“I’ve heard of that movie,” recalled this Windust party, “pacifist propaganda in the depths of the Cold War, I believe it was flagged as potentially Communist-inspired.”
“Yeah, you people blacklisted Sam Jaffe too. He wasn’t a Communist, but he refused to testify. For years no studio would hire him. He made a living teaching math in high school. Strangely enough.”
“He taught high school? Who would’ve been disloyal enough to hire him?”
“This is 2001, Maxeleh,” Ernie now shaking his head back and forth, “the Cold War is supposed to be over, how can these people not have changed or moved on, where is such a terrible inertia coming from?”
“You always used to say their time hasn’t passed, it’s yet to come.”
At bedtime Ernie used to tell his daughters scary blacklist stories. Some kids had the Seven Dwarfs, Maxine and Brooke had the Hollywood Ten. The trolls and wicked sorcerers and so forth were usually Republicans of the 1950s, toxic with hate, stuck back around 1925 in almost bodily revulsion from anything leftward of “capitalism,” by which they usually meant keeping an increasing pile of money safe from the depredations of the IRS. Growing up on the Upper West Side, it was impossible not to hear about people like this. Maxine often wonders if it didn’t help steer her toward fraud investigation, as much as maybe it’s steered Brooke toward Avi and his techie version of politics.
“So you’ll call him back?”
“You sound like what’s-her-name in there. No, Pop, I have no plans to do that.”
IT DOESN’T SEEM to be up to Maxine, however. Next day, evening rush hour, it’s just starting to rain… sometimes she can’t resist, she needs to be out in the street. What might only be a simple point on the workday cycle, a reconvergence of what the day scattered as Sappho said someplace back in some college course, Maxine forgets, becomes a million pedestrian dramas, each one charged with mystery, more intense than high-barometer daylight can ever allow. Everything changes. There’s that clean, rained-on smell. The traffic noise gets liquefied. Reflections from the street into the windows of city buses fill the bus interiors with unreadable 3-D images, as surface unaccountably transforms to volume. Average pushy Manhattan schmucks crowding the sidewalks also pick up some depth, some purpose—they smile, they slow down, even with a cellular phone stuck in their ear they are more apt to be singing to somebody than yakking. Some are observed taking houseplants for walks in the rain. Even the lightest umbrella-to-umbrella contact can be erotic.
“If it’s the right umbrella, you’re saying,” Heidi once sought to clarify.
“Picky Heidi, any umbrella, what would it matter?”
“Airhead Maxi, it could be Ted Bundy.”
Which this evening turns out to be something like that, actually. Maxine’s under some scaffolding waiting out a brief intensity in the downpour when she becomes aware of some kind of male presence. Umbrellas touch. Strangers in the night, exchanging— No wait, that’s something else.
“Evening, Ms. Tarnow.” He’s holding out a business card, which she recognizes as a copy of the same one Ernie passed on to her last night. This one she doesn’t take. “It’s OK, no GPS chip or anything.”
Oboy. The fucking voice, sonorous, overcoached, phony as a cold call on an answering machine. She flicks a sidelong glance. Fiftyish, midnight-brown shoes, Elaine’s idea of nice, trench coat with a high polyester content, ever since grade school exactly the kind of person everybody including herself has warned her to stay away from. So of course she starts in with the blurting.
“Already have one of these. This is you in person, Nicholas Windust, I don’t suppose you carry a federal ID, warrant or something? just being a careful citizen, understand, trying to do my part to fight crime?” When will she learn to dummy up? No wonder the Borderline Personality folks keep after her, their seasonal noodges are in fact paranoia-calibration updates and she ignores them at her peril. So what’s wrong with me, she wonders, am I some kind of a make-nice compulsive? Am I as desperate as Heidi always tells me I am?
He has flipped open meanwhile some pocket-size item of leather goods, flipped it shut again, it could be a Costco membership card, anything. “Look, you can really help us. If you wouldn’t mind coming down to the Federal Building, it shouldn’t take—”
“Are you fuckin insane?”
“OK, then how about La Cibaeña over on Amsterdam? I mean, you could still get drugged and abducted, but the coffee’s got to be better than it is downtown.”
“Five minutes,” she mutters. “Think of it as speed interrogating.” Why is she even allowing him that much? Need for parental approval, thirty, forty years down the line? Swell. Of course Ernie still believes the Rosenbergs were innocent and loathes the FBI and all clones thereof, while Elaine suffers from undiagnosed OY, or Obsessive Yenta syndrome. Besides which, something about him, relentless as a car alarm, is screaming Not Acceptable. James Bond has it easy, Brits can always fall back on accents, where you got your tux, a multivolume set of class signifiers. In New York all you have really is shoes.
At which point in her analysis the rain has let up a little and they’ve reached La Cibaeña Chinese-Dominican Café. This is my neighborhood, it belatedly occurs to her, what if somebody sees me here with this creep?
“You might want to try the General Tso’s catibias, they’re highly spoken of.”
“Pork, I’m Jewish, something in Leviticus, don’t ask.” Maxine is in fact hungry but orders only coffee. Windust wants a morir soñando and has a nice chat about this in Dominican dialect with the waitress.
“Fantastic morir soñando here,” he informs Maxine, “old Cibao recipe, handed down through the family for generations.”
Maxine happens to know it’s the owner going in the back and throwing Creamsicles in the blender. She considers letting Windust in on this and is instantly annoyed at how reflexively wiseassed it will sound. “So. This was about my brother-in-law? He’ll be back in a couple weeks, you can talk to him yourself.”
Windust exhales audibly through his nose, more in regret than annoyance. “You want to know what’s been getting the security community all nervous lately, Ms. Tarnow? It’s a piece of software called Promis, originally designed for federal prosecutors, to share data among the district courts. It works regardless of what language your files are written in, even what operating system you’re using. The Russian mob have been selling it to the rugriders, and more to the point, Mossad have been generously traveling all over the world helping local agencies install it, sometimes throwing in a krav maga course as a sales incentive.”
“And sometimes rugelach from the bakery, do I begin to detect a Jewphobic note here?” Something a little lopsided about his face, she notices, not sure what exactly, looks like it could have been in a couple of fights. A line or two, some nonnegotiable tension, the beginnings of that pitted texture men get sometimes. An unexpectedly precise mouth. The lips held together when he isn’t talking. No openmouthed expectancy around this one. His hair is still wet from the rain, cut short and plastered down, part on the right, going gray… Eyes that may have seen too much and should really be covered by shades…
“Hello?”
Not a good idea right now, Maxine, this drifting into thought. OK, “And because I’m Jewish, you figure I’ll want to hear about Jewish software? Some people-skills seminar they make you go to every review cycle perhaps.”
“No offense,” his smirk indicating otherwise, “but what’s disturbing about this Promis software is that there’s always a backdoor built in, so anytime it gets installed on a government computer anywhere in the world—law enforcement, intelligence, special ops—anybody who happens to know about this backdoor can just slip in through it and make themselves at home—wherever—and all manner of secrets get compromised. Not to mention there’s a couple of Israeli chips, highly sophisticated, which Mossad have been known to install at the same time, without necessarily informing the client. What these chips do is scavenge information even while the computer’s turned off, hold it till the Ofeq satellite comes over, then transmit everything out to it in a single data burst.”