Bleeding Edge

25

Waiting for her at home in the mailbox is a small square jiffy bag with a postmark from somewhere out in the deep interior of the U.S. Some state beginning with an M maybe. At first she thinks it’s from the kids or Horst, but there’s no note, just a DVD in a plastic sleeve.

She pops the disc into the DVD player, and abruptly onto the screen comes a Dutch-angled view of a rooftop, somewhere on the far West Side, and the river and Jersey beyond. Early-morning light. A burned-in time stamp reads 7:02:00 A.M., a week or so back, staying frozen for a moment before it begins to increment. On comes a track full of broken sound, distant ambulance sirens, garbage collection down in the street, a helicopter passing or maybe hovering. The shot is from either behind or inside some piece of structure that houses the building’s water tank. Out on the roof are two men with a shoulder-mounted missile, maybe a Stinger, and a third who is spending most of his time hollering into a cellular phone with a long whip antenna.

There are time gaps when nothing much is happening. The dialogue isn’t too clear, but it’s in English, the accents not especially local, from someplace out between the coasts. Reg (it has to be Reg) is back to his old zoom-happy ways, taking note of every passenger jet that shows up in the sky before returning to the standby routine on the roof.

At around 8:30, noticing movement on the roof of another building close by, the camera pans over toward it and zooms in on a figure with an AR15 assault rifle, who now attaches a bipod, gets down in prone firing position, gets up, removes the bipod, goes over to the roof parapet and uses that for support instead, moving around this way to different positions till he finds one he likes. His only targets appear to be the Stinger guys. Even more interesting, he is making no efforts at concealment, as if the Stinger guys know he’s there, all right, and aren’t doing anything about it.

A short while later, the guy with the mobile points into the sky and everything tightens into action, the crew aiming at and acquiring their target, which looks like a Boeing 767, heading south. They track the plane and go through motions like they’re preparing to fire, but they don’t fire. The plane continues, presently vanishing behind some buildings. The guy on the phone yells “OK, let’s wrap it,” and the crew pack up everything and they all vacate the roof. The shooter on the other roof has likewise vanished. There’s wind noise and a brief spell of silence from below.

Maxine gets on the phone to March Kelleher. “March, do you know how to post video material on your Weblog?”

“Sure, bandwidth allowing. You sound strange, got something interesting?”

“Something you ought to see.”

“Come on over.”

March lives between Columbus and Amsterdam a few blocks away, on a cross street that Maxine can’t remember the last time she’s been on. If ever. A cleaner’s, an Indian place she never noticed. This old boricua neighborhood survives, scraped and soiled, driven indoors, done with, its original texts being relentlessly overwritten—the gangs of the fifties, the drug dealing twenty years ago, all publicly fading into yup indifference, as high-rise construction, free of all self-doubt, continues its march northward. Someday very soon this will all be midtown, as one by one the sorrowful dark brickwork, the Section 8 housing, the old miniature apartment buildings with fancy Anglo names and classical columns flanking their narrow stoops, and arch-shaped window openings and elaborate wrought-iron fire escapes rapidly going to rust, are demolished and bulldozed into the landfill of failing memory.

March’s building, known as The St. Arnold, is a medium-size prewar intrusion on a block of brownstones, with a consciously seedy look Maxine has learned to associate with frequent changes of ownership. Today there’s an off-brand moving van outside, painters and plasterers at work in the lobby, Out of Order sign on one of the elevators. Maxine gets more than the usual number of suspicious O-Os, before being allowed to go in the elevator that’s working. Security this tight of course could also result if enough tenants here were into shady activities and paying off the staff.

March is wearing novelty slippers each shaped like a shark, with sound chips in the heels so when she walks around, they play the opening of the Jaws (1975) theme. “Where can I find these, price is no object, I can write it off.”

“I’ll ask my grandson, he bought them with his allowance—Ice’s money, but I figure if it went through the kid, then maybe it’s laundered enough.”

They go into the kitchen, old Provençal tiles on the floor and an unpainted pine table that the two of them can sit at and still leave room for March’s computer and a pile of books and a coffeemaker. “My office here. Whatcha got?”

“Not sure. If it’s what it looks like, it should carry a radiation warning.”

They start up the disc, and March, getting the situation from frame one, mutters holy shit, sits fidgeting and frowning till the guy with the rifle shows up, then leans forward intently, slopping a little coffee onto that morning’s overpriced copy of the Guardian. “I don’t fucking believe it.” When the scene is done, “Well.” She pours coffee. “Who shot this?”

“Reg Despard, documentary guy I know who was doing a project on hashslingrz—”

“Oh, I remember Reg, we met during the blizzard of ’96, down at the World Trade Center, there was a janitors’ strike, all kinds of weird shit going on, secrets, payoffs. By the end of it, we felt like old veterans. We had a standing deal, anything interesting, I’d get to post it first on my Weblog. Bandwidth allowing. We lost touch, but what goes around comes around. Does this look to you what it looks like to me?”

“Somebody nearly shoots down an airplane, changes their mind at the last minute.”

“Or maybe it’s a dry run. Somebody planning to shoot down an airplane. Say, somebody in the private sector, working for the current U.S. regime.”

“Why would they—”

Irish people are not known for silently davening, but March sits for a short while appearing to. “OK, first of all maybe this is a fake, or a setup. Pretend I’m the Washington Post, OK?”

“Sure.” Maxine reaches toward March’s face and begins to make page-turning motions.

“No. No, I meant like in that Watergate movie? Responsible journalism and so forth. First of all, this disc is a copy, right? So Reg’s original could’ve been messed with in any number of ways. That date-and-time stamp in the corner could be fake.”

“Who would fake this, do you think?”

March shrugs. “Somebody who wants to nail Bush’s ass, assuming ‘Bush’ and ‘ass’ is a distinction you make? Or maybe it’s one of Bush’s people playing the victim card, trying to nail somebody who wants to nail Bush—”

“OK but suppose it is some kind of a dress rehearsal. Who’s the sharpshooter over on the other roof?”

“Insurance to see that they go through with it?”

“And on the other end of the phone that guy’s yelling into?”

“Excuse me, you already know what I think. Those Stinger guys were talking English, my guess is civilian contractors, because that’s GOP ideology, whenever possible privatize—and when the spook sound labs have the dialogue all cleaned up and transcribed, those mercs are gonna be in some deep shit for not doing enough of a sweep of the roof. How did Reg get this to you, if I may ask?”

“Over the transom.”

“How do you know Reg sent it? Maybe it’s CIA.”

“OK March it’s all a fake, I just came over here to waste your time. What do you advise, do nothing?”

“No, we find out where this roof is, for starters.” They scan through the footage again. “OK, so that’s the river… that’s Jersey.”

“Not Hoboken. No bridge, so it’s south of Fort Lee—”

“Wait, freeze it. That’s the Port Imperial Marina. Sid goes in and out of there sometimes.”

“March, I hate to even mention this, I’ve never been up there, but I have a creepy feeling about this roof, that…”

“Don’t say it.”

“… it’s the fuckin…”

“Maxi?”

“Deseret.”

March squints at the screen. “Hard to tell, none of these angles are that clear. Could be any of a dozen buildings in that stretch of Broadway.”

“Reg was stalking the place. Trust me, that’s where this was shot. Just something I know.”

Carefully, as to a nutcase, “Maybe you only want it to be The Deseret?”

“Because…?”

“It’s where they found Lester Traipse. Maybe you want to believe there’s a connection.”

“Maybe there is, March, all my life the place has given me bad dreams, and them I’ve learned to trust.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard to check out if it’s the same rooftop.”

“I’m a regular on the freight elevator there, I’ll get you a guest pass for the pool, then we can figure a way on up to the roof.”

AFTER THREADING A MAZE of unfrequented hallways and fire stairs, they emerge into the open, high up near a catwalk between two sections of the building, suitable for teen adventurers, clandestine lovers, well-heeled wrongdoers on the run, and take this vertiginous crossover to a set of iron steps that bring them finally around up onto the roof, into the wind above the city.

“Look sharp,” March ducking behind a vent. “Some gents with metal accessories.”

Maxine crouches down next to her. “Yeah I’ve got their album, I think.”

“Is it that missile crew again? What’s all that that they’re carrying?”

“Doesn’t look like Stingers. Wouldn’t it be easier to just go over and ask them?”

“Am I your husband, is this a gas station? Go on ahead, it makes you happy.”

They have no sooner got to their feet when here comes yet another group stepping off the elevator.

“Wait,” March angling her shades, “I know her, that’s Beverly, from the Tenants’ Association.”

“March!” A wave too vigorous not to be prescription-drug-assisted. “Glad you’re here.”

“Bev, what’s up?”

“Scumbag co-op board again. Went behind everybody’s back, leased some space up here to a cellular-phone outfit. These guys,” indicating the work crew, “are trying to put in microwave antennas to irradiate the neighborhood. Somebody doesn’t stop em we’re all gonna end up with glow-in-the-dark brains.”

“Count me in, Bev.”

“March, um…”

“Come on, Maxi, in or out, it’s your neighborhood too.”

“OK, for a while, but that’s another guilt trip you owe me.”

“For a while” of course turns out to be the rest of the day Maxine’s stuck on the roof. Every time she starts to leave, there’s a new mini-crisis, installers, supervisors, building management to argue with, then Eyewitness News shows up, shoots some footage, then more lawyers, late-rising picketers, flaneurs and sensation seekers drifting in and out of the picture, everybody with an opinion.

In that slack corner of the afternoon when it’s too discouraging even to look at a clock, March, as if remembering she came up here to check for clues, stoops and picks up a screw cap of some kind, weathered gray, two-, two-and-a-half-inch diameter, dings here and there, some faded writing in marker pen. Maxine squints at it. “What’s this, Arabic?”

“Has a sort of military look, doesn’t it?”

“You think…”

“Listen… do you mind if we show this to Igor? Just a hunch.”

“Igor could be some kind of criminal mastermind, you’re OK with that?”

“Remember Kriechman, the slumlord?”

“Sure. First time we met, you were picketing him.”

“At some point a couple years later, business motives no doubt, Igor took a dislike, went up to Pound Ridge, introduced piranhas into the Doctor’s swimming pool.”

“And they all became best friends forever?”

“The message was conveyed, the Doctor ceased and desisted whatever it was and has been very well-mannered since then. So I’ve come to think of Igor as a benevolent mobster for whom real estate is only a sideline.”

THEY TAKE A MEETING in the ZiL, on its way through Manhattan from one piece of monkey business to another.

“Sure, blast from past, part from Stinger missile launcher. Battery-coolant receptacle cap.”

“You used to get shot at with Stingers,” March is thoughtful enough to point out.

“Me, my friends, nothing personal. After Afghanistan, Stingers stayed there with mujahedeen, went on black market, many got bought back by CIA. I arranged a few deals, CIA didn’t care how much they spent, you could get up to $150,000 a pop.”

“That was a long time ago,” Maxine sez. “Are there any of them still around?”

“Plenty. Worldwide, maybe 60, 70,000 units plus Chinese knockoffs… Not so much in U.S., which makes this one interesting. Mind my asking—where’d you find it?”

March and Maxine exchange a look. “What could hurt?” Maxine supposes.

“Actually the last time somebody said that…”

“You know you want to tell me,” Igor beams.

They tell him, including a quick synopsis of the DVD. “And who videos this?”

Turns out Reg and Igor have also done some business. They met in Moscow around the peak of the Russian-baby-adoption craze in the U.S., when Reg was taping eligible babies to help pediatricians stateside to advise prospective parents. Because of the potential for fraud here, the idea was not to have these babies just sit there and pose for close-ups but actually do things like reach for objects, roll or crawl around, which meant some direction or at least wrangling from Reg. “Very sympathetic young man. Great appreciation for Russian cinema. Always at Gorbushka Market buying up kilos of DVDs, piratstvo, of course, but no Hollywood movies, only Russian—Tarkovsky, Dziga Vertov, Lady with Little Dog, not to mention greatest animated film ever made, Yozhik v Tumane (1975).”

Maxine hears spasmodic sniffling and looks in the front seat to find Misha and Grisha both with tears in their eyes and quivering lower lips. “They, ah, like that one too?”

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.”