“Maybe he’s more interesting than that—”
“‘Interesting.’ Ah.” The annoying staccato Heidi ah. “And Hitler was a good dancer, a wonderful sense of humor, I can’t fuckin believe this, we watch the same movies on the Lifetime channel, these are always the ones who turn out to be the sociopathic rat, shtupping the receptionist, embezzling the children’s lunch money, slowly poisoning the innocent bride with the bug spray in the breakfast food.”
“That’s like…” innocently, “a cereal killer?”
“Just ’cause I once pitched you a commercial about cops? You believed that?”
“He’s not a cop. We’re not newlyweds. Remember? Heidi, chill, for goodness sakes.”
21
After a day of wandering around in the vast shopping basin of the SoHo-Chinatown-Tribeca interface, Maxine and Heidi find themselves one evening in the East Village looking for a bar where Driscoll is supposed to be singing with a nerdcore band called Pringle Chip Equation, when sudden gusts of smell, not yet at this distance intense but strangely contoured in their purity, begin as they walk through the humid twilight to accost them. Presently from down the block, screaming in panic, dramatically clutching their noses and occasionally heads, civilians come running. “I think I saw the movie,” Heidi sez. “What’s that smell?”
Turns out to be Conkling Speedwell, packing his Naser tonight, which looks in fact to’ve been recently deployed, its LED-studded delivery cone blinking truculently. He is accompanied by a small detachment of corporate security in designer fatigues each with a shoulder patch shaped like a flask of Chanel No. 5, with FRAGRANCE FORCE written across the stopper part and on the label the mirrored-C logo flanked by a couple of Glocks.
“Sting operation,” Conkling explains. “Truckful of Latvian counterfeit product, we were supposed to make a buy, but it all went stinko.” He nods at a forlorn trio of Pardaugava mini-mobsters semiconsciously collapsed in a doorway. “They’ll be OK, just aldehyde shock, caught ’em with the main lobe, maximized the prewar nitro musk and jasmine absolute, right?”
“Anybody would’ve done the same.” And on the topic of chemistry, what, excuse me, is suddenly up with Heidi and Conkling here?
“Say… is that Poison you’re wearing?” Conkling’s nose, in the dim light, having acquired a slowly pulsing glow.
“How could you tell?” with the eyelashes and so forth. Annoying enough, more so given the Poison issue, which has long simmered between Heidi and Maxine, especially Heidi’s practice of wearing it into elevators. All over the city, sometimes even years later, elevators have still not gotten over Heidi occupancies however brief, some even being obliged to attend special Elevator Recovery Clinics to be detoxified. “You have to stop blaming yourself for this, you were the victim…”
“I should’ve just closed the doors on her and defaulted to the roof…”
Meantime here comes the precinct, plus the bomb squad, a couple ambulances, and a SWAT team.
“Why, sure and if it isn’t the kid.”
“Moskowitz, what brings you out?”
“Schmoozin with some o’ the b’ys down to the Krispy Kreme, happened to pick this up on the scanner— Why, and is it itself theer with the blinkin lights, that infamous Neaaaser, now?”
“Oh… what, this? Nah, nah, just a toy for the kids, listen,” pressing a decoy button to activate a sound chip, which begins to play “Baby Beluga.”
“Lovely, and what sort of eedjit would you be takin me for, young Conkling?”
“The savant kind, I guess, but meanwhile look, Jay, there’s a whole van full of Chanel No. 5 over there that might get lost on the way to the property room unless somebody keeps an eye on it.”
“Why, it’s me dear wife’s own favorite scent, it is.”
“Well, in that case.”
“Conkling,” Maxine’d love to stay and chat, but, “you happen to know a bar in the neighborhood called Vodkascript, we’re looking for it.”
“Passed it, just a couple blocks that way.”
“You’re welcome to join us,” Heidi struggling with the overeagerness.
“Don’t know how long we’ll be here…”
“Ah, c’mon.” Sez Heidi. She is wearing jeans tonight and a twinset in some ill-advised tangerine shade, despite, or because of, which, Conkling is enchanted.
“Guys, we’ll finish up the paperwork back at 57th, OK?” Sez Conkling.
That was quick. Thinks Maxine.
At Vodkascript they find a roomful of trustafarians, cybergoths, out-of-work codefolk, uptowners ever in search of a life less vapid, all jammed into a tiny ex–neighborhood bar with no A/C and too many amplifiers, listening to Pringle Chip Equation. The band are all wearing nerd eyeglass frames and, like everybody else in the room, sweating. The lead guitarist plays an Epiphone Les Paul Custom and the keyboardist a Korg DW-8000, and there is also a reedperson with assorted horns and a percussionist with a wide range of tropical instruments. In a special guest appearance tonight, Driscoll Padgett is heard on an occasional vocal. Maxine never imagined that Driscoll’s universe of three-letter acronyms might include “LBD,” but now look at this latest edition. Hair pinned up, revealing to Maxine’s surprise one of those sweetly hexagonal junior-model faces, eyes and lips underdone, the chin resolute as if she were getting serious about her life. A face, Maxine can’t help thinking, come into its own…
After the set, Driscoll waves and comes over.
“Driscoll, Heidi, and this is Conkling.”
“Oh, sure, the guy with the Hitler,” quick look at Maxine, “uh, thing. How’d that work out?”
“Hitler,” Heidi violently with the eyelashes, scattering pieces of mascara, as if it’s a pop star she and Conkling might have in common.
Fuck here we go, Maxine half-subvocalizes, having only herself recently learned of Conkling’s longtime obsession with, not so much Hitler in general as the even more focused question of, what did Hitler smell like? Exactly? “I mean obviously like a vegetarian, like a nonsmoker, but… what was Hitler’s cologne, for example?”
“I always figured it was 4711,” Heidi taking her beat a little faster than a normal person might.
Conkling is instantly mesmerized. The sort of thing you see in older Disney cartoons. “Me too! Where did you—”