Down on the floor, nose level with an electrical outlet, she imagines for a second she can see some great brightness of power just behind the parallel slits. Something scurries at the edge of her vision, the size of a mouse, and it is Lester Traipse, the shy, wronged soul of Lester, in need of sanctuary, abandoned, not least by Maxine. He stands in front of the outlet, reaches in, parts the sides of one slit like a doorway, glances back apologetically, slides into the annihilating brightness. Gone.
She cries out, though not for Lester exactly.
• • •
IN THE MELANCHOLY LIGHT, Maxine scans Windust’s face for evidence of emotion. For a quickie, it was OK even if God forbid there should be anything like eye contact around here. On the other hand, at least he used a condom—wait, wait, junior-prom reflexes aren’t bad enough, she’s doing credits and debits on this now also?
Out the window, instead of a sweeping panorama of lights, each illuminating a different Big Apple drama, there’s a modest low-rise view, water tanks poised like antique skyrockets on rooftops whose last waterproofing got mopped on by immigrant hands generations dead, light from other windows mediated by nailed-up bedcovers, bookshelves full of wrecked paperbacks, the backsides of TV sets, shades pulled all the way down tenancies ago and never raised.
There is a kitchen of sorts in here, whose cupboards, in the tradition of accommodation addresses, are full of items some invisible long train of nameless reps and troubleshooters and traveling folk must have thought they needed to get through their stays, the nights they didn’t have the will or the permission to venture out in the streets… strange forms of pasta, cans with pictures in unfamiliar color processes of hard-to-identify foodstuffs, soups with unpronounceable names, snack products with official-looking waivers where the nutritional information is usually found. In the fridge all she sees is a single beet, sitting, one would have to say insolently, on a plate. There are suggestions of blue-green mold, interesting visually, but…
“Time for coffee?”
“It’s all right, I have to get back.”
“School night, of course. I should give Dotty a call myself.”
“Dotty, who would be…”
“My wife.”
Ha. With an internal double take at herself along the lines of, so what? And this makes how many wives now, two? and what’s it to you, Maxine? Finally, the underlying question, He’s deliberately waited till right now to mention a wife?
Windust has found a box covered in Japanese writing of what appear to be seaweed snacks, into which he now dives, with every appearance of an appetite. Maxine watches, not nauseous exactly, or not yet.
“Care for one of these, they’re… special…. And, Maxine… I’m not upset.”
Talk about romantic outbursts. Not upset, imagine. On the other hand, what about “set up”? Some uncharted gust of interior wind brings her the scent of 9:30, reminding her of The Deseret roof, and Lester Traipse again.
“I may be a little distracted today,” she sees no harm in mentioning, “there’s a case, technically not my area, but it’s been on my mind. Maybe you caught it on the news. A murder, Lester Traipse?”
Cold, cold customer. “Who?”
“It happened just down the street from me, at The Deseret. You’ve never been there, by any chance? I mean considering your deep interest in Gabriel Ice, who happens to own a piece of the building.”
“Really.”
She was expecting a courtroom-drama confession? He knows I know, she figures, so enough work for one day.
Once inside a cab he has not come downstairs to see her off in, headed uptown, What, she is just able to mentally inquire of herself, was I, the fuck, thinking? And the worst, or does she mean the best, part of it is that even right now it will take very little, yes, all pivoting here on FDR’s silvery small cheekbone in fact, to lean forward, interrupt the call-in hatefest on the cabbie’s radio, and in a voice sure to be trembling ask to be brought back to the homicidal bagman in his dark savage squat, for more of the same.
• • •
SHE DOESN’T GET AROUND to reading the folder Windust brought till later that evening. There are all these suddenly fascinating fringe chores to be done, sorting the sponges under the sink by size and color, running a head-cleaner tape through the VCR, going through the take-out menus for excess duplication. Finally she picks the thing up, with its faded punkrock aura. The cover is innocent of title, author, logo, any ID at all. Inside she finds a sort of mini-dossier in which we learn right away, and seemingly a big deal to whoever compiled this, that Gabriel Ice is Jewish, while also continuing to be instrumental in the illegal transfer of millions of $US to an account in Dubai controlled by the Wahhabi Transreligious Friendship (WTF) Fund, which, according to this anyway, is a known terrorist paymaster.
“Why,” the account wonders plaintively, “being Jewish, would Ice provide aid and comfort on this lavish scale to the enemies of Israel?” Possible theories include Simple Greed, Double Agency, and Self-Hating Jew.
There are a dozen pages on attempts to follow the money through the hawala setup Eric discovered, beginning with Bilhana Wa-ashifa Import-Export in Bay Ridge, thence via the re-invoicing of shipments into the U.S. of halvah, pistachios, geranium essence, chickpeas, several kinds of ras el hanout, and shipments outbound of mobile telephones, MP3 players, and other light electronics, DVDs, old Baywatch episodes in particular—these data, assembled by some committee of the clue-challenged, alarmingly unacquainted even with GAAP, all thrown together so haphazardly that after half an hour Maxine’s eyeballs are rotating in opposite directions and she has no idea if the document is meant as self-congratulation or some thickly disguised confession of failure. Bottom line, they seem to know about the hawala—hey, awesome. What else? The last page is headed “Recommendations for Action” and runs down the usual list of sanctions against hashslingrz, withdrawal of security clearance, prosecution, cancellation of outstanding contracts, and a disturbing footnote, “Option X—Consult Manual.” Manual not, of course, included.
Why would Windust want to show her this? The probability of a setup continues to increase. Close to dawn, she finds herself in a dream rerun of Now, Voyager (1942) in which versions of Paul Henreid, as “Jerry,” and Bette Davis, as “Charlotte,” are about to take another smoke break. As always, “Jerry” suavely puts two cigarettes in his mouth and lights them both, but this time as “Charlotte” expectantly reaches for hers, “Jerry” keeps them both in his mouth, continuing to puff away, beaming pleasantly, sending up huge clouds of smoke, till there’s only a couple of soggy cigarette butts hanging off of his lower lip. In her reverse shots, “Charlotte” is seen to grow more and more anxious. “Oh… oh well… of course if you…” Maxine comes awake screaming, under the impression there is something in bed with her.
• • •
HAVING LATELY DISCOVERED in the yuppie collectors’ market a credulity that may be limitless, a gang of cigar forgers have been working out of a smoke shop on West 30th, offering “smuggled” Cuban cigars for $20 a pop, an attractive price for the time, along with a line of “rare antique” cigars, including alleged selections from J. P. Morgan’s private stock, original chewed-on props from Groucho Marx movies, and cigar incunabula such as Christopher Columbus’s first Cuban, mentioned by de las Casas in Historia de las Indias. Incredibly, these fakes are all fetching their asking prices, and a boutique hedge fund in town has been paying these knockoff artists huge sums, writing it off to travel and entertainment, then taking what when the media get hold of it will be called Lavish Kickbacks. One morning a couple days later, Maxine is just getting comfortable with this perennially active ticket when Daytona comes in shaking her head back and forth, with her eyes angled downward and to the right. Recalling a neurolinguistic workshop she once attended in Atlantic City, Maxine observes, “You’re talking to yourself again.”
“Don’t be playin that woowoo shit on me, call’s on line one. See if you can talk his ass down.”
“You’ve read the material I left you?”
How about I had such a nice time the other day, haven’t been able to get you out of my mind, so forth? Terminate this fucking conversation forthwith, why don’t you. Instead, Miss Congeniality, “I knew most of it already, but thanks.”
“You knew about Ice being Jewish.”
“Yes and Superman too, so what, excuse me, it’s 1943 again? what’s the obsession with you people?”
“He did hire your brother-in-law.”
“So? You’re saying these Jews, they really stick together? That’s it?”
“The thing about Mossad—they’re America’s allies, but only up to a point. They cooperate, and they don’t cooperate.”
“Yes Jewish Zen, quite common, Al Jolson in blackface one minute, singing in temple the next, remember that one? Let me invite your attention to Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, which should clear up any lingering questions you might have, plus allow me to get back to a demanding workday which does not grow any less so with phone calls like this one. Unless you would like to just what we call spit it out?”
“We know how much money Ice has been diverting, where it’s going, we’re almost sure of who it’s going to. But so far we still only have the separate threads. You’ve read those pages, you see how scattered it all is. We need somebody with fraud-investigating skills to weave it together into some shape we can take upstairs.”
“Please, I’m struggling here, that is so fucking lame. Are you saying that nowhere in your own vast database can you find contact information for even one professional liar? It’s what you people do, it’s your hometown industry.” Try to remember also, Maxine noodged herself, romantic history aside, this is the party who was there when Lester Traipse got dumped underneath the pool at The Deseret.
“Oh and by the way.” Casual as a sanitation truck. “You’ve heard of the Civil Hackers’ School in Moscow?”
“No, uh-uh.”
“According to some of my colleagues, it was created by the KGB, it’s still an arm of Russian espionage, its mission statement includes destroying America through cyberwarfare. Your new best friends Misha and Grisha are recent graduates, it seems.”
Surveillance, OK, russophobic reflexes to be expected, and yet what goes on here, the chutzpah. “You don’t like me socializing with Russkies. Excuse me, I thought all that Cold War drama was over. Is it mob allegations, what?”
“These days the Russian mob and the government share many interests. I’m only advising you to be more reflective about the company you keep.”
“Worse than high school, I swear, one date they think they own you.”
An exasperated click and the line goes dead.
25
Waiting for her at home in the mailbox is a small square jiffy bag with a postmark from somewhere out in the deep interior of the U.S. Some state beginning with an M maybe. At first she thinks it’s from the kids or Horst, but there’s no note, just a DVD in a plastic sleeve.
She pops the disc into the DVD player, and abruptly onto the screen comes a Dutch-angled view of a rooftop, somewhere on the far West Side, and the river and Jersey beyond. Early-morning light. A burned-in time stamp reads 7:02:00 A.M., a week or so back, staying frozen for a moment before it begins to increment. On comes a track full of broken sound, distant ambulance sirens, garbage collection down in the street, a helicopter passing or maybe hovering. The shot is from either behind or inside some piece of structure that houses the building’s water tank. Out on the roof are two men with a shoulder-mounted missile, maybe a Stinger, and a third who is spending most of his time hollering into a cellular phone with a long whip antenna.
There are time gaps when nothing much is happening. The dialogue isn’t too clear, but it’s in English, the accents not especially local, from someplace out between the coasts. Reg (it has to be Reg) is back to his old zoom-happy ways, taking note of every passenger jet that shows up in the sky before returning to the standby routine on the roof.
At around 8:30, noticing movement on the roof of another building close by, the camera pans over toward it and zooms in on a figure with an AR15 assault rifle, who now attaches a bipod, gets down in prone firing position, gets up, removes the bipod, goes over to the roof parapet and uses that for support instead, moving around this way to different positions till he finds one he likes. His only targets appear to be the Stinger guys. Even more interesting, he is making no efforts at concealment, as if the Stinger guys know he’s there, all right, and aren’t doing anything about it.
A short while later, the guy with the mobile points into the sky and everything tightens into action, the crew aiming at and acquiring their target, which looks like a Boeing 767, heading south. They track the plane and go through motions like they’re preparing to fire, but they don’t fire. The plane continues, presently vanishing behind some buildings. The guy on the phone yells “OK, let’s wrap it,” and the crew pack up everything and they all vacate the roof. The shooter on the other roof has likewise vanished. There’s wind noise and a brief spell of silence from below.
Maxine gets on the phone to March Kelleher. “March, do you know how to post video material on your Weblog?”
“Sure, bandwidth allowing. You sound strange, got something interesting?”
“Something you ought to see.”
“Come on over.”
March lives between Columbus and Amsterdam a few blocks away, on a cross street that Maxine can’t remember the last time she’s been on. If ever. A cleaner’s, an Indian place she never noticed. This old boricua neighborhood survives, scraped and soiled, driven indoors, done with, its original texts being relentlessly overwritten—the gangs of the fifties, the drug dealing twenty years ago, all publicly fading into yup indifference, as high-rise construction, free of all self-doubt, continues its march northward. Someday very soon this will all be midtown, as one by one the sorrowful dark brickwork, the Section 8 housing, the old miniature apartment buildings with fancy Anglo names and classical columns flanking their narrow stoops, and arch-shaped window openings and elaborate wrought-iron fire escapes rapidly going to rust, are demolished and bulldozed into the landfill of failing memory.
March’s building, known as The St. Arnold, is a medium-size prewar intrusion on a block of brownstones, with a consciously seedy look Maxine has learned to associate with frequent changes of ownership. Today there’s an off-brand moving van outside, painters and plasterers at work in the lobby, Out of Order sign on one of the elevators. Maxine gets more than the usual number of suspicious O-Os, before being allowed to go in the elevator that’s working. Security this tight of course could also result if enough tenants here were into shady activities and paying off the staff.
March is wearing novelty slippers each shaped like a shark, with sound chips in the heels so when she walks around, they play the opening of the Jaws (1975) theme. “Where can I find these, price is no object, I can write it off.”
“I’ll ask my grandson, he bought them with his allowance—Ice’s money, but I figure if it went through the kid, then maybe it’s laundered enough.”
They go into the kitchen, old Provençal tiles on the floor and an unpainted pine table that the two of them can sit at and still leave room for March’s computer and a pile of books and a coffeemaker. “My office here. Whatcha got?”
“Not sure. If it’s what it looks like, it should carry a radiation warning.”
They start up the disc, and March, getting the situation from frame one, mutters holy shit, sits fidgeting and frowning till the guy with the rifle shows up, then leans
forward intently, slopping a little coffee onto that morning’s overpriced copy of the Guardian. “I don’t fucking believe it.” When the scene is done, “Well.” She pours coffee. “Who shot this?”
“Reg Despard, documentary guy I know who was doing a project on hashslingrz—”
“Oh, I remember Reg, we met during the blizzard of ’96, down at the World Trade Center, there was a janitors’ strike, all kinds of weird shit going on, secrets, payoffs. By the end of it, we felt like old veterans. We had a standing deal, anything interesting, I’d get to post it first on my Weblog. Bandwidth allowing. We lost touch, but what goes around comes around. Does this look to you what it looks like to me?”
“Somebody nearly shoots down an airplane, changes their mind at the last minute.”
“Or maybe it’s a dry run. Somebody planning to shoot down an airplane. Say, somebody in the private sector, working for the current U.S. regime.”
“Why would they—”
Irish people are not known for silently davening, but March sits for a short while appearing to. “OK, first of all maybe this is a fake, or a setup. Pretend I’m the Washington Post, OK?”
“Sure.” Maxine reaches toward March’s face and begins to make page-turning motions.
“No. No, I meant like in that Watergate movie? Responsible journalism and so forth. First of all, this disc is a copy, right? So Reg’s original could’ve been messed with in any number of ways. That date-and-time stamp in the corner could be fake.”
“Who would fake this, do you think?”
March shrugs. “Somebody who wants to nail Bush’s ass, assuming ‘Bush’ and ‘ass’ is a distinction you make? Or maybe it’s one of Bush’s people playing the victim card, trying to nail somebody who wants to nail Bush—”
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