“Maybe, long as you don’t mind.” Is she thinking about hawalas, hashslingrz, even Reg’s personal safety, actually no, it’s that deco-derivative shuttle terminal of Lucas and Justin’s that might or might not get her access to DeepArcher. Whatever that turns out to be. She isn’t quite ready to admit it, but she’s already entertaining the first draft of a fantasy in which Eric, sherpa of the Deep Web, faithful and maybe even cute, helps her find her way through the maze. Nancy fuckin Drew, here. “Maybe if I made a realworld approach first. Face-to-face. See how much we trust each other.”
“Good luck. You think I’m paranoid? These days you even go near this guy, he freaks.”
“I can make it an accidental meeting. Pretty standard maneuver. Can you give me a list of his hangouts?”
“I’ll e-mail something to you.” And soon Reg, taking a quick gander around at the street, has gone sidling off in the direction of downtown, miles away in the springtime shimmer.
AMONG MAXINE’S MORE USEFUL SENSORS is her bladder. When she’s out of range of information she needs, she can go whole days without any particular interest in pissing, but when phone numbers, koans, or stock tips from which she’s likely to profit are close by, the gotta-go alarm has reliably steered her to enough significant restroom walls that she’s learned to pay attention.
This time she’s down in the Flatiron District when the alarm goes off. Against her better judgment, she steps into the dimly lit grease- and cigarette-smoke interior of Wall of Silence, once a tech-bubble hot spot, since fallen into greasyspoondom. The way to the restrooms is not as clearly marked as it could be. She finds herself wandering among customers at tables, who seem to be either unhappy couples or single men, possibly help-line candidates. One of whom, actually, now seems to be calling her name, with some urgency. Well, there’s urgency and there’s urgency. She squints through the gloom.
“Lucas?” Yep, and signs of seedy personal disarray even in this light. “You happen to know where they keep the toilet around here?”
“Hi, Maxi, listen, while you’re in there could you do me a favor—”
“You just broke up with somebody,” this being the kind of place you’d naturally choose for that, “and want to know how she’s doing. Sure. What’s her name?”
“Cassidy, but how did you—”
“And where is it?”
Back through the kitchen, down some stairs, around a couple of corners. Lit no more brightly than upstairs, and some would call this being considerate. There is a smell of cannabis purposefully alight. Maxine scans the short row of stalls. No blood coming from under the doors, no sounds of uncontrollable sobbing, good, good… “Yo Cassidy?”
“Who’s that?” from inside one of the stalls. “The bitch he’s dumping me for, no doubt.”
“Nah, thanks for the guess, but I’m in enough trouble already. Just gonna go in here for a minute,” stepping into the stall next to Cassidy’s.
“I should have known what was up the minute I saw this place,” Cassidy sez. “Better if we’d handled everything out in the street.”
“Lucas is having a little guilt, wants to know if you’re OK.”
“Not a problem, I came in here to piss, not open a vein. Lucas who?”
“Oh.”
“Figures, these fuckin clubs I keep ending up in. He told me Kyle.”
They sit there side by side, mutually invisible, the partition between inscribed in marker pen, eye pencil, lipstick later rubbed at and smeared by way of commentary, gusting across the wall in failing red shadows, phone numbers with antiquated prefixes, cars for sale, announcements of love lost, found, or wished for, racial grievances, unreadable remarks in Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, a web of symbols, a travel brochure for night voyages Maxine has not yet thought about making. Meantime Cassidy is outlining some unsold pilot about dysfunctional dating south of 14th Street in which Lucas, near as Maxine can tell, only gets a walk-on. That’s until, inexplicably though only so for a moment, Cassidy is on to the topic of DeepArcher.
“Yeah, that splash screen,” Maxine kvells, “it’s awesome.”
“I designed it. Like that chick who did the tarot deck. Awesome and don’t forget hip,” half, but only half, ironic.
“Wait, awesome and hip, where have I heard that.”
Yep, turns out when she first met Lucas, Cassidy was working for hwgaahwgh.com.
“Did you have any kind of a contract with Lucas, Kyle, whatever?”
“No and I wasn’t doing it out of love, either. Hard to explain. It was all just coming from somewhere, for about a day and a half I felt I was duked in on forces outside my normal perimeter, you know? Not scared, just wanted to get it over with, wrote the file, did the Java, didn’t look at it again. Next thing I remember is one of them saying holy shit it’s the edge of the world, but frankly I can’t see a way they’re going to build any traffic. If I was a new user, coming to it cold, I’d be like, Public Void Close in a real hurry and try to forget about it. Better if they go for the single customer, Gabriel Ice or somebody.”
Presently, through strange toilet ESP, the ladies emerge at the same moment from their stalls and have a look at each other. Maxine is not too surprised to find tats, piercings, hair of an orchid shade not on any map of the human genome, an age somewhat south of legal for anything. The way Cassidy’s looking back meanwhile makes Maxine feel like Hillary Clinton or something.
“Can you check upstairs and see if he’s still there?”
“Happy to.” She ascends into the murky bummersphere again. Yes he’s still there.
“Startin to get worried about both of you.”
“Lucas, she’s twelve. And you better start paying her royalties.”
9
Now and then a taxing entity like the NYC Finance Department will hire an outside examiner, especially when there’s a Republican mayor, given that party’s curious belief that private sector always equals good and public bad. Maxine gets back to the office in time for a call from Axel Quigley down at John Street, with the latest on another heartrendingly sad case of sales-tax evasion, taking it personally as always, even though it’s been going on for a while. Axel’s whistle-blowers tend to be disgruntled employees, he and Maxine in fact met at a Disgruntled Employee Workshop led by Professor Lavoof, generally acknowledged godfather of Disgruntlement Theory and developer of the influential Disgruntled Employee Simulation Program for Audit Information and Review, aka DESPAIR.
According to Axel, somebody at a restaurant chain called Muffins and Unicorns has been using phantomware to falsify cash-register receipts. Sales-suppression devices are either factory-installed in the cash registers themselves or being run off of a custom application known as a zapper, kept externally on a CD. Evidence points to a high-level manager, maybe owner. Axel’s most likely suspect is Phipps Epperdew, better known as Vip because he always looks like he’s just emerged from a Lounge or flashed a Discount Card with that acronym on it.
The interesting thing for Maxine about zapper fraud is the face-to-face element. You don’t learn it from a manual, because there’s nothing in print. Features written into the software that you don’t find in the manual are meant instead to be passed on in person, orally, from cash-register vendor to user. The way certain kinds of magical lore go from rogue rabbis to apprentices in kabbalah. If the manual is scripture, phantomware tutorials are the secret knowledge. And the geeks who promote it—except for one or two little details, like the righteousness, the higher spiritual powers—they’re the rabbis. All strictly personal and in a warped way even romantic.