Number 7 subway will be extended over here and the Javits Center will have its own stop. Someday there will be parks and soaring condos and luxury tourist hotels. Right now it is still a windswept hard-to-get-to region that visitors from other planets, arriving in centuries to come after New York has been long forgotten, will assume was ceremonial, even religious, used for public spectacles, mass sacrifices, lunch breaks.

  Today there is a huge gathering of police up and down 11th Avenue and seething all among the blocks over to Tenth. Maxine is just as happy not to be on foot at the moment. The cabdriver, whose problem this has become, thinks it might be a police exercise, based on a scenario where terrorists take over Javits Center.

  “Why,” Maxine wonders, “would anybody want to?”

  “Well, spoze it happened during the Auto Show. Then they’d have all those cars and trucks. They could sell off some of that for money to buy bombs and AKs and shit,” the driver clearly with a scenario of his own here, “keep the cool units like the Ferraris and Panozes, use the trucks for military vehicles, oh, and they’d also need to hijack a fleet of car carriers, Peterbilt 378s, somethin like that. And… and the really good vintage stuff, Hispano-Suizas, Aston Martins, they could hold them for ransom.”

  “‘Give us ten million or we’ll trash this car’?”

  “Bend the aerial at least, nothin that would seriously fuck with the resale value, understand.” All around them the Finest flock, swarm, stand guard, run in formation up and down the street. Above in the bright pre-autumnal sky, UFOs carry out their patient cloaked reconnaissance. Now and then a cop with a bullhorn will approach, glaring, and yell at the cab to move on.

  Finally they pull up in front of the address, which seems to be a six-story rental building, unfashionable, forsaken, due someday for demolition and replacement by some high-rise condo scheme. At night maybe one lighted window per floor. It reminds her of her own part of town back in the eighties, when the neighborhood was being co-opped. Tenants who can’t or won’t move out. Developers who’re itching to tear the place down acting very unpleasant.

  When she hits the buzzer, it seems like ten minutes of being stared and smirked at by a sudden gathering of half the neighborhood, before a shrill noise that could be anything co
mes out of the undersize speaker.

  “It’s me—Maxine.”

  “Nnggahh?”

  She shouts her name again and peers through the unwashed glass. The door remains unbuzzed. Finally, just as she’s turning away, here comes Windust to open it.

  “Buzzer doesn’t work, never has.”

  “Thanks for sharing that.”

  “Wanted to see how long you’d wait.”

  Desolate corridors, unswept and underlit, that stretch on for longer than the building’s outside dimensions would suggest. Walls glisten unhealthily in creepy yellows and grime-inflected greens, colors of medical waste… Open to all sorts of penetration besides the squatters who now and then step out into a sight line and immediately back, like targets in a first-person shooter. Carpeting has been removed from the hallways. Leaks are not being fixed. Paint hangs. Fluorescent bulbs on borrowed time buzz purplishly overhead.

  According to Windust, wild dogs live in the basement and begin to come out at sundown, to roam the halls all night. Brought in originally to intimidate the last tenants into moving out, left on site to fend for themselves as soon as the Alpo bill outgrew the relocation budget.

  Inside the apartment, Windust doesn’t waste time. “Get down on the floor.” Seems to be in a sort of erotic snit. She gives him a look.

  “Now.”

  Shouldn’t she be saying, “You know what, fuck yourself, you’ll have more fun,” and walking out? No, instead, instant docility—she slides to her knees. Quickly, without further discussion, not that some bed would have been a better choice, she has joined months of unvacuumed debris on the rug, face on the floor, ass in the air, skirt pushed up, Windust’s not-exactly-manicured nails ripping methodically at sheer taupe pantyhose it took her easily twenty minutes in Saks not so long ago to decide on, and his cock is inside her with so little inconvenience that she must have been wet without knowing it. His hands, murderer’s hands, are gripping her forcefully by the hips, exactly where it matters, exactly where some demonic set of nerve receptors she has been till now only semi-aware of have waited to be found and used like buttons on a game controller… impossible for her to know if it’s him moving or if she’s doing it herself… not a distinction to be lingered on till much later, of course, if at all, though in some circles it is held to be something of a big deal…