Bleeding Edge

21

After a day of wandering around in the vast shopping basin of the SoHo-Chinatown-Tribeca interface, Maxine and Heidi find themselves one evening in the East Village looking for a bar where Driscoll is supposed to be singing with a nerdcore band called Pringle Chip Equation, when sudden gusts of smell, not yet at this distance intense but strangely contoured in their purity, begin as they walk through the humid twilight to accost them. Presently from down the block, screaming in panic, dramatically clutching their noses and occasionally heads, civilians come running. “I think I saw the movie,” Heidi sez. “What’s that smell?”

Turns out to be Conkling Speedwell, packing his Naser tonight, which looks in fact to’ve been recently deployed, its LED-studded delivery cone blinking truculently. He is accompanied by a small detachment of corporate security in designer fatigues each with a shoulder patch shaped like a flask of Chanel No. 5, with FRAGRANCE FORCE written across the stopper part and on the label the mirrored-C logo flanked by a couple of Glocks.

“Sting operation,” Conkling explains. “Truckful of Latvian counterfeit product, we were supposed to make a buy, but it all went stinko.” He nods at a forlorn trio of Pardaugava mini-mobsters semiconsciously collapsed in a doorway. “They’ll be OK, just aldehyde shock, caught ’em with the main lobe, maximized the prewar nitro musk and jasmine absolute, right?”

“Anybody would’ve done the same.” And on the topic of chemistry, what, excuse me, is suddenly up with Heidi and Conkling here?

“Say… is that Poison you’re wearing?” Conkling’s nose, in the dim light, having acquired a slowly pulsing glow.

“How could you tell?” with the eyelashes and so forth. Annoying enough, more so given the Poison issue, which has long simmered between Heidi and Maxine, especially Heidi’s practice of wearing it into elevators. All over the city, sometimes even years later, elevators have still not gotten over Heidi occupancies however brief, some even being obliged to attend special Elevator Recovery Clinics to be detoxified. “You have to stop blaming yourself for this, you were the victim…”

“I should’ve just closed the doors on her and defaulted to the roof…”

Meantime here comes the precinct, plus the bomb squad, a couple ambulances, and a SWAT team.

“Why, sure and if it isn’t the kid.”

“Moskowitz, what brings you out?”

“Schmoozin with some o’ the b’ys down to the Krispy Kreme, happened to pick this up on the scanner— Why, and is it itself theer with the blinkin lights, that infamous Neaaaser, now?”

“Oh… what, this? Nah, nah, just a toy for the kids, listen,” pressing a decoy button to activate a sound chip, which begins to play “Baby Beluga.”

“Lovely, and what sort of eedjit would you be takin me for, young Conkling?”

“The savant kind, I guess, but meanwhile look, Jay, there’s a whole van full of Chanel No. 5 over there that might get lost on the way to the property room unless somebody keeps an eye on it.”

“Why, it’s me dear wife’s own favorite scent, it is.”

“Well, in that case.”

“Conkling,” Maxine’d love to stay and chat, but, “you happen to know a bar in the neighborhood called Vodkascript, we’re looking for it.”

“Passed it, just a couple blocks that way.”

“You’re welcome to join us,” Heidi struggling with the overeagerness.

“Don’t know how long we’ll be here…”

“Ah, c’mon.” Sez Heidi. She is wearing jeans tonight and a twinset in some ill-advised tangerine shade, despite, or because of, which, Conkling is enchanted.

“Guys, we’ll finish up the paperwork back at 57th, OK?” Sez Conkling.

That was quick. Thinks Maxine.

At Vodkascript they find a roomful of trustafarians, cybergoths, out-of-work codefolk, uptowners ever in search of a life less vapid, all jammed into a tiny ex–neighborhood bar with no A/C and too many amplifiers, listening to Pringle Chip Equation. The band are all wearing nerd eyeglass frames and, like everybody else in the room, sweating. The lead guitarist plays an Epiphone Les Paul Custom and the keyboardist a Korg DW-8000, and there is also a reedperson with assorted horns and a percussionist with a wide range of tropical instruments. In a special guest appearance tonight, Driscoll Padgett is heard on an occasional vocal. Maxine never imagined that Driscoll’s universe of three-letter acronyms might include “LBD,” but now look at this latest edition. Hair pinned up, revealing to Maxine’s surprise one of those sweetly hexagonal junior-model faces, eyes and lips underdone, the chin resolute as if she were getting serious about her life. A face, Maxine can’t help thinking, come into its own…

After the set, Driscoll waves and comes over.

“Driscoll, Heidi, and this is Conkling.”

“Oh, sure, the guy with the Hitler,” quick look at Maxine, “uh, thing. How’d that work out?”

“Hitler,” Heidi violently with the eyelashes, scattering pieces of mascara, as if it’s a pop star she and Conkling might have in common.

Fuck here we go, Maxine half-subvocalizes, having only herself recently learned of Conkling’s longtime obsession with, not so much Hitler in general as the even more focused question of, what did Hitler smell like? Exactly? “I mean obviously like a vegetarian, like a nonsmoker, but… what was Hitler’s cologne, for example?”

“I always figured it was 4711,” Heidi taking her beat a little faster than a normal person might.

Conkling is instantly mesmerized. The sort of thing you see in older Disney cartoons. “Me too! Where did you—”

“Only a wild guess, JFK used it, right? and both men, mutatis mutandis, had the same kind of, you know, charisma?”

“Exactly, and if young Jack borrowed his father’s cologne—in the literature we often find a father-to-son transmission model—we know the elder Kennedy admired Hitler, even plausibly enough to want to smell like him, add to that that every U-boat in Admiral Dönitz’s fleet got spritzed continuously with 4711, barrels full of it every voyage, and furthermore Dönitz was personally named by Hitler as his successor—”

“Conkling,” Maxine gently and not for the first time, “that doesn’t make Hitler a big U-boat lover, by that point there was nobody else he trusted, and somehow, the logic here?”

At first, assuming Conkling was only developing a thesis out loud, Maxine was willing to cut him some slack. But soon she began to grow vaguely alarmed, recognizing, behind a pose of wholesome curiosity, the narrow stare of the zealot. At some point he showed Maxine a “period press photo” in which Dönitz is presenting Hitler with a gigantic bottle of 4711, its label clearly visible. “Wow,” careful not to agitate Conkling, “talk about product placement, huh? Mind if I pull a Xerox of this?” Just a hunch, but she wanted to show it to Driscoll.

It drew an instant eyeroll. “Photoshopped. Look.” Driscoll opened her computer, clicked around some Web sites, typed in a couple of search terms, finally pulled up a photo from July 1942 of Dönitz and Hitler, identical to Conkling’s, except that the two men are only shaking hands. “Angle Dönitz’s arm down a couple of degrees, find an image of the bottle, scale it any size you want, put it in his hand, leave Hitler’s where it is, looks like he’s reaching for the bottle, see?”

“Think there’s any point in telling Conkling any of this?”

“Depends where he got the picture from and how much he spent.”

When Maxine, not shy, asked, Conkling looked embarrassed. “Swap meets… New Jersey… you know how there’s always Nazi memorabilia… Look, there could be an explanation—it could still be a genuine Nazi propaganda photo, right? which they altered themselves, for a poster or…”

“You’d still need to get it expertized— Oh, Conkling, there’s somebody on the other line here, I have to take this.”

Maxine has tried since to keep their conversations professional. Conkling does ease up some with the Hitler references, but it only makes Maxine nervous. Wild talents like überschnozz here, she learned long ago at the New York campus of Fraud University, can often be nutcases also.

Heidi of course thinks it’s cute. When Conkling slides off to the toilet, she leans till their heads are touching and murmurs, “So Maxine, is there an issue here?”

“You mean,” switching to loyal sidekick, “as in ‘Bird Dog’ by the Everly Brothers, well, far as I know, Conkling is nobody’s quail at the moment, and besides you only poach husbands, isn’t that right, Heidi.”

“Aahhh! You will never—”

“And what about Carmine, passionate, Italian, goes without saying jealous, a recipe for Naser versus Glock at high noon, no?”

“Carmine and I are deliriously happy, no I’m only thinking of you, Maxine, my best friend, don’t want to get in your way…”

At which point Conkling comes back and the saccharimeter readings drop to a less alarming level.

“Fascinating toilet. Not quite the complexity of a Welcome to the Johnsons, say, but plenty of stories old and new.”

CALL FROM AXEL DOWN at the tax office, latest on Vip Epperdew, seems he’s jumped bail and fled the jurisdiction. “His young friends have also disappeared. Maybe in another direction, maybe they’re still all together.”

“You want me to fix you up with a good skiptracer?”

“What’s to go after? Not our problem anymore. Muffins and Unicorns is in receivership, Vip’s accounts are all frozen, the tax liability’s being negotiated, the wife is filing for divorce and about to get her real-estate license, happy endings all around. Excuse me while I go find a tissue.”

Maxine, for whom the Uncle Dizzy ticket is a kind of tutorial in annoyance control, spends an hour or two with Xeroxes of Diz’s receipts and journals, takes a break, finds Conkling browsing through back issues of Fraud magazine. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“You looked pretty busy. Didn’t want to interrupt. Just an update on that 9:30 product—I consulted one of my associates, we go back to the old days at IF&F. She’s proösmic—she can foresmell things that’re going to happen. Sometimes a scent can act as a trigger. In this case more like a detonator—she took one pass at the air sample I showed her and went nitrous.” For weeks already she’d been going around in a state of panic, short of breath, waking up for no reason, probed gently but insistently by a reverse sillage, a wake from the future. “She says no one alive has smelled it before, this toxic accord she’s been picking up, bitter, indolic, caustic, ‘like breathing in needles,’ is how she puts it. Proprietary molecules, synthetics, alloys, all subjected to catastrophic oxidization.”

“Which means what, like a fire?”

“Could be. She has a pretty good record with fires, including some big ones.”

“And?”

“She’s getting out of town. Telling everybody she knows to do the same. Because 9:30 cologne’s connected with D.C., she’s not going near D.C. either.”

“How about you, you staying in town?”

Misunderstanding, “This weekend? I wasn’t going to, but then I met somebody and changed my mind.”

“‘Somebody.’”

“Your friend the other night, wearing the Poison.”

Bashful the Dwarf here. “Heidi. Well, I do congratulate you on your taste in women.”

“I hope this won’t come between you.”

A double take she has trained over the years down to a less noticeable take and a half, “What. You think we might get into some Alexis-and-Krystle-by-the-poolside, over who gets to date you, Conkling? Tell you what, I’ll do the noble thing, go back to my husband if he’ll have me.”

“You seem… annoyed somehow, I’m sorry.”

“With Horst due back any day, some impatience maybe, but not with you.”

“Your husband was always in the picture, I knew that right away—well, actually, I smelled it, so I made the effort from then on to keep things strictly business with us, case you didn’t catch that.”

“Aw, Conkling. I hope it hasn’t been too inconvenient for you.”

“It has. But what I really came over to ask, is have you seen her today?”

“Heidi? Heidi is…” But there she has to put it on pause. Doesn’t she. The ethical thing about now might be to, well, not warn, maybe just happen to mention one or two of Heidi’s minor character zits. But Conkling, poor zhlub, is so desperate here to talk about her, oh and what’s her sign and who’s her favorite band, and, and…

Please. “You want what, my blessing? Thinks I’m the Rabbi here. How about I write you an audit opinion, I could manage that.”

Wistfully though rehearsed, “I think you and I took it about as far as it was going.”

“Yes we could’ve been an item,” Maxine pretends to reflect.

“With Heidi you don’t think—it’s just the Naser, do you?”

“You want to be appreciated for yourself.”

“Bring out the Naser once, people jump to conclusions. Some women can’t resist a military connection, however remote. I was never a field type, in my heart I’m always behind some desk. Not like—”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

It is insanely unlikely he was about to mention Windust. Insane, right? But who else, then?