Bleeding Edge

6

Pizza for supper. What else is new?

“Mom, this really crazy lady showed up at school today.”

“And so… somebody, what, called the cops?”

“No, we had assembly and she was the guest speaker. She graduated from Kugelblitz sometime back in the olden days.”

“Mom, did you know that the Bush family does business with Saudi Arabian terrorists?”

“Oil business, you mean.”

“I think that’s what she meant, but…”

“What”

“Like there was something else. Something she wanted to say but not in front of a kid audience.”

“Sorry I missed it.”

“Come to the upper-school commencement. She’s gonna be guest speaker again.”

Ziggy hands over a flyer with an ad for a Web site called Tabloid of the Damned, and “March Kelleher” autographed on it.

“Hey, so you saw March. Well. In fact, well well.” The hashslingrz legend continues, here. March Kelleher happens to be Gabriel Ice’s mother-in-law, her daughter Tallis and Ice having been college sweethearts, Carnegie Mellon maybe. A subsequent coolness, pari passu with the dotcom billionaire’s revenue growth no doubt, is said to’ve developed. None of Maxine’s business of course, though she knows that March herself is divorced and that there are two other kids besides Tallis, boys, one is some kind of IT functionary out in California and another went off to Katmandu and has been postcard-nomadic ever since.

March and Maxine go back to the co-opping frenzy of ten or fifteen years ago, when landlords were reverting to type and using Gestapo techniques to get sitting tenants to move. The money they offered was contemptuously little, but some renters went for it. Those who didn’t got a different treatment. Apartment doors removed for “routine maintenance,” garbage uncollected, attack dogs, hired goons, eighties pop played really loud. Maxine noticed March on a picket line of neighborhood gadflies, old lefties, tenants’-rights organizers and so forth, in front of a building over on Columbus, waiting for the union’s giant inflatable rat to show up. Picket-sign slogans included RATS WELCOME—LANDLORD’S FAMILY and CO-OP—CRUEL OFFENSIVE OUTRAGEOUS PRACTICES. Undocumented Colombians carried furniture and household possessions out to the sidewalk, trying to ignore the emotional uproar. March had the anglo crew boss cornered against a truck and was giving him an earful. She was slender, with shoulder-length red hair parted in the middle and then pulled back into a snood, as it turned out one of a wardrobe of these retro hair accessories, which had become her trademark around the neighborhood. On that particular day in late winter, the snood was scarlet, and March’s face seemed to Maxine silvery at the edges, like some antique photograph.

Maxine was looking for a chance to get into a conversation with her when the landlord showed up, one Dr. Samuel Kriechman, a retired plastic surgeon, along with a small posse of heirs and assigns. “Why you miserable, greedy old bastard,” March cheerfully greeted him. “You dare to show your face around here.”

“Ugly cunt,” replied the genial patriarch, “nobody in my profession would even touch a face like yours, who is this bitch, get her the fuck out of here.” A great-grandson or two stepped forward, eager to obey.

March produced from her purse a 24-ounce aerosol can of Easy-Off oven cleaner and began to shake it. “Ask the eminent physician what lye can do for your face, kids.”

“Call the cops,” ordered Dr. Kriechman. Elements of the picket line came over and began to discuss matters with Kriechman’s entourage. There was some, well, argumentative gesturing, extending to casual contact which the Post may have amplified slightly in the story it ran. Cops showed up. As light faded and deadlines approached, the crowd thinned out. “We don’t picket at night,” March told Maxine, “hate to step off the line personally, but then again I could use a drink about now.”

The nearest bar was the Old Sod, technically Irish, though an aging gay Brit or two may have wandered infrequently in. The drink March had in mind was a Papa Doble, which Hector the bartender, previously only seen drawing beers and pouring shots, assembled for March as if he’d been doing it all week. Maxine had one too, just to keep her company.

They discovered they’d been living only blocks from each other all this time, March since the late fifties when the Puerto Rican gangs were terrorizing the Anglos in the neighborhood, and you didn’t go east of Broadway after sunset. She hated Lincoln Center, for which an entire neighborhood was destroyed and 7,000 boricua families uprooted, just because Anglos who didn’t really give a shit about High Culture were afraid of these people’s children.

“Leonard Bernstein wrote a musical about it, not West Side Story, the other one, where Robert Moses sings,

In a shrill Broadway tenor plausible enough to curdle the drink in Maxine’s stomach. “They even had the chutzpah to actually film West Side fuckin Story in the same neighborhood they were destroying. Culture, I’m sorry, Hermann Göring was right, every time you hear the word, check your sidearm. Culture attracts the worst impulses of the moneyed, it has no honor, it begs to be suburbanized and corrupted.”

“You should meet my parents sometime. No love for Lincoln Center, but you can’t keep em away from the Met.”

“You kidding, Elaine, Ernie? we go back, we used to show up at the same demonstrations.”

“My mother demonstrated? What for, a discount someplace?”

“Nicaragua,” unamused, “Salvador. Ronald Raygun and his little pals.”

This was when Maxine was living at home, getting her degree, sneaking out into weekend club-drug mindlessness, and only noticing at the time that Elaine and Ernie seemed a little distracted. It wasn’t till years later that they felt comfortable about sharing their memories of plastic handcuffs, pepper spray, unmarked vans, the Finest doing what cops do best.

“Making me the Insensitive Daughter once again. They must’ve picked up some some tell, some shortfall in my character.”

“Maybe they were only trying to keep you clear of trouble,” March said.

“They could have invited me along, I could have had their backs for them.”

“Never too late to start, there’s enough to do God knows, you think anything’s changed? dream on. The fucking fascists who call the shots haven’t stopped needing races to hate each other, it’s how they keep wages down, and rents high, and all the power over on the East Side, and everything ugly and brain-dead just the way they like it.”

“I do remember,” Maxine tells the boys now, “March was always sort of… political?”

She sticks a Post-it on her calendar to go to graduation and see what the old snood-wearing mad dog is up to these days.

REG REPORTS IN. He’s been to see his IT maven Eric Outfield, who’s been down in the Deep Web looking into hashslingrz’s secrets. “Tell me something, what’s an Altman-Z?”

“A formula they use to predict if a company will go bankrupt in, say the next two years. You plug numbers into it and look for a score below maybe 2.7.”

“Eric found a whole folder of Altman-Z workups that Ice has been running on different small dotcoms.”

“With a view to… what, acquiring?”

Evasive eyeballs. “Hey, I’m just the whistle-blower.”

“Did this kid show you any of these?”

“We haven’t been meeting much online, he’s so paranoid,” yeah, Reg, “he only likes to meet face-to-face on the subway.”

Today an insane white Christer at one end of the car was competing with a black a cappella group at the other. Perfect conditions. “Brought you something.” Reg handing over a disc. “I’m supposed to tell you it’s been personally blessed by Linus himself, with penguin piss.”

“This is to make me have guilt now, right?”

“Sure, that’d help.”

“I’m on it, Reg. Just not too comfortable.”

“Better you than me, frankly I wouldn’t have the cojones.” It has turned out to be a cannonball dive into strange depths. Eric is using the computer at the place he’s been temping, a large corporation with no IT chops to speak of, in the middle of a crisis nobody saw coming. Something a little different. Each time he surfaces from the Deep Web he’s a little more freaked, or so it seems to those in neighboring cubes, though so many of these spend their hours down in the mainframe room snorting Halon out of the fire extinguishers that they may lack some perspective.

The situation is not as straightforward as Eric might have been hoping. The encryption is challenging, if not mad serious. Whereas Reg has been entertaining fantasies of a quick in and out, Eric has found the clerks at this 7-Eleven are packing assault rifles on full auto.

“I keep running into this dark archive, all locked down tight, no telling what’s stashed there till I crack in.”

“Limited access, you’re saying.”

“Idea is to have a failsafe in case of a disaster, natural or man-made, you can hide your archive on redundant servers out in remote locations, hoping at least one’ll survive anything short of the end of the world.”

“As we know it.”

“If you want to be chirpy about it, I guess.”

“Ice is expecting a disaster?”

“More likely just wants to keep stuff away from inquiring minds.” Eric’s original tactic was to pretend to be a script kiddie out for a joyride, seeing if he could get in with Back Orifice and then install a NetBus server. A message came up immediately written in Leet characters along the lines of “Congratulations noob you think you made it in but all you’re really in now is a world of deep shit.” Something in the style of this response caught Eric’s attention. Why should their security be going to the trouble to make it so personal? Why not just brief and bureaucratic, like “Access Denied”? Something, maybe only its amused vehemence, reminded him of older hackers from the nineties.

Are they playing with him? What sort of playmates are they likely to be? Eric figured if he was supposed to be just some packet monkey nosing around, he’d have to pretend he doesn’t know how heavy-duty, or even who, these guys are. So at first he goes after the password as if it might be something old-school like the Microsoft LM hash, which even retards can crack. To which Security replies, again in Leet, “Noob do you really know who you’re fucking with?”

Reg and Eric were out in the middle of Brooklyn by this point, the doo-wop and Bible recitation long out the exits and Eric poised for flight. “You’re in and out of there all the time, Reg, you ever happen to run into any of their security people?”

“Rumor I hear is that Gabriel Ice runs the department himself. There’s supposed to be some history. Somebody had a live terminal in a desk drawer and forgot to tell him.”

“Forgot.”

“Next thing anybody knew, there was all kinds of proprietary code out there for free. Took months to fix, cost them a big contract with the navy.”

“And the careless employee?”

“Disappeared. All this is company folklore, understand.”

“That’s reassuring.”

No more dangerous than a chess game, it seems to Reg. Defense, retreat, deception. Unless it’s a pickup game in the park where your opponent turns violently psychopathic without warning, of course.

“Paranoia, whatever, Eric’s still intrigued,” Reg reports to Maxine. “It’s dawning on him that this could be a kind of entrance exam. If it’s the Ice Man himself on the other end of this, if Eric’s good enough, maybe they’ll let him in. Maybe I should be telling him to run like hell.”

“I heard it’s a recruiting tactic over there, you might want to point that out. Meantime, Reg, you sound a lot less enthusiastic about your project.”

“Actually, it’s a coastal thing you’re hearing, I don’t even know what I’m doing on this one anymore.”

Uh-oh. Intuition alert. None of Maxine’s business, of course, but, “The ex.”

“Same ol’ blues line, nothin important. Except now her and hubby, they’re making noises about moving out to Seattle. I don’t know, he’s some kind of corporate hotshot. Vice President in Charge of Rectal Discomfort.”

“Ah, Reg. Sorry. In the old soap operas, ‘transferred to Seattle’ was code for written out of the script. I used to think Amazon, Microsoft, and them were started up by fictional soap-opera rejects.”

“Keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, cute li’l announcement card from Gracie, ‘Hooray! we’re pregnant!’ Should be happening about now, right? So end the suspense already.”

“You’d be OK with that?”

“Better than some creep thinking my kids are his. Which gives me nightmares. Literally. Like he could be a fuckin abuser.”

“C’mon, Reg.”

“What. These things happen.”

“Too much family television, bad for your brain, watch the after-midnight cartoons instead.”

“Come on, how’m I supposed to deal with that?”

“Not the sort of thing you can just let go, I guess.”

“Actually, I had a li’l more proactive approach in mind?”

“Oh no, Reg. You’re not…”

“Packing? Bust a cap in the muthafucker’s ass, lovely fantasy ain’t it… but then Gracie I suppose would never talk to me again. The girls either.”

“Hmm, maybe not.”

“Also thought about a snatch-and-grab, can’t afford even that. Sooner or later I’d have to go to work, Social Security number and they’ve got me again, and it’s lawyers dealt into what’s left of my life. And ol’ Pointy-Hair gets the girls back anyway, and I’m forbidden ever to see them again. So my latest thinkin is, is maybe I should go out there and make nice instead.”

“Uh huh and… they’re expecting you?”

“Maybe I’ll find a job first, then surprise everybody. Just don’t want you thinkin too badly of me. I know it looks like I’m running away from something, but New York is really where I’ve been running away, and now there’s about to be a whole continent between me and my kids. Too far.”

IT IS MAXINE’S practice when checking into little start-ups like hwgaahwgh.com to also have a look at any investors in the picture. If somebody stands to lose money, there’s always a chance, emergency-vehicle exhaust-fume issues or whatever, they’ll want to hire Maxine. The name that keeps popping up in connection with hwgaahwgh is a VC down in SoHo, doing business as Streetlight People. As in “Don’t Stop Believing,” Maxine imagines. Among whose listed clients—coincidence, no doubt—also happens to be hashslingrz.

Streetlight People is located in a cast-iron-front ex-factory space somewhat off the major shopping routes around SoHo. Karmic echoes of the sweatshop era long smoothed away by portable soundbreaks, screens and carpeting, passed into a neutral, unhaunted hush. Buddy Nightingale seating in a spectrum of hesitant aquas, daffodils, and fuchsias, brushed-nickel workstations custom-designed by Zooey Chu, punctuated now and then with black leather bosses’ chairs by Otto Zapf.

If asked, Rockwell “Rocky” Slagiatt would explain that losing the vowel at the end of his name was the price of smoothness and rhythm in doing business, like lyrics in an opera. Actually he thought it would sound more Anglo, though for special visitors, of whom Maxine today seems to be one, he is known to suddenly flip polarity and become disingenuously ethnic again.

“Hey! You want sum’na eat? Peppuhvr-n-egg sangwidge.”

“Thanks, but I just—”

“My mothuh’s peppuhvr-n-egg sangwidge.”

“Well, Mr. Slagiatt, that depends. Do you mean it’s your mother’s recipe? or, it’s, like, her personal pepper-and-egg sandwich, that for some reason she keeps in that credenza there instead of a fridge where it should be?” From her studies with Shawn, Maxine is trained in the exotic Asian technique known as “False Eating,” so if it comes to it, she’ll only have to make believe eat the pepper-and-egg sandwich, which despite its authentic appearance could be poisoned with almost anything.

“’t’s ahright!” grabbing back the object, now seen actually to have an unnatural wobble to it. “It’s plastic!” throwing it in a desk drawer.

“Little hard to chew.”

“You’re a sport, Maxi, it’s OK I call you that, Maxi?”

“Sure. OK if I don’t call you Rocky?”

“Your choice, no rush,” suddenly, for a moment, Cary Grant. What? Somewhere on Maxine’s perimeter, long-disused antennas quiver and begin to track.

He picks up the phone. “Hold my calls, OK? What? Talk to me… Nah. Nah, the drag-along is set in cement. The full ratchet, maybe doable, but see Spud on that.” Ringing off, summoning a file onto his screen. “OK. This is about the recently belly-up hwgaahwgh dotcom.”

“For whom you are, or should I say were, their VC.”

“Yeah, we did their Series A. Since then we been tryin to evolve to more of a mezz posture here, early stages are way too easy, the real challenge,” busy tapping keys, “comes in structuring the tranches… valuing the company, where you get the Wayne Gretzky Principle of where the puck is gonna be instead of where it is now, see what I’m saying.”

“How about where it was?”

Squinting at the screen, “Part of the doo-doo diligence is, is we keep these daily logs, it all gets archived, impressions, hopes and fears… Looks like… even back puttin together the term sheet, these guys were being way too picky about liquidation preferences. Took days more than it should. We ended up with a 1-X multiple on only a little tiny position, so… without wishing to pry, why you come zoomin in on us about this?”

“Are you upset by unwelcome attention, Mr. Slagiatt?”

“Ain’t like we’re loan sharks here. Look up on that shelf.”

She looks. “You… have a company bowling team.”

“Industry awards, Max. Since that thing with the Wells notice in ’98? our wake-up call,” earnest as a victim on a talk show, “we all went up to Lake George on retreat, shared our feelings totally, took a vote, cleaned up our act, those days are behind us now.”

“Congratulations. Always a plus to find a moral dimension. Maybe it’ll help you appreciate some funny numbers I found.”

She fills him in on the Benford-curve and other discrepancies at hashslingrz. “Prominent among payees of these fishy expenditures is hwgaahwgh.com. What’s strange is that after the company is liquidated, the amounts paid to it grow dramatically even more lavish and it all seems to be disappearing someplace offshore.”

“Fuckin Gabriel Ice.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“The book on this guy is he takes a position, typically less than five percent, in each of a whole portfolio of start-ups he knows from running Altman-Z’s on them are gonna fail within a short-term horizon. Uses them as shells for funds he wants to move around inconspicuously. Hwgaahwgh seems to be one of these. Where to and what for, ya got to wonder, huh?”

“Working on that.”

“Mind if I ask, who got you onto this?”

“Somebody who’d rather not be involved. Meantime, I see from your client list you also do some business with Gabriel Ice.”

“Not me directly, not for a while.”

“No schmoozing with Ice in any social way? you and maybe even…” head-gesturing at a framed photo on Rocky’s desk.

“That would be Cornelia,” nods Rocky.

Maxine waves at the picture. “How do you do, I’m sure.”

“Not only a looker as you can see, but a elegant hostess from the old school. Equal to any social challenge.”

“Gabriel Ice, he’s… challenging?”

“OK, we been out to dinner, once. Twice maybe. Places on the East Side a guy comes by with a grater and a truffle, grates it all over your food till you say stop? Vintage dates on the Champagne, so forth—with ol’ Gabe it’s always about the price… Ain’t seen either of them since maybe last summer out in the Hamptons.”

“The Hamptons. It figures.” Glittering rat hole and summertime home to America’s rich, famous, and a vast seasonal inflow of yup wannabes. Half Maxine’s business sooner or later tracks back to somebody’s need for the diseased Hamptons fantasy, which is way past its sell-by date by now, in case nobody’s noticed.

“More like Montauk. Not even on the beach, back in the woods.”

“So your paths…”

“Cross now and then, sure, couple times in the IGA, enchiladas at the Blue Parrot, but the Ices are running in way different circles these days.”

“Had them figured for Further Lane at least.”

Shrug. “Even out on the South Fork, my wife tells me, there’s still resistance to money like Ice’s. One thing to build a house with its foundation in the sand, right, somethin else to pay for it with money not everybody believes is real.”

“I Ching talk.”

“She noticed.” The semimischievous look again.

Uh, huh, “A boat, how about a boat, they own a boat?”

“Lease one maybe.”

“Oceangoing?”

“What am I, Moby Dick? You’re that curious, go out there and see.”

“Yeah, right, who springs for the jitney, where’s the per diem, see what I’m saying.”

“What. You doin this on spec?”

“So far it’s a buck and a half for the subway down here, that I can probably absorb. Beyond that…”

“Shouldn’t be a problem.” Picking up the phone, “Yes Lupita mi amor, could you cut us a check, please, for… uh,” raising his eyebrows at Maxine, who shrugs and holds up five fingers, “five thousand U.S., payable to—”

“Hundred,” sighs Maxine, “Five hundred, jeez all right I’m impressed, but it’s only enough so I can start a ticket. Next invoice you can be Donald Trump or whatever, OK?”

“Just tryin to help, not my fault I’m a giving generous type of guy, is it? Lemme at least buy yiz lunch?”

She risks a look at his face, and sure enough—the Cary Grant beam, the Interested Smile. Aahh! What would Ingrid Bergman do, Grace Kelly? “I don’t know…” Actually, she does know, because she has this built-in fast-forward feature in her brain that can locate herself, a day or two from now, glaring into the mirror going, “What, in the fuck, were you thinking?” and right at the moment it’s coming up No Signal. Hmm. Maybe it’s just that she can do with some lunch.

They go around the corner to Enrico’s Italian Kitchen, which she recalls getting raves in Zagat, and find a table. Maxine heads for the ladies’ toilet, and on the way back, in fact while she’s still in there, she can hear Rocky and the waiter arguing. “No,” Rocky with a sort of evil glee Maxine has noticed also in certain children, “not ‘pas-ta e fa-gio-li,’ I think what I said was pastafazool.”

“Sir, if you’ll look on the menu, it’s clearly spelled,” pointing helpfully at each word, “‘pasta, e, fagioli’?”

Rocky gazes at the waiter’s finger, deciding on how best to remove it from its hand. “But ain’t I a reasonable person? of course I am, so let’s go to the classical source here, tell me, kid, does Dean Martin sing ‘When the stars make-a you droli / Just-a like-a pasta e fagioli’? no. No, what he sings is—”

Maxine sits quietly, attending to her eyeblink rate, as Rocky, far from sotto voce but on pitch, makes with his Dean Martin impression. Marco the owner sticks his head out of the kitchen. “Oh, it’s you. Che si dice?”

“Would you explain to the new guy?”

“He bothering you? five minutes, he’s in the dumpster with the scungilli shells.”

“Maybe just change the spelling on the menu for him?”

“You sure? Got to go in the computer for that. Be easier to just whack him.”

The waiter, whose credits include a couple of Sopranos episodes, recognizing this for what it is, stands by, trying not to roll his eyes too much.

Maxine ends up having the homemade strozzapreti with chicken livers, and Rocky goes for the osso buco. “Hey, what kinda wine?”

“How about a ’71 Tignanello?— but then again with all the wiseguy dialogue, maybe just, uh, li’1 Nero d’Avola? small glass?”

“Readin my mind.” Not exactly doing a double take at the pricey supertuscan, but a certain gleam has entered his eye, which is what she may have been looking to provoke. And why would that be, again?

Rocky’s mobile phone goes off, Maxine recognizing the ringtone as “Una furtiva lagrima.” “Listen my darling, here’s the situation— Wait… Un gazz, I’m talkin to a robot here, right? Again. So! uh-huh! how you doing? how long you been a robot… You wouldn’t be Jewish, by any chance? Yeah, like when you were thirteen, did your parents give you a bot mitzvah?”

Maxine scrolls the ceiling, “Mr. Slagiatt. Mind if I ask you something? Just professional interest—the seed money for hashslingrz, do you happen to know who put it up originally?”

“Speculation at the time was lively,” Rocky remembers, “usual suspects, Greylock, Flatiron, Union Square, but nobody really knew. Big dark secret. Could’ve been anybody with the resources to keep it quiet. Even one of the banks. Why?”

“Trying to narrow it down. Angel money, some eccentric right-winger out in a Sunbelt mansion with central air? Or a more institutional type of evil?”

“Wait—what are you attempting to imply, as my wife might say?”

“What with you folks,” Maxine deadpan, “and your longtime GOP connections…”

“Us folks, ancient stuff, Lucky Luciano, the OSS, please. Forget it.”

“No ethnic slurs intended of course.”

“Should I bring up Longy Zwillman? Welcome to Streetlight People,” raising his glass and tapping hers lightly.

She can hear from inside her purse the as-yet-undeposited check laughing at her, as if she has been the butt of a great practical joke.

The Nero d’Avola on the other hand is not bad at all. Maxine nods amiably. “Let’s wait till my invoice.”