Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

  This wasn’t settling well.

  “Mind doing some more investigating?”

  “I exist to serve,” she replied.

  “Okay. If Tanzer works from a computer, and who doesn’t, can you get to it and see what he’s got stored away there?”

  “I guess you didn’t realize, but I’m an expert hacker. I should be able to narrow down his IP address without any trouble.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Like eating cake, if I could eat cake. Meanwhile, I think I’ll also stop in on the divine Miss Eighteen one more time and see if she can identify the relationship between the Schmeltzerites and Tanzer.”

  I told her I thought that idea had merit. And with that, silence, and the departure of Marlene from the screen.

  So, the Schmeltzerites roll in money. And a great deal of money made Ratsy a very happy boy.

  CHAPTER 28

  HOME INVASION

  NOT FIVE MINUTES AFTER Maggie had departed, the door to my apartment shot open. The prophet Ezekiel stormed in and slammed the door. Eyes wide, hair awry, his head shifting quickly back and forth like a bird’s—he spotted me at my desk and strode over, a man on a mission.

  “Professor!” he blurted loud enough to be heard two blocks away. “Professor!”

  I looked up from my desk. “Zeke. What do you want?”

  “I heard that Ms. Maggie’s been meddling with the Schmeltzerites’ systems.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “I don’t know how I know, but I know that I know.”

  He removed his stocking cap and held it in both hands, fidgeting. For once he seemed bereft of words.

  I said, “You want to tell me something?”

  “I want to tell you they are not happy over there at that center where you’ve been snooping.”

  “Should this mean anything to me?”

  “I think so,” Mingus said. Before I could learn more, there was a loud knock on the door. Mingus’s head jolted back.

  “Sorry, Doc,” he said. “They had guns.”

  He dropped onto the couch and placed his head between his legs. He drifted off to the lands he traveled.

  I reached into the top drawer of my desk and extracted the .38 I’d traded for my bike and placed it in my pocket. Another insistent knock and I opened the door. On the other side stood Yitzi Menkies accompanied by two of the four box boys.

  “Hi, boys,” I said, looking at Yitzi’s mates. “Here for another ride around the park?” Both scowled. One of them bore a bandage spread across his swollen nose and a shiner on his left eye that wouldn’t heal much before the Ides of March. I gave him a light smack in the belly. “Remember the good times?” I asked.

  He glowered and apparently was considering vengeance, but Menkies gave him a sharp look that indicated that this was not the right time.

  “Next time, then,” I said, and smiled.

  “Don’t crap around,” said the Schmeltzerite Rebbe. He moved into my home, the other two following behind like a fading shadow “May I sit down?” Menkies asked.

  “You may not.”

  Menkies’s two associates stiffly parked themselves at military attention close enough to the door to prevent me from making a break. Menkies scanned the apartment.

  “You didn’t just happen to be walking the neighborhood, did you?” I said. “The dead rebbe come to you in a vision and suggest you come and interrupt my perfectly ordinary day, with Yin and Yang over there?”

  The two shifted position slightly.

  “I shouldn’t think you’d be so irritable, Nicky,” said Menkies. “It was you, after all, who invaded my organization’s privacy, spying on my bookkeeping. We came—”

  “It was you who sent these guys and two more to stuff me in the back of a Volkswagen?”

  “They weren’t going to kill you,” he said. “Only threaten you a little, scare you off the case. So it didn’t work. No hard feelings you shot one of my guys.”

  “The case? What do you care about the case?”

  Shifting the subject, he said, “The boys and I came to chat with you about this intrusion into my space, but I should add, not before installing an impenetrable firewall against further stunts. Your agent computer will not succeed in infiltrating our system a second time.” He folded his arms and stretched his height as much as possible. “What was it looking for?” he said, doing his best to simulate a tough guy.

  I considered my response.

  “Maybe you can answer a question for me, Yitzi.”

  He looked at me with incredulity.

  “Christ, Nicky, you’ve got balls. I’m here with enough muscle to dismember you and that oddity on the couch, and you fucking got questions for me?”

  He scratched the back of his head and once again scanned my books—I’d like to think reminiscing about our old yeshiva days.

  “All right, what’s the question?” he asked.

  I had the gun in my pocket. That afforded me some courage. The memory of me and Shmulie and a couple of others stuffing a screaming boy into his locker bolstered my confidence further.

  “My computer brought me some insight into your budget,” I said. “You pay yourself quite handsomely. And why not? It’s your show, soup to nuts.”

  “We do a lot of good work around the world,” he said, as if any good work the Schmeltzerites did, other than perhaps bolstering the Hawaiian-shirt industry, mitigated world-class fraud.

  “A very great deal of money seems to fall from out of nowhere straight into your coffers. A good bit of it disappears into a black box.”

  “Where our money comes from or where it goes is none of your affair.”

  “You’ll admit there’s a lot of it moving around over there at your HQ, like rain in a major hurricane,” I said.

  “We’re quite fortunate,” he said, attempting humility.

  An idea had been seeping through my more sensitive synapses since around the time Menkies yanked me away from 42 and shoved me out of his lunchroom.

  “Are you and Shmulie partners?”

  “Are we partners?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”

  Yitzi picked at his mustache, and I patted the gun in my pants pocket for reassurance, should it be required. The prophet Ezekiel mumbled something in his sleep.

  “If I had to guess,” I said, “I’d figure you guys’re taking care of something huge for him, and he pays you the cost of it, helps you with your own shit, and adds a surplus of twenty-five million per year for your troubles.”

  Yitzi continued picking at his mustache. Perhaps this wasn’t going the way he’d expected.

  A thin voice issued from the sound system. A much-diminished Maggie, seriously enervated, spoke. “Nick, Nick,” she said, coughing. “I caught a virus.”

  A virus? What the hell?

  “How did you get it?”

  “Ms. Eighteen. Not my friend, Nick. I was fooled.”

  Yitzi wore a malicious grin. “What did I tell you?” he asked. “After what happened earlier, I gave my system orders to pass on a delicious mix of electronic shit that would disable anything invading my space. Your system has been fatally compromised.”

  Somewhere during this exchange, the prophet Ezekiel bounced up and off the couch like a pink rubber ball flung against the side of a tenement, fully awake. “Professor, I’m sorry. They had guns,” he said.

  This interruption diverted Menkies. The two goons jumped. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the pistol. I pointed the gun at Yitzi’s head and said, “All right, Mush.” Yitzi flinched. “Get out of here. Take these two assholes and get the fuck out.” Pushing the gun hard into Menkies’s temple, I pulled back the hammer.

  For several long seconds he st
ood still, probably considering what a showdown might look like. But a funny look of triumph seized hold of his eyes. He’d lost some dignity, true, but had won the day, no doubt.

  He said, “Okay, boys, let’s get out of here. I’ve seen what I came to see.” Turning his attention to me, he said, “Nicky, I’d think twice before coming to my center, you or your machinery.” Picking his dignity up from the floor, he quickly led his two mongrels out of my apartment, back onto the streets of Brooklyn.

  “Wow,” said Ezekiel. “That was close.” He collapsed once again on the couch.

  I now had other concerns. The ailing Maggie, her moans filling my apartment, sounded weaker than even a moment ago. “What can I do, Maggie?” I asked.

  “Not sure, but must tell you something,” she replied like a dying man in an old war movie delivering one more message. “Tanzer . . . he works for them. Middleman. Shmulie and Schmeltzer, together . . . Tanzer, middleman. Tanzer, One I’d Man . . .”

  Maggie’s voice sputtered once more and was gone. The sound of exhaling air drenched the room. Marlene closed her eyes. With Maggie’s fading, so faded Marlene.

  ***

  Even a virulent computer virus was not necessarily fatal. Or so said Louise Rose, the head of IT at the university to whom I rushed Maggie’s limp body, so to speak, that afternoon.

  A couple of decades ago, Louise had been one of my students, though not my best. She wisely chose a field other than religious studies, a field at which she excelled and in which employment was plentiful. She wrote scholarship on the very issue that frequently brought Maggie and me to loggerheads—the meaning of being a member of the human race refracted through artificial intelligence.

  “I can probably clean it up and get it going again, Professor,” she told me as I stood in her lab. “But you have to understand,” she continued. “These AI machines roll off the assembly line somewhere in China already intricate as hell, and then on their own they create greater complexity still, which I imagine you’ve observed.”

  “The understatement of the century.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Like I say, I can almost certainly get it up and running again. But I can’t guarantee you’ll recognize it when I return it to you.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, surprised at my emotional reaction at the possibility of getting back something other than Maggie.

  “I mean, Professor, it’s like someone suffering a severe head trauma. When an accident victim who’s experienced a brain injury wakes up, many things can be different. Memory loss, loss of higher-level functioning, loss of identity, all kinds of cognitive impairments. With humans, with time and patience, many victims can be returned to some degree of what was normal. When an AI machine is damaged, you never know what’s been affected, and so the recovery may mimic severe loss of cognitive function. Or identity. You may not recognize what I return to you. We’ll see. I shall certainly do my best for you.”

  “Thanks, Louise. You’ll make it a priority? I’m in the middle of something important, and she’s essential in my researches.”

  “She?”

  “Definitely she.”

  “You’re fooling yourself, Professor Friedman. I’ve seen this before, though I can’t relate. I’m too much of a skeptic. To my simple mind, it’s not hard to know a person when I see one. What lies before me at the moment is not human. It’s just a souped-up quantum job in a wide screen. It came to you in a box from a factory in China. Even so, these AI machines do the most inexplicable things.”

  “Call me a fool. Resurrect my machine and I’ll be in your debt.”

  “Can you change the C you gave me in your Modern Jewish Thought class to an A?”

  “Don’t you think enough time’s passed since you took that course?”

  “Just a joke, Professor. I got my BS twenty years ago. The grade didn’t prevent me from getting into grad school, and here I am, head of IT.”

  “Lost my sense of humor for a moment. I’m really concerned about my computer. I’ve come to depend on her for many more things than I’d ever imagined. She’s become a friend.”

  “Let me get to work, Professor. We can talk philosophy another time. I hope to have something for you by the end of the day.”

  “Thanks. Talk to you later, then.”

  “Adios,” she said.

  I departed the lab and walked into the gray chill of late-afternoon Manhattan, heading to Track 42 at Grand Central and the Velvet Underground. I was heading for another meeting with my buddy Shelley Tanzer. I was fixated on the One-I’d Man conundrum, what or who it could be. The meaning of the Land of No Mind must have been constituted by that mentally vacuous region occupied by the proponents of a new so-called religion whose first commandment was “A blithering idiot shalt thou be.”

  CHAPTER 29

  THE KEY

  FOR THIS VISIT I took some precautions. In my back pocket I carried my adoptive pistol. Just a few blocks north of the university, I purchased two Deluxe Zap Lazar pistols for the price of one, each good for two shots.

  My entry in the VU transpired uneventfully. Once again, I met the police drone; rather than deal with any aggravation no matter how limited, I once again paid the price of admission and walked those darkened tunnels toward Shelley’s hovel. The few people I passed on my way manifested no special interest in my presence as they faded in and out of my sight.

  I found Shelley’s place easily and pulled back the door and entered without permission. For a moment, I was alone with all the Phantom of the Opera memorabilia.

  “Welcome back, Professor Friedman. So nice to see you again,” boomed Shelley from the darkness in the rear of his apartment.

  I looked around but couldn’t see him. “Come out, Shelley. We need to chat.”

  “I’m stayin’ where I am, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’d prefer not.”

  “What you want?”

  “The terms of your employment with the good folk in Lower Park Slope. I’d like to discuss them.”

  “With that monkey Menkies and his gang a happy idiots?”

  I sat and talked to the ceiling. “They pay you handsomely.”

  “Yeah, and they give me free Rebbe Toilet Paper. Some hot stuff, lemme tell you.”

  “I believe you receive a good deal more than that.”

  “Aright, maybe so. It’s none a your fucking business.”

  A refrain I’d been hearing a lot lately. “Sheldon, it’s become my business.”

  “It’s Shelley, Professor. No one calls me Sheldon, save Ma, and she’s dead.”

  I turned and there he was, his hair still a lengthy mess, arm in a sling. He wore an ankle-length smoking jacket, which, as best as I could tell in the semi-darkness, was maroon velvet. In his mouth sat an unlit pipe, bringing images of Hugh Hefner gone to seed.

  “Okay, Shelley, then. Shelley, what do you do for the Schmeltzerites to earn that enormous salary?”

  I stood and faced him. I stepped closer.

  “By the way, Professor, I’m happy to see you survived that little trick I played on you the other day. I kinda knew you would, you know?”

  “How?”

  “I just knew you would. I got my contacts up there just like everyone else. I knew you’d survive.”

  “What do you do for the Schmeltzerites, Shelley?”

  “Oh, you know, a little a this and a little a that.”

  “What do you do for them?”

  “Say, Professor, you wouldn’t want another cup a tea like the last time, would you?”

  “I think not, Shelley. I’ve sworn off peppermint tea. Your job. What is your job?”

  “Professor, I don’t owe you nothin’.”

  “I think maybe you do. I don’t want any tea, and I don’t want any bullshit. Tell me what you do for the Schmeltzerites and Shmulie Shimmer.”


  “I tole you last time, Shmulie’s sleepin’ with the fishies next to a couple old rusty Chevies.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Den where is da fat fart?”

  “I don’t know, but I think you do. Not only do you know where he is, you manage his money. That much you already told me.”

  Shelley took a step back and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, a little boy wilting beneath the unwelcome attention of a grown-up.

  “The truth, Shelley. I want the truth. You owe me the truth.”

  He removed the pipe from his mouth. Holding the bowl, he pointed the stem of it toward me. “I already said I don’t owe you nothin’. I got orders to feed you dose pills.”

  “Whose orders?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “Or won’t say . . .”

  “Have it your way, Prof.”

  “Who gave the order?”

  Tanzer looked hard at me, taking several long breaths before answering.

  “Menkies.”

  “Menkies?”

  “Yeah, him. He tole me put the triple dose in your tea.”

  At the time I drank that tea, Yitzi Menkies had appeared nowhere on my radar.

  “Which brings me back to my question,” I said. “What kind of work do you do for Menkies? It’s a lot of money he pays you. Enough to underwrite a revival of Phantom.”

  He looked to the ceiling as if in a reverie. “Broadway’s gonna make a comeback,” he said. Returning to planet Earth, he said, “How ya know how much he pays me?”

  “I have my sources. I’m asking the questions.” I was growing impatient. His actions had endangered my life—under orders, apparently, but he’d been a compliant fuck. I removed one of the Lazar pistols from my pocket and pointed it at Shelley’s forehead.

  “Easy, Professor! Put that damned thing away. They’re dangerous. You saw what it done to that guy here the other day.”

  “Damned right they’re dangerous.” I waved it. “Look, Shelley, I’m getting tired of this. I owe you nothing. You owe me everything.”