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

“Nothing too unusual, except . . . before NYPD got there, before the gunsmoke, a scent, maybe a cologne, I can’t ID right offhand, commercial, maybe from a few years back . . .”

“Somebody who was there.”

Emerging from a moment of thought, “Actually I think it’s time to go check the library.”

Meaning, it turns out, Conkling’s own extensive collection of vintage perfumes, which Conkling keeps at his crib in Chelsea, where the first thing Maxine notices is a glossy black instrument sitting in a battery charger among a number of dramatically oversize ferns which may have mutated because of the apparatus in their midst, humming in more than one key, red and green LEDs glowing and blinking here and there, with a Clint Eastwood–size pistol grip and a long discharge cone. A creature hidden in jungle foliage, staring at her.

“This is the Naser,” Conkling introduces them, “or olfactory laser.” Going on to explain that odors can be regarded as if they had periodic waveforms, like sound or light. The everyday human nose receives all smells in a jumble, like the eye receives the frequencies of incoherent light. “The Naser here can separate these into component ‘notes,’ isolate and put each in phase, causing it to ‘cohere,’ then amplify as needed.”

Sounds a little West Coast, though the object looks intimidating enough. “This is a weapon? it . . . it’s dangerous?”

“In the same way,” Conkling supposes, “that sniffing pure rose attar will turn your brain into red Jell-O. Don’t want to be messing with no Naser, necessarily.”

“Can you, like, just set it on ‘Stun’?”

“If I have to use it at all, it means I’ve made a mistake.” He goes over to a glass-fronted cabinet full of flasks and atomizers, custom and commercial. “This scent—it’s not one I could place immediately, not fresh soap so much as disinfectant. Not tobacco so much as stale cigarette butts. Some civet maybe, but Kouros it ain’t. Nonhuman urine as well.” Maxine recognizes this as magician’s patter. Conkling opens one of the cabinet doors and reaches out a four-ounce spray bottle, holds it about a foot from his nose, and without hitting the plunger appears to inhale slightly. “Whooboy. Yep, this is it. Check it out.”

“‘9:30’,” Maxine reads from the label, “‘Men’s Cologne.’ Wait, is this the 9:30 Club down in D.C.?”

“The same, although it’s no longer at the old F Street address, where it was located when this stuff was sold, back in the late eighties sometime.”

“That’s a while. This must be the last bottle in town.”

“You never know. Even an example like this that comes and goes, there can still be thousands of gallons out there in the original packaging, just waiting to be found by scent collectors, nostalgists, in this case unreconstructed punk rockers, and don’t rule out the insane. The original manufacturer got bought by somebody else, and 9:30 if I remember right was then relicensed. So we’re pretty much left with the secondary market, discount houses, ads in the trades, eBay.”

“How important is this?”

“It’s the chronology that’s bothering me here—too close to the gunsmoke not to be part of the event. If they’ve brought in Jabbering Jay Moskowitz on this, then he already knows of the connection, meaning so does everybody in the NYPD including meter readers. Jay is a top forensic Nose but isn’t always clear on how professionally to share information.”

“So . . . a guy wearing this . . .”

“Don’t rule out a woman who might have been in close contact with a man wearing it. Someday there’ll be search engines you can just input a little spritz of anything and voila, nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, the whole story will be there on the screen before you can scratch your head in amazement. Meantime there’s the Nose community. Anecdotal material. I’ll ask around.”

There arrives the usual moment of awkward silence. Conkling still has an erection but, as if it’s hardware he’s lost the manual to, is hesitant about deploying it. Maxine herself is of two minds. Something seems to be going on that nobody’s telling her. The moment, howsoever, passes, and before she knows it, she’s back at the office. Ah well, as Scarlett O’Hara observes at the end of the movie . . .

•   •   •

SHE DREAMS SHE’S ALONE on the top floor of The Deseret, by the pool. Under the unnaturally smooth surface, visible through the optically perfect water, almost as an afterthought to the anxious vacancy of the space, a male Caucasian corpse in a suit and tie stretches face-up full length on the bottom as if taking a break from afterlife affairs, rolling, in some eerie semisleep, from one side to another. It is Lester Traipse, and it isn’t. When she leans over the edge to get a closer look, his eyes open and he recognizes her. He doesn’t have to rise up through the surface to speak, she can hear him from underwater. “Azrael,” is what he’s saying, and then again, with some urgency.

“Gargamel’s cat?” Maxine inquires, “like on the Smurfs?”

No, and the disappointment in Lester/not-Lester’s face tells her she should know better. In nonbiblical Jewish tradition, as she is perfectly aware, Azrael is the angel of death. In Islam also, for that matter . . . And briefly she is back in the corridor, Gabriel Ice’s guarded mystery tunnel out in Montauk. Why? would be an interesting question to pursue, except that Giuliani, in his tireless quest for quality infrastructure, has caused not one but several jackhammers to start up well before working hours, figuring the taxpayers won’t object to the extra overtime pay, and any message is corrupted, fragmented, lost.

19

Meantime Heidi, back from Comic-Con in San Diego, her head still teeming with superheroes, monsters, sorcerers, and zombies, has been visited by NYPD detectives looking into the address books of Heidi’s old ex-fiance Evan Strubel, who has recently been run in on charges of aggravated computer tampering, in connection with a federal insider-trading beef. Heidi’s first thought is, He still has me in his Rolodex?

“You two were romantically involved?”

“Not romantically. Baroquely maybe. Years ago.”

“Was that before or after he got married?”

“Thought you guys were from the precinct, not the Adultery Squad.”

“Pretty touchy,” it seems to the Bad Cop.

“Yep, and feely too,” Heidi snaps back. “What’s it to you, Your Eminence?”

“Just trying to get a chronology,” soothes the Good Cop. “Whatever you’re comfortable sharing, Heidi.”

“‘Sharing,’ yo, Geraldo, I thought you got canceled.”

And so forth, sort of like police handball.

As they are about to leave, Heidi finds the Bad Cop beaming strangely at her. “Oh, and Heidi . . .”

“Yes, Detective”— pretending to search her memory—“Nozzoli.”

“These chick flicks from the fifties? Ever watch any of those?”

“On the movie channels now and then,” Heidi somehow unable not to bat her eyelashes, “sure, I guess, who wants to know?”

“There’s a Douglas Sirk festival next week down at the Angelika, and if you’re interested, maybe we could go grab some coffee first, or—”

“Excuse me. Are you asking me—”

“Unless you’re ‘married,’ of course.”

“Oh, these days they allow married women to drink coffee, it even gets written into prenups.”

“Heidi,” Maxine, when she hears this, sighs as always, “desperate, unreflective Heidi, this Detective Nozzoli, he’s, ah, he’s married himself?”

“You are so the jaded cynic of the universe!” cries Heidi, “It could be George Clooney and you would find something wrong!”

“An innocent question, what.”

“We went to see Written on the Wind (1956)” Heidi continues as if gone starry-eyed remembering, “and whenever Dorothy Malone came on the screen? Carmine got a hardon. A big one.”