Bleeding Edge

by Pynchon, Thomas

  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—”

  “OK but suppose it is some kind of a dress rehearsal. Who’s the sharpshooter over on the other roof?”

  “Insurance to see that they go through with it?”

  “And on the other end of the phone that guy’s yelling into?”

  “Excuse me, you already know what I think. Those Stinger guys were talking English, my guess is civilian contractors, because that’s GOP ideology, whenever possible privatize—and when the spook sound labs have the dialogue all cleaned up and transcribed, those mercs are gonna be in some deep shit for not doing enough of a sweep of the roof. How did Reg get this to you, if I may ask?”

  “Over the transom.”

  “How do you know Reg sent it? Maybe it’s CIA.”

  “OK March it’s all a fake, I just came over here to waste your time. What do you advise, do nothing?”

  “No, we find out where this roof is, for starters.” They scan through the footage again. “OK, so that’s the river . . . that’s Jersey.”

  “Not Hoboken. No bridge, so it’s south of Fort Lee—”

  “Wait, freeze it. That’s the Port Imperial Marina. Sid goes in and out of there sometimes.”

  “March, I hate to even mention this, I’ve never been up there, but I have a creepy feeling about this roof, that . . .”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “. . . it’s the fuckin . . .”

  “Maxi?”

  “Deseret.”

  March squints at the screen. “Hard to tell, none of these angles are that clear. Could be any of a dozen buildings in that stretch of Broadway.”

  “Reg was stalking the place. Trust me, that’s where this was shot. Just something I know.”

  Carefully, as to a nutcase, “Maybe you only want it to be The Deseret?”

  “Because . . . ?”

  “It’s where they found Lester Traipse. Maybe you want to believe there’s a connection.”

  “Maybe there is, March, all my life the place has given me bad dreams, and them I’ve learned to trust.”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard to check out if it’s the same rooftop.”

  “I’m a regular on the freight elevator there, I’ll get you a guest pass for the pool, then we can figure a way on up to the roof.”

  • • •

  AFTER THREADING A MAZE of unfrequented hallways and fire stairs, they emerge into the open, high up near a catwalk between two sections of the building, suitable for teen adventurers, clandestine lovers, well-heeled wrongdoers on the run, and take this vertiginous crossover to a set of iron steps that bring them finally around up onto the roof, into the wind above the city.

  “Look sharp,” March ducking behind a vent. “Some gents with metal accessories.”

  Maxine crouches down next to her. “Yeah I’ve got their album, I think.”

  “Is it that missile crew again? What’s all that that they’re carrying?”

  “Doesn’t look like Stingers. Wouldn’t it be easier to just go over and ask them?”

  “Am I your husband, is this a gas station? Go on ahead, it makes you happy.”

  They have no sooner got to their feet when here comes yet another group stepping off the elevator.

  “Wait,” March angling her shades, “I know her, that’s Beverly, from the Tenants’ Association.”

  “March!” A wave too vigorous not to be prescription-drug-assisted. “Glad you’re here.”

  “Bev, what’s up?”

  “Scumbag co-op board again. Went behind everybody’s back, leased some space up here to a cellular-phone outfit. These guys,” indicating the work crew, “are trying to put in microwave antennas to irradiate the neighborhood. Somebody doesn’t stop em we’re all gonna end up with glow-in-the-dark brains.”

  “Count me in, Bev.”

  “March, um . . .”

  “Come on, Maxi, in or out, it’s your neighborhood too.”

  “OK, for a while, but that’s another guilt trip you owe me.”

  “For a while” of course turns out to be the rest of the day Maxine’s stuck on the roof. Every time she starts to leave, there’s a new mini-crisis, installers, supervisors, building management to argue with, then Eyewitness News shows up, shoots some footage, then more lawyers, late-rising picketers, flaneurs and sensation seekers drifting in and out of the picture, everybody with an opinion.

  In that slack corner of the afternoon when it’s too discouraging even to look at a clock, March, as if remembering she came up here to check for clues, stoops and picks up a screw cap of some kind, weathered gray, two-, two-and-a-half-inch diameter, dings here and there, some faded writing in marker pen. Maxine squints at it. “What’s this, Arabic?”

  “Has a sort of military look, doesn’t it?”

  “You think . . .”

  “Listen . . . do you mind if we show this to I
gor? Just a hunch.”

  “Igor could be some kind of criminal mastermind, you’re OK with that?”

  “Remember Kriechman, the slumlord?”

  “Sure. First time we met, you were picketing him.”

  “At some point a couple years later, business motives no doubt, Igor took a dislike, went up to Pound Ridge, introduced piranhas into the Doctor’s swimming pool.”

  “And they all became best friends forever?”

  “The message was conveyed, the Doctor ceased and desisted whatever it was and has been very well-mannered since then. So I’ve come to think of Igor as a benevolent mobster for whom real estate is only a sideline.”

  • • •

  THEY TAKE A MEETING in the ZiL, on its way through Manhattan from one piece of monkey business to another.

  “Sure, blast from past, part from Stinger missile launcher. Battery-coolant receptacle cap.”

  “You used to get shot at with Stingers,” March is thoughtful enough to point out.

  “Me, my friends, nothing personal. After Afghanistan, Stingers stayed there with mujahedeen, went on black market, many got bought back by CIA. I arranged a few deals, CIA didn’t care how much they spent, you could get up to $150,000 a pop.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Maxine sez. “Are there any of them still around?”

  “Plenty. Worldwide, maybe 60, 70,000 units plus Chinese knockoffs . . . Not so much in U.S., which makes this one interesting. Mind my asking—where’d you find it?”

  March and Maxine exchange a look. “What could hurt?” Maxine supposes.

  “Actually the last time somebody said that . . .”

  “You know you want to tell me,” Igor beams.

  They tell him, including a quick synopsis of the DVD. “And who videos this?”

  Turns out Reg and Igor have also done some business. They met in Moscow around the peak of the Russian-baby-adoption craze in the U.S., when Reg was taping eligible babies to help pediatricians stateside to advise prospective parents. Because of the potential for fraud here, the idea was not to have these babies just sit there and pose for close-ups but actually do things like reach for objects, roll or crawl around, which meant some direction or at least wrangling from Reg. “Very sympathetic young man. Great appreciation for Russian cinema. Always at Gorbushka Market buying up kilos of DVDs, piratstvo, of course, but no Hollywood movies, only Russian—Tarkovsky, Dziga Vertov, Lady with Little Dog, not to mention greatest animated film ever made, Yozhik v Tumane (1975).”

  Maxine hears spasmodic sniffling and looks in the front seat to find Misha and Grisha both with tears in their eyes and quivering lower lips. “They, ah, like that one too?”

  Igor shakes his head impatiently. “Hedgehogs, Russian thing, don’t ask.”

  “This writing on the battery cap, what’s it say, can you read it?”

  “Pashto, ‘God is great,’ maybe legit, maybe CIA forgery to look like mujahedeen, covering up some caper of their own.”

  “Well now that you’ve brought it up, there’s another . . .”

  “Let me read your mind. Spetsnaz knife, right?”

  “With the flying blade, that allegedly did in Lester Traipse—”

  “Poor Lester.” A strange mixture of compassion and warning in his face.

  “Uh-oh.” Yet another relationship here, it figures. “The knife story is a frame-up, I gather.”

  “Spetsnaz don’t shoot knives through air at people, Spetsnaz throw knives. Ballistic knife is weapon for chainik, with no throwing skills, afraid to get close up, wants to avoid gunshot noise. And—” pretending to hesitate “—blade they took out of Lester, OK, my distant cousin works downtown at Police Plaza, he saw it in property room, guess what. Fucking podyobka, totally, ain’t even Ostmark blade, maybe Chinese, maybe cheaper. Let’s hope someday I tell you more, but it still ain’t what Flintstones call page right out of history. Too much payback to deal with right now.”

  “Whatever you feel comfortable sharing, of course, Igor. Meantime, what are we supposed to be doing about the other weapon? The hi-tech one on the roof? Suppose there’s a clock on this?”

  “Mind letting me watch DVD? Simple nostalgia, you understand.”

  26

  Cornelia rings up and as previously threatened wants to go shopping. Maxine is expecting Bergdorf’s or Saks, but instead Cornelia hustles her into a cab and next thing she knows they’re headed for the Bronx. “I’ve always wanted to shop at Loehmann’s,” Cornelia explains.

  “But they never let you in because you . . . have to be accompanied by somebody Jewish?”

  “I’m offending you.”

  “Nothing personal. Little history, is all. You realize, I hope, that this is not the Loehmann’s of legend. That one moved, back in, I don’t know, late 80’s?”

  When Maxine and Heidi were girls, the store was still on Fordham Road, and every month or so their mothers would take them up there to learn how to shop. Loehmann’s in those days had a no-returns policy, so you had to get it right the first time. It was boot camp. Gave you discipline and reflexes. Heidi took to it as if in a previous life she had been a rag-trade superstar. “I feel like I’m weirdly home, that this is who I really am, I can’t explain it.”

  “I can,” Maxine said, “you’re a compulsive shopper.”

  For Maxine it was less cosmic. The changing room was short on privacy, what people liked to call “communal,” crowded with women in different stages of undress and attitude trying on clothes half of which didn’t fit but nevertheless offering free fashion advice to whoever looked like they needed it, meaning everybody. Like the locker room back at Julia Richman without the envy and paranoia. Now here’s this pearl-wearing WASP wants to drag her back into it all again.

  The new Loehmann’s has been moved northward, into a former skating rink, it seems, almost to Riverdale, right up against the relentless roar of the Deegan, and Maxine has to struggle not to let out a scream of recognition—same endless aisles of heaped and picked-over garments, same old notorious Back Room as well, stuffed, she bets, with the same buyers’ mistakes and horror-story prom gowns with sequins shedding everywhere. Cornelia, on the other hand, the minute she steps in the store, is under its spell. “Oh, Maxi! I love it!”

  “Yes, well . . .”

  “Meet you by the registers, say around one, we’ll go have lunch, OK?” Cornelia disappearing into a miasma of whatever formaldehyde product retailers put on garments to make them smell this way, and Maxine, feeling not exactly claustrophobic, more like flashback-intolerant, wanders outside again, into the streets, at least to see what’s what, and then remembers that only a little way up the Deegan, just over the Yonkers line, is Sensibility, the ladies’ shooting range she’s just mailed in another year’s membership dues to, and that for this excursion to Loehmann’s she has somehow remembered to bring along the Beretta.

  Hey. Cornelia will be hours. Maxine finds a cab letting off a fare, and twenty minutes later she’s all signed in at Sensibility, on the firing line in goggles, earplugs, and head muffs, with a convenience-store cup full of loose rounds, blasting away. Let the gamer have his zombies, Han Solo his TIE fighters, Elmer Fudd his elusive rabbit, for Maxine it has always been the iconic paper target figure known to cops as The Thug, here rendered in fuchsia and optical green. He has the look of an aging juvenile delinquent, with one of those shiny high-fifties haircuts, a scowl, and a possibly nearsighted squint. Today, even with his image cranked all the way back to the berm, she manages to place some nice groups in his head, chest, and, actually, dick area—which long ago may have been an issue, though after a while it seemed to Maxine the number of trouser wrinkles the artist shows radiating from the target’s crotch could be read as an invitation to shoot there as well. She takes some time practicing double taps. Pretends briefly—only a bit of fun, you know—that it’s Windust she’s shooting at.

  In the lobby on the way out, she’s at the pay phone calling a cab when who does she run into but her old
partner in wine theft, Randy, last seen driving away from the parking lot at the Montauk lighthouse. He seems a little preoccupied today. They withdraw to a settee beneath a mural-size screen grab from the opening of The Letter (1940) in which Bette Davis is pretending to pump six rounds into an uncredited though perhaps not altogether unthanked “David Newell.”

  “Guess what, that son of a bitch Ice? Pulled my access to his house. Somebody must’ve took a wine inventory. Got my license plates off the closed-circuit video.”

  “Bummer. No legal follow-ups, I hope.”

  “Not so far. Tell the truth, I’m just as happy to be clear of the place. Been hearing about some weird shit lately.” Strange lights at dark hours, visitors with funny-looking eyes, checks that bounce and come back with unreadable writing all over them. “Film crews showing up around Montauk suddenly from the paranormal channels. Cops pullin all kinds of overtime, working mysterious incidents includin that fire at Bruno and Shae’s place. I guess you heard about ol’ Westchester Willy by now?”

  “On the run’s the last I heard.”

  “He’s out in Utah.”

  “What?”

  “The three of em, I got some snail mail yesterday, they’re getting married. To each other.”

  “They didn’t just skip, they eloped?”

  “Here, check this out.” An engraved card featuring flowers, wedding bells, cupids, some kind of not-all-that-easy-to-make-out hippie typeface.

  Maxine, beginning to feel nauseous, reads as far as she has to. “This is an invitation to their shower, Randy? It’s what, legal in Utah for three people to get married?”