Windust seems to think it’s a date. He is done up, otherwise inexplicably, in somebody’s idea of hipster gear—jeans, vintage sharkskin sport coat, Purple Drank T-shirt, enough dress-code violations to get him thrown off the L train. Maxine peers at this for as long as she has to, shrugs, “It’s a look.”
He wants to sit inside, Maxine feels safer close to the street and it’s nice out today, so, cozy schmozy, outside it shall be. Windust orders a soft-boiled egg and a Bloody Mary, Maxine wants half a grapefruit and coffee in a bowl. “Amazed you could find the time, Mr. Windust,” with a smile of shameless bogosity, “So! my brother-in-law’s back in the USA now, I can’t imagine what else this could be about.”
“We were intrigued to learn he’s hired on at hashslingrz.com. Like your turnout by the way, Armani, isn’t it?”
“Just some schmatte from H&M, but how nice of you to notice.” And what is with the getting cute here, stop, stop, Maxine when will you…?
“Suggesting an interesting hookup of interests, if Avram Deschler is, as we suspect, a Mossad sleeper.”
Maxine makes with a Blank Stare she has learned from Shawn and often found useful. “Too academic for me.”
“Play dumb if you like, but I ran a search on you, you’re the little lady who sent Jeremy Fink up the river. Busted the Manalapan Ponzoids gang over in Jersey. Went down to Grand Cayman disguised as a reggae backup singer, firebombed ten and a half billion in physical Swiss francs, and exfiltrated in the perps’ own Gulfstream jet.”
“That was Mitzi Turner, actually. They’re always getting us confused. Mitzi’s the asskicker, I’m just a working mom.”
“Regardless, given the number of U.S. government contracts hashslingrz is involved with—”
“Look, either Avi’s some fantasy of yours, darkside hacker-saboteur, Mossad assassin, or he’s just another standard-issue geek trying to get through like the rest of us here outside the Beltway—whatever, I still don’t see how I come into it.”
Windust opens and reaches into an aluminum attaché case which he seems to be living out of, judging from the shaving kit and changes of underwear inside, and finds a folder. “Before his next tête-à-tête with Gabriel Ice, here’s something you might want to look over.”
Without being able to see his eyes, she watches his mouth for, what, some footnote? but no, he’s only smiling at her not even in a sociable way, more like he’s holding some winning hand, or a weapon aimed at her heart.
Though unenthusiastic about touching anything that’s been in contact with Windust’s intimate apparel, she’s also a fraud investigator whose prime directive is You Never Know, so she takes the folder gingerly and stashes it in her Kate Spade satchel.
“On the clear understanding,” Maxine quickly adding, “as Deborah Kerr, or Marni Nixon, might say, or actually sing—that this is none of my—”
“Am I making you nervous?”
She risks a fast sideways peek and is astonished to catch on his face now a look that would not be out of place in a pickup joint south of 14th Street, some late Saturday night when the hotter inventory has been squired away out the door and the pickings have grown unhelpfully slimmer. What’s up with this? She is not about to react to such a face. A silence arises, and lengthens, and not only a silence, as her glance, inadvertently wandering to that other indicator of the inward, confirms. It’s in fact a hardon of some size, and worse, he’s caught her looking.
“That’s it, back to work,” is what, in heedless idiocy, she finds herself unable to much more than croak. But doesn’t move, doesn’t even reach for her bag.
“Here, maybe this’ll be easier,” writing something on a napkin. In a more wholesome, or maybe only earlier, era it might have been the name of a good restaurant, or an idea for a start-up. Today the best you can call this is an invitation to step into airheadedness and error. An address inconvenient to the subway, she notices. “Say about rush hour, better chances for invisibility, that work for you?”
Among many things she hasn’t picked up before is this note in his voice, demanding, not what you’d call especially seductive. And yet still not a deal killer. And what would that have to be, she wonders. He gets up, nods, and splits leaving her with the check. After saying he’d pay for it. What is she thinking, again?
AS IF HE’S A KINDLY angel bringing a last chance to act responsibly, Conkling materializes in the waiting room unannounced, the way he usually does. “Whoo,” Daytona with a dramatic flinch, “scared the shit out of me, what you be lettin all these ghetto-ass g’s walk in here all the time?” Conkling meantime has gone all weird, for his own reasons.
“What. You smell something.”
“That masculine again–9:30 Cologne for Men. Something here is giving off indicia.” Like a hound dog in a jailbreak movie, Conkling follows the sillage into Maxine’s office, zeroing in on her purse. “Pretty slow drydown on this stuff, so it’s from sometime in the last couple hours.”
Oh, what else. Windust. She digs in her bag, brings out the folder he gave her. Conkling riffles the pages. “This is it.”
“Guy I, hmm, just had brunch with, he’s in from D.C.”
“You’re sure there’s no connection here with Lester Traipse?”
“Just somebody I went to college with,” Oh? what’s this, a sudden reluctance to share information with Conkling about Windust? For some reason? That she doesn’t want to get into right now? “Works in middle management now at the EPA, maybe the stuff is on some list of toxic pollutants?”
Her thoughts go wandering off, and nobody tries to summon them back. Did Windust, once in a more sympathetic-juvenile day, actually hang out at the old 9:30 Club the way Maxine did at the Paradise Garage? Maybe on Stateside breaks from doing evil all around the world, maybe he caught Tiny Desk Unit and Bad Brains in their local-band period, maybe the smell of 9:30 Cologne is his last, his only link with the undercorrupted youth he was? Maybe Conkling is coming down with a seasonal allergy and his nose is a little off today? Maybe Maxine is sliding deeper into a sentimental idiocy attack? Maybe’s ass, OK? Circumstantial schmircumstantial, Windust was there when Lester was taken out, and maybe he even did it.
Damn.
What happened to the chances for a giddy romantic episode today? Suddenly it looks a lot more like field research.
Meantime Conkling wants to talk about, who else, Princess Heidrophobia. By the time Maxine is able to get his unwholesomely obsessed ass back out the door, she’s left with a scant half hour to get put together for her, what would you call it, working rendezvous with Windust. Somehow she finds herself home, and immobile in front of the bedroom closet, and wondering why her mind has gone this blank. Polyvinyl chloride, something in bright red perhaps, though not inappropriate, is somehow absent from the inventory. Jeans are out of the question also. At length, deep in, at the event horizon of closet oblivion, she notices a chic cocktail-hour suit in a subdued aubergine shade, discovered long ago at the Galeries Lafayette going-out-of-business sale and kept for reasons that probably don’t include nostalgia. She tries to think of ways in which Windust might read it. If he reads it, if he doesn’t just grab and start ripping… Repeated messages from her Vertex, or does she mean Vortex, of Femininity are piling up unanswered.
24
The address is in a far-west-side piece of lower Hell’s Kitchen among trainyard and tunnel approaches plowed indifferently through a neighborhood whose disconnected fragments have been left to survive as they might, lofts, recording studios, pool-table showrooms, movie-equipment rental places, chop shops… Wised-up real-estate mavens of Maxine’s acquaintance assure her that this is the next hot neighborhood. Redevelopment is in the air. Someday the Number 7 subway will be extended over here and the Javits Center will have its own stop. Someday there will be parks and soaring condos and luxury tourist hotels. Right now it is still a windswept hard-to-get-to region that visitors from other planets, arriving in centuries to come after New York has been long forgotten, will assume was ceremonial, even religious, used for public spectacles, mass sacrifices, lunch breaks.