“Though he was not by nature a violent person, he had learned a long time ago that nobody held on to a job like his unless they were willing to do whatever it took. For years he had sought new and creative methods short of violence, which usually came down to buying people off. Stalkers of imperial celebrities were hired as bodyguards, journalists with nasal-length issues were redesignated ‘analysts’ and installed at desks in the state intelligence office.
“By this logic the old woman with her sack of garbage should have become an environmental cabinet minister and someday get parks and recycle centers all across the realm named after her. But whenever anyone tried to approach her with job offers, she was never to be found. Her criticisms of the regime, however, had already entered the collective consciousness of the city and become impossible to delete.
“Well, kids, it’s just a story. The kind of story you were likely to hear in Russia back in the days when Stalin was in power. People told each other these Aesop’s fables and everybody knew what stood for what. But can we in the 21st-century U.S. say the same?
“Who is this old lady? What does she think she’s been finding out all these years? Who is this ‘ruler’ shes’s refusing to be bought off by? And what’s this ‘work’ he was ‘doing in secret’? Suppose ‘the ruler’ isn’t a person at all but a soulless force so powerful that though it cannot ennoble, it does entitle, which, in the city-nation we speak of, is always more than enough? The answers are left to you, the Kugelblitz graduating class of 2001, as an exercise. Good luck. Think of it as a contest. Send your answers to my Weblog, tabloidofthedamned.com, first prize is a pizza with anything you want on it.”
The address gets her some applause, more than it would’ve at the snob academies east and west of here, but not as much as you might’ve expected a Kugelblitz alum to get.
“It’s my personality,” she tells Maxine at the reception afterward. “The women don’t like the way I turn myself out, the men don’t like my attitude. Which is why I’m starting to cut back on the personal appearances and concentrate instead on my Weblog.” Handing Maxine one of the flyers that Otis brought home.
“I’ll visit it,” Maxine promises.
Nodding across the patio, “Who’s that you came in with, the Sterling Hayden look-alike?”
“The what? Oh, that’s my ex. Well. Sort of ex.”
“This is the same ‘ex’ as two years ago? It wasn’t final then, it isn’t final yet, what are you waiting for? Some Nazi name, if I remember right.”
“Horst. Is this gonna be on the Internet now?”
“Not if you do me a big favor.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Seriously, you’re a CFE, right?”
“They pulled my certificate, I’m freelance now.”
“Whatever. I have to pick your brain about something.”
“Should we have lunch someplace?”
“I don’t do lunch. Corrupt artifact of late capitalism. Breakfast maybe?”
She’s smiling, however. It occurs to Maxine that contrary to the speech she just gave, March isn’t a crone, she’s a dumpling. With the face and demeanor of somebody who you know within five minutes of meeting them will be telling you to eat something. Something specific, which she will have on a spoon already on its way to your mouth.
THE PIRAEUS DINER on Columbus is littered, dilapidated, full of cigarette smoke and cooking odors from the kitchen, a neighborhood institution. Mike the waiter drops a couple of very heavy menus bound in cracked brown plastic on the table and stalks off. “I can’t believe this place is still here,” March says. “Talk about living on borrowed time.”
“Come on, this joint, it’s eternal.”
“What planet are you from again? Between the scumbag landlords and the scumbag developers, nothing in this city will ever stand at the same address for even five years, name me a building you love, someday soon it’ll either be a stack of high-end chain stores or condos for yups with more money than brains. Any open space you think will breathe and survive in perpetuity? Sorry, but you can kiss its ass good-bye.”
“Riverside Park?”
“Ha! Forget it. Central Park itself isn’t safe, these men of vision, they dream about CPW to Fifth Avenue solid with gracious residences. Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by. The only way to live here is not to get attached.”
Maxine is hearing similar advice from Shawn, though not necessarily in terms of real estate. “I checked out your Weblog last night, March, so now you’re chasing dotcoms also?”
“Real estate, easy to hate, these techies it’s a little different. You know what Susan Sontag always sez.”
“‘I like the streak, I’m keeping it’?”
“If there’s a sensibility you really want to talk about, and not just exhibit it yourself, you need ‘a deep sympathy modified by contempt.’”
“I get the contempt part, but remind me about the sympathy?”
“Their idealism,” maybe a little reluctantly, “their youth… Maxi, I haven’t seen anything like it since the sixties. These kids are out to change the world. ‘Information has to be free’—they really mean it. At the same time, here’s all these greedy fuckin dotcommers make real-estate developers look like Bambi and Thumper.”
The coin-op washing machine of Intuition clangs on into a new cycle. “Let me guess. Your estranged son-in-law, Gabriel Ice.”
“She’s a magician. You do birthday parties?”
“Actually right at the moment, hashslingrz also happen to be causing a client of mine some agità. Sort of client.”
“Yeah, yeah?” Eagerly, “Fraud maybe?”
“Nothing forensic that’d hold up in court, or not yet anyway.”
“Maxi, there is something really, really weird going on over there.”
Mike shows up with a smoldering cigar gripped in his teeth. “Ladies?”
“Not lately,” March beams. “How about waffles, bacon, sausage, homefries, coffee.”
“Special K,” sez Maxine, “skim milk, some kind of fruit?”
“Today for you, a banana.”
“Some coffee too. Please.”
March is shaking her head slowly. “Early-stage food nazi here. So tell me, you and Gabriel Ice, what?”
“Just good friends, don’t believe Page Six.” Maxine gives her a quick rundown—the Benford Curve anomalies, the ghost vendors, the Gulfward flow of capital. “I’ve only got a surface picture so far. But there do seem to be a lot of government contracts.”
March nods sourly. “Hashslingrz is as tight as it gets with the U.S. security apparatus, an arm of, if you like. Crypto work, countermeasures, heaven knows what-all. You know he’s got a mansion out in Montauk, just a morning jog down the trail from the old air base.” Funny look on her face, a strange mixture of amusement and doom.
“Why would that—”
“The Montauk Project.”
“The… Oh, wait, Heidi’s mentioned that… She teaches it, some kind of… urban legend?”
“You could say.” Beat. “You could also say, the terminal truth about the U.S. government, worse than anything you can imagine.”
Mike shows up with the food. Maxine sits peeling her banana, slicing it over the cereal, trying to keep her eyes wide and unjudging while March digs in to her high-cholesterol eats and is soon talking with her mouth full. “I see my share of conspiracy theories, some are patently bullshit, some I want to believe so much I have to be careful, others are inescapable even if I wanted to escape. The Montauk Project is every horrible suspicion you’ve ever had since World War II, all the paranoid production values, a vast underground facility, exotic weapons, space aliens, time travel, other dimensions, shall I go on? And who turns out to have a lively if not psychopathic interest in the subject but my own reptilian son-in-law, Gabriel Ice.”