Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

“Oh… last century sometime?”

“Wasn’t it that clambake at the San Remo for Eliot Spitzer?”

“Might be. Never could figure you at a Democratic fund-raiser.”

“Oh, Eliot and I go back. Ever since Skadden, Arps, maybe longer.”

“And now he’s Attorney General and he’s going after you guys as much he ever went after the mob.” If there’s a difference, she almost adds. “Ironic, huh?”

“Costs and benefits. On balance he’s been good for us, put away some elements that would have eventually turned and bit us.”

“Cornelia did imply that you have friends all over the spectrum.”

“In the long run, it’s less to do with labels than with everyone coming out happy. Some of these folks really have become my friends, in the pre-Internet sense of the term. Cornelia, certainly. Long ago I briefly courted her mother, who had the good judgment to show me the door.”

Maxine has brought Reg’s DVD and a tiny Panasonic player, which Platt, not sure of where the wall outlets are exactly, allows her to plug in. He beams at the little screen in a way that makes her feel like a grandchild showing him a music video. But about the time the Stinger crew get set up,

“Oh. Oh, wait just a minute, is this the pause button here, would you mind—”

She pauses it. “Problem?”

“These weapons, they’re… Stinger missiles or something. A bit out of my ground, I hope you appreciate.”

And if she wanted a runaround, she’d be over in Central Park. “Right, I keep forgetting, you people tend to be Mannlicher-Carcano types.”

“Jackie and I were dear friends,” he replies coolly, “and I’m not sure I oughtn’t to resent that.”

“Resent, resent, please, I knew this was a mistake.” She’s on her feet, picking up her Kate Spade bag, noticing an unaccustomed lightness. Naturally, the one fucking day she probably should have brought the Beretta. Reaches to eject the DVD. By now Platt’s diplomatic reflexes have taken over, or maybe WASP control freakery. Murmuring something like “There, there,” he hits a hidden call button, which rapidly brings in the intern with a pot of coffee and an assortment of cookies. Maxine wonders if Girl Scouts were inappropriately involved in this. Platt watches the rest of the rooftop footage in silence.

“Well. Provocative. Perhaps if you could spare me a couple of minutes?” Withdrawing to an inner office and leaving Maxine with the intern, who is leaning in the doorway now gazing at her, she wants to say inscrutably, but that would be racist. Absent a full ingredient list, she is of course not about to start scarfing cookies.

“So… how’s the job? your first step in a legal career here?”

“I hope not. What I really am is a rap artist.”

“Like uh, who, Jay-Z?”

“Well, actually I’m more of a Nas person. As you may know they’re in this feud at the moment, that old Queens-versus-Brooklyn thing again, hate to take sides, but—“The World Is Yours,” how can anything even compare?”

“You perform in public, like clubs?”

“Yeah. Got a club date coming up soon, in fact, here, check this out.” From somewhere he has produced a TB-303 clone with built-in speakers, which he now plugs in and powers up, and starts fingering a major pentatonic bass line. “Dig it,”

“Yes oh and Darren,” Chandler Platt reentering a little brusquely, “when you have a chance, could you please bring me those copies of the Braun, Fleckwith side letter? And get Hugh Goldman for me over there?”

“Mad cool, yo,” unplugging his digital bass and heading for the door.

“Thanks, Darren,” Maxine smiles, “nice song—from what little Mr. Platt has allowed me to hear.”

“Actually, he’s unusually tolerant. Not everyone in his demographic goes for what we like to think of as Gongsta Rap.”

“Y— I thought I might have caught one or two, I’m not sure, racial overtones…”

“Preemptive. They gonna be give me all rice-nigga remarks and shit, this way I beat ’em to it.” He hands her a disc in a jewel case. “My mix tape, enjoy.”

“He gives them away,” Chandler Platt blinking his eyes at regular intervals and without motive, like faces in low-budget cartoons. “I made the mistake of asking him once how he expects to make money. He said that wasn’t the point, but has never explained what is. To me, I’m appalled, it strikes at the heart of Exchange itself.” He reaches for and sits contemplating a chocolate-chip cookie. “Back when I was getting into the business, all ‘being Republican’ meant really was a sort of principled greed. You arranged things so that you and your friends would come out nicely, you behaved professionally, above all you put in the work and took the money only after you’d earned it. Well, the party, I fear, has fallen on evil days. This generation—it’s almost a religious thing now. The millennium, the end days, no need to be responsible anymore to the future. A burden has been lifted from them. The Baby Jesus is managing the portfolio of earthly affairs, and nobody begrudges Him the carried interest…” Suddenly, and from the cookie’s point of view, rudely, chomping into it and scattering crumbs. “Sure you won’t have one, they’re quite… No? All right, thanks, don’t mind if I…” Grabbing another, two or three actually, “I just spoke with some people. A most puzzling conversation, I have to say. At least they picked up.”

“Not the standard corporate chitchat, then.”

“No, something else, something… peculiar. Not out loud, or in so many words, but as if…”

“Wait. If you don’t want to tell me—”

“… as if they know already what’s going to happen. This… event. They know, and they’re not going to do anything about it.”

Is this all yet another exercise in freaking out the common folk so we’ll keep bleating and begging for protection? How scared is Maxine supposed to feel? “I didn’t get you in any trouble, I hope.”

“‘Trouble.’” She thinks she’s seen most of the looks of despair available to men of this pay grade, but what now briefly appears on his face you’d have to open a new file for. “In trouble with that bunch? Never that easy to tell, really. Even if there were to be unpleasantness, I could rely without hesitation upon young Darren, who’s board-certified in everything from nunchaku up through… well, Stinger missiles, I’m sure, and beyond. Rest easy as to my safety, young lady, and look instead to your own. Try to avoid terrorist-related activities. Oh, and would you mind going out the back way? You weren’t here, you see.”

The back exit happens to be near Darren’s cubicle. Maxine glances in and finds him standing by a window, turned away in quarter profile, looking, sighting, down fifty stories into New York, down into that specific abyss, with an intensity she recognizes from the DeepArcher splash screen. Should she run in, break his concentration with questions like, Do you know Cassidy, did you pose for the Archer, provoking him into who knows what don’t-be-in-my-face-bitch gongsta displeasure… Is she that desperate for a literal link between this kid and some screen image? when she knows all the time there is none, that the figure was there, has always been there, that’s all, that Cassidy thanks to some intervention nobody knows how to name found her way to the silent, stretched presence at the edge of the world and copied what she remembered and immediately forgot the way back there… .