Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

EDITH FROM YENTA EXPRESSO is out in the hallway, lounging in front of her door as if soliciting customers. “Maxine, some guy was here the other day looking for you? Daytona was out also, he asked me to tell you he’d be back.”

“Uh-oh,” having one of those intuitive flashes. “Nice shoes?”

“High three figures, Edward Greens, snakeskin, appropriately enough. You might want to be careful though, he’s problematic.”

“Client?”

“Known to the community. Don’t get me wrong, lonely is OK, it’s my bread and butter, I’m down with lonely, I’m down with desperate. But this guy…”

“Not that look, Edith please. This isn’t romantic.”

“I’m in the business thirty years, trust me, how romantic is it? As romantic as it gets.”

“Creeping me out here. You’re saying I should expect him back?”

“Don’t worry, I already gave them a heads-up at the Times, they’ll spell your name right.”

SO, SURE ENOUGH, as if Edith’s wearing a wire, a phone call from Nicholas Windust. He wants to do brunch at some faux-Parisian brasserie over on the East Side. “Long as you’re springing,” Maxine shrugs, thinking of it as a modest federal tax rebate.

Windust seems to think it’s a date. He is done up, otherwise inexplicably, in somebody’s idea of hipster gear—jeans, vintage sharkskin sport coat, Purple Drank T-shirt, enough dress-code violations to get him thrown off the L train. Maxine peers at this for as long as she has to, shrugs, “It’s a look.”

He wants to sit inside, Maxine feels safer close to the street and it’s nice out today, so, cozy schmozy, outside it shall be. Windust orders a soft-boiled egg and a Bloody Mary, Maxine wants half a grapefruit and coffee in a bowl. “Amazed you could find the time, Mr. Windust,” with a smile of shameless bogosity, “So! my brother-in-law’s back in the USA now, I can’t imagine what else this could be about.”

“We were intrigued to learn he’s hired on at hashslingrz.com. Like your turnout by the way, Armani, isn’t it?”

“Just some schmatte from H&M, but how nice of you to notice.” And what is with the getting cute here, stop, stop, Maxine when will you…?

“Suggesting an interesting hookup of interests, if Avram Deschler is, as we suspect, a Mossad sleeper.”

Maxine makes with a Blank Stare she has learned from Shawn and often found useful. “Too academic for me.”

“Play dumb if you like, but I ran a search on you, you’re the little lady who sent Jeremy Fink up the river. Busted the Manalapan Ponzoids gang over in Jersey. Went down to Grand Cayman disguised as a reggae backup singer, firebombed ten and a half billion in physical Swiss francs, and exfiltrated in the perps’ own Gulfstream jet.”

“That was Mitzi Turner, actually. They’re always getting us confused. Mitzi’s the asskicker, I’m just a working mom.”

“Regardless, given the number of U.S. government contracts hashslingrz is involved with—”

“Look, either Avi’s some fantasy of yours, darkside hacker-saboteur, Mossad assassin, or he’s just another standard-issue geek trying to get through like the rest of us here outside the Beltway—whatever, I still don’t see how I come into it.”

Windust opens and reaches into an aluminum attaché case which he seems to be living out of, judging from the shaving kit and changes of underwear inside, and finds a folder. “Before his next tête-à-tête with Gabriel Ice, here’s something you might want to look over.”

Without being able to see his eyes, she watches his mouth for, what, some footnote? but no, he’s only smiling at her not even in a sociable way, more like he’s holding some winning hand, or a weapon aimed at her heart.

Though unenthusiastic about touching anything that’s been in contact with Windust’s intimate apparel, she’s also a fraud investigator whose prime directive is You Never Know, so she takes the folder gingerly and stashes it in her Kate Spade satchel.

“On the clear understanding,” Maxine quickly adding, “as Deborah Kerr, or Marni Nixon, might say, or actually sing—that this is none of my—”

“Am I making you nervous?”

She risks a fast sideways peek and is astonished to catch on his face now a look that would not be out of place in a pickup joint south of 14th Street, some late Saturday night when the hotter inventory has been squired away out the door and the pickings have grown unhelpfully slimmer. What’s up with this? She is not about to react to such a face. A silence arises, and lengthens, and not only a silence, as her glance, inadvertently wandering to that other indicator of the inward, confirms. It’s in fact a hardon of some size, and worse, he’s caught her looking.

“That’s it, back to work,” is what, in heedless idiocy, she finds herself unable to much more than croak. But doesn’t move, doesn’t even reach for her bag.

“Here, maybe this’ll be easier,” writing something on a napkin. In a more wholesome, or maybe only earlier, era it might have been the name of a good restaurant, or an idea for a start-up. Today the best you can call this is an invitation to step into airheadedness and error. An address inconvenient to the subway, she notices. “Say about rush hour, better chances for invisibility, that work for you?”

Among many things she hasn’t picked up before is this note in his voice, demanding, not what you’d call especially seductive. And yet still not a deal killer. And what would that have to be, she wonders. He gets up, nods, and splits leaving her with the check. After saying he’d pay for it. What is she thinking, again?

AS IF HE’S A KINDLY angel bringing a last chance to act responsibly, Conkling materializes in the waiting room unannounced, the way he usually does. “Whoo,” Daytona with a dramatic flinch, “scared the shit out of me, what you be lettin all these ghetto-ass g’s walk in here all the time?” Conkling meantime has gone all weird, for his own reasons.

“What. You smell something.”

“That masculine again–9:30 Cologne for Men. Something here is giving off indicia.” Like a hound dog in a jailbreak movie, Conkling follows the sillage into Maxine’s office, zeroing in on her purse. “Pretty slow drydown on this stuff, so it’s from sometime in the last couple hours.”

Oh, what else. Windust. She digs in her bag, brings out the folder he gave her. Conkling riffles the pages. “This is it.”

“Guy I, hmm, just had brunch with, he’s in from D.C.”

“You’re sure there’s no connection here with Lester Traipse?”

“Just somebody I went to college with,” Oh? what’s this, a sudden reluctance to share information with Conkling about Windust? For some reason? That she doesn’t want to get into right now? “Works in middle management now at the EPA, maybe the stuff is on some list of toxic pollutants?”

Her thoughts go wandering off, and nobody tries to summon them back. Did Windust, once in a more sympathetic-juvenile day, actually hang out at the old 9:30 Club the way Maxine did at the Paradise Garage? Maybe on Stateside breaks from doing evil all around the world, maybe he caught Tiny Desk Unit and Bad Brains in their local-band period, maybe the smell of 9:30 Cologne is his last, his only link with the undercorrupted youth he was? Maybe Conkling is coming down with a seasonal allergy and his nose is a little off today? Maybe Maxine is sliding deeper into a sentimental idiocy attack? Maybe’s ass, OK? Circumstantial schmircumstantial, Windust was there when Lester was taken out, and maybe he even did it.

Damn.

What happened to the chances for a giddy romantic episode today? Suddenly it looks a lot more like field research.