Bleeding Edge (19 page)

Maxine doesn’t think of herself as especially timid, she’s walked into fund-raisers wearing the wrong accessories, driven overseas in rental cars with alien gearshifts, prevailed in beefs with bill collectors, arms dealers, and barking-mad Republicans without much hesitation bodily or spiritual. But now as she steps through the door, the interesting question arises, Maxine, are you out of your fucking mind? For centuries they’ve
been trying to indoctrinate girls with stories about Bluebeard’s Castle, and here she is once more, ignoring all that sound advice. Somewhere ahead lies a confidential space, unaccounted for, resisting analysis, a fatality for wandering into which is what got her kicked out of the profession to begin with and will maybe someday get her dead. Up in the world, it is the bright middle of a summer day with birds under the eaves and yellowjackets in the gardens and the smell of pine trees. Down here it’s cold, an industrial cold she feels all the way to her toenails. Isn’t only that Ice doesn’t want her here. She knows, without knowing the reasons, that this is about the last door she should ever have stepped through.

She finds a long corridor, swept, austere, track lighting at wide intervals, shadows where they shouldn’t be, leading—unless she’s turned around somehow—toward the abandoned air base with the big radar antenna. Whatever’s at the other end down here, across the fence, Gabriel Ice’s access to it is important enough to be protected by a key code, making this likely more than some rich guy’s innocent hobby.

She moves cautiously in, a trespasser’s timer blinking silently in her head. Some of the doors along the corridor are shut and locked, some are open, the rooms behind them empty in a chill and unnaturally tended way, as if bad history could be stabilized somehow and preserved for decades. Unless of course this is simply protected office space in here, some physical version of the dark archive at hashslingrz that Eric has been looking into. It smells like bleach, as if recently disinfected. Concrete floors, channels leading to drains set at low points. Steel beams overhead, with fittings whose purpose she can’t or doesn’t want to figure out. No furniture except for gray Formica office tables and folding chairs. Some 220-volt wall outlets, but no sign of heavy appliances.

Has all the hair spray been somehow turning her head into an antenna? She’s begun to hear whispering that soon resolves into radio traffic of some kind—looks around for speakers, can’t locate any, yet the air is increasingly full of numerals and NATO phonetic letters including Whiskey, Tango, and Foxtrot, affectless voices distorted by radio
interference, crosstalk, bursts of solar noise . . . occasionally a phrase in English she’s never fast enough to catch.

She has come to a stairwell descending even deeper into the terminal moraine. Further than she can see. Her coordinates all at once shift ninety degrees, so that she can’t tell now if she’s staring vertically down uncountable levels or straight ahead down another long hallway. It lasts only a heartbeat, but how long dos it have to? She imagines somebody’s idea of Cold War salvation down there, carefully situated at this American dead end, some faith in brute depth, some prayerful confidence that a blessed few would survive, beat the end of the world and the welcoming-in of the Void . . .

Oh shit, what’s this— at the next landing down, something’s poised, vibrating, looking up at her . . . in this light it isn’t easy to say, she hopes she’s only hallucinating, something alive yet too small to be a security person . . . not a guard animal . . . no . . . a child? Something in a child-size fatigue uniform, approaching her now with wary and lethal grace, rising as if on wings, its eyes too visible in the gloom, too pale, almost white . . .

The timer in her head goes off, jangling, urgent. Somehow, reaching for the Beretta right now will not be a wise idea. “All right Air Jordans—do your stuff!” She turns and sprints back up the corridor, back through the door she shouldn’t have opened, back into the wine cellar to find Randy, who’s been looking for her.

“You OK?”

Depending on how you define OK. “This Vosne-Romanée here, I was wondering . . .”

“Year don’t matter much, grab it, let’s go.” For a wine thief, Randy is suddenly not acting too suave here. They scramble into the rig and head out the way they came. Randy is silent till they reach the lighthouse, as if he saw something back at Ice’s too.

“Listen, do you ever get up to Yonkers at all? My wife’s family’s up there, and sometimes I’ll do some shootin at this li’l ladies’ target range called Sensibility—”

“‘Men always welcome’, sure, I know it, fact I’m a member.”

“Well, maybe I’ll catch you there sometime?”

“Lookin forward, Randy.”

“Don’t forget your burgundy there.”

“Um . . . you were talking earlier about karma, maybe you should just go on ahead, take it.”

•   •   •

SHE DOESN’T EXACTLY PEEL OUT,
but neither does she dawdle, casting anxious glances in the mirror at least till about Stony Brook. Roll on, four-wheeler, roll on. Talk about fools’ errands. Vip Epperdew’s last known address a charcoal ruin, Gabriel Ice’s compound ostentatious and unsurprising, except for a mystery corridor and something in it she doesn’t want to know if she even saw. So . . . maybe she can deduct some of this, midsize daily rate, credit-card discount, one tank of gas, buck and a quarter a gallon, see if they’ll go for $1.50. . . .

Just before the country station goes out of range, on comes the Droolin Floyd Womack classic,

Oh, my brain, it’s

Lately started throbbin, and

Now and then, it’s also

uh, squirmin too . . .

and my

precious sleep at night, it’s robbin,

’Cause it’s throb-

bin, squirmin, just for you.

[female backup] Why, does, it

squirm? why does it

Throb, I wonder?

[Floyd] Uh, tell me please, it’s driving

Me insane . . .

Can it be, some

evil spell I’m under? Oh be

Still, you squirmin,

Uh, throbbin brain . . .

That night she dreams the usual Manhattan-though-not-exactly she has visited often in dreams, where, if you go far enough out any avenue, the familiar grid begins to break down, get wobbly and interwoven with suburban arterials, until she arrives at a theme shopping mall which she understands has been deliberately designed to look like the aftermath of a terrible Third World battle, charred and dilapidated, abandoned hovels and burned-out concrete foundations set in a natural amphitheater so that two or more levels of shops run up a fairly steep slope, everything sorrowful rust and sepia, and yet here at these carefully distressed outdoor cafés sit yuppie shoppers out having a cheerful cup of tea, ordering yuppie sandwiches stuffed full of arugula and goat cheese, behaving no differently than if they were at Woodbury Common or Paramus. She is supposed to be meeting Heidi here but abruptly finds herself at nightfall on a path through some woods. Light flickers ahead. She smells smoke with a strong toxic element, plastic, drug-lab fixins, who knows? comes around a bend in the path and there is the house from the Vip Epperdew videotape, on fire—black smoke in knots and whorls, battered among acid-orange flames, pouring upward to merge with a starless overcast. No neighbors have assembled to watch. No sirens growing louder in the distance. Nobody coming to put the fire out or to rescue whoever might still be inside, not Vip but, somehow, this time, Lester Traipse. Maxine stands paralyzed in the jagged light, running through her options and responsibilities. The burning is violent, all-consuming, the heat too fierce to approach. Even at this distance, she feels her oxygen supply being taken. Why Lester? She wakes with this feeling of urgency, knowing she has to do something, but can’t see what.

The day as usual comes sloshing in on her. Pretty soon she’s up to her ears in tax dodges, greedy little hotshots dreaming about some big
score, spreadsheets she can’t make sense of. About lunchtime Heidi sticks her head in.

“Just the pop-culture brain I was looking to pick.” They go grab a quick salad at a deli around the corner. “Heidi, tell me again about the Montauk Project.”

“Been around since the eighties, part of the American vernacular by now. Next year they’ll be opening the old air station to tourists. There’s already companies running tour buses.”

“What?”

“Another form of everything ends up as a Broadway musical.”

“So nobody takes the Montauk Project seriously anymore, you’re saying.”

A dramatic sigh. “Maxi, earnest Maxi, forensic as always. These urban myths can be attractors, they pick up little fragments of strangeness from everywhere, after a while nobody can look at the whole thing and believe it all, it’s too unstructured. But somehow we’ll still cherry-pick for the intriguing pieces, God forbid we should be taken in of course, we’re too hip for that, and yet there’s no final proof that some of it
isn’t
true. Pros and cons, and it all degenerates into arguments on the Internet, flaming, trolling, threads that only lead deeper into the labyrinth.”

Nor, it occurs to Maxine, does touristy mean detoxified, necessarily. She knows people who go to Poland in the summer on Nazi-death-camp tour packages. Complimentary Polish Mad Dogs on the bus. Out in Montauk there could be funseekers infesting every square inch of surface area, while underneath their idle feet, whatever it is, whatever Ice’s tunnel connects with, goes on.

“If you’re not eating that . . .”

“Fress, Heidi, fress, please. I wasn’t as hungry as I thought.”

L
ater in the afternoon, the sky begins to gather a lurid yellow tinge. Something’s on the way in from across the river. Maxine puts on Big Apple news traffic and weather station WYUP, and after the usual string of fast-mouth commercials, each more offensive than the last, on comes the familiar teletype theme and a male voice, “You give us thirty-two minutes—you don’t get it back.”

Seeming a bit too chirpy for the material, a newslady announces, “A body found today in a deluxe Upper West Side apartment building has been identified as Lester Traipse, a well-known Silicon Alley entrepreneur . . . an apparent suicide, though police say murder isn’t being ruled out.”

“Meanwhile, week-old Baby Ashley, rescued yesterday from a dumpster in Queens, is doing well, according to—”

“No,” the way someone much older and more demented might shout back at the radio, “fuck no, you stupid bitch, not Lester.” She just talked to him. He’s supposed to be alive.

She has seen the main sequence of embezzlers’ remorse, tearful press interviews, sidewise please-hit-me glances, sudden onsets of nerve pain, but Lester is, was, one of those rare specimens, he was trying to
pay back what he took, to mensch up, seldom if ever do guys like this cancel their own series. . .

Leaving what? Maxine feels an unwelcome prickling along her jawline. None of the conclusions she’s jumping to here look good. The Deseret? The Fucking Deseret? Something wrong with taking Lester over to Fresh Kills and leaving him on the landfill?

She finds herself gazing out the window. She squints past roofline contours, vents, skylights, water tanks and cornices under this pre-storm lighting, shining as if already wet against the darkening sky, down the street to where the cursed Deseret rears above Broadway, one or two storm-nervous lights already on, its stonework at this distance seeming too uncleansable, its shadows too many, ever to breach.

Insanely she begins to blame herself. Because she found Ice’s tunnel. Ran away from whatever was approaching. It’s Ice getting even, coming after her now.

•   •   •

IT DOESN’T HELP MUCH WHEN,
later in the evening, she’s out in the rain and sees Lester Traipse across the street, going down into the subway at Broadway and 79th, in the company of a blond bombshell of a certain age. Sure that this blonde is somehow Lester’s handler, that they’ve been up on the surface for a while, taking care of business, and now she’s bringing him back underneath, Maxine goes sprinting across the most dangerous intersection in the city, and by the time she gets through the moving obstacle course of murderous drivers sending up careless wings of filthy water and down to the subway platform, Lester and the blonde are nowhere to be seen in any direction. Of course, in NYC it is not uncommon to catch sight of a face that you know, beyond all argument, belongs to somebody no longer among the living, and sometimes when it catches you staring, this other face may begin to recognize yours as well, and 99% of the time you turn out to be strangers.

Next morning, after a shiftily insomniac night punctuated with dream clips, she shows up at her appointment with Shawn in something
of a state. “I was like, ‘Lester?’ just about to yell across the street something stupid, you’re supposed to be dead or something.”

“First thing to suspect is,” Shawn advises, “is that your memory’s going?”

“No, uh-uh, this was Lester and nobody else.”

“Well . . . I guess it happens sometimes. Ordinary unenlightened folks just like you, no special gifts or netheen, will see through all the illusion, just as well as a master with, like, years of training? And what they’re able to see is, is the real person, the ‘face before the face’ we call it in Zen, and maybe then they attach some more familiar face to it?”

“Shawn, that’s very helpful, thank you, but suppose it really
was
Lester?”

“Uh huh well was he walking in, like, third ballet position, by any chance?”

“Not cute, Shawn, the guy just—”

“What? Died? Didn’t die? Made the news on WYUP? Got on the subway with some unidentified babe? Make up your mind.”

In his ads, stuck to every newspaper machine in the city, Shawn promises, “Guaranteed No Use Of Kyosaku,” these being the wooden “warning sticks” Soto Zen instructors use to focus your attention. So instead of hitting people, Shawn gets abusive with remarks. Maxine emerges from the session feeling like she’s been one-on-one with Shaquille O’Neal.

In the outer office she finds another client waiting, light gray suit, pale raspberry shirt, tie and matching handkerchief in deep orchid. For a minute she thinks it’s Alex Trebek. Shawn sticks his head out, gets all congenial. “Maxine, meet Conkling Speedwell, someday you’ll think it was fate, but it’s really just me being a busybody.”

“Sorry if I cut in on your session,” Maxine shaking hands, taking note of the guy’s you could say agendaless grip, something rarely met with in this town.

“Buy me lunch sometime.”

Enough with Lester for a while. He can wait. He has all the time in the world now. Pretending to consult her watch, “How’s today looking?”

“Better than it was.”

OK. “You know Daphne and Wilma’s, down the street?”

“Sure, nice odor dynamic there. About one?”

Odor what? Turns out Conkling is a freelance professional Nose, having been born with a sense of smell far more calibrated than the rest of us normals enjoy. He’s been known to follow an intriguing
sillage
for dozens of city blocks before finding the source is a dentist’s wife from Valley Stream. He believes in a dedicated circle of hell for anybody who shows up at dinner or for that matter enters an elevator wearing an inappropriate scent. Dogs he hasn’t met formally come up to him with inquiring looks. “A negotiable talent, sometimes a curse.”

“So tell me, what am I wearing today?”

He’s already smiling, shaking his head slightly, avoiding eye contact. Maxine understands that whatever this gift is, he doesn’t go around showing it off.

“On second thought . . .”

“Too late.” Some kind of jive nose manipulation, as if clearing his passages. “OK—first of all, it’s from Florence . . .”

Uh-oh.

“The Officina in Santa Maria Novella, and you have on the original Medici formulation, Number 1611.”

Aware that her mouth has dropped open a few millimeters further than she would like, “Don’t tell me how you do it, don’t, it’s like card tricks, I don’t want to know.”

“I seldom run into that many Officina persons actually.”

“More of them around than you’d think. You wander into this beautiful high old room full of these scents, people who’ve been to Florence a hundred times never heard of the place, you start to think maybe it’s your own secret discovery—then suddenly, shopper’s nightmare, it’s all over town.”

“People who wouldn’t know a floral from a chypre,” sympathetic. “Drives you nuts.”

“And . . . being a Nose . . . it’s nice work, the pay’s good?”

“Well, most of it’s with the larger corporations, we all keep revolving firm to firm, after a while you begin to notice the companies changing hands, getting restructured, just like the classic scents do, then you’re out on the bricks again. For years it never occurred to me this might be what our mutual guru calls a message from beyond. ‘Who is the person without rank, who goes in and out through the portals of the face?’ is how he put it.”

“He gave me that one too.”

“‘Portals’ is supposed to mean eyes, but right away I figured nostrils, the koan turned out to be spot-on, gave me some room to think, and nowadays I’m freelance, my waiting list for new clients is about six months, which is longer than any of those company jobs ever lasted.”

“And Shawn . . . ”

“Steers an occasional client my way, takes a small fee. Enough to cover his Erolfa bill, which he tends to bathe in. Usual thing.”

“In the Nose business. You have your own perfume line, or . . . ?”

He seems embarrassed. “More like an investigative agency.”

Aahhh! “A private Nose.”

“It gets worse. 90 percent of my business is matrimonial.”

What else? “Goodness. How . . . would something like that work?”

“Oh, they show up, ‘Smell my husband, my wife, tell me who they’ve been with, what’d they have for lunch, how many drinks, are they doing drugs, is there oral sex—’ that seems to be the top FAQ—and so forth. Thing is, it’s all in time sequence, each indication layered on top of the one before. You can put together a chronology.”

“Strangely enough”—is this such a good idea?—“there’s this situation I’ve had come up . . . Do you mind if I just pick your— let me put that another way, could one of you Nose people go in to a crime scene, like a police psychic, give it a snort, and reconstruct what went on?”

“Sure, Nasal Forensics. Moskowitz, De Anzoli, couple others, they specialize in that.”

“How about you?”

Conkling angles his head, she’d have to say charmingly, and takes a minute. “Cops and me . . . You run a nasal scan, the boys get paranoid, they think maybe you’re scanning them too, snorting into all those deep cop secrets. So we always end up at cross-purposes.”

“This is never a problem for Moskowitz and them?”

“Moskowitz is a decorated bunco-squad veteran, De Anzoli has a D.Crim., and there’s family members also on the job, it’s a culture of trust. Me, I’m more comfortable as an independent.”

“Oh, I can relate.” She points her face across the room and then slides her eyeballs sideways to look at him. “Unless you already smelled that about me also?”

“Like is there some notorious pheromone, kicks in whenever—Wait, rewind, now you’re gonna think—”

Maxine beams brightly and sips her Sudden Enlightenment Organic Bamboo tea. “Sure must make dating complicated, this snoot of yours.”

“Is why I can generally keep quiet about it. Except when Shawn tries to fix me up.”

They have a look at each other. Over the past year, Maxine has been out with hat fetishists, day traders, pool sharks, private-equity hotshots, and seldom has she been visited by anxieties about seeing any of them again. Now, a little bit late for it, she remembers to check out Conkling’s left hand, which proves, like her own, to be innocent of a ring.

He catches her looking. “I forgot to check your finger too. Awful, ain’t we.” Conkling has a boy and a girl in middle school who show up on weekends, and today’s Friday. “I mean, they have keys, but usually they find me there.”

“Yeah I’ve got to go punch back in too. Here, this is my home, office, beeper.”

“Here’s mine, and if you’re serious about a crime-scene job, I can either put you in touch with Moskowitz or . . .”

“Better if it was you.” She allows for a heartbeat and a half. “I don’t want to coordinate with the NYPD any more than I need to on this. Not that they ever take kindly to civilians poking their—sorry, I meant
inquiring into
police business.”

•   •   •

SO WHAT THEY DO
is meet for a noon swimming date at The Deseret pool, it having been proven scientifically, according to Conkling, that the human sense of smell tends to peak on average at 11:45
A.M.
Maxine wears some midrange Trish McEvoy scent that’s going to wash off anyway, so it shouldn’t freak her out beyond some proper perimeter if Conkling guesses right again.

Conkling seems to be fit, in a frequent-swimmer way. Today he’s wearing something from one of the WASP catalogs a couple sizes too big. Maxine resists any eyebrow commentary. She was expecting maybe a Speedo thong? She discreetly checks for dick size anyway, curious also about any reaction he might be having to how she looks in this number she has on today, a high-ticket reformatting of the LBD into a swimsuit, instead of the more or less disposable ones she gets through the mail in floral prints it is better not to think about . . . And whoop there it is. Isn’t it?

“Something, uh . . .”

“Oh I was just looking for uh, my goggles.”

“On your head?”

“Right.”

From its looks, The Deseret pool could be the oldest one in the city. Overhead you can see soaring into the chlorine-scented mists a huge segmented dome of some translucent early plastic, each piece concave and teardrop-shaped, separated by bronze-colored cames—during the daytime, whatever the sun’s angle, admitting the same verdigris light, its surface at nightfall growing ever more remote and less visible, vanishing before closing time into a wintry gray.

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.