Bleeding Edge - Pynchon Thomas (список книг .TXT) 📗
“Wait. If you don’t want to tell me—”
“. . . as if they know already what’s going to happen. This . . . event. They know, and they’re not going to do anything about it.”
Is this all yet another exercise in freaking out the common folk so we’ll keep bleating and begging for protection? How scared is Maxine supposed to feel? “I didn’t get you in any trouble, I hope.”
“‘Trouble.’” She thinks she’s seen most of the looks of despair available to men of this pay grade, but what now briefly appears on his face you’d have to open a new file for. “In trouble with that bunch? Never that easy to tell, really. Even if there were to be unpleasantness, I could rely without hesitation upon young Darren, who’s board-certified in everything from nunchaku up through . . . well, Stinger missiles, I’m sure, and beyond. Rest easy as to my safety, young lady, and look instead to your own. Try to avoid terrorist-related activities. Oh, and would you mind going out the back way? You weren’t here, you see.”
The back exit happens to be near Darren’s cubicle. Maxine glances in and finds him standing by a window, turned away in quarter profile, looking, sighting, down fifty stories into New York, down into that specific abyss, with an intensity she recognizes from the DeepArcher splash screen. Should she run in, break his concentration with questions like, Do you know Cassidy, did you pose for the Archer, provoking him into who knows what don’t-be-in-my-face-bitch gongsta displeasure . . . Is she that desperate for a literal link between this kid and some screen image? when she knows all the time there is none, that the figure was there, has always been there, that’s all, that Cassidy thanks to some intervention nobody knows how to name found her way to the silent, stretched presence at the edge of the world and copied what she remembered and immediately forgot the way back there . . . .
Jangling with unquiet thoughts, Maxine emerges onto the street and notices it’s only a short walk to Saks. Maybe a half hour of fashion-related fugue, don’t call it shopping, will soft-sell her back down. She cuts across to Fifth Avenue by way of Forty-Seventh Street. It being the Diamond District, who wouldn’t? Not only on the chance however remote of glimpsing from afar exactly the stones, the setting she’s been looking for all her life, but also for the general air of intrigue, the feeling that nothing, nobody on this block is positioned where they are by accident, that saturating the space, invisible as the wavelengths that carry soap operas into the home, dramas of faceted intricacy are teeming all around.
“Maxine Tarnow? Isn’t it?” Seems to be Emma Levin, Ziggy’s krav maga teacher. “Just down here to meet my boyfriend for lunch.”
“So you two are what—shopping for diamonds? maybe . . . the diamond? Oh! What’s that . . . dingdong sound I hear? Could it be . . .” No. She didn’t actually say this out loud. Did she? is she really turning into Elaine, nonconsensually as Larry Talbot into the Wolf Man, for example?
Naftali, the ex-Mossad boyfriend, works security for a diamond merchant here on the street. “You’d think we’d’ve met years ago on the job, field guy in on a visit to the office, kaplotz! Magic! but no, it was a fixer-upper. Same lightning bolt, however . . .”
“Ziggy’s been bringing home Naftali stories since he started krav maga. Big impression, which on Ziggy it’s hard to make.”
“There he is. My dreamboat.” Naftali is pretending to lounge against a storefront, a flaneur who can be triggered silently, instantly into the wrath of God. According to Ziggy, the first time Naftali visited the studio, Nigel immediately asked him how many people he’d killed, and he shrugged, “I lost count,” and when Emma glared, added, “I mean . . . I can’t remember?” Maybe a case of kidding a kidder, but Maxine wouldn’t want to have to find out. Flabless and close-cropped, a black suit, a face amiable from half a block away reacquiring as it comes into focus its history of laceration and breakage and feelings kept at a professional distance. Though for Emma Levin he makes exceptions. They smile, they embrace, and for a second they’re the two brightest sparklers on the block.
“Ah, you’re Ziggy’s mom. The tough guy. How’s his summer going?”
Tough? her little Ziggurat? “He’s somewhere off in Iowa, Illinois, one of them. Practicing his moves every day, I’m sure.”
“Good place to be,” Naftali speeding his beat a little, and Emma flashing him the look.
As an ex-blurter, Maxine can relate, but still, wondering what he’s almost saying, she tries, “Wish I could figure a way to get out of town for a while.”
He’s watching her intently, not exactly smiling but pleased, like somebody who’s been in on enough interrogations to appreciate the etiquette. “Out here in the open, you know, you get all these stories. The problem is, most of it’s garbage.”
“Which doesn’t help that much, if you’re a worrier.”
“You’re a worrier? I wouldn’t have thought.”
“Naftali Perlman,” Emma growls, “now you stop hustling her, she’s married.”
“Separated,” Maxine batting her eyelashes.
“See, how possessive,” Naftali beaming. “We’re going to lunch, you want to join us?”
“I’m due back at work, but thanks.”
“Your work . . . you’re . . . a model?”
In a very precise way, Emma Levin draws one foot to the side, cocks an elbow, puts on her kung fu–movie face.
“My kinda woman!” An explicit squeeze which Emma cannot be said to avoid.
“Behave, guys. Shalom.”
27
The boys call in one night from Prairie du Chien or Fond du Lac or someplace to tell her they’ll be home in two days.
All, as Ace Ventura sez, and even sings, righty then. Maxine wanders uneasily around the place, convinced she has left evidence of misbehavior out in glaringly plain sight that will, not exactly get her in trouble with Horst, but oblige her to be heedful of his feelings, which despite appearances, he may actually have. She runs through the company she’s kept—aside from Windust—since Horst left town. Conkling, Rocky, Eric, Reg. In every case she can claim legitimate work reasons, which would be fine if Horst was the IRS.
Though Heidi is likely to be less than helpful, “Maybe you and Carmine could drop by, say, accidentally?” Maxine wonders.
“You’re expecting trouble?”
“Emotions, maybe.”
“Mm-hmm? . . . so what you’re really saying is you want Horst to see me in a relationship with another person, because you’re paranoid Horst and I may still be an item? Maxi, insecure Maxi, when will you be able to just let it go?”
Heidi seems on edge these days, even for Heidi, so Maxine isn’t too surprised when her girlhood chum makes a point of not showing up, with Carmine or without, when the Loeffler menfolk at last come roughhousing home again, loud and sugar-high, down the hall and through the door.
“Hey Mom. Missed you.”
“Oh, guys.” She kneels on the floor and holds the boys till everybody gets too embarrassed.
They’re all wearing red Kum & Go ball caps and have brought Maxine one too, which she puts on. They’ve been everywhere. Floyd’s Knobs, Indiana. Duck Creek Plaza in Bettendorf. Chuck E. Cheese and Loco Joe’s. They sing her the Hy-Vee commercial. More than once.
Arriving in Chicago, they promptly got a tour down memory lane, which for Horst was the LaSalle Street canyon, his first and oldest home turf, where he’d been one of those handjiving adventurers who dared the pit every trading day. Started at the Merc trading three-month Eurodollar futures, both for clients and for himself, wearing a custom trader’s jacket with tastefully muted green and magenta stripes and a three-letter name tag pinned to it. After the pits closed around three in the afternoon, he shifted to civvies and walked over to the Chicago Board of Trade and checked in at the Ceres Cafe. When the CME decided to ban double trading, Horst joined a good-size migration over to the CBOT, where no such qualms existed, though Eurodollar activity was noticeably less intense. For a while he shifted to Treasuries, but soon, as if answering some call from deep in the tidy iterations of Midwest DNA, he had found his way into the agricultural pits, and next thing he knew, he was out in deep American countryside, inhaling the aroma from handfuls of wheat, scrutinizing soybeans for purple seed stain, walking through fields of spring barley squeezing kernels and inspecting glumes and peduncles, talking to farmers and weather oracles and insurance adjusters—or, as he put it to himself, rediscovering his roots.
