Bleeding Edge

by Pynchon, Thomas

  “Hawaladars around here tend to be in import-export, they take their fees in the form of discounts on prices and stuff. They’re like good bookies, keep it all in their heads, something Westerners can’t seem to do, so at hashslingrz somebody has been hiding a lot of major transaction history down behind multiple passwords and unlinked directories and so forth.”

  “You heard about this from Eric?”

  “He has a tap in a back office at hashslingrz.”

  “Somebody’s in there wearing a wire?”

  “It’s, actually it’s a Furby.”

  “Excuse me, a—”

  “Seems there’s a voice-recognition chip inside that Eric was modifying—”

  “Wait, the cute fuzzy little critter every child in town including my own had to have a couple of Christmases back, that Furby? this genius of yours hacks Furbys?”

  “Common practice in his subculture, seems to be a low tolerance there for cuteness. At first Eric was only looking for ways to annoy the yups—you know, teach it some street language, emotional-outburst chops, so forth. Then he noticed how many Furbys were showing up in the cubicles of code grinders over where he works. So we took the Furby he was messing with, upgraded the memory, put in a wireless link, I brought it in to hashslingrz, sat it on a shelf, now when I want I can stroll by with a pickup inside my Nagra 4 and download all kinds of confidential stuff.”

  “Such as this hawala that hashslingrz is using to get money out of the country.”

  “Over to the Gulf, it turns out. This particular hawala is headquartered in Dubai. Plus Eric’s been finding that to even get to where hashslingrz’s books are stashed, they put you through elaborate routines written in this, like, strange Arabic what he calls Leet? It’s all turning into a desert movie.”

  This is true. An offshore angle, with more dimensions than angles are supposed to have, has not escaped Maxine’s attention. She has found herself consulting current updates of the always useful Bribe Payers Index and its companion list the Corrupt Perceptions Index, which rank countries around the world for their likelihood of bent behavior, and hashslingrz seems to have dodgy linkages all over the map, particularly in the Mideast. Lately she’s been picking up certain tells for the well-known Islamic allergy to anything interest-bearing. Bond activity is rare to nonexistent. Instead of selling short, there is a tendency to go to elaborate sharia-compliant workarounds like arboon auctions. Why the concern for Muslim phobias about charging interest, unless . . . ?

  Unless Ice stands to make a bundle in the region, what else?

  Convection currents in Maxine’s coffee keep bringing something to the surface just long enough for her to mutter “Hey, wait . . .” before submerging again too quickly to ID it. She isn’t about to put her finger in and explore. “Reg, say your guy cracks all the encryption. What are you planning to do with what you find?”

  “Something’s up,” impatient, also anxious. “Maybe even something that’s got to be stopped.”

  “Which you think is more serious than simple fraud. What could be that big of a deal?”

  “You’re the expert, Maxine. If it was a classic fraud haven, Grand Cayman or whatever, it’d be one thing. But this is the Mideast, and somebody’s going to way too much trouble to keep secrets, as if Ice or somebody in his shop ain’t just squirreling it away but bankrolling something, something big and invisible—”

  “And . . . funneling sums over to the Emirates in the Hefty Smurf range can’t be for some totally innocent reason, because . . . ?”

  “Because I keep trying to come up with innocent reasons and can’t. Can you?”

  “I don’t do international intrigue, remember? Well, maybe Nigerian e-mails, but usually I’m down here with the bent baristas and the pigeon-drop artists.”

  They sit there for a minute while unknown forms of life pursue recreational activities in their food.

  “Keepin that Tomcat in your purse there, I hope.”

  “Oh, Reg. Maybe it’s you that should be carrying.”

  “Maybe I should be finalizing travel plans, like, far, far away. Eric needless to say keeps getting more spooked the further into this he goes. Insists now on rendezvousing down in the Deep Web instead of in the subway, and frankly I’m a little reluctant.”

  “What’s to be reluctant about?”

  “Were you ever down there?”

  “Not long ago. Seems like a nice secure place to meet.”

  “You’re so comfortable with it, maybe you should be the one to go down there and talk to Eric. Cut out the middleman here.”

  “Maybe, long as you don’t mind.” Is she thinking about hawalas, hashslingrz, even Reg’s personal safety, actually no, it’s that deco-derivative shuttle terminal of Lucas and Justin’s that might or might not get her access to DeepArcher. Whatever that turns out to be. She isn’t quite ready to admit it, but she’s already entertaining the first draft of a fantasy in which Eric, sherpa of the Deep Web, faithful and maybe even cute, helps her find her way through the maze. Nancy fuckin Drew, here. “Maybe if I made a realworld approach first. Face-to-face. See how much we trust each other.”

  “Good luck. You think I’m paranoid? These days you even go near this guy, he freaks.”

  “I can make it an accidental meeting. Pretty standard maneuver. Can you give me a list of his hangouts?”

  “I’ll e-mail something to you.” And soon Reg, taking a quick gander around at the street, has gone sidling off in the direction of downtown, miles away in the springtime shimmer.

  • • •

  AMONG MAXINE’S MORE USEFUL SENSORS is her bladder. When she’s out of range of information she needs, she can go whole days without any particular interest in pissing, but when phone numbers, koans, or stock tips from which she’s likely to profit are close by, the gotta-go alarm has reliably steered her to enough significant restroom walls that she’s learned to pay attention.

  This time she’s down in the Flatiron District when the alarm goes off. Against her better judgment, she steps into the dimly lit grease- and cigarette-smoke interior of Wall of Silence, once a tech-bubble hot spot, since fallen into greasyspoondom. The way to the restrooms is not as clearly marked as it could be. She finds herself wandering among customers at tables, who seem to be either unhappy couples or single men, possibly help-line candidates. One of whom, actually, now seems to be calling her name, with some urgency. Well, there’s urgency and there’s urgency. She squints through the gloom.

  “Lucas?” Yep, and signs of seedy personal disarray even in this light. “You happen to know where they keep the toilet around here?”

  “Hi, Maxi, listen, while you’re in there could you do me a favor—”

  “You just broke up with somebody,” this being the kind of place you’d naturally choose for that, “and want to know how she’s doing. Sure. What’s her name?”

  “Cassidy, but how did you—”

  “And where is it?”

  Back through the kitchen, down some stairs, around a couple of corners. Lit no more brightly than upstairs, and some would call this being considerate. There is a smell of cannabis purposefully alight. Maxine scans the short row of stalls. No blood coming from under the doors, no sounds of uncontrollable sobbing, good, good . . . “Yo Cassidy?”

  “Who’s that?” from inside one of the stalls. “The bitch he’s dumping me for, no doubt.”

  “Nah, thanks for the guess, but I’m in enough trouble already. Just gonna go in here for a minute,” stepping into the stall next to Cassidy’s.

  “I should have known what was up the minute I saw this place,” Cassidy sez. “Better if we’d handled everything out in the street.”

  “Lucas is having a little guilt, wants to know if you’re OK.”

  “Not a problem, I came in here to piss, not open a vein. Lucas who?”

  “Oh.”

  “Figures, these fuckin clubs I keep ending up in. He told me Kyle.”

  They sit there side by side, mutually invisible,
the partition between inscribed in marker pen, eye pencil, lipstick later rubbed at and smeared by way of commentary, gusting across the wall in failing red shadows, phone numbers with antiquated prefixes, cars for sale, announcements of love lost, found, or wished for, racial grievances, unreadable remarks in Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, a web of symbols, a travel brochure for night voyages Maxine has not yet thought about making. Meantime Cassidy is outlining some unsold pilot about dysfunctional dating south of 14th Street in which Lucas, near as Maxine can tell, only gets a walk-on. That’s until, inexplicably though only so for a moment, Cassidy is on to the topic of DeepArcher.

  “Yeah, that splash screen,” Maxine kvells, “it’s awesome.”

  “I designed it. Like that chick who did the tarot deck. Awesome and don’t forget hip,” half, but only half, ironic.

  “Wait, awesome and hip, where have I heard that.”

  Yep, turns out when she first met Lucas, Cassidy was working for hwgaahwgh.com.

  “Did you have any kind of a contract with Lucas, Kyle, whatever?”

  “No and I wasn’t doing it out of love, either. Hard to explain. It was all just coming from somewhere, for about a day and a half I felt I was duked in on forces outside my normal perimeter, you know? Not scared, just wanted to get it over with, wrote the file, did the Java, didn’t look at it again. Next thing I remember is one of them saying holy shit it’s the edge of the world, but frankly I can’t see a way they’re going to build any traffic. If I was a new user, coming to it cold, I’d be like, Public Void Close in a real hurry and try to forget about it. Better if they go for the single customer, Gabriel Ice or somebody.”

  Presently, through strange toilet ESP, the ladies emerge at the same moment from their stalls and have a look at each other. Maxine is not too surprised to find tats, piercings, hair of an orchid shade not on any map of the human genome, an age somewhat south of legal for anything. The way Cassidy’s looking back meanwhile makes Maxine feel like Hillary Clinton or something.

  “Can you check upstairs and see if he’s still there?”

  “Happy to.” She ascends into the murky bummersphere again. Yes he’s still there.

  “Startin to get worried about both of you.”

  “Lucas, she’s twelve. And you better start paying her royalties.”

  9

  Now 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.”