Bleeding Edge

17

Since the mid-nineties when WYNY switched formats overnight from country to classic disco, decent driving music in these parts has been in short supply, but someplace a little past Dix Hills she picks up another country station, maybe from Connecticut, and presently on comes Slade May Goodnight with her early-career chartbuster, “Middletown New York.”

[After a pedal-steel break that has always reached in and found Maxine’s heart]

So forth. By which point Maxine is singing along in a pretty focused way, with the wind blowing tears back into her ears, and she’s getting looks from drivers in adjoining lanes.

She hits Exit 70 about midday, and since Marvin’s videotape wasn’t that attentive to what Jodi Della Femina might call shortcuts, Maxine has to go intuitive with this, leaving Route 27 after a while and driving for about as long as she recalls it taking on the tape, till she notices a tavern called Junior’s Ooh-La-Lounge with lunch-hour pickups and motorcycles out front.

She goes in, sits at the bar, gets a doubtful salad and a PBR longneck and a glass. The jukebox is playing music Maxine’s unlikely ever to hear string arrangements of in any lunch venue in Manhattan. Presently the guy three stools down introduces himself as Randy and observes, “Well, the shoulder bag has a sway to it suggestive of small arms, but I don’t smell cop somehow, and you’re not a dealer, so what does that leave, I wonder.” He could be described as roly-poly, though Maxine’s antennas put him among that subset of the roly-poly who also carry weapons, maybe not on his person but certainly someplace handy. He has a neglected beard and wears a red ball cap with some Meat Loaf reference on it, out the back of which hangs a graying ponytail.

“Hey, maybe I am a cop. Working undercover.”

“Nah, cops have ’at special somethin you get to recognize, least if you’ve been bounced around much.”

“Guess I’ve only been dribbled up and down the back court a little. Am I supposed to apologize?”

“Only if you’re here to get somebody in trouble. Who you lookin for?”

Okay. How about— “Shae and Bruno?”

“Oh, them, hey, you can get them in as much trouble’s you want. Everybody around here’s collected their share of karma, but those two… what in ’ee hell would you want with them?”

“It’s this friend of theirs.”

“Hope you don’t mean Westchester Willy? Built kinda low to the ground, partial to that Belgian beer?”

“Maybe. Would you happen to know how to get to Shae and Bruno’s place?”

“Oh, so… you’re the insurance adjuster, right?”

“How’s that?”

“The fire.”

“I’m only a bookkeeper from this guy’s office. He hasn’t showed up for a while. What fire?”

“Place burned down a couple weeks ago. Big story on the news, emergency response from all over, flames lightin up the sky, you could see it from the LIE.”

“How about—”

“Charred remains? No, nothin like that.”

“Traces of accelerant?”

“Sure you’re not one of these them crime-lab babes, like on TV.”

“Now you’re sweet-talking me.”

“That was gonna be later. But if you—”

“Randy, if I wasn’t so wired into office mode right now?”

A general pause. Colleagues in on breaks from work struggling not to laugh too loud. Everybody here knows Randy, pretty soon there is a schadenfreudefest in progress about who’s having the worst time of it. Since last year when the tech boom collapsed, most homeowners out here who took hits in the market have been defaulting on contracts right and left. Only occasionally can you still find echoes of the nineties’ golden age of home improvement and the name that keeps coming up, not to Maxine’s surprise, is Gabriel Ice.

“His checks are still clearing,” Maxine supposes. Randy laughs merrily, the way roly-poly folks do. “When he writes them.” Renovating the bathrooms, Randy has found himself being stiffed invoice after invoice. “I owe all over the place now, four-figure showerheads as big as pizzas, marble for the bathtubs special-ordered from Carrara, Italy, custom glaziers for gold-streaked mirror glass.” Everybody in the room chimes in with a story like this. As if at some point having had a fateful encounter with tabloid figure Donald Trump’s cost accountants, Ice is now applying the guiding principle of the moneyed everywhere—pay the major contractors, blow off the small ones.

Ice has few fans in these parts—to be expected, Maxine supposes, but it’s a shock to find opinion in the room unanimous that he also likely had a hand in torching Bruno and Shae’s place.

“What’s the connection?” Maxine squinting. “I always took him for more of a Hamptons person.”

“Cheatin side of town, as the Eagles like to say, Hamptons ain’t doin that for him, he needs to get away from the lights and the limos, out to some old fallindown house like Bruno and Shae’s where a man can kick out the jambs.”

“They think it’s who they used to be,” opines a young woman in painter’s overalls, no bra, Chinese tats all up and down her bare arms, “nerds with fantasies. They want to go back to that, revisit.”

“Oh, Bethesda, you’re such a pussy, that’s cuttin ol’ Gabe way too much slack. Just like with everythin else, he’s lookin to get laid on the cheap’s all it is.”

“But why,” Maxine in her best insurance-adjuster voice, “burn the place down?”

“They had a reputation there for getting into odd behavior and whatever. Maybe Ice was bein blackmailed.”

Maxine does a quick sweep of the faces in range but doesn’t see anybody who thinks they know for sure.

“Real-estate karma,” somebody suggests. “A crib as out of scale as Ice’s would mean a lot of smaller houses somehow have to be destroyed, part of maintaining the overall balance.”

“That’s a lot of arson counts, Eddie,” sez Randy.

“So… it’s a sizable spread,” Maxi pretends to ask, “the Ice home?”

“We call it Fuckingham Palace. Like to have a look at the place? I was headin out that way.”

Trying to sound like a groupie, “Can’t resist a stately home. But would they even let me in the gate?”

Randy produces a chain with an ID tag. “Gate’s automatic, li’l transponder here, always carry an extra.”

Bethesda clarifies. “Tradition around here, these big houses are great places to bring a date if your idea of romance is gettin rudely interrupted right in the middle.”

“Penthouse Forum did that whole special issue,” Randy footnotes.

“Here, let’s just go detail you a little.” They repair to the ladies’ toilet, where Bethesda brings out a teasing brush and an eight-ounce can of Final Net and reaches for Maxine’s hair. “Got to lose this scrunchy thing, right now you’re lookin too much like these Bobby Van’s people.”

When Maxine emerges from the facility, “Mercy,” Randy swoons, “thought it was Shania Twain.” Hey, Maxine’ll take that.

Minutes later Randy’s wheeling out of the lot in an F-350 with a contractor’s rack on it, Maxine close behind wondering how good of a plan this is and growing more doubtful as Junior’s is replaced in the mirror by dismal residential streets gone tattered and chuckholed, full of small old rentals and dead-ending against chain-linked parking lots.

They make a brief stop to look at the site of Shae, Bruno, and Vip’s old playhouse. It’s a total loss. Green summer growth is vaporing back over the ashes. “Think it was an accident? Torched deliberately?”

“Can’t speak for your pal Willy, but Shae and Bruno are not the most advanced of spirits, in fact pretty dumb fucks when you come to it, so maybe somebody did somethin stupid lightin up. Could’ve happened that way.”

Maxine goes fishing in her bag for a digital camera to get a few shots of the scene. Randy peering in over her shoulder spots the Beretta. “Oh, my. That’s a 3032? What kind of load?”

“Sixty-grain hollowpoint, how about yourself?”

“Partial to Hydroshocks. Bersa nine-millimeter?”

“Awesome.”

“And… you’re not really a bookkeeper in an office.”

“Well, sort of. The cape is at the cleaner’s today, and I forgot to bring along the spandex outfit, so you’re missing the full effect. You can take your hand off my ass, however.”

“My goodness, was I really—”

Which, compared to her usual social day, passes for a class act.

They continue out to the Montauk Point Lighthouse. Everybody is supposed to love Montauk for avoiding everything that’s wrong with the Hamptons. Maxine came out here as a kid once or twice, climbed to the top of the lighthouse, stayed at Gurney’s, ate a lot of seafood, fell asleep to the pulse of the ocean, what wasn’t to like? But now as they decelerate down the last stretch of Route 27, she can only feel the narrowing of options—it’s all converging here, all Long Island, the defense factories, the homicidal traffic, the history of Republican sin forever unremitted, the relentless suburbanizing, miles of mowed yards, contractor hardpan, beaverboard and asphalt shingling, treeless acres, all concentrating, all collapsing, into this terminal toehold before the long Atlantic wilderness.

They park in the visitors’ lot at the lighthouse. Tourists and their kids all over the place, Maxine’s innocent past. “Let’s wait here for a minute, there’s video surveillance. Leave your car in the lot, we’ll pretend it’s a romantic rendezvous, drive away together in my rig. Less suspicion from Ice’s security that way.”

Makes sense to Maxine, though this could still be some elaborate horse’s-ass nooner he thinks he’s pulling here. They drive out of the lot again, follow the loop around to Old Montauk Highway, presently hook a right inland on Coast Artillery Road.

Gabriel Ice’s ill-gotten summer retreat proves to be a modest ten-bedroom what realtors like to call “postmodern” house with circle and pieces of circle in the windows and framing, open plan, filled with that strange lateral oceanic light that brought artists out here when the South Fork was still real. Obligatory Har-Tru tennis court, gunite pool which though technically “Olympic” size seems scaled more to rowing events than swimming, with a cabana that would qualify as a family residence in many up-Island towns Maxine can think of, Syosset, for example. Over the tops of the trees rises a giant old-time radar antenna from the days of anti-Soviet nuclear terror, soon to be a state-park tourist attraction.

Ice’s place is swarming with contractors, everything smells like joint compound and sawdust. Randy picks up a paper container of coffee, a sack of grout, and a preoccupied expression, and pretends he’s there about some bathroom question. Maxine pretends to tag along.

How could there be secrets here? Drive-through kitchen, state-of-the-art projection room, everything out in the open, no passages inside the walls, no hidden doors, all still too new. What could lie behind a front like this, when it’s front all the way through?

That’s till they get down to the wine cellar, which seems to’ve been Randy’s destination all along.

“Randy. You’re not going to—”

“I figure what I don’t drink I can go on that eBay thing and turn for some bucks, start getting some of my money back here.”

Randy picks up a bottle of white Bordeaux, shakes his head at the label, puts it back. “Dumb son of a bitch got stuck with a rackful of ’91. A little justice, I guess, not even my wife would drink this shit. Wait, what’s this? OK maybe I could cook with this.” He moves on to reds, muttering and blowing dust off and stealing till his cargo pockets and Maxine’s tote bag are full. “Gonna go stash these in the rig. Anything we missed?”

“I’ll have another look around, meet you back outside in a minute.”

“Just keep an eye out for rent-a-cops, they’re not always in uniform.”

It isn’t vintage year or appellation that’s caught her eye, but a shadowy, almost invisible door over in one corner, with a keypad next to it.

Soon as Randy’s out the door, she pulls out her Filofax, which these days has evolved into an expensive folder full of loose pieces of paper, and in the dim light goes looking for a list of hashslingrz passwords Eric has found down in his Deep Web inquiries and Reg has passed along. She recalls some of them being flagged as key codes. Sure enough, only a couple-three fingerdances later, an electric motor whines and a bolt slams open.

Maxine doesn’t think of herself as especially timid, she’s walked into fund-raisers wearing the wrong accessories, driven overseas in rental cars with alien gearshifts, prevailed in beefs with bill collectors, arms dealers, and barking-mad Republicans without much hesitation bodily or spiritual. But now as she steps through the door, the interesting question arises, Maxine, are you out of your fucking mind? For centuries they’ve been trying to indoctrinate girls with stories about Bluebeard’s Castle, and here she is once more, ignoring all that sound advice. Somewhere ahead lies a confidential space, unaccounted for, resisting analysis, a fatality for wandering into which is what got her kicked out of the profession to begin with and will maybe someday get her dead. Up in the world, it is the bright middle of a summer day with birds under the eaves and yellowjackets in the gardens and the smell of pine trees. Down here it’s cold, an industrial cold she feels all the way to her toenails. Isn’t only that Ice doesn’t want her here. She knows, without knowing the reasons, that this is about the last door she should ever have stepped through.

She finds a long corridor, swept, austere, track lighting at wide intervals, shadows where they shouldn’t be, leading—unless she’s turned around somehow—toward the abandoned air base with the big radar antenna. Whatever’s at the other end down here, across the fence, Gabriel Ice’s access to it is important enough to be protected by a key code, making this likely more than some rich guy’s innocent hobby.

She moves cautiously in, a trespasser’s timer blinking silently in her head. Some of the doors along the corridor are shut and locked, some are open, the rooms behind them empty in a chill and unnaturally tended way, as if bad history could be stabilized somehow and preserved for decades. Unless of course this is simply protected office space in here, some physical version of the dark archive at hashslingrz that Eric has been looking into. It smells like bleach, as if recently disinfected. Concrete floors, channels leading to drains set at low points. Steel beams overhead, with fittings whose purpose she can’t or doesn’t want to figure out. No furniture except for gray Formica office tables and folding chairs. Some 220-volt wall outlets, but no sign of heavy appliances.

Has all the hair spray been somehow turning her head into an antenna? She’s begun to hear whispering that soon resolves into radio traffic of some kind—looks around for speakers, can’t locate any, yet the air is increasingly full of numerals and NATO phonetic letters including Whiskey, Tango, and Foxtrot, affectless voices distorted by radio interference, crosstalk, bursts of solar noise… occasionally a phrase in English she’s never fast enough to catch.

She has come to a stairwell descending even deeper into the terminal moraine. Further than she can see. Her coordinates all at once shift ninety degrees, so that she can’t tell now if she’s staring vertically down uncountable levels or straight ahead down another long hallway. It lasts only a heartbeat, but how long dos it have to? She imagines somebody’s idea of Cold War salvation down there, carefully situated at this American dead end, some faith in brute depth, some prayerful confidence that a blessed few would survive, beat the end of the world and the welcoming-in of the Void…

Oh shit, what’s this— at the next landing down, something’s poised, vibrating, looking up at her… in this light it isn’t easy to say, she hopes she’s only hallucinating, something alive yet too small to be a security person… not a guard animal… no… a child? Something in a child-size fatigue uniform, approaching her now with wary and lethal grace, rising as if on wings, its eyes too visible in the gloom, too pale, almost white…

The timer in her head goes off, jangling, urgent. Somehow, reaching for the Beretta right now will not be a wise idea. “All right Air Jordans—do your stuff!” She turns and sprints back up the corridor, back through the door she shouldn’t have opened, back into the wine cellar to find Randy, who’s been looking for her.

“You OK?”

Depending on how you define OK. “This Vosne-Romanée here, I was wondering…”

“Year don’t matter much, grab it, let’s go.” For a wine thief, Randy is suddenly not acting too suave here. They scramble into the rig and head out the way they came. Randy is silent till they reach the lighthouse, as if he saw something back at Ice’s too.

“Listen, do you ever get up to Yonkers at all? My wife’s family’s up there, and sometimes I’ll do some shootin at this li’l ladies’ target range called Sensibility—”

“‘Men always welcome’, sure, I know it, fact I’m a member.”

“Well, maybe I’ll catch you there sometime?”

“Lookin forward, Randy.”

“Don’t forget your burgundy there.”

“Um… you were talking earlier about karma, maybe you should just go on ahead, take it.”

SHE DOESN’T EXACTLY PEEL OUT, but neither does she dawdle, casting anxious glances in the mirror at least till about Stony Brook. Roll on, four-wheeler, roll on. Talk about fools’ errands. Vip Epperdew’s last known address a charcoal ruin, Gabriel Ice’s compound ostentatious and unsurprising, except for a mystery corridor and something in it she doesn’t want to know if she even saw. So… maybe she can deduct some of this, midsize daily rate, credit-card discount, one tank of gas, buck and a quarter a gallon, see if they’ll go for $1.50….

Just before the country station goes out of range, on comes the Droolin Floyd Womack classic,

That night she dreams the usual Manhattan-though-not-exactly she has visited often in dreams, where, if you go far enough out any avenue, the familiar grid begins to break down, get wobbly and interwoven with suburban arterials, until she arrives at a theme shopping mall which she understands has been deliberately designed to look like the aftermath of a terrible Third World battle, charred and dilapidated, abandoned hovels and burned-out concrete foundations set in a natural amphitheater so that two or more levels of shops run up a fairly steep slope, everything sorrowful rust and sepia, and yet here at these carefully distressed outdoor cafés sit yuppie shoppers out having a cheerful cup of tea, ordering yuppie sandwiches stuffed full of arugula and goat cheese, behaving no differently than if they were at Woodbury Common or Paramus. She is supposed to be meeting Heidi here but abruptly finds herself at nightfall on a path through some woods. Light flickers ahead. She smells smoke with a strong toxic element, plastic, drug-lab fixins, who knows? comes around a bend in the path and there is the house from the Vip Epperdew videotape, on fire—black smoke in knots and whorls, battered among acid-orange flames, pouring upward to merge with a starless overcast. No neighbors have assembled to watch. No sirens growing louder in the distance. Nobody coming to put the fire out or to rescue whoever might still be inside, not Vip but, somehow, this time, Lester Traipse. Maxine stands paralyzed in the jagged light, running through her options and responsibilities. The burning is violent, all-consuming, the heat too fierce to approach. Even at this distance, she feels her oxygen supply being taken. Why Lester? She wakes with this feeling of urgency, knowing she has to do something, but can’t see what.

The day as usual comes sloshing in on her. Pretty soon she’s up to her ears in tax dodges, greedy little hotshots dreaming about some big score, spreadsheets she can’t make sense of. About lunchtime Heidi sticks her head in.

“Just the pop-culture brain I was looking to pick.” They go grab a quick salad at a deli around the corner. “Heidi, tell me again about the Montauk Project.”

“Been around since the eighties, part of the American vernacular by now. Next year they’ll be opening the old air station to tourists. There’s already companies running tour buses.”

“What?”

“Another form of everything ends up as a Broadway musical.”

“So nobody takes the Montauk Project seriously anymore, you’re saying.”

A dramatic sigh. “Maxi, earnest Maxi, forensic as always. These urban myths can be attractors, they pick up little fragments of strangeness from everywhere, after a while nobody can look at the whole thing and believe it all, it’s too unstructured. But somehow we’ll still cherry-pick for the intriguing pieces, God forbid we should be taken in of course, we’re too hip for that, and yet there’s no final proof that some of it isn’t true. Pros and cons, and it all degenerates into arguments on the Internet, flaming, trolling, threads that only lead deeper into the labyrinth.”

Nor, it occurs to Maxine, does touristy mean detoxified, necessarily. She knows people who go to Poland in the summer on Nazi-death-camp tour packages. Complimentary Polish Mad Dogs on the bus. Out in Montauk there could be funseekers infesting every square inch of surface area, while underneath their idle feet, whatever it is, whatever Ice’s tunnel connects with, goes on.

“If you’re not eating that…”

“Fress, Heidi, fress, please. I wasn’t as hungry as I thought.”