Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

“So forth.”

“So,” Maxine asks, “what happens? He lets go of it?”

Shawn gives her a nice long stare and with Buddhist precision, shrugs. “He lets go of it, and he doesn’t let go of it.”

“Uh, huh, I must’ve said something wrong.”

“Hey. Maybe I said something wrong. Your assignment for next time is to find out which of us, and what.”

Yet another one of these shadowy calls. She should get on to Axel and tell him Vip’s a frequent visitor to the South Fork, then pass on the card-number fragments she was able to copy down off the videotape. But not so fast here, she cautions herself, let’s just see…

She runs the tape again, especially the dialogue between Vip and whoever’s behind the camera, whose voice is maddeningly just there at the edge of her memory…

Ha! It’s a Canadian accent. Of course. On the Lifetime Movie Channel, you hear little but. In fact, it’s Québéquois. Could that mean…

She gets on to Felix Boïngueaux’s cellular. He’s still in town chasing VC money. “Heard anything from Vip Epperdew?”

“Don’t expect to.”

“You have his phone number?”

“Got a few of them. Home, beeper, they all ring forever and never pick up.”

“Mind sharing them?”

“Not at all. If you get lucky, ask him where our check is, eh?”

It’s close. It’s close enough. If it was Felix behind the camera, Felix who sent her the tape, then this is either what social workers like to call a cry for help from Vip or, more likely, seeing it’s Felix, some elaborate setup. As to how this shuffles together with Felix being down here allegedly looking for investors—back burner, it’ll keep, disingenuous li’l schmuck.

One of the phone prefixes is up in Westchester, no answer, not even a machine, but there’s also a Long Island number, which she looks up in her crisscross at the office, already queasy with a suspicion, and sure enough, it’s in the flip side of the Hamptons, all but certainly the amateur-porn set Shae and Bruno live in, where Vip has been making excuses to slide away to, to pay his dues to the other version of his life. The number brings an electronic squawk and a robot to tell Maxine sorry, this number is no longer in service. But there’s something strange in its tone, as if incompletely robotized, that conveys inside knowledge, not to mention You Poor Idiot. A paranoid halo thickens around Maxine’s head, if not a nimbus of certainty. Ordinarily there wouldn’t be money enough in circulation to get her inside bomb-throwing distance of the east end of Long Island, but she finds herself now dropping the Tomcat in her bag, adding an extra clip, sliding into working jeans and a beach-town-appropriate T-shirt, and next thing she’s down on 77th renting a beige Camry. Gets on the Henry Hudson Parkway, hassles the Cross Bronx over to the Throgs Neck Bridge, the line of city towers to her right crystalline today, sentinel, onto the LIE. Cranks down the windows and tilts the seat back to cruising format and proceeds on eastward.

Since the mid-nineties when WYNY switched formats overnight from country to classic disco, decent driving music in these parts has been in short supply, but someplace a little past Dix Hills she picks up another country station, maybe from Connecticut, and presently on comes Slade May Goodnight with her early-career chartbuster, “Middletown New York.”

[After a pedal-steel break that has always reached in and found Maxine’s heart]

So forth. By which point Maxine is singing along in a pretty focused way, with the wind blowing tears back into her ears, and she’s getting looks from drivers in adjoining lanes.

She hits Exit 70 about midday, and since Marvin’s videotape wasn’t that attentive to what Jodi Della Femina might call shortcuts, Maxine has to go intuitive with this, leaving Route 27 after a while and driving for about as long as she recalls it taking on the tape, till she notices a tavern called Junior’s Ooh-La-Lounge with lunch-hour pickups and motorcycles out front.

She goes in, sits at the bar, gets a doubtful salad and a PBR longneck and a glass. The jukebox is playing music Maxine’s unlikely ever to hear string arrangements of in any lunch venue in Manhattan. Presently the guy three stools down introduces himself as Randy and observes, “Well, the shoulder bag has a sway to it suggestive of small arms, but I don’t smell cop somehow, and you’re not a dealer, so what does that leave, I wonder.” He could be described as roly-poly, though Maxine’s antennas put him among that subset of the roly-poly who also carry weapons, maybe not on his person but certainly someplace handy. He has a neglected beard and wears a red ball cap with some Meat Loaf reference on it, out the back of which hangs a graying ponytail.

“Hey, maybe I am a cop. Working undercover.”

“Nah, cops have ’at special somethin you get to recognize, least if you’ve been bounced around much.”

“Guess I’ve only been dribbled up and down the back court a little. Am I supposed to apologize?”

“Only if you’re here to get somebody in trouble. Who you lookin for?”

Okay. How about— “Shae and Bruno?”

“Oh, them, hey, you can get them in as much trouble’s you want. Everybody around here’s collected their share of karma, but those two… what in ’ee hell would you want with them?”

“It’s this friend of theirs.”

“Hope you don’t mean Westchester Willy? Built kinda low to the ground, partial to that Belgian beer?”

“Maybe. Would you happen to know how to get to Shae and Bruno’s place?”

“Oh, so… you’re the insurance adjuster, right?”

“How’s that?”

“The fire.”

“I’m only a bookkeeper from this guy’s office. He hasn’t showed up for a while. What fire?”

“Place burned down a couple weeks ago. Big story on the news, emergency response from all over, flames lightin up the sky, you could see it from the LIE.”

“How about—”

“Charred remains? No, nothin like that.”

“Traces of accelerant?”

“Sure you’re not one of these them crime-lab babes, like on TV.”

“Now you’re sweet-talking me.”

“That was gonna be later. But if you—”

“Randy, if I wasn’t so wired into office mode right now?”

A general pause. Colleagues in on breaks from work struggling not to laugh too loud. Everybody here knows Randy, pretty soon there is a schadenfreudefest in progress about who’s having the worst time of it. Since last year when the tech boom collapsed, most homeowners out here who took hits in the market have been defaulting on contracts right and left. Only occasionally can you still find echoes of the nineties’ golden age of home improvement and the name that keeps coming up, not to Maxine’s surprise, is Gabriel Ice.