Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

“If it’s the right umbrella, you’re saying,” Heidi once sought to clarify.

“Picky Heidi, any umbrella, what would it matter?”

“Airhead Maxi, it could be Ted Bundy.”

Which this evening turns out to be something like that, actually. Maxine’s under some scaffolding waiting out a brief intensity in the downpour when she becomes aware of some kind of male presence. Umbrellas touch. Strangers in the night, exchanging— No wait, that’s something else.

“Evening, Ms. Tarnow.” He’s holding out a business card, which she recognizes as a copy of the same one Ernie passed on to her last night. This one she doesn’t take. “It’s OK, no GPS chip or anything.”

Oboy. The fucking voice, sonorous, overcoached, phony as a cold call on an answering machine. She flicks a sidelong glance. Fiftyish, midnight-brown shoes, Elaine’s idea of nice, trench coat with a high polyester content, ever since grade school exactly the kind of person everybody including herself has warned her to stay away from. So of course she starts in with the blurting.

“Already have one of these. This is you in person, Nicholas Windust, I don’t suppose you carry a federal ID, warrant or something? just being a careful citizen, understand, trying to do my part to fight crime?” When will she learn to dummy up? No wonder the Borderline Personality folks keep after her, their seasonal noodges are in fact paranoia-calibration updates and she ignores them at her peril. So what’s wrong with me, she wonders, am I some kind of a make-nice compulsive? Am I as desperate as Heidi always tells me I am?

He has flipped open meanwhile some pocket-size item of leather goods, flipped it shut again, it could be a Costco membership card, anything. “Look, you can really help us. If you wouldn’t mind coming down to the Federal Building, it shouldn’t take—”

“Are you fuckin insane?”

“OK, then how about La Cibaeña over on Amsterdam? I mean, you could still get drugged and abducted, but the coffee’s got to be better than it is downtown.”

“Five minutes,” she mutters. “Think of it as speed interrogating.” Why is she even allowing him that much? Need for parental approval, thirty, forty years down the line? Swell. Of course Ernie still believes the Rosenbergs were innocent and loathes the FBI and all clones thereof, while Elaine suffers from undiagnosed OY, or Obsessive Yenta syndrome. Besides which, something about him, relentless as a car alarm, is screaming Not Acceptable. James Bond has it easy, Brits can always fall back on accents, where you got your tux, a multivolume set of class signifiers. In New York all you have really is shoes.

At which point in her analysis the rain has let up a little and they’ve reached La Cibaeña Chinese-Dominican Café. This is my neighborhood, it belatedly occurs to her, what if somebody sees me here with this creep?

“You might want to try the General Tso’s catibias, they’re highly spoken of.”

“Pork, I’m Jewish, something in Leviticus, don’t ask.” Maxine is in fact hungry but orders only coffee. Windust wants a morir soñando and has a nice chat about this in Dominican dialect with the waitress.

“Fantastic morir soñando here,” he informs Maxine, “old Cibao recipe, handed down through the family for generations.”

Maxine happens to know it’s the owner going in the back and throwing Creamsicles in the blender. She considers letting Windust in on this and is instantly annoyed at how reflexively wiseassed it will sound. “So. This was about my brother-in-law? He’ll be back in a couple weeks, you can talk to him yourself.”

Windust exhales audibly through his nose, more in regret than annoyance. “You want to know what’s been getting the security community all nervous lately, Ms. Tarnow? It’s a piece of software called Promis, originally designed for federal prosecutors, to share data among the district courts. It works regardless of what language your files are written in, even what operating system you’re using. The Russian mob have been selling it to the rugriders, and more to the point, Mossad have been generously traveling all over the world helping local agencies install it, sometimes throwing in a krav maga course as a sales incentive.”

“And sometimes rugelach from the bakery, do I begin to detect a Jewphobic note here?” Something a little lopsided about his face, she notices, not sure what exactly, looks like it could have been in a couple of fights. A line or two, some nonnegotiable tension, the beginnings of that pitted texture men get sometimes. An unexpectedly precise mouth. The lips held together when he isn’t talking. No openmouthed expectancy around this one. His hair is still wet from the rain, cut short and plastered down, part on the right, going gray… Eyes that may have seen too much and should really be covered by shades…

“Hello?”

Not a good idea right now, Maxine, this drifting into thought. OK, “And because I’m Jewish, you figure I’ll want to hear about Jewish software? Some people-skills seminar they make you go to every review cycle perhaps.”

“No offense,” his smirk indicating otherwise, “but what’s disturbing about this Promis software is that there’s always a backdoor built in, so anytime it gets installed on a government computer anywhere in the world—law enforcement, intelligence, special ops—anybody who happens to know about this backdoor can just slip in through it and make themselves at home—wherever—and all manner of secrets get compromised. Not to mention there’s a couple of Israeli chips, highly sophisticated, which Mossad have been known to install at the same time, without necessarily informing the client. What these chips do is scavenge information even while the computer’s turned off, hold it till the Ofeq satellite comes over, then transmit everything out to it in a single data burst.”

“Oh, devious, these Jews.”

“Israel doesn’t spy on us? Remember the Pollard case back in 1985? Even left-wing papers like the New York Times carried that story, Ms. Tarnow.”

How right-wing, Maxine wonders, does a person have to be to think of the New York Times as a left-wing newspaper? “So Avram has been working on what then, the chips, the software?”

“We think he’s Mossad. Maybe not a graduate of Hertzliya but at least one of their civilian sleepers, what they call sayanim . Holding down a day job out here in the Diaspora, waiting for a call.”

Maxine looks at her watch, gathers her purse, and rises. “Not about to shop my sister’s husband. Think of it as a personal quirk. Oh and your five minutes were up a while ago.” She feels rather than hears his silence. “What. Such a face.”

“One more thing, all right? People at my shop have learned of your interest, we assume professional, in the finances of hashslingrz.com.”

“These are all public, the sites I use, nothing illegal, how do you know what I’m researching anyway?”

“Child’s play,” sez Windust, “we like to think of it as ‘No keystroke left behind.’”

“So let me guess, you people want me to back off of hashslingerz.”

“No, actually, if there’s a fraud issue, we’d like to know about it. Sometime.”

“You want to hire me? For money? Or were you planning to rely on charm?”

He finds a pair of tortoiseshell Wayfarer clones in his coat pocket and covers his eyes. Finally. Smiles, with that precision mouth. “Am I that much of a bad guy?”

“Oh. Now I’m supposed to help him with his self-esteem, Dr. Maxine here. Listen, a suggestion, you’re from D.C., try the self-help section at Politics & Prose—empathy, we’re all out of that today, the truck didn’t show up.”

He nods, rises, heads for the door. “Hope I see you again sometime.” With the shades on, of course there is no telling what if anything this means. And he has stuck her, the cheapskate, with the check.