Bleeding Edge - Pynchon Thomas (список книг .TXT) 📗

Insanely she begins to blame herself. Because she found Ice’s tunnel. Ran away from whatever was approaching. It’s Ice getting even, coming after her now.

•   •   •

IT DOESN’T HELP MUCH WHEN, later in the evening, she’s out in the rain and sees Lester Traipse across the street, going down into the subway at Broadway and 79th, in the company of a blond bombshell of a certain age. Sure that this blonde is somehow Lester’s handler, that they’ve been up on the surface for a while, taking care of business, and now she’s bringing him back underneath, Maxine goes sprinting across the most dangerous intersection in the city, and by the time she gets through the moving obstacle course of murderous drivers sending up careless wings of filthy water and down to the subway platform, Lester and the blonde are nowhere to be seen in any direction. Of course, in NYC it is not uncommon to catch sight of a face that you know, beyond all argument, belongs to somebody no longer among the living, and sometimes when it catches you staring, this other face may begin to recognize yours as well, and 99% of the time you turn out to be strangers.

Next morning, after a shiftily insomniac night punctuated with dream clips, she shows up at her appointment with Shawn in something of a state. “I was like, ‘Lester?’ just about to yell across the street something stupid, you’re supposed to be dead or something.”

“First thing to suspect is,” Shawn advises, “is that your memory’s going?”

“No, uh-uh, this was Lester and nobody else.”

“Well . . . I guess it happens sometimes. Ordinary unenlightened folks just like you, no special gifts or netheen, will see through all the illusion, just as well as a master with, like, years of training? And what they’re able to see is, is the real person, the ‘face before the face’ we call it in Zen, and maybe then they attach some more familiar face to it?”

“Shawn, that’s very helpful, thank you, but suppose it really was Lester?”

“Uh huh well was he walking in, like, third ballet position, by any chance?”

“Not cute, Shawn, the guy just—”

“What? Died? Didn’t die? Made the news on WYUP? Got on the subway with some unidentified babe? Make up your mind.”

In his ads, stuck to every newspaper machine in the city, Shawn promises, “Guaranteed No Use Of Kyosaku,” these being the wooden “warning sticks” Soto Zen instructors use to focus your attention. So instead of hitting people, Shawn gets abusive with remarks. Maxine emerges from the session feeling like she’s been one-on-one with Shaquille O’Neal.

In the outer office she finds another client waiting, light gray suit, pale raspberry shirt, tie and matching handkerchief in deep orchid. For a minute she thinks it’s Alex Trebek. Shawn sticks his head out, gets all congenial. “Maxine, meet Conkling Speedwell, someday you’ll think it was fate, but it’s really just me being a busybody.”

“Sorry if I cut in on your session,” Maxine shaking hands, taking note of the guy’s you could say agendaless grip, something rarely met with in this town.

“Buy me lunch sometime.”

Enough with Lester for a while. He can wait. He has all the time in the world now. Pretending to consult her watch, “How’s today looking?”

“Better than it was.”

OK. “You know Daphne and Wilma’s, down the street?”

“Sure, nice odor dynamic there. About one?”

Odor what? Turns out Conkling is a freelance professional Nose, having been born with a sense of smell far more calibrated than the rest of us normals enjoy. He’s been known to follow an intriguing sillage for dozens of city blocks before finding the source is a dentist’s wife from Valley Stream. He believes in a dedicated circle of hell for anybody who shows up at dinner or for that matter enters an elevator wearing an inappropriate scent. Dogs he hasn’t met formally come up to him with inquiring looks. “A negotiable talent, sometimes a curse.”

“So tell me, what am I wearing today?”

He’s already smiling, shaking his head slightly, avoiding eye contact. Maxine understands that whatever this gift is, he doesn’t go around showing it off.

“On second thought . . .”

“Too late.” Some kind of jive nose manipulation, as if clearing his passages. “OK—first of all, it’s from Florence . . .”

Uh-oh.

“The Officina in Santa Maria Novella, and you have on the original Medici formulation, Number 1611.”

Aware that her mouth has dropped open a few millimeters further than she would like, “Don’t tell me how you do it, don’t, it’s like card tricks, I don’t want to know.”

“I seldom run into that many Officina persons actually.”

“More of them around than you’d think. You wander into this beautiful high old room full of these scents, people who’ve been to Florence a hundred times never heard of the place, you start to think maybe it’s your own secret discovery—then suddenly, shopper’s nightmare, it’s all over town.”

“People who wouldn’t know a floral from a chypre,” sympathetic. “Drives you nuts.”

“And . . . being a Nose . . . it’s nice work, the pay’s good?”

“Well, most of it’s with the larger corporations, we all keep revolving firm to firm, after a while you begin to notice the companies changing hands, getting restructured, just like the classic scents do, then you’re out on the bricks again. For years it never occurred to me this might be what our mutual guru calls a message from beyond. ‘Who is the person without rank, who goes in and out through the portals of the face?’ is how he put it.”

“He gave me that one too.”

“‘Portals’ is supposed to mean eyes, but right away I figured nostrils, the koan turned out to be spot-on, gave me some room to think, and nowadays I’m freelance, my waiting list for new clients is about six months, which is longer than any of those company jobs ever lasted.”

“And Shawn . . . ”

“Steers an occasional client my way, takes a small fee. Enough to cover his Erolfa bill, which he tends to bathe in. Usual thing.”

“In the Nose business. You have your own perfume line, or . . . ?”

He seems embarrassed. “More like an investigative agency.”

Aahhh! “A private Nose.”

“It gets worse. 90 percent of my business is matrimonial.”

What else? “Goodness. How . . . would something like that work?”

“Oh, they show up, ‘Smell my husband, my wife, tell me who they’ve been with, what’d they have for lunch, how many drinks, are they doing drugs, is there oral sex—’ that seems to be the top FAQ—and so forth. Thing is, it’s all in time sequence, each indication layered on top of the one before. You can put together a chronology.”

“Strangely enough”—is this such a good idea?—“there’s this situation I’ve had come up . . . Do you mind if I just pick your— let me put that another way, could one of you Nose people go in to a crime scene, like a police psychic, give it a snort, and reconstruct what went on?”

“Sure, Nasal Forensics. Moskowitz, De Anzoli, couple others, they specialize in that.”

“How about you?”

Conkling angles his head, she’d have to say charmingly, and takes a minute. “Cops and me . . . You run a nasal scan, the boys get paranoid, they think maybe you’re scanning them too, snorting into all those deep cop secrets. So we always end up at cross-purposes.”

“This is never a problem for Moskowitz and them?”

“Moskowitz is a decorated bunco-squad veteran, De Anzoli has a D.Crim., and there’s family members also on the job, it’s a culture of trust. Me, I’m more comfortable as an independent.”

“Oh, I can relate.” She points her face across the room and then slides her eyeballs sideways to look at him. “Unless you already smelled that about me also?”

“Like is there some notorious pheromone, kicks in whenever—Wait, rewind, now you’re gonna think—”

Maxine beams brightly and sips her Sudden Enlightenment Organic Bamboo tea. “Sure must make dating complicated, this snoot of yours.”