“Oh, devious, these Jews.”
“Israel doesn’t spy on us? Remember the Pollard case back in 1985? Even left-wing papers like the New York Times carried that story, Ms. Tarnow.”
How right-wing, Maxine wonders, does a person have to be to think of the New York Times as a left-wing newspaper? “So Avram has been working on what then, the chips, the software?”
“We think he’s Mossad. Maybe not a graduate of Hertzliya but at least one of their civilian sleepers, what they call sayanim. Holding down a day job out here in the Diaspora, waiting for a call.”
Maxine looks at her watch, gathers her purse, and rises. “Not about to shop my sister’s husband. Think of it as a personal quirk. Oh and your five minutes were up a while ago.” She feels rather than hears his silence. “What. Such a face.”
“One more thing, all right? People at my shop have learned of your interest, we assume professional, in the finances of hashslingrz.com.”
“These are all public, the sites I use, nothing illegal, how do you know what I’m researching anyway?”
“Child’s play,” sez Windust, “we like to think of it as ‘No keystroke left behind.’”
“So let me guess, you people want me to back off of hashslingerz.”
“No, actually, if there’s a fraud issue, we’d like to know about it. Sometime.”
“You want to hire me? For money? Or were you planning to rely on charm?”
He finds a pair of tortoiseshell Wayfarer clones in his coat pocket and covers his eyes. Finally. Smiles, with that precision mouth. “Am I that much of a bad guy?”
“Oh. Now I’m supposed to help him with his self-esteem, Dr. Maxine here. Listen, a suggestion, you’re from D.C., try the self-help section at Politics & Prose—empathy, we’re all out of that today, the truck didn’t show up.”
He nods, rises, heads for the door. “Hope I see you again sometime.” With the shades on, of course there is no telling what if anything this means. And he has stuck her, the cheapskate, with the check.
Well. Should’ve been it for Agent Windust. So it doesn’t help that that very night, or actually next morning just before dawn, she has a vivid, all-but-lucid dream about him, in which they are not exactly fucking, but fucking around, definitely. The details ooze away as dawn light and the sounds of garbage trucks and jackhammers grow in the room, till she’s left with a single image unwilling to fade, this federal penis, fierce red, predatory, and Maxine alone its prey. She has sought to escape but not sincerely enough for the penis, which is wearing some strange headgear, possibly a Harvard football helmet. It can read her thoughts. “Look at me, Maxine. Don’t look away. Look at me.” A talking penis. That same jive-ass radio-announcer voice.
She checks the clock. Too late to go back to sleep, though who would want to, necessarily? What she needs is to go in to the office and work on something nice and normal for a while. Just as she’s about to head out with the boys to school, the doorbell rings its usual Big Ben theme which somebody a hundred years ago figured would be appropriate to the grandiosity of the building. Maxine squints through the peephole and here’s Marvin the kozmonaut, dreads pushed up under his bike helmet, orange jacket and blue cargo pants, and over his shoulder an orange messenger bag with the running-man logo of the recently failed kozmo.com.
“Marvin. You’re up early. What’s with the outfit, you guys folded weeks ago.”
“Don’t mean I have to stop ridin. My legs are still pumpin, no mechanical issues with the bike, I can ride forever, I’m the Flyin Dutchmahn.”
“Strange, I’m not expecting anything, you must have me mixed up with some other lowlife again.” Except Marvin has an uncanny history of always showing up with items Maxine knows she didn’t order but which prove each time to be exactly what she needs.
This is the first time she’s ever seen him in the daylight hours. His shift used to begin at nightfall, and from then till dawn he’d be out on his orange fixed-gear track bike delivering donuts, ice cream, and videotapes, guaranteed to arrive within the hour, to the all-night community of dopers, hackers, instant-gratification cases who thought the dotcom balloon would ascend forever.
“It was all these ritzy neighborhoods up here,” is Marvin’s theory, “I knew the minute we started deliverin north of 14th Street it was the beginnin of the end.”
According to folklore, Mayor Giuliani, who hates all bike delivery people, is said to have declared a vendetta against Marvin personally, which along with his Trinidadian origins and single-digit employee number at kozmo have brought him iconic status in the track-rider community.
“Missed you, Marvin.”
“Lotta work. These days I’m all over the place, like Duane Reade. Don’t give me that banknote you’re wavin all around, it’s way too much and way too sentimental, oh and here, this is for you as well.”
Producing some kind of high-tech gizmo in beige plastic about four inches long by an inch wide, which seems to have a USB connector on one end.
“Marvin, what is it?”
“Ah, Mizziz L, always makin with those jokes. I just deliver em my dear.”
Time to seek the advice of an expert. “Ziggy, what is this thing?”
“Looks like one of those little eight-megabyte flash drives. Like a memory card, only different? IBM makes one, but this is some Asian knockoff.”
“So there could be files or something stored on this?”
“Anything, most likely text.”
“What do I do, just plug it in my computer?”
“Yaahh! No! Mom! you don’t know what’s on it. I know some kids at Bronx Science—let them check it out in the computer lab up there.”
“Sound like your grandma, Zig.”
Next day, “That thumb drive? it’s OK, safe to copy, just a lot of text, looks semiofficial.”
“And now your friends have seen it before I have.”
“They… uh, they don’t read that much, Mom. Nothing personal. A generational thing.” Turns out to be a piece of Nicholas Windust’s own dossier, downloaded from some Deep Web directory for spooks called Facemask, and displaying the kind of merciless humor also to be found in high-school yearbooks.
Windust does not after all seem to be FBI. Something worse, if possible. If there is a brother- or God forbid sisterhood of neoliberal terrorists, Windust has been in there from the jump, a field operative whose first recorded job, as an entry-level gofer, was in Santiago, Chile, on 11 September 1973, spotting for the planes that bombed the presidential palace and killed Salvador Allende.
Beginning with low-level bagman activities, graduating to undercover surveillance and corporate espionage, Windust’s list of credits at some point turned sinister, perhaps as early as his move across the Andes to Argentina. Job responsibilities began to include “interrogation enhancement” and “noncompliant-subject relocation.” Even with her light grasp of Argentine history during those years, Maxine can translate this well enough. Around 1990, as part of a cadre of old Argentina hands, U.S. veterans of the Dirty War who then stayed on to advise the IMF stooges that rose to power in its aftermath, Windust was one of the founders of a D.C. think tank known as Toward America’s New Global Opportunities (TANGO). He has a thirty-year history of visiting-lecturer gigs, including at the infamous School of the Americas. Is surrounded by the usual posse of younger protégés, though he seems to be against cults of personality on principle.