Текст книги "Bleeding Edge"

Автор книги: Thomas Pynchon

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 31 страниц)

18

Later in the afternoon, the sky begins to gather a lurid yellow tinge. Something’s on the way in from across the river. Maxine puts on Big Apple news traffic and weather station WYUP, and after the usual string of fast-mouth commercials, each more offensive than the last, on comes the familiar teletype theme and a male voice, “You give us thirty-two minutes—you don’t get it back.”

Seeming a bit too chirpy for the material, a newslady announces, “A body found today in a deluxe Upper West Side apartment building has been identified as Lester Traipse, a well-known Silicon Alley entrepreneur . . . an apparent suicide, though police say murder isn’t being ruled out.”

“Meanwhile, week-old Baby Ashley, rescued yesterday from a dumpster in Queens, is doing well, according to—”

“No,” the way someone much older and more demented might shout back at the radio, “fuck no, you stupid bitch, not Lester.” She just talked to him. He’s supposed to be alive.

She has seen the main sequence of embezzlers’ remorse, tearful press interviews, sidewise please-hit-me glances, sudden onsets of nerve pain, but Lester is, was, one of those rare specimens, he was trying to pay back what he took, to mensch up, seldom if ever do guys like this cancel their own series. . .

Leaving what? Maxine feels an unwelcome prickling along her jawline. None of the conclusions she’s jumping to here look good. The Deseret? The Fucking Deseret? Something wrong with taking Lester over to Fresh Kills and leaving him on the landfill?

She finds herself gazing out the window. She squints past roofline contours, vents, skylights, water tanks and cornices under this pre-storm lighting, shining as if already wet against the darkening sky, down the street to where the cursed Deseret rears above Broadway, one or two storm-nervous lights already on, its stonework at this distance seeming too uncleansable, its shadows too many, ever to breach.

Insanely she begins to blame herself. Because she found Ice’s tunnel. Ran away from whatever was approaching. It’s Ice getting even, coming after her now.

•   •   •

IT DOESN’T HELP MUCH WHEN, later in the evening, she’s out in the rain and sees Lester Traipse across the street, going down into the subway at Broadway and 79th, in the company of a blond bombshell of a certain age. Sure that this blonde is somehow Lester’s handler, that they’ve been up on the surface for a while, taking care of business, and now she’s bringing him back underneath, Maxine goes sprinting across the most dangerous intersection in the city, and by the time she gets through the moving obstacle course of murderous drivers sending up careless wings of filthy water and down to the subway platform, Lester and the blonde are nowhere to be seen in any direction. Of course, in NYC it is not uncommon to catch sight of a face that you know, beyond all argument, belongs to somebody no longer among the living, and sometimes when it catches you staring, this other face may begin to recognize yours as well, and 99% of the time you turn out to be strangers.

Next morning, after a shiftily insomniac night punctuated with dream clips, she shows up at her appointment with Shawn in something of a state. “I was like, ‘Lester?’ just about to yell across the street something stupid, you’re supposed to be dead or something.”

“First thing to suspect is,” Shawn advises, “is that your memory’s going?”

“No, uh-uh, this was Lester and nobody else.”

“Well . . . I guess it happens sometimes. Ordinary unenlightened folks just like you, no special gifts or netheen, will see through all the illusion, just as well as a master with, like, years of training? And what they’re able to see is, is the real person, the ‘face before the face’ we call it in Zen, and maybe then they attach some more familiar face to it?”

“Shawn, that’s very helpful, thank you, but suppose it really was Lester?”

“Uh huh well was he walking in, like, third ballet position, by any chance?”

“Not cute, Shawn, the guy just—”

“What? Died? Didn’t die? Made the news on WYUP? Got on the subway with some unidentified babe? Make up your mind.”

In his ads, stuck to every newspaper machine in the city, Shawn promises, “Guaranteed No Use Of Kyosaku,” these being the wooden “warning sticks” Soto Zen instructors use to focus your attention. So instead of hitting people, Shawn gets abusive with remarks. Maxine emerges from the session feeling like she’s been one-on-one with Shaquille O’Neal.

In the outer office she finds another client waiting, light gray suit, pale raspberry shirt, tie and matching handkerchief in deep orchid. For a minute she thinks it’s Alex Trebek. Shawn sticks his head out, gets all congenial. “Maxine, meet Conkling Speedwell, someday you’ll think it was fate, but it’s really just me being a busybody.”

“Sorry if I cut in on your session,” Maxine shaking hands, taking note of the guy’s you could say agendaless grip, something rarely met with in this town.

“Buy me lunch sometime.”

Enough with Lester for a while. He can wait. He has all the time in the world now. Pretending to consult her watch, “How’s today looking?”

“Better than it was.”

OK. “You know Daphne and Wilma’s, down the street?”

“Sure, nice odor dynamic there. About one?”

Odor what? Turns out Conkling is a freelance professional Nose, having been born with a sense of smell far more calibrated than the rest of us normals enjoy. He’s been known to follow an intriguing sillage for dozens of city blocks before finding the source is a dentist’s wife from Valley Stream. He believes in a dedicated circle of hell for anybody who shows up at dinner or for that matter enters an elevator wearing an inappropriate scent. Dogs he hasn’t met formally come up to him with inquiring looks. “A negotiable talent, sometimes a curse.”

“So tell me, what am I wearing today?”

He’s already smiling, shaking his head slightly, avoiding eye contact. Maxine understands that whatever this gift is, he doesn’t go around showing it off.

“On second thought . . .”

“Too late.” Some kind of jive nose manipulation, as if clearing his passages. “OK—first of all, it’s from Florence . . .”

Uh-oh.

“The Officina in Santa Maria Novella, and you have on the original Medici formulation, Number 1611.”

Aware that her mouth has dropped open a few millimeters further than she would like, “Don’t tell me how you do it, don’t, it’s like card tricks, I don’t want to know.”

“I seldom run into that many Officina persons actually.”

“More of them around than you’d think. You wander into this beautiful high old room full of these scents, people who’ve been to Florence a hundred times never heard of the place, you start to think maybe it’s your own secret discovery—then suddenly, shopper’s nightmare, it’s all over town.”

“People who wouldn’t know a floral from a chypre,” sympathetic. “Drives you nuts.”

“And . . . being a Nose . . . it’s nice work, the pay’s good?”

“Well, most of it’s with the larger corporations, we all keep revolving firm to firm, after a while you begin to notice the companies changing hands, getting restructured, just like the classic scents do, then you’re out on the bricks again. For years it never occurred to me this might be what our mutual guru calls a message from beyond. ‘Who is the person without rank, who goes in and out through the portals of the face?’ is how he put it.”

“He gave me that one too.”

“‘Portals’ is supposed to mean eyes, but right away I figured nostrils, the koan turned out to be spot-on, gave me some room to think, and nowadays I’m freelance, my waiting list for new clients is about six months, which is longer than any of those company jobs ever lasted.”

“And Shawn . . . ”

“Steers an occasional client my way, takes a small fee. Enough to cover his Erolfa bill, which he tends to bathe in. Usual thing.”

“In the Nose business. You have your own perfume line, or . . . ?”

He seems embarrassed. “More like an investigative agency.”

Aahhh! “A private Nose.”

“It gets worse. 90 percent of my business is matrimonial.”

What else? “Goodness. How . . . would something like that work?”

“Oh, they show up, ‘Smell my husband, my wife, tell me who they’ve been with, what’d they have for lunch, how many drinks, are they doing drugs, is there oral sex—’ that seems to be the top FAQ—and so forth. Thing is, it’s all in time sequence, each indication layered on top of the one before. You can put together a chronology.”

“Strangely enough”—is this such a good idea?—“there’s this situation I’ve had come up . . . Do you mind if I just pick your– let me put that another way, could one of you Nose people go in to a crime scene, like a police psychic, give it a snort, and reconstruct what went on?”

“Sure, Nasal Forensics. Moskowitz, De Anzoli, couple others, they specialize in that.”

“How about you?”

Conkling angles his head, she’d have to say charmingly, and takes a minute. “Cops and me . . . You run a nasal scan, the boys get paranoid, they think maybe you’re scanning them too, snorting into all those deep cop secrets. So we always end up at cross-purposes.”

“This is never a problem for Moskowitz and them?”

“Moskowitz is a decorated bunco-squad veteran, De Anzoli has a D.Crim., and there’s family members also on the job, it’s a culture of trust. Me, I’m more comfortable as an independent.”

“Oh, I can relate.” She points her face across the room and then slides her eyeballs sideways to look at him. “Unless you already smelled that about me also?”

“Like is there some notorious pheromone, kicks in whenever—Wait, rewind, now you’re gonna think—”

Maxine beams brightly and sips her Sudden Enlightenment Organic Bamboo tea. “Sure must make dating complicated, this snoot of yours.”

“Is why I can generally keep quiet about it. Except when Shawn tries to fix me up.”

They have a look at each other. Over the past year, Maxine has been out with hat fetishists, day traders, pool sharks, private-equity hotshots, and seldom has she been visited by anxieties about seeing any of them again. Now, a little bit late for it, she remembers to check out Conkling’s left hand, which proves, like her own, to be innocent of a ring.

He catches her looking. “I forgot to check your finger too. Awful, ain’t we.” Conkling has a boy and a girl in middle school who show up on weekends, and today’s Friday. “I mean, they have keys, but usually they find me there.”

“Yeah I’ve got to go punch back in too. Here, this is my home, office, beeper.”

“Here’s mine, and if you’re serious about a crime-scene job, I can either put you in touch with Moskowitz or . . .”

“Better if it was you.” She allows for a heartbeat and a half. “I don’t want to coordinate with the NYPD any more than I need to on this. Not that they ever take kindly to civilians poking their—sorry, I meant inquiring into police business.”

•   •   •

SO WHAT THEY DO is meet for a noon swimming date at The Deseret pool, it having been proven scientifically, according to Conkling, that the human sense of smell tends to peak on average at 11:45 A.M. Maxine wears some midrange Trish McEvoy scent that’s going to wash off anyway, so it shouldn’t freak her out beyond some proper perimeter if Conkling guesses right again.

Conkling seems to be fit, in a frequent-swimmer way. Today he’s wearing something from one of the WASP catalogs a couple sizes too big. Maxine resists any eyebrow commentary. She was expecting maybe a Speedo thong? She discreetly checks for dick size anyway, curious also about any reaction he might be having to how she looks in this number she has on today, a high-ticket reformatting of the LBD into a swimsuit, instead of the more or less disposable ones she gets through the mail in floral prints it is better not to think about . . . And whoop there it is. Isn’t it?

“Something, uh . . .”

“Oh I was just looking for uh, my goggles.”

“On your head?”

“Right.”

From its looks, The Deseret pool could be the oldest one in the city. Overhead you can see soaring into the chlorine-scented mists a huge segmented dome of some translucent early plastic, each piece concave and teardrop-shaped, separated by bronze-colored cames—during the daytime, whatever the sun’s angle, admitting the same verdigris light, its surface at nightfall growing ever more remote and less visible, vanishing before closing time into a wintry gray.

Joaquin the pool guy is on duty. Usually something of a motormouth, today he seems to Maxine a little, you’d say, unforthcoming.

“You heard anything more about the body they found?”

“Much as anybody, which is nothing. Not even the guys on the door, not even Fergus the nightman, who knows everything. Cops been and gone, now everybody’s pretty creeped out, right?”

“It wasn’t a tenant, I heard.”

“I don’t ask.”

“Somebody must know something.”

“Around here it’s deaf and dumb. Policy of the building. Sorry, Maxine.”

After a couple of token laps, Maxine and Conkling pretend to head for their respective locker rooms, but meet up again, sneak into a staff-only stairwell, presently they’re underneath the pool, moving flipflopped and semiclad through the shadows and mysteries of the unnumbered thirteenth floor, which belongs to a disaster always about to happen, a buffer space constantly under the threat of inundation from above if the pool—concrete, state of the art back then, grandfathered exempt from what today would be a number of code violations—should God forbid ever spring a leak. For now it’s the outward and structural form of a secret history of payoffs to contractors and inspectors and signers of permits, dishonest stewards long gone who expected the deluge after them to take place well after any statute of limitations has run. Creaking underframe, early-20th-century trusswork and bracing. A range of animal life in which mice could be the least of one’s worries. The only light comes shimmering from watertight observation windows in the pool, each enclosed in its private viewing booth, much like a peep show at an arcade, where according to an early real-estate brochure “admirers of the natatory arts may obtain, without themselves having to undergo immersion, educational views of the human form unrestricted by the demands of gravity.” Light from above the pool comes down through the water and through the observation windows and out into this darkened level below, a strange rarefied greenish blue.

It was in one of these cubicles that the police found Lester’s corpse propped up as if gazing into the pool, where earlier a swimmer had noticed him and after a couple more laps, getting the picture, freaked out. According to the papers, a knife-blade of some sort had been driven with great force into Lester’s skull, apparently not by hand because part of the tang still protruded from Lester’s forehead. The absence of a knife-handle suggested a spring-propelled ballistic blade, illegal in the U.S. since 1986, though said to be standard issue for Russian special forces. The Post, for whom the Cold War still emits a warm nostalgic glow, loves stories like this, so the screaming began, KGB assassination squads running loose through the city and so forth, and this sort of thing would go on for the better part of a week.

When she saw the headline, “GONE BALLISTIC!,” Maxine rang up Rocky Slagiatt. “Your ol’ Spetsnaz buddy Igor Dashkov. He would’t happen to know anything about this.”

“Already asked him. He says that knife is a urban myth. He was in the Spetsnaz for about a century and never saw one.”

“Not quite my question, but—”

“Hey. Wouldn’t rule out a Russian hit. On the other hand . . .”

Right. Wouldn’t rule out somebody trying to set it up to look like a Russian hit, either.

The crime scene itself here, meanwhile, looks pretty picked over. There’s yellow tape around, and chalk marks, along with discarded plastic evidence pouches and cigarette butts and fast-food packaging. Ignoring a background haze of cop aftershave, tobacco smoke, stomach effluxes from neighborhood saloons, crime-lab solvents, fingerprint powder, luminol—

“Wait, you can smell luminol? Isn’t it supposed to be odorless?”

“Nah. Notes of pencil shavings, hibiscus, number-two diesel, mayonnaise—”

“Excuse me, that’s wine-maven talk.”

“Oops . . .”

Filtering, howsoever, these other odors out, Conkling enters orbit around the central fact of the stiff that was here, that in the one professional sense is still here, problematical now because of what forensic Noses like to call the deathmask, the way the indoles of bodily decay assume precedence over all other notes that might be present. There are differential techniques for getting around this, of course, one attends oddly furtive all-weekend seminars in New Jersey to learn them, sometimes these have practical value, sometimes it’s all just New Age gobbledygook from the eighties that the gurus presiding have found it difficult to move comfortably on from, thus allowing the ever-hopeful attendee to flush another $139.95 plus tax into the soil stack of his fiscal affairs. Half of it IRS-allowable, but usually, vaguely, a disappointment.

“Just do a grab, here—” Conkling going in his duffel and pulling out some heavy-duty plastic bags and a little pocket-size unit and a plastic fitting.

“What’s that?”

“Air-sampling pump—cute, huh? Runs off a rechargeable battery. Just going to take a couple liters here.”

Waiting till they step out of the guest or freight elevator onto the street, the clamoring, soiled, innocent street, “So . . . what did you smell up there?”

“Nothing too unusual, except . . . before NYPD got there, before the gunsmoke, a scent, maybe a cologne, I can’t ID right offhand, commercial, maybe from a few years back . . .”

“Somebody who was there.”

Emerging from a moment of thought, “Actually I think it’s time to go check the library.”

Meaning, it turns out, Conkling’s own extensive collection of vintage perfumes, which Conkling keeps at his crib in Chelsea, where the first thing Maxine notices is a glossy black instrument sitting in a battery charger among a number of dramatically oversize ferns which may have mutated because of the apparatus in their midst, humming in more than one key, red and green LEDs glowing and blinking here and there, with a Clint Eastwood–size pistol grip and a long discharge cone. A creature hidden in jungle foliage, staring at her.

“This is the Naser,” Conkling introduces them, “or olfactory laser.” Going on to explain that odors can be regarded as if they had periodic waveforms, like sound or light. The everyday human nose receives all smells in a jumble, like the eye receives the frequencies of incoherent light. “The Naser here can separate these into component ‘notes,’ isolate and put each in phase, causing it to ‘cohere,’ then amplify as needed.”

Sounds a little West Coast, though the object looks intimidating enough. “This is a weapon? it . . . it’s dangerous?”

“In the same way,” Conkling supposes, “that sniffing pure rose attar will turn your brain into red Jell-O. Don’t want to be messing with no Naser, necessarily.”

“Can you, like, just set it on ‘Stun’?”

“If I have to use it at all, it means I’ve made a mistake.” He goes over to a glass-fronted cabinet full of flasks and atomizers, custom and commercial. “This scent—it’s not one I could place immediately, not fresh soap so much as disinfectant. Not tobacco so much as stale cigarette butts. Some civet maybe, but Kouros it ain’t. Nonhuman urine as well.” Maxine recognizes this as magician’s patter. Conkling opens one of the cabinet doors and reaches out a four-ounce spray bottle, holds it about a foot from his nose, and without hitting the plunger appears to inhale slightly. “Whooboy. Yep, this is it. Check it out.”

“‘9:30’,” Maxine reads from the label, “‘Men’s Cologne.’ Wait, is this the 9:30 Club down in D.C.?”

“The same, although it’s no longer at the old F Street address, where it was located when this stuff was sold, back in the late eighties sometime.”

“That’s a while. This must be the last bottle in town.”

“You never know. Even an example like this that comes and goes, there can still be thousands of gallons out there in the original packaging, just waiting to be found by scent collectors, nostalgists, in this case unreconstructed punk rockers, and don’t rule out the insane. The original manufacturer got bought by somebody else, and 9:30 if I remember right was then relicensed. So we’re pretty much left with the secondary market, discount houses, ads in the trades, eBay.”

“How important is this?”

“It’s the chronology that’s bothering me here—too close to the gunsmoke not to be part of the event. If they’ve brought in Jabbering Jay Moskowitz on this, then he already knows of the connection, meaning so does everybody in the NYPD including meter readers. Jay is a top forensic Nose but isn’t always clear on how professionally to share information.”

“So . . . a guy wearing this . . .”

“Don’t rule out a woman who might have been in close contact with a man wearing it. Someday there’ll be search engines you can just input a little spritz of anything and voilà, nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, the whole story will be there on the screen before you can scratch your head in amazement. Meantime there’s the Nose community. Anecdotal material. I’ll ask around.”

There arrives the usual moment of awkward silence. Conkling still has an erection but, as if it’s hardware he’s lost the manual to, is hesitant about deploying it. Maxine herself is of two minds. Something seems to be going on that nobody’s telling her. The moment, howsoever, passes, and before she knows it, she’s back at the office. Ah well, as Scarlett O’Hara observes at the end of the movie . . .

•   •   •

SHE DREAMS SHE’S ALONE on the top floor of The Deseret, by the pool. Under the unnaturally smooth surface, visible through the optically perfect water, almost as an afterthought to the anxious vacancy of the space, a male Caucasian corpse in a suit and tie stretches face-up full length on the bottom as if taking a break from afterlife affairs, rolling, in some eerie semisleep, from one side to another. It is Lester Traipse, and it isn’t. When she leans over the edge to get a closer look, his eyes open and he recognizes her. He doesn’t have to rise up through the surface to speak, she can hear him from underwater. “Azrael,” is what he’s saying, and then again, with some urgency.

“Gargamel’s cat?” Maxine inquires, “like on the Smurfs?”

No, and the disappointment in Lester/not-Lester’s face tells her she should know better. In nonbiblical Jewish tradition, as she is perfectly aware, Azrael is the angel of death. In Islam also, for that matter . . . And briefly she is back in the corridor, Gabriel Ice’s guarded mystery tunnel out in Montauk. Why? would be an interesting question to pursue, except that Giuliani, in his tireless quest for quality infrastructure, has caused not one but several jackhammers to start up well before working hours, figuring the taxpayers won’t object to the extra overtime pay, and any message is corrupted, fragmented, lost.