Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

Sid starts up the motor finally, heads back up Arthur Kill and into Newark Bay, at Kearny Point bears right into the forsaken and abused Passaic River. “Let you two off when I can, then I’m gonna return to my secret undisclosed base.”

Around Point No Point, under the black arching trusswork of the Pulaski Skyway. The light, inexorable as iron, growing in the sky… Tall brick stacks, railyards… Dawn over Nutley. Well, technically dawn over Secaucus. Sid pulls up to a boat dock belonging to the Nutley High rowing team, removes an imaginary yachting cap, and gestures his passengers ashore. “Welcome to Deep Jersey.”

“Captain Stubing here,” March yawns.

“Oh and you won’t forget Igor’s backpack, will you my Tomato Surprise.”

Maxine’s hair is a mess, she’s been out all night for the first time since the 1980s, her ex and their children are somewhere out in the U.S. sure to be having a nice time without her, and for maybe a minute and a half she feels free—at least at the edge of possibilities, like whatever the Europeans who first sailed up the Passaic River must have felt, before the long parable of corporate sins and corruption that overtook it, before the dioxins and the highway debris and unmourned acts of waste.

From Nutley there’s a New Jersey Transit bus to the Port of Authority by way of Newark. They grab a couple minutes of sleep. Maxine has one of those transit dreams. Women in shawls, a sinister light. Everybody speaking Spanish. A somehow desperate flight by antiquated bus through jungles to escape a threat, a volcano possibly. At the same time, this is also a tour bus full of Upper West Side Anglos, and the tour director is Windust, lecturing in that wise-ass radio voice, something about the nature of volcanoes. The volcano behind them, which hasn’t gone away, grows more ominous. Maxine wakes up out of this someplace on the Lincoln Tunnel approach. In the terminal, March suggests, “Let’s go out the other way, avoid Disney Hell and go find some breakfast.”

They find a Latino breakfast joint on Ninth and dig in.

“Something on your mind, Maxine.”

“Been meaning to ask you this for a while, what was going on in Guatemala back in 1982?”

“Same as Nicaragua, El Salvador, Ronald Reagan and his people, Schachtmanite goons like Elliott Abrams, turning Central America into a slaughterhouse all to play out their little anti-Communist fantasies. Guatemala by then had fallen under the control of a mass murderer and particular buddy of Reagan named Ríos Montt, who as usual wiped off his bloody hands on the baby Jesus like so many of these charmers do. Government death squads funded by the U.S., army sweeps through the western highlands, officially targeting the EGP or Guerrilla Army of the Poor but in practice exterminating any native populations they came across. There was at least one death camp, on the Pacific coast, where the emphasis may’ve been political, but up in the hills it was on-site genocide, not even mass burial, just bodies left for the jungle to take care of, which certainly must have saved the government a lot on cleanup costs.”

Maxine is somehow not as hungry as she thought. “And any Americans who were there…”

“Either humanitarian kids, naïve and borderline idiotic, or ‘advisers’ sharing their extensive expertise at butchering nonwhites. Though by then, most of that was being outsourced to U.S. client states with the necessary technical chops. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering.”

“Yeah. When you’re ready, tell me. I’m really Dr. Ruth Westheimer, nothing shocks me.”

Waiting on her office doorstep is a case of wine, which when she sees its label causes her to observe, “Well, holy shit.” An ’85 Sassicaia? A case? Must be a mistake. There seems to be a note, however—“Turns out you saved us some money too,” unsigned, yet who else can it be but Rocky, the ol’ ethnoenologist? Good anyhow for enough guilt to get her back into the increasingly problematic hwgaahwgh/hashslingrz books.

Something today strikes her as odd. One of those nagging patterns that’s not always welcome because it means uncompensated overtime, but what else is new. She puts on some coffee, has another look at the trail between hwgaahwgh and hashslingrz’s account in the Emirates, and after a while sees what it is. A persistent shortfall, and of some size. As in somebody is tapping the pipeline. What’s curious is the amount. It seems to match another sum, a puzzling persistent surplus related to the cash component of Ice’s purchase of hwgaahwgh.com. The checks are being deposited into a business operating account at a bank on Long Island.

Since going rogue, Maxine has acquired a number of software kits, courtesy of certain less reputable clients, which have bestowed on her superpowers not exactly falling within Generally Accepted Accounting Practices, such as thou shalt not hack into anybody’s bank account, thou shalt leave that sort of thing for the FBI. She roots around in a couple of desk drawers, finds an unlabeled disc in a sickly green metallic shade, and well before lunch is into Lester Traipse’s private affairs. Sure enough, the mystery shortfall is exactly balanced by a sum being regularly transferred on into one of Lester’s personal accounts.

Expressively exhaling, “Lester, Lester, Lester.” Well. All that nondisclosure talk, just smoke to cover what he was really up to, something way more dangerous. Lester discovered the invisible underground river of cash flowing through his soon-to-be-defunct company and has been diverting a hefty chunk of Ice’s ghost payments from their fate as riyals over into some secret account of his own. Figuring he’s hit the big time.

So the other night at the karaoke joint, when he compared Gabriel Ice to a loan shark or a pimp, it was no idle figure of speech. Lester, endangered as a girl under a viaduct who’s been holding out on the man running her, desperate for any kind of help, was sending Maxine a distress signal in a code that, shame on her, she didn’t even bother to read…

And the hard part is that she knows better, knows that beneath the high-cap scumscapes created by the corporate order and celebrated in the media, there are depths where petty fraud becomes grave and often deadly sin. Certain types of personality get bent insanely out of shape, punishment is violent and—an anxious reflexive look at the clock on the wall—immediate. This guy might not know how much trouble he’s in.

She’s surprised when Lester picks up his mobile on the first ring. “You lucked out, this is the last call I was planning to take on this thing.”

“Changing your carrier service?”

“Shitcanning the instrument. I think there’s a tracking chip on it.”

“Lester, I’ve come across something kind of serious, we should meet. Leave your cell phone at home.” She can tell from his breathing that he knows what it is.

ETERNAL SEPTEMBER, dating from the high nineties, is a disused techies’ saloon tucked away between a barbershop and a necktie boutique half a block from a low-traffic station down one of the old IND lines.

“Some sentimental attachment,” Maxine looking around trying not to make a face.

“No, I’m figuring anybody who actually comes in here in the middle of the day is so without clue that we can talk safely.”

“You know you’re in trouble, right, so I don’t have to start in nagging about that.”

“I wanted to tell you that night at the karaoke, but…”

“Felix kept putting in. Was he monitoring you? Protecting you?”

“He heard about my run-in in the bathroom and figured he should’ve had my back, that’s all. I have to assume Felix is who he says he is.”