Bleeding Edge (27 page)

Igor shakes his head impatiently. “Hedgehogs, Russian thing, don’t ask.”

“This writing on the battery cap, what’s it say, can you read it?”

“Pashto, ‘God is great,’ maybe legit, maybe CIA forgery to look like mujahedeen, covering up some caper of their own.”

“Well now that you’ve brought it up, there’s another . . .”

“Let me read your mind. Spetsnaz knife, right?”

“With the flying blade, that allegedly did in Lester Traipse—”

“Poor Lester.” A strange mixture of compassion and warning in his face.

“Uh-oh.” Yet another relationship here, it figures. “The knife story is a frame-up, I gather.”

“Spetsnaz don’t shoot knives through air at people, Spetsnaz
throw
knives. Ballistic knife is weapon for
chainik
, with no throwing skills, afraid to get close up, wants to avoid gunshot noise. And—” pretending to hesitate “—blade they took out of Lester, OK, my distant cousin works downtown at Police Plaza, he saw it in property room, guess what. Fucking podyobka, totally, ain’t even Ostmark blade, maybe Chinese, maybe cheaper. Let’s hope someday I tell you more, but it still ain’t what Flintstones call page right out of history. Too much payback to deal with right now.”

“Whatever you feel comfortable sharing, of course, Igor. Meantime, what are we supposed to be doing about the other weapon? The hi-tech one on the roof? Suppose there’s a clock on this?”

“Mind letting me watch DVD? Simple nostalgia, you understand.”

C
ornelia rings up and as previously threatened wants to go shopping. Maxine is expecting Bergdorf’s or Saks, but instead Cornelia hustles her into a cab and next thing she knows they’re headed for the Bronx. “I’ve always wanted to shop at Loehmann’s,” Cornelia explains.

“But they never let you in because you . . . have to be accompanied by somebody Jewish?”

“I’m offending you.”

“Nothing personal. Little history, is all. You realize, I hope, that this is not the Loehmann’s of legend. That one moved, back in, I don’t know, late 80’s?”

When Maxine and Heidi were girls, the store was still on Fordham Road, and every month or so their mothers would take them up there to learn how to shop. Loehmann’s in those days had a no-returns policy, so you had to get it right the first time. It was boot camp. Gave you discipline and reflexes. Heidi took to it as if in a previous life she had been a rag-trade superstar. “I feel like I’m weirdly home, that this is who I really am, I can’t explain it.”

“I can,” Maxine said, “you’re a compulsive shopper.”

For Maxine it was less cosmic. The changing room was short on privacy, what people liked to call “communal,” crowded with women in different stages of undress and attitude trying on clothes half of which didn’t fit but nevertheless offering free fashion advice to whoever looked like they needed it, meaning everybody. Like the locker room back at Julia Richman without the envy and paranoia. Now here’s this pearl-wearing WASP wants to drag her back into it all again.

The new Loehmann’s has been moved northward, into a former skating rink, it seems, almost to Riverdale, right up against the relentless roar of the Deegan, and Maxine has to struggle not to let out a scream of recognition—same endless aisles of heaped and picked-over garments, same old notorious Back Room as well, stuffed, she bets, with the same buyers’ mistakes and horror-story prom gowns with sequins shedding everywhere. Cornelia, on the other hand, the minute she steps in the store, is under its spell. “Oh, Maxi! I love it!”

“Yes, well . . .”

“Meet you by the registers, say around one, we’ll go have lunch, OK?” Cornelia disappearing into a miasma of whatever formaldehyde product retailers put on garments to make them smell this way, and Maxine, feeling not exactly claustrophobic, more like flashback-intolerant, wanders outside again, into the streets, at least to see what’s what, and then remembers that only a little way up the Deegan, just over the Yonkers line, is Sensibility, the ladies’ shooting range she’s just mailed in another year’s membership dues to, and that for this excursion to Loehmann’s she has somehow remembered to bring along the Beretta.

Hey. Cornelia will be hours. Maxine finds a cab letting off a fare, and twenty minutes later she’s all signed in at Sensibility, on the firing line in goggles, earplugs, and head muffs, with a convenience-store cup full of loose rounds, blasting away. Let the gamer have his zombies, Han Solo his TIE fighters, Elmer Fudd his elusive rabbit, for Maxine it has always been the iconic paper target figure known to cops as The Thug, here rendered in fuchsia and optical green. He has the look of an aging juvenile delinquent, with one of those shiny high-fifties haircuts, a scowl,
and a possibly nearsighted squint. Today, even with his image cranked all the way back to the berm, she manages to place some nice groups in his head, chest, and, actually, dick area—which long ago may have been an issue, though after a while it seemed to Maxine the number of trouser wrinkles the artist shows radiating from the target’s crotch could be read as an invitation to shoot there as well. She takes some time practicing double taps. Pretends briefly—only a bit of fun, you know—that it’s Windust she’s shooting at.

In the lobby on the way out, she’s at the pay phone calling a cab when who does she run into but her old partner in wine theft, Randy, last seen driving away from the parking lot at the Montauk lighthouse. He seems a little preoccupied today. They withdraw to a settee beneath a mural-size screen grab from the opening of
The Letter
(1940) in which Bette Davis is pretending to pump six rounds into an uncredited though perhaps not altogether unthanked “David Newell.”

“Guess what, that son of a bitch Ice? Pulled my access to his house. Somebody must’ve took a wine inventory. Got my license plates off the closed-circuit video.”

“Bummer. No legal follow-ups, I hope.”

“Not so far. Tell the truth, I’m just as happy to be clear of the place. Been hearing about some weird shit lately.” Strange lights at dark hours, visitors with funny-looking eyes, checks that bounce and come back with unreadable writing all over them. “Film crews showing up around Montauk suddenly from the paranormal channels. Cops pullin all kinds of overtime, working mysterious incidents includin that fire at Bruno and Shae’s place. I guess you heard about ol’ Westchester Willy by now?”

“On the run’s the last I heard.”

“He’s out in Utah.”

“What?”

“The three of em, I got some snail mail yesterday, they’re getting married. To each other.”

“They didn’t just skip, they eloped?”

“Here, check this out.” An engraved card featuring flowers, wedding bells, cupids, some kind of not-all-that-easy-to-make-out hippie typeface.

Maxine, beginning to feel nauseous, reads as far as she has to. “This is an invitation to their
shower,
Randy? It’s what, legal in Utah for three people to get married?”

“Probably not, but you know how it is, run into somebody in a bar, bullshit level starts to rise, pretty soon, crazy impulsive kids, they’re hoppin in the rig and headin out yonder.”

“You’re, ah, planning to attend this get-together?”

“It’s tough enough figuring out what to give them. A His, His, and Hers bath ensemble? A triple-sink vanity?”

“Thirty-piece set of cookware.”

“There you go. Must be a federal fugitive warrant out on em, you could pick up some quick change, fly out there, maybe I could come along for muscle.”

“I’m not a bounty hunter, Randy. Just a bookkeeper who’s a little surprised the relationship lasted more than ten minutes after the money got frozen. In fact, I think it’s kinda cute. I must be turning into my mother.”

“Yeah, somethin how Shae and Bruno stepped up for ol’ Willy that way. You start feelin a little bitter about human nature, then people fool you.”

“Or in my business,” Maxine reminds herself more than Randy, “people fool you and then after a while you start to get bitter.”

She arrives back at Loehmann’s just about the time Cornelia resurfaces from the crowds of women in the Back Room who’ve been molesting racks of discounted clothing, squinting doubtfully at designer labels, seeking advice by way of cellular phone from their size-zero teenage daughters. Maxine recognizes in Cornelia signs of advanced DITS, or Discount Inventory Tag Stupor.

“You’re starved, let’s find something before you pass out,” and off they go looking for lunch. Back in the old Fordham Road era, as she
recalls, you could at least find a decent knish in the neighborhood, a classic egg cream. Around here there’s a Domino’s Pizza and a McDonald’s, and a possibly make-believe Jewish delicatessen, Bagels ’n’ Blintzes, which is of course where Cornelia simply must do lunch, having heard of it no doubt from some Junior League newsletter, and where they are presently in a booth, surrounded by a dumpsterload of Cornelia’s purchases, which “impulsive” is maybe too kind a word for.

At least this isn’t some midtown ladies’ tearoom. The waitress, Lynda, is a classic deli veteran, who only needs to hear two seconds’ worth from Cornelia to start muttering, “Thinks I’m the downstairs maid,” Cornelia meantime making a point of asking for “Jewish” rye bread for her turkey-pastrami and roast-beef combo. Sandwich arrives, “And you’re quite sure this is
Jewish
rye bread.”

“I’ll ask it. Hello!” Holding the sandwich up to her face, “You’re Jewish? The customer wants to know before she eats you. What? No, she’s goyishe, but they don’t have kosher so maybe this pick-pick-pick is what they do instead,” so forth.

Maxine introduces Cornelia to Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, pours it in a glass for her. “Here, Jewish champagne.”

“Interesting, a bit on the demi-sec side—excuse me, oh Lynda? would you happen to have this drier, brut perhaps . . . ?”

“Sh-shh,” goes Maxine, though Lynda, recognizing WASP jocularity here, ignores.

In the course of lunchtime yakking, Maxine gets an earful of Slagiatt marriage history. Though the attraction was perverse and immediate, Cornelia and Rocky, it seems, did not so much fall in love as stumble into a classic NYC folie à deux—she, charmed at the notion of marrying into an Immigrant Family, expecting Mediterranean Soul, matchless cooking, an uninhibited embrace of life including not-quite-imaginable Italian sex activities, he meanwhile looking forward to initiation into the Mysteries of Class, secrets of elegant dress and grooming and high-society repartee, plus a limitless supply of old money to borrow against
without having to worry too much about debt collection, or not the kind he was used to anyway.

Imagine their mutual dismay on learning the real situation. Far from the Channel 13 upper-class dynasty he expected, Rocky discovered in the Thrubwells a tribe of nosepicking vulgarians with the fashion sense and conversational skills of children raised by wolves, and with a collective net worth Dun & Bradstreet barely acknowledged. Cornelia was equally stunned to find that the Slagiattis, most of whom were distributed along a suburban archipelago well east of the Nassau line, and for whom the closest thing to an Italian feast was to order in from Pizza Hut, did not “do warmth,” even among themselves, regulating the children, for example, not with the genial screaming or smacking around one might have expected from an adolescence spent at the Thalia watching neorealist films but with cold, silent, indeed one must say pathological glaring.

As early as their honeymoon in Hawaii, Rocky and Cornelia were exchanging What-have-we-done gazes. But it was heaven there, with ukuleles for harps, and sometimes heaven has its way. One evening, as they watched a postcoital sunset, “WASP chicks,” declared Rocky, an adoring note already throbbing in his voice. “Well.”

“We are dangerous women. We have our own crime syndicate, you know.”

“Huh?”

“The Muffya.”

A sort of compassionate clarity dawned, and grew. Cornelia went on insisting dramatically that for Thrubwells most of the Social Register was rather too impossibly ethnic and arriviste, and Rocky went on singing “Donna non vidi mai” while ogling her in the shower, often eating a Sicilian slice as he sang. But in growing closer they also came to know who it was they thought they were kidding.

“Your husband tends to run to extra dimensions,” Maxine supposes.

“Down in K-Town they call him ‘4-D.’ He’s also psychic, by the way. He thinks you’re having some trouble at the moment, but he’s reluctant
to what he calls ‘put in.’” Cornelia with one of those WASP eyebrow routines, possibly genetic, sympathy with a subtext of please, not another loser to deal with . . .

Still, however unintended, a potential mitzvah should be looked into. “Without getting too cute, it’s some video I’ve come across. I wouldn’t even be wondering how worried I should get, except it’s political in the worst way, maybe international, and I guess I’m to the point where I really could use some advice.”

With no hesitation Maxine can see, “In that case you must get in touch with Chandler Platt, he has a genius for facilitating outcomes, and he’s really very sweet.”

Which sets off a game-show buzzer, actually, for if Maxine’s not mistaken, she’s already run into this Platt customer, a financial-community big shot and fixer of some repute with upper-echelon access and what strikes her as a sense, finely calibrated as an artillery map, of where his best interests lie. Over the years they’ve met at various functions at the junction between East Side largesse and West Side guilt, and as it’s coming back to her now, Chandler may even once have grabbed her tit briefly, more of a reflex than anything, some cloakroom situation, no harm no foul. She doubts he even remembers.

And, well, there are fixers and fixers. “This genius of his—it extends to knowing how to dummy up?”

“Ah. One cannoli hope, as the Godfather always sez.”

•   •   •

CHANDLER PLATT HAS
a roomy corner office midtown, at the high-muzzle-velocity law firm of Hanover, Fisk, up in one of the glass boxes along the Sixth Avenue corridor, with a view conducive to delusions of grandeur. Dedicated elevator, a traffic-flow design that makes it impossible to tell how much, forget what kind of, business is afoot. There seems to be a lot of deep amber and Czarist red in the picture. An Asian child intern shows Maxine into the presence of Chandler Platt, who is installed behind a desk made of 40,000-year-old New Zealand kauri,
more like a piece of real estate than a piece of furniture, leading the casual observer, even one with a vanilla view of these matters, to wonder how many secretaries might fit comfortably beneath it and what amenities the space would be furnished with—restroom conveniences, Internet access, futons to allow the li’l cuties to work in shifts? Such unwholesome fantasies are only encouraged by the smile on Platt’s face, uneasily located between lewd and benevolent.

“A pleasure, Ms. Loeffler, after how long’s it been?”

“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.”