Bleeding Edge (24 page)

Oof. Isn’t this the moment to go stomping out the door with a dignified yet unequivocal over-the-shoulder fuck-you? “Well. Let me think about that.”

B
rooke and Avi finally show up back in the States looking like they’ve spent the year at some strange anti-kibbutz dedicated to screen-staring, keeping out of the sun, and not missing too many meals, Elaine taking one look at Brooke promptly conveys her over to Megareps, a neighborhood health club, and negotiates a trial membership while Brooke loiters at the snack bar on the ground floor, contemplating muffins, bagels, and smoothies in a less than objective way.

Maxine isn’t that eager to see her sister but figures she has to do at least a drop-by. Turns out at the moment Elaine and Brooke are down at the World Trade Center eyeballing the unexplored shopping potential of Century 21. Ernie is supposed to be at Lincoln Center watching some well-received Kyrgyz movie but has actually snuck over to
The Fast and the Furious
at the Sony multiplex, so Maxine finds herself for an enchanted hour and a half in the company of her brother-in-law, Avram Deschler, who is minding a Tongue Polonaise of Elaine’s, which has been slowly cooking all day in the kitchen, filling the place with a smell initially intriguing, soon compelling. The matter of the federal visits can’t help but come up.

“I think it’s only about my clearance.”

“Your . . . ?”

“You heard of a computer-security firm called hashslingrz?”

A pointed look at the bottom of her shoe. “Dimly.”

“They get a lot of federal work, NSA and so forth, and they’ve offered me a job, and in fact I’m starting week after next.” Waiting for at least dazzled admiration.

That’s all the federal house calls were about? Sorry, somehow Maxine doubts it. Security clearances are routine low-level chores, and there is some deeper horseshit in progress here.

“So . . . you met the big guy, Gabriel Ice.”

“He actually showed up in person, in Haifa, to recruit me. We did breakfast at a falafel joint in Wadi Nisnas. He seemed to know the owner. I told him what I wanted for salary, benefits, and he said OK. No hondeling. Tahini all over his shirt.”

“Just a regular guy.”

“Exactly.”

As if only ditzing from topic to topic, “Avi, you know anything about a piece of software called Promis?”

A pause maybe a week or two further along than blue lines on a stick. “Kind of an old story in the business. The scheming and counterscheming at Inslaw, the court cases, the FBI stealing it away, and so forth. A cash cow for Mossad, however. From what people tell me.”

“And the rumor about a backdoor . . .”

“There wasn’t one originally, but certain customers insisted, so the program got modified. More than once. In fact, it’s an ongoing evolution. Today’s version, you wouldn’t recognize it. Or so I’m told.”

“Long as I’m picking your brain here, somebody also told me about a computer chip, some Israeli vendor, maybe you’ve run across it, sits quietly in a customer’s machine absorbing data, from time to time transmitting what it’s gathered out to interested parties?”

Not that he jumped or anything, but his eyes have begun to roam the room. “Elbit makes one that I know of.”

“Ever run across one, like, physically?”

He finally meets her gaze and then sits staring at her, as if she’s some kind of a screen, and she figures the point of diminishing returns has arrived.

Soon Brooke and Elaine come back from downtown with a number of Century 21 bags plus a strange vegan p’tcha into whose crystalline depths one can gaze with growing albeit perplexed fascination. “Lovely,” according to Elaine, “like a three-dimensional Kandinsky. Perfect with the tongue.”

Tongue Polonaise is a childhood favorite around here. Maxine used to think it meant some classical-piano novelty act. All day, a pickled beef tongue has been out in the kitchen simmering in an elaborate tsimmis of chopped apricots, mango puree, pineapple chunks, cherries with the pits out, grapefruit marmalade, two or three different varieties of raisin, orange juice, sugar and vinegar, mustard and lemon juice, and of the essence, for reasons lost in some snoozy nimbus of tradition, gingersnaps—Nabisco by default, since Keebler dropped the old Sunshine variety a couple of years back.

“She forgets the gingersnaps again,” Ernie likes to pretend to growl, “you’re gonna read about it in the
Daily News.
”

The sisters warily exchange a hug. The conversation avoids all contact with the controversial until onto the living-room tube comes a Channel 13 yakker hosted by Beltway intellectual Richard Uckelmann called
Thinking with Dick,
whose guests today include an Israeli cabinet official Brooke and Avi used to run into at parties. Under discussion is the always-lively topic of West Bank settlements. After a minute and a half, though it seems longer, of government propaganda, Maxine blurts, “This guy didn’t try to sell you any real estate, I hope.”

Just what Brooke has been waiting for. “Miss Smartmouth,” a little screechy, “always with a remark. Try going out on night patrol sometime, arabushim throwing bombs at you, see how far that mouth gets you.”

“Girls, girls,” murmurs Ernie.

“You mean ‘girl, girl,’ I think,” Maxine sez, “I’m the one suddenly being trashed here.”

“Brooke only means she’s been to a kibbutz and you haven’t,” Elaine soothingly.

“Right, all day long at the Grand Canyon Mall in Haifa, spending her husband’s money, some kibbutz.”

“You, you don’t even have a husband.”

“Oh, look, a screamfest. Just what I came over here for.” She blows a kiss at the p’tcha, which seems to wobble in reply, and looks around for her purse. Brooke stomps off to the kitchen. Ernie goes after her, Elaine gazes sorrowfully at Maxine, Avi pretends to be absorbed in the television.

“All right, all right, Ma, I’ll behave, just . . . I was gonna say do something about Brooke, but I think that moment passed thirty years ago.” Presently, Ernie comes out of the kitchen eating a gingersnap, and Maxine goes in to find her sister shredding potatoes for latkes. Maxine finds a knife and starts chopping onions and for a while they prep in silence, neither willing to be the first to talk, God forbid it should be anything like “I’m sorry.”

“Hey, Brooke?” Maxine eventually. “Pick your brain a minute?”

A shrug, like, I’ve got a choice?

“I was out on a date with a guy who says he’s ex-Mossad. I couldn’t tell if he was bullshitting me or what.”

“Did he take off his right shoe and sock and—”

“Hey, how’d you know?”

“Any given night in any singles bar in Haifa, you can always find some loser who’s taken a Sharpie and put three dots on the bottom of his heel. Some old folklore about a secret tattoo, total bullshit.”

“And there are still girls who fall for it?”

“Didn’t you ever?”

“Come on, Jews and tattoos? I’m desperate, but not unobservant.”

Everybody makes nice for the rest of the evening. The Tongue Polonaise comes in on a Wedgwood platter Maxine only remembers seeing at seder. Ernie dramatically sharpens a knife and begins carving the tongue as ceremoniously as if it’s a Thanksgiving turkey.

“So?” inquires Elaine, after Ernie takes a bite.

“A time machine of the mouth, my darling, Proust Schmoust, this takes a man straight back to his bar mitzvah.” Singing a couple bars of “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” just to prove it.

“It’s his mother’s recipe,” clarifies Elaine, “well, except for the mangoes, they hadn’t been invented yet.”

•   •   •

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?”