Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

“Horst never got… abusive with you, or anything…?”

“Horst? a dove. Well, maybe except for that one time he started choking me…”

“He what?”

“Oh? He never told you about that.”

“Horst actually—”

“Put it this way, Heidi—he had his hands around my neck, and he was squeezing? What would you call that?”

“What happened?”

“Oh, there was a game on, he got distracted, Brett Favre or somebody did something, I don’t know, anyway he relaxed his grip, went off to the fridge, got a beer. Can of Bud Light, I believe. We kept arguing, of course.”

“Wow, close call.”

“Not really. I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers.” A quick paradiddle with her chopsticks on Heidi’s head.

DETECTIVE CARMINE NOZZOLI, with access to the federal crime database, turns out to be an unexpectedly obliging resource, allowing Maxine for example to run a quick make on Tallis’s fiber-salesman BF. On first glance, Chazz Larday is an average lowlife from down in the U.S. someplace, come to NYC to make his fortune, having emerged out of a silent seething Gulf Coast petri dish of who knows how many local-level priors, a directoryful of petty malfeasance soon enough escalating into Title 18 beefs including telemarketing rackets via the fax machine, conspiracy to commit remanufactured toner cartridge misrepresentation, plus a history of bringing slot machines across state lines to where they are not necessarily legal, and cruising up and down the back roads of heartland suburbia peddling bootleg infrared strobes that will change red lights to green for rounders and assorted teenage offenders who don’t like stopping for nothing, all at the behest allegedly of the Dixie Mafia, a loose confederacy of ex-cons and full-auto badasses very few of whom know or even like one another.

Carmine just shakes his head. “Mob arrangements I can understand, strong respect for family—but these good old boys, it’s shocking.”

“Has this Chazz guy done time?”

“Only for a couple of the little ones, county jail time, sheriff’s wife bringin him casseroles and so forth, but all the big ones, he walked. Seems to have resources behind him. Then and now.”

Mrs. Plibbler, high-school drama teacher from hell, once again must Maxine invoke thee here as guardian spirit of fraud police accredited and otherwise. “Oh hi, I’m calling from hashslingrz? Is this Mr. Larday?”

“You guys don’t have this number.”

“Uh huh, well this is Heather, from Legal? Trying to clear up one or two details about some arrangements you have with our company comptroller, Mrs. Ice?”

“Mizzis Ice.” Pause. After some time in fraud work, you learn to read phone silences. They come in different lengths and depths, room ambiences and front-edge attacks. This one is telling Maxine that Chazz knows he shouldn’t have blurted what he just did.

“I’m sorry, is that information not correct? Do you mean the arrangements are with Mister Ice?”

“Darlin, you are either so out of the loop or else you’re one of these fuckin bloggers runnin a gossip page, either way be advised we have a trace on this instrument, we know who you are and where you are and our people will not hesitate to come after you. You have a good day now, you hear?” He hangs up and when she redials, there’s no answer.

Good luck to him with the cop-show talk, but more important, what’s up with Tallis, how innocent a party can she be in any of this? If she’s in on something, how far in? And is that innocent pure or innocent stupid?

Given the likely level of corruption around here, Gabriel Ice may know all about that li’l lovebirds’ nidito up in East Harlem, maybe even be springing for the rent. What else? Has he also been using Tallis as a mule to move money secretly to Darklinear Solutions? Why so secretly, for goodness’ sakes? Too many questions, no theories. Maxine catches sight of herself in a mirror. Her mouth is not at the moment hanging open, but it might as well be. As Henny Youngman might diagnose it, ESP bypass.

VYRVA MEANWHILE IS BACK from Las Vegas and Defcon, not as poolside tan as expected, in fact striking Maxine as, what’s the word, reserved? distraught? weird? As if something happened in Vegas that didn’t all stay there, some ominous overflow, like alien DNA hitching a ride unnoticed back here to planet Earth, to perform its mischief in its own good time.

Fiona’s still away at camp, working on a Quake-movie adaptation of The Sound of Music (1965). Fiona and her team are doing the Nazis.

“You must miss her.”

“Of course I miss her,” a little too quick.

Maxine puts her eyebrows into an I-said-something? asymmetry.

“Just as well she’s not here, ’cause right now, it’s starting to get crazy, everybody’s after DeepArcher, the guys got seriously hit on in Vegas, one after another, the NSA, the Mossad, terrorist go-betweens, Microsoft, Apple, start-ups that’ll be gone in a year, old money, new money, you name it.”

Since it’s been on her mind, Maxine names it. “Hashslingrz too, I suppose.”

“Natch. There we are, Justin and me, an innocent tourist couple strolling through Caesars, suddenly here’s Gabriel Ice lurking by a buffet table with an attaché case full of lobbying material.”

“Ice was at Defcon?”

“At a Black Hat Briefing, some kind of security conference they hold every year the week before Defcon, a casino hotel full of guys who’d hack a lightbulb, corporate cops, crypto geniuses, sniffers and spoofers, designers, reverse engineers, TV network suits, everybody with something to sell.”

They’re down in Tribeca, a chance encounter at a street corner. “Come on, we’ll grab an ice coffee.”

Vyrva starts to look at her watch, suppresses the gesture. “For sure.”

They find a place and duck into the blessed A/C. Something astrological going on, Jupiter, the money planet, in Pisces, the sign of all things fishy. “See—” Vyrva sighs. “There’s a chance of some money.”

Aww. “There wasn’t before?”

“Honestly, should it matter who gets to own the damned old source code? Not as if it has a conscience, DeepArcher, it’s just there, users can be anybody, no moral questionnaire ‘r netheen? it’s rilly only about the money. Who ends up with how much?”

“Except that in my business,” Maxine gently, “what I see a lot of is innocent people making these deals with the satanic forces, for money way out of scale to anything they’re used to, and there’s a point where it all rolls in on them and they go under, and sometimes they don’t come back up.”

But Vyrva is far away now, the summer street outside, the cumulus piling up over Jersey, the rush hour bearing down, it’s all country miles from wherever she is, rambling some DeepArcher of the unshared interior, her click history vanishing behind her like footprints in the air, like free advice unheard, so Maxine supposes it’ll have to keep, whatever it is, whatever’s finally on the term sheet.

With the gracious assistance as always of Detective Nozzoli, Maxine has obtained a license ID photo of Eric Jeffrey Outfield, and this, along with a brief list from Reg of places Eric is most likely to be found, sends her through a steamy August evening out to Queens to a strip club called Joie de Beavre. The place is located along a stretch of frontage road next to the LIE, its neon sign depicting a lewdly humanized beaver wearing a beret and winking its eyes alternately at a wiggling stripper.

“Hi, I was told to see Stu Gotz?”

“In back.”

She was expecting a dressing room out of some movie musical? What she finds is a sort of casually upgraded ladies’ toilet, stall partitions and so forth—some, to be sure, with glittery stars taped on the doors—a litter of pint liquor bottles, roaches both smokable and crawling, used Kleenex, not recognizably a Vincente Minnelli set.