Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

“Never met him, but I hear very little good spoken. What’d he do, try to get cute with the term sheet?”

“No, strangely enough, that was all legit.”

“The money was good?”

“Maybe too good.” With some telltale fidgeting of the Florsheims indicating there’s more, much more. “That was always a puzzler. We were way too narrowband, too slow, even you could say too Third World, for hashslingrz. CSS or whatever, bandwidth never came up as much of an issue with us. Whereas Ice, he’s a bandwidth hog. Buying up all the budget-priced infrastructure he can find. Dotcoms that overbuilt their fiber networks, went broke doing it, their loss, Ice’s gain.”

Somebody who isn’t Felix is now channeling Michael McDonald on “What a Fool Believes,” and several people in the room are singing along. In this festive setting, the subtext of bitterness Maxine’s hearing in Lester’s story is so noticeable that her post-CFE/ESP alarm begins to beep. What can this mean?

“So your job for Ice…”

“Old-school HTML pages, in this case ‘He’s Taking More Lithium,’ everything encrypted, nothin any of us knew how to read. Ice wanted robot meta tags on everything. NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, no nothin. It’s supposed to be for keeping pages away from Web crawlers, stashed deep enough down to be safe. But anybody could’ve done that in-house, there was more nerd delinquents hanging around that place than a Quake server.”

“Yeah, I heard Ice was also running a sort of rehab clinic for ankle-biters. You’ve physically been to visit the hashslingrz HQ?”

“Shortly after he bought hwgaahwgh, Ice summoned me in for an audience. I thought at least I’d get lunch, which instead turns out to be instant coffee and health-food tortilla chips in a bowl. No salsa. No salt, even. All he does is sit there and eyeball me. We must have talked, but I can’t remember about what. I still have nightmares. Not about Ice so much as his posse. Some of them ex-jailbirds. I’d bet on it.”

“And I guess they made you sign some nondisclosure agreement.”

“Not that anything was ever gonna be disclosed around there, nobody was exactly opening their kimono, even now, with hwgaahwgh .com liquidated, the NDA stays in force till the foreseeable end of the Universe or Daikatana finally comes out, whichever happens first. Totally their call—having a bad day, little stomach episode, they can come take it out on me whenever they want.”

“And so… that discussion in the gentlemen’s lounge… may not have really been about Web design?”

He gives her one of those eyes-up glances that find enough light in the near distance to flash a specular warning. Like, I can’t go there, and you better not either.

“Only,” noodging, “that that guy in there doesn’t fit the usual nerd profile.”

“You’d think Ice would show more confidence, wouldn’t you?” with a look both faraway and fearful, as if seeing something approach from a close-enough perimeter. “Him with his high-level connections. Instead here he is insecure, anxious, angry, like some loan shark or pimp who’s just learned he can’t depend for help on the cops he’s paying off, or even on the higher levels he has to report to—no SEC to hear his sad complaint, no Fraud Unit, he’s alone.”

“So what you guys were really arguing about in there was somebody leaking information?”

“I should be so lucky. When information wants to be free, blabbing never counts as worse than a misdemeanor.”

With something else then in the next sentence, just about to drop, which is when Felix shows up, just short of suspicious, as if he and Lester might have their own nondisclosure arrangements.

Lester has been trying to compose his face into an innocent blank, but some tell must’ve slipped through, because Felix now throws Maxine one of those “You better not be fucking anything up, here, eh?” sorts of look, grabs Lester, and hustles him off.

She is once again, as with the make-believe nerd in the men’s toilet, visited by a strong hint of secret intention. As if customizing cash registers may all along have been a cover story for what Felix is really up to.

While for some the night is growing blurry, for Maxine it’s turning staccato, breaking up into small microepisodes separated by pulses of forgetting. She remembers looking at the sign-up sheet and seeing she has apparently, not fully knowing why, called Steely Dan’s up-tempo ballad of memory and regret, “Are You with Me Dr. Wu.” Next thing she knows she’s up at the mike, with Lester unexpectedly stepping in to sing harmony on the hook. During the saxophone break while Koreans holler “Pass the mike,” they find themselves doing disco moves. “Paradise Garage,” Maxine sez. “You?”

“Danceteria mostly.” She risks a quick look at his face. He carries a furtive fantasizing gaze she’s seen too many times before, an awareness of living not only on borrowed money but on borrowed time also.

Then she’s out in the street and everybody is scattering, the Korean tour bus has shown up and the driver and hostesses are in a lively screamfest with their haewoned passengers, Rocky and Cornelia are waving and air-kissing their way into the back of a rented Town Car, Felix is talking earnestly into a mobile phone, and the disguised heavy from the men’s toilet removes his thick plastic frames, puts on a ball cap, adjusts an invisible cloak, and vanishes halfway down the block.

Leaving behind them in the Lucky 18 an empty orchestra playing to an empty room.

Around 11:30 in the morning, Maxine spots a substantial black vehicle which reminds her of a vintage Packard only longer, parked near her office, disregarding the signs that say no parking for an hour and a half on that side to allow for street sweeping. Usual practice is for everybody to double-park on the other side and wait for the sweeper to come through, then move back in in its wake and park legally again. Maxine notices that nobody is waiting anywhere near the mystery limo and that, even more curiously, parking enforcement, usually found in this neighborhood like cheetahs at the fringes of antelope herds, is mysteriously absent. Here, in fact, even as she watches, comes the sweeper, wheezing noisily around the corner, then, catching sight of the limo, pausing as if to consider its options. Procedure would be for the sweeper to pull up behind the offending vehicle and wait for it to move. Instead, creeping nervously on up the block, it swerves apologetically around the lengthy ride and hastens to the corner.

Maxine notices a Cyrillic bumper sticker, which as she is shortly to learn reads MY OTHER LIMO IS A MAYBACH, for this vehicle here turns out, actually, to be a ZiL-41047, brought over piece by piece from Russia, reassembled in Brooklyn, and belonging to Igor Dashkov. Maxine, peering through the tinted glass, is interested to find March Kelleher inside, deep in confabulation with Igor. The window cranks down, and Igor puts his head out, along with a Fairway bag which appears to be stuffed with money.

“Maxi, kagdila . Madoff Securities advice was excellent! Just in time! My associates are so happy! Over moon! They took steps, assets are safe, and this is for you.”

Maxine recoils, only partly out of the classic accountant’s allergy to real folding money. “You fuckin insane?”

“Amount you saved them was considerable.”

“I can’t accept this.”

“Suppose we call it retainer.”

“And who’d be hiring me exactly?”

Shrug, smile, nothing more specific.

“March, what’s with this guy? And what are you doing in there?”

“Hop in.” As she does so, Maxine notices that March is sitting there counting a lapful of greenbacks of her own. “No and I’m not the GF either.”