“As another kid billionaire with a wacko obsession, you mean, or…?”
“Try ‘power-hungry little CIA-groupie jerkoff.’”
“That’s if it’s real, this Montauk thing.”
“Remember, back in ’96, TWA Flight 800? Blown out of the sky over Long Island Sound, a government investigation which got so cute that everybody ended up thinking it was them that did it. Montaukies say it was particle-beam weapons being developed in a secret lab under Montauk Point. Some conspiracies, they’re warm and comforting, we know the names of the bad guys, we want to see them get their comeuppance. Others you’re not sure you want any of it to be true because it’s so evil, so deep and comprehensive.”
“What—time travel? Aliens?”
“If you were doing something in secret and didn’t want the attention, what better way to have it ridiculed and dismissed than bring in a few Californian elements?”
“Ice doesn’t strike me as an antigovernment crusader or a seeker after truth.”
“Maybe he thinks it’s all real and wants to be duked in. If he isn’t already. He doesn’t talk about it at all. Everybody knows that Larry Ellison races yachts, Bill Gross collects stamps. But this, what Forbes would probably call, ‘passion’ of Ice’s, isn’t too widely known. Yet.”
“Sounds like something you want to post on your Weblog.”
“Not till I find out more. Every day there’s new evidence, too much Ice money going for hidden purposes in too many directions. Maybe all connected, maybe only part. These ghost payments you’ve been trying to follow, for example.”
“Trying. They’re getting smurfed out all over the world to pass-through accounts in Nigeria, Yugoslavia, Azerbaijan, all finally reassembled in a holding bank in the Emirates, some Special Purpose Vehicle registered in the Jebel Ali Free Zone. Like the Smurf Village, only cuter.”
March sits blinking at the food on her fork, and you can almost see those old-lefty gears being double-clutched into engagement and starting to spin. “Now, that I might want to post.”
“Maybe not. I wouldn’t want to scare anybody off quite yet.”
“What if it’s Islamic terrorists or something? Time might be of the essence.”
“Please. I just chase embezzlers, what do I look like, James Bond?”
“I don’t know, give us a macho smirk here, let’s see.”
But something now in March’s face, some obscure collapse, starts Maxine wondering who else is going to cut her any slack. “OK look, my whistle-blower has a source, some kid übergeek, he’s been digging, trying to crack into some stuff that hashslingrz has encrypted. Whatever he finds, whenever that is, I could pass it on to you, OK?”
“Thanks, Maxi. I’d like to say I owe you one, though at the moment, technically, I don’t. But if you’d really like me to…” She looks almost embarrassed, and Maxine’s mom ESP, cranking into action now, tells her this will not be unconnected with Tallis, the child March is not shy about admitting she once literally prayed to have, the one she misses most of all, living over on the Upper East Side, just across the park but it might as well be Katmandu also, society lady, a kid of her own that March seldom if ever sees—lost Tallis, bought and sold into a world March will never give up her hatred of.
“Let me guess.”
“I can’t go over there. I can’t, but maybe you could on a pretext, just to see how she’s doing. Really, just a secondhand report’s all I want. From what I can tell off the Internet, she’s the company comptroller at hashslingrz, so maybe you could, I don’t know…”
“Just call up, say ‘Hi, Tallis, I think somebody at your company’s playing Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar, maybe you need a decertified CFE?’ Come on, March, it’s ambulance chasing.”
“So… they’ll re-decertify you, what?”
Carefully, “When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Carnegie Mellon when she got her M.B.A. Years now. I wasn’t even invited, but I went anyhow. Even from where I was, way in the back, she was radiant. I lurked around the Fence there for a while hoping she’d come by. Kind of fuckin pathetic, looking back. That Barbara Stanwyck movie, without the bad fashion advice.”
Provoking a reflex appraisal of March’s turnout choices today. Maxine notices how the snood matches her handbag. Sort of a vivid turnip purple. “OK, look, I can probably use the occasion to do a little social engineering. Even if she won’t take a meeting, even that’ll tell me something, right?”
12
Tallis is briefly back from Montauk and able to make some space for Maxine before work. Very early in the morning, through queasy summer light, Maxine first heads downtown to a weekly appointment with Shawn, who looks like he’s just pulled an all-nighter at a sensory-deprivation tank.
“Horst is back.”
“Is that, like,” air quotes, “‘back’? Or just back?”
“I’m supposed to know?”
Tapping a temple as if hearing voices from far away, “Vegas? Church of Elvis? Horst ’n’ Maxine take two?”
“Please, this is what I’d hear from my mother, if my mother didn’t hate Horst so much.”
“Too oedipal for me, but I can refer you to a really awesome Freudian, flexible rates, all that.”
“Maybe not. What do you think Dōgen would do?”
“Sit.”
After what seems like a good part of the hour has ticked away, “Um… sit, yes, and…?”
“Just sit.”
THE CABDRIVER ON THE WAY uptown has his radio tuned to a Christian call-in station, which he’s listening to attentively. This does not bode well. He decides to get on Park and take it all the way up. The biblical text being discussed on the radio at the moment is from 2 Corinthians, “For you suffer fools gladly, seeing you yourselves are wise,” which Maxine takes as a sign not to suggest alternate routes.
Park Avenue, despite attempts at someone’s idea of beautification, has remained, for all but the chronically clue-free, the most boring street in the city. Built originally as a kind of genteel lid to cover up the train tracks running into Grand Central, what should it be, the Champs-Élysées? Sped through, at night, by stretch limo, let’s say, on the way to Harlem, it might register as just bearable. In broad daylight, however, at an average speed of one block per hour, jammed with loud and toxic-smelling traffic, all in advanced states of disrepair, whose drivers suffer (or enjoy) a hostility level comparable to that of Maxine’s driver here—not to mention police barricades, Form Single Lane signs, jackhammer crews, backhoes and front-end loaders, cement mixers, asphalt spreaders, and battered dump trucks unmarked by any contractor’s name let alone phone number—it becomes an occasion for spiritual exercise, though maybe more of the Eastern type than anything connected with this radio station, now blasting some kind of Christian hip-hop. Christian what? No, she doesn’t want to know.
Presently they are cut off by a Volvo with dealer plates, flaunting its polyhedral crush zones, secure in its exemption from accident.
“Fucking Jews,” the driver glaring, “people drive like fucking animals.”
“But… animals can’t drive,” soothes Maxine, “and actually… would Jesus talk like that?”
“Jesus would love it if every Jew got nuked,” the driver explains.