Bleeding Edge

by Pynchon, Thomas

  Joaquin the pool guy is on duty. Usually something of a motormouth, today he seems to Maxine a little, you’d say, unforthcoming.

  “You heard anything more about the body they found?”

  “Much as anybody, which is nothing. Not even the guys on the door, not even Fergus the nightman, who knows everything. Cops been and gone, now everybody’s pretty creeped out, right?”

  “It wasn’t a tenant, I heard.”

  “I don’t ask.”

  “Somebody must know something.”

  “Around here it’s deaf and dumb. Policy of the building. Sorry, Maxine.”

  After a couple of token laps, Maxine and Conkling pretend to head for their respective locker rooms, but meet up again, sneak into a staff-only stairwell, presently they’re underneath the pool, moving flipflopped and semiclad through the shadows and mysteries of the unnumbered thirteenth floor, which belongs to a disaster always about to happen, a buffer space constantly under the threat of inundation from above if the pool—concrete, state of the art back then, grandfathered exempt from what today would be a number of code violations—should God forbid ever spring a leak. For now it’s the outward and structural form of a secret history of payoffs to contractors and inspectors and signers of permits, dishonest stewards long gone who expected the deluge after them to take place well after any statute of limitations has run. Creaking underframe, early-20th-century trusswork and bracing. A range of animal life in which mice could be the least of one’s worries. The only light comes shimmering from watertight observation windows in the pool, each enclosed in its private viewing booth, much like a peep show at an arcade, where according to an early real-estate brochure “admirers of the natatory arts may obtain, without themselves having to undergo immersion, educational views of the human form unrestricted by the demands of gravity.” Light from above the pool comes down through the water and through the observation windows and out into this darkened level below, a strange rarefied greenish blue.

  It was in one of these cubicles that the police found Lester’s corpse propped up as if gazing into the pool, where earlier a swimmer had noticed him and after a couple more laps, getting the picture, freaked out. According to the papers, a knife-blade of some sort had been driven with great force into Lester’s skull, apparently not by hand because part of the tang still protruded from Lester’s forehead. The absence of a knife-handle suggested a spring-propelled ballistic blade, illegal in the U.S. since 1986, though said to be standard issue for Russian special forces. The Post, for whom the Cold War still emits a warm nostalgic glow, loves stories like this, so the screaming began, KGB assassination squads running loose through the city and so forth, and this sort of thing would go on for the better part of a week.

  When she saw the headline, “GONE BALLISTIC!,” Maxine rang up Rocky Slagiatt. “Your ol’ Spetsnaz buddy Igor Dashkov. He would’t happen to know anything about this.”

  “Already asked him. He says that knife is a urban myth. He was in the Spetsnaz for about a century and never saw one.”

  “Not quite my question, but—”

  “Hey. Wouldn’t rule out a Russian hit. On the other hand . . .”

  Right. Wouldn’t rule out somebody trying to set it up to look like a Russian hit, either.

  The crime scene itself here, meanwhile, looks pretty picked over. There’s yellow tape around, and chalk marks, along with discarded plastic evidence pouches and cigarette butts and fast-food packaging. Ignoring a background haze of cop aftershave, tobacco smoke, stomach effluxes from neighborhood saloons, crime-lab solvents, fingerprint powder, luminol—

  “Wait, you can smell luminol? Isn’t it supposed to be odorless?”

  “Nah. Notes of pencil shavings, hibiscus, number-two diesel, mayonnaise—”

  “Excuse me, that’s wine-maven talk.”

  “Oops . . .”

  Filtering, howsoever, these other odors out, Conkling enters orbit around the central fact of the stiff that was here, that in the one professional sense is still here, problematical now because of what forensic Noses like to call the deathmask, the way the indoles of bodily decay assume precedence over all other notes that might be present. There are differential techniques for getting around this, of course, one attends oddly furtive all-weekend seminars in New Jersey to learn them, sometimes these have practical value, sometimes it’s all just New Age gobbledygook from the eighties that the gurus presiding have found it difficult to move comfortably on from, thus allowing the ever-hopeful attendee to flush another $139.95 plus tax into the soil stack of his fiscal affairs. Half of it IRS-allowable, but usually, vaguely, a disappointment.

  “Just do a grab, here—” Conkling going in his duffel and pulling out some heavy-duty plastic bags and a little pocket-size unit and a plastic fitting.

  “What’s that?”

  “Air-sampling pump—cute, huh? Runs off a rechargeable battery. Just going to take a couple liters here.”

  Waiting till they step out of the guest or freight elevator onto the street, the clamoring, soiled, innocent street, “So . . . what did you smell up there?”

  “Nothing too unusual, except . . . before NYPD got there, before the gunsmoke, a scent, maybe a cologne, I can’t ID right offhand, commercial, maybe from a few years back . . .”

  “Somebody who was there.”

  Emerging from a moment of thought, “Actually I think it’s time to go check the library.”

  Meaning, it turns out, Conkling’s own extensive collection of vintage perfumes, which Conkling keeps at his crib in Chelsea, where the first thing Maxine notices is a glossy black instrument sitting in a battery charger among a number of dramatically oversize ferns which may have mutated because of the apparatus in their midst, humming in more than one key, red and green LEDs glowing and blinking here and there, with a Clint Eastwood–size pistol grip and a long discharge cone. A creature hidden in jungle foliage, staring at her.

  “This is the Naser,” Conkling introduces them, “or olfactory laser.” Going on to explain that odors can be regarded as if they had periodic waveforms, like sound or light. The everyday human nose receives all smells in a jumble, like the eye receives the frequencies of incoherent light. “The Naser here can separate these into component ‘notes,’ isolate and put each in phase, causing it to ‘cohere,’ then amplify as needed.”

  Sounds a little West Coast, though the object looks intimidating enough. “This is a weapon? it . . . it’s dangerous?”

  “In the same way,” Conkling supposes, “that sniffing pure rose attar will turn your brain into red Jell-O. Don’t want to be messing with no Naser, necessarily.”

  “Can you, like, just set it on ‘Stun’?”

  “If I have to use it at all, it means I’ve made a mistake.” He goes over to a glass-fronted cabinet full of flasks and atomizers, custom and commercial. “This scent—it’s not one I could place immediately, not fresh soap so much as disinfectant. Not tobacco so much as stale cigarette butts. Some civet maybe, but Kouros it ain’t. Nonhuman urine as well.” Maxine recognizes this as magician’s patter. Conkling opens one of the cabinet doors and reaches out a four-ounce spray bottle, holds it about a foot from his nose, and without hitting the plunger appears to inhale slightly. “Whooboy. Yep, this is it. Check it out.”

  “‘9:30’,” Maxine reads from the label, “‘Men’s Cologne.’ Wait, is this the 9:30 Club down in D.C.?”

  “The same, although it’s no longer at the old F Street address, where it was located when this stuff was sold, back in the late eighties sometime.”

  “That’s a while. This must be the last bottle in town.”

  “You never know. Even an example like this that comes and goes, there can still be thousands of gallons out there in the original packaging, just waiting to be found by scent collectors, nostalgists, in this case unreconstructed punk rockers, and don’t rule out the insane. The original manufacturer got bought by somebody else, and 9:30 if I remember right was then relicensed. So we’re pre
tty much left with the secondary market, discount houses, ads in the trades, eBay.”

  “How important is this?”

  “It’s the chronology that’s bothering me here—too close to the gunsmoke not to be part of the event. If they’ve brought in Jabbering Jay Moskowitz on this, then he already knows of the connection, meaning so does everybody in the NYPD including meter readers. Jay is a top forensic Nose but isn’t always clear on how professionally to share information.”

  “So . . . a guy wearing this . . .”

  “Don’t rule out a woman who might have been in close contact with a man wearing it. Someday there’ll be search engines you can just input a little spritz of anything and voilà, nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, the whole story will be there on the screen before you can scratch your head in amazement. Meantime there’s the Nose community. Anecdotal material. I’ll ask around.”

  There arrives the usual moment of awkward silence. Conkling still has an erection but, as if it’s hardware he’s lost the manual to, is hesitant about deploying it. Maxine herself is of two minds. Something seems to be going on that nobody’s telling her. The moment, howsoever, passes, and before she knows it, she’s back at the office. Ah well, as Scarlett O’Hara observes at the end of the movie . . .

  • • •

  SHE DREAMS SHE’S ALONE on the top floor of The Deseret, by the pool. Under the unnaturally smooth surface, visible through the optically perfect water, almost as an afterthought to the anxious vacancy of the space, a male Caucasian corpse in a suit and tie stretches face-up full length on the bottom as if taking a break from afterlife affairs, rolling, in some eerie semisleep, from one side to another. It is Lester Traipse, and it isn’t. When she leans over the edge to get a closer look, his eyes open and he recognizes her. He doesn’t have to rise up through the surface to speak, she can hear him from underwater. “Azrael,” is what he’s saying, and then again, with some urgency.

  “Gargamel’s cat?” Maxine inquires, “like on the Smurfs?”

  No, and the disappointment in Lester/not-Lester’s face tells her she should know better. In nonbiblical Jewish tradition, as she is perfectly aware, Azrael is the angel of death. In Islam also, for that matter . . . And briefly she is back in the corridor, Gabriel Ice’s guarded mystery tunnel out in Montauk. Why? would be an interesting question to pursue, except that Giuliani, in his tireless quest for quality infrastructure, has caused not one but several jackhammers to start up well before working hours, figuring the taxpayers won’t object to the extra overtime pay, and any message is corrupted, fragmented, lost.

  19

  Meantime Heidi, back from Comic-Con in San Diego, her head still teeming with superheroes, monsters, sorcerers, and zombies, has been visited by NYPD detectives looking into the address books of Heidi’s old ex-fiancé Evan Strubel, who has recently been run in on charges of aggravated computer tampering, in connection with a federal insider-trading beef. Heidi’s first thought is, He still has me in his Rolodex?

  “You two were romantically involved?”

  “Not romantically. Baroquely maybe. Years ago.”

  “Was that before or after he got married?”

  “Thought you guys were from the precinct, not the Adultery Squad.”

  “Pretty touchy,” it seems to the Bad Cop.

  “Yep, and feely too,” Heidi snaps back. “What’s it to you, Your Eminence?”

  “Just trying to get a chronology,” soothes the Good Cop. “Whatever you’re comfortable sharing, Heidi.”

  “‘Sharing,’ yo, Geraldo, I thought you got canceled.”

  And so forth, sort of like police handball.

  As they are about to leave, Heidi finds the Bad Cop beaming strangely at her. “Oh, and Heidi . . .”

  “Yes, Detective”— pretending to search her memory—“Nozzoli.”

  “These chick flicks from the fifties? Ever watch any of those?”

  “On the movie channels now and then,” Heidi somehow unable not to bat her eyelashes, “sure, I guess, who wants to know?”

  “There’s a Douglas Sirk festival next week down at the Angelika, and if you’re interested, maybe we could go grab some coffee first, or—”

  “Excuse me. Are you asking me—”

  “Unless you’re ‘married,’ of course.”

  “Oh, these days they allow married women to drink coffee, it even gets written into prenups.”

  “Heidi,” Maxine, when she hears this, sighs as always, “desperate, unreflective Heidi, this Detective Nozzoli, he’s, ah, he’s married himself?”

  “You are so the jaded cynic of the universe!” cries Heidi, “It could be George Clooney and you would find something wrong!”

  “An innocent question, what.”

  “We went to see Written on the Wind (1956)” Heidi continues as if gone starry-eyed remembering, “and whenever Dorothy Malone came on the screen? Carmine got a hardon. A big one.”

  “Don’t tell me—the old penis-in-the popcorn-box-routine. Just to keep in the fifties spirit.”

  “Maxi, hopelessly-West-Side-liberal Maxi, if you only knew what you were missing with these law-enforcement guys. Believe me, once you’ve tried cop, you never want to stop.”

  “Yes but tell me Heidi, what happened to your obsession with Arnold Vosloo from The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, and, and the interviews you keep trying to set up with his office—”

  “Envy,” supposes Heidi, “is so often all that stands between some of us and a sad, empty life.”

  Today Maxine is halfway through her file of take-out menus when Heidi sticks her head in with the latest episode of a continuing purse drama. Having survived an identity crisis brought on by her old Coach model, which has had observers attentive to bag signifiers mistaking her for various sorts of Asian, she is now deep in the basic princessly exercise of whether to go for a class image with Longchamps, for example, and live with never being able to find anything inside it, or schlep around a more comparmentalized model and accept a slight downgrade to her hipness rating.

  “But that’s history now, Carmine bless him has solved all that.”

  “Carmine is . . . he’s some kind of . . . purse fetishist, Heidi?”

  “No, but the man does pay attention. Look, check out what he bought me.” It’s an inexpensive tote in some autumnal print, with a gold-tone heart on it. “Fall and winter, right? Now watch.” Heidi reaches inside and turns the whole thing inside out, presenting a totally different bag, light-colored and floral. “Spring and summer! it’s convertible! you get a twofer, see?”

  “How inventive. A bipolar bag.”

  “And well then of course it’s a piece of living history also.” Down in one corner Maxine reads MADE ESPECIALLY FOR YOU BY MONICA.

  “New one on me, unless . . . oh. No, Heidi, wait. ‘Monica’. He didn’t get this at, at Bendel’s?”

  “Yep, right off the truck—it’s the ol’ Portly Pepperpot herself. Do you realize what this will fetch on eBay in a couple of years?”

  “A Monica Lewinsky original. Tough call, but I’d err on the side of good taste is timeless.”

  “And who’d know better than you Maxi, all the seasons you’ve seen come and go.”

  “Oh but of course it’s a hint isn’t it, Carmine is suggesting a particular act, now let me think, what can that be, something you may not’ve been all that eager to perform . . .”

  It’s a fairly lightweight handbag, but Heidi does her best to assault Maxine with it in a meaningful way. They chase around the apartment screaming for a while before deciding to take a supper break and order in from Ning Xia Happy Life, whose take-out menus keep getting shoved under everybody’s back door.

  Heidi squints at the options. “There’s a breakfast menu? Long March Szechuan Muesli? Magic Goji Longevity Shake? what, excuse me, the fuck?”

  The delivery guy who shows up is not Chinese but Latino, which gets Heidi further confused. “Seguro usted tiene el correcto apartmento? We were waiting for a Chinese deli
very? Foodo Chineso?”

  Unpacking the bags, they can’t remember ordering half of it. “Here, try this,” passing Heidi a dubious egg roll.

  “Strange . . . exotic burst of flavor . . . This is . . . meat? what kind, do you suppose?”

  Pretending to look at the menu, “All it said was ‘Benji Roll’? Sounded intriguing, so—”

  “Dog!” Heidi jumping up and running over to the sink to spit out what she can. “Oh God! Those people eat dog over there! You ordered this, how could you? You never saw the movie? What kind of a childhood did you— Aaaahhh!”

  Maxine shrugs. “You want me to help induce vomiting, or can you remember how to do that OK?”

  The Twelve Flavors Drunken Squid is a little overdone. They settle for dropping pieces from different heights onto their plates to see how high they’ll bounce. The Green Jade Energetic Surprise comes in a plastic container molded to look like a jade box from the Qing dynasty. “The surprise,” Heidi nervously, “is a shrunken head inside.” It turns out to be mostly broccoli. The Gang of Four Vegetarian Combo, on the other hand, is exquisite, if mysterious. Anybody eating it at the physical Ning Xia restaurant impulsive enough to ask what’s in it will only get a glare. The Chinese fortune-cookie fortunes are even more problematic.

  “‘He is not who he seems to be,’” Heidi reads.

  “Carmine, obviously. Oh, Heidi.”

  “Please. It’s a fortune cookie, Maxi.”

  Maxine cracks open her cookie. “‘Even the ox may bear violence in his heart.’ What?”

  “Horst, obviously.”

  “Nah. Could be anybody.”

  “Horst never got . . . abusive with you, or anything . . . ?”