“Actually, I’m a Eurowire type gal.” She has barely time to think about adding, “How squalid is this?” when the round comes in, invisible, silent till it hits a piece of wall, whereupon it finds its voice and ricochets droning brightly off into Chinatown, by which time Windust has grabbed Maxine and pulled her down behind a skip full of construction debris.
“Holy shit. Are you—”
“Wait,” he advises, “just give it a minute, I’m not sure about the angle, it could’ve come from anyplace. Up in any of those,” gesturing with his head at the upper stories surrounding them. They watch the pavement fragment further into what will later be taken for only a few more city potholes. The people across the street don’t seem to notice. On the incoming breeze, a distant slow stammering. “Somehow I’ve been expecting three-round bursts. This sounds more like an AK. Hold steady.”
“I knew I should’ve worn the Kevlar outfit today.”
“Among your friends in the Russian mob, distance equals respect, so we should consider assassination by AK-47 an honor.”
“Gee, you must be some hot shit.”
“In fifteen seconds,” glancing at his watch, “I plan to disappear and get on with my day. You might want to wait here for a bit before resuming your own.”
“Class act, I figured you’d grab my arm and we’d run someplace, like in movies? Chinese people jumping out of the way? Or was I supposed to be blond?” Scanning upper windows meantime, reaching into her purse, bringing out the Beretta, thumbing off the safety.
“Good,” Windust nodding like it’s about time. “You can cover me.”
“That one there, the one that’s open, that look good to you?” No reply. Already, as the Eagles say, gone. She crab-steps out from behind the skip anyway and lets go a couple of double taps at the window, screaming, “Motherfuckers!”
Goodness, Maxine, where’d that come from? Nobody’s returning fire. The people waiting for the bus begin to point and pass remarks. Keeping an eye on the street traffic, she waits for a vehicle tall enough to take cover behind, which turns out to be a moving van with MITZVAH MOVERS in mock-Hebrew lettering and a cartoon of what appears to be an insane rabbi with a piano on his back, and vacates the area.
Well, as Winston Churchill always sez, there is nothing more exhilarating than getting shot at without result, though for Maxine there is also a flip side or payback, which arrives a few hours later, on the after-school stoop at Kugelblitz, in front of an assortment of Upper West Side moms whose life skills include an eye for the slightest uptick in the distress of others, not that Maxine quite collapses in tears, though her knees feel unreliable and she may be experiencing a certain lightness of head…
“Everything all right, Maxine? you look so… inexplicable.”
“One of those having-it-all moments, Robyn, and yourself?”
“Going crazy with Scott’s bar mitzvah, you have no idea, the work, caterers, deejay, invitations. And Scott, his aliyah, he’s still struggling to memorize it, with the Hebrew running the other way we’re worried now it’s making him dyslexic?”
“Well,” in the most rational voice available to her at the moment, “why not go off-Torah and choose a passage from, I don’t know, Tom Clancy? not really that traditional, true, not even I guess Jewish, but something with, you know, maybe Ding Chavez in it?” noticing after a short time lag that Robyn is looking at her funny and people are beginning to edge away. Providentially at this point, the kids all come charging out of the lobby and onto the stoop, and parental subroutines kick in, carrying her and Ziggy and Otis down the steps and into the street, where she notices Nigel Shapiro busy poking with a little stylus at the tiny keyboard of a wavy-shaped pocket-size green-and-purple unit. Doesn’t look like a Game Boy. “Nigel, what is that?”
Looking up after a while, “This? it’s a Cybiko, my sister gave itta me, everybody at La Guardia has em, the big selling point is the silence. It’s wireless, see, you can send text messages back and forth in class and nobody hears you.”
“So if Ziggy and I each had one, we could message back and forth?”
“If you’re in range, which is only like a block and a half. But trust me, Mizzus Loeffler, it’s da wave o’ da fyootch.”
“You’ll be wanting one, I imagine, Ziggy.”
“Already got one, Mom.” And who knows who else. Maxine has a moment of eyebrow oscillation. Talk about private networks.
THE OFFICE PHONE LETS LOOSE with some robotic theme, and Maxine picks up. It’s Lloyd Thrubwell, in some agitation. “The subject you inquired after? I’m so sorry. There’s not much further I can take this.”
Yeah let me look in my Beltway-to-English phrasebook here… “You’re being ordered to back off of it, right?”
“This person has been the topic of an internal memo, several actually. I can’t say any more than that.”
“You probably heard already, but Windust and I got shot at yesterday.”
“His wife,” only having a spot of fun, “or your husband?”
“I’ll take that as WASP for ‘Thank God you’re both all right.’”
Muffled mouthpiece passage. “Wait, I’m sorry, it’s a serious event, of course. We’re already looking into it.” A beat of silence, which on Avi’s stress analyzer is clearly registering far over in the Lying Through Ass range. “Do either of you have any theories as to the shooter’s identity?”
“Out of all the enemies Windust has made during a long career doing his country’s shitwork, jeepers Lloyd, personally, any thoughts on that would so be a chore.”
More muffled yakking. “No problem. If you have any contact with the subject, however indirect, we would strongly advise against continuing it.” The display on Avi’s gizmo has now turned a vivid cadmium red and begun to blink.
“Because they don’t want me meddling in Agency business, or something else?”
“Something else,” Lloyd whispers.
The sound background changes as an extension is picked up, and another voice, one she has never heard, at least not in the waking world, advises, “He means your personal safety, Ms. Loeffler. The assessment here on Brother Windust is that he’s a highly educated asset, but doesn’t know everything. Lloyd, that’s all, you can get off the line now.” The connection goes dead.
36
Some holiday season someday, Maxine would like to find featured on the tube a revisionist Christmas Carol, where Scrooge is the good guy for a change. Victorian capitalism has hustled him over the years for his soul, turning him from an innocent entry-level kid into a mean old man who treats everybody like shit, none worse than his apparently honest bookkeeper Bob Cratchit, who in reality has been systematically skimming off of poor haunted and vulnerable Scrooge, cooking the books, and running off periodically to Paris to squander what he’s stolen on champagne, gambling, and cancan girls, leaving Tiny Tim and the family in London to starve. At the end, instead of Bob being the instrument of Scrooge’s redemption, it turns out to be by way of Scrooge that Bob is ransomed back to the side of humanity again.
Every year when Christmas and Hanukkah roll around, this story begins to slop over into work. Maxine finds herself reversing polarities, overlooking obvious Scrooges and zooming in on secretly sinful Cratchits. The innocent are guilty, the guilty are beyond hope, everything’s on its head, it’s a Twelfth Night of late-capitalist contradiction, and not especially relaxing.
Having listened through the window to the same heartfelt street-trumpet rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” a thousand times, each identical, note-for-note, finding this at last, what’s the phrase—fucking tiresome, Maxine, Horst, and the boys decide to take a break together and roll a couple of frames down at the Port Authority bus terminal, which houses the last unyuppified bowling alley in the city.