Bleeding Edge - Pynchon Thomas - Страница 52

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“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 . . .

Remember the Alley,

each day was a party, and

we were the new kids in town . . .

geeks on a joyride,

all rowdy and red-eyed,

and too high, to ever come down . . .

South of the DoubleClick

welcome sign, hard to find

much status quo in the house,

techies just chillin there

morphing to millionaires

all at the wave of a mouse . . .

Was it real?

was it

anything more than a

dream through a lunch break, a

prayer on the fly,

Could we feel . . .

off the edge of the screen, somethin

meatspace and mean, that was passing us by . . .

When all of those high times

and lowlifes and good news

And bad moves have drifted away,

these streets are still thronging

With hustling and longing

just like they were

back in the day . . .

I’m in a new place now,

the rent’s high, the dates lie,

The town’s not as cozy as then,

Call me, keep try’n me,

Maybe you’ll find me . . .

Maybe you’ll find me,

Again . . .

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—”

“Only a wild guess, JFK used it, right? and both men, mutatis mutandis, had the same kind of, you know, charisma?”

“Exactly, and if young Jack borrowed his father’s cologne—in the literature we often find a father-to-son transmission model—we know the elder Kennedy admired Hitler, even plausibly enough to want to smell like him, add to that that every U-boat in Admiral Donitz’s fleet got spritzed continuously with 4711, barrels full of it every voyage, and furthermore Donitz was personally named by Hitler as his successor—”

“Conkling,” Maxine gently and not for the first time, “that doesn’t make Hitler a big U-boat lover, by that point there was nobody else he trusted, and somehow, the logic here?”

At first, assuming Conkling was only developing a thesis out loud, Maxine was willing to cut him some slack. But soon she began to grow vaguely alarmed, recognizing, behind a pose of wholesome curiosity, the narrow stare of the zealot. At some point he showed Maxine a “period press photo” in which Donitz is presenting Hitler with a gigantic bottle of 4711, its label clearly visible. “Wow,” careful not to agitate Conkling, “talk about product placement, huh? Mind if I pull a Xerox of this?” Just a hunch, but she wanted to show it to Driscoll.

It drew an instant eyeroll. “Photoshopped. Look.” Driscoll opened her computer, clicked around some Web sites, typed in a couple of search terms, finally pulled up a photo from July 1942 of Donitz and Hitler, identical to Conkling’s, except that the two men are only shaking hands. “Angle Donitz’s arm down a couple of degrees, find an image of the bottle, scale it any size you want, put it in his hand, leave Hitler’s where it is, looks like he’s reaching for the bottle, see?”

“Think there’s any point in telling Conkling any of this?”

“Depends where he got the picture from and how much he spent.”

When Maxine, not shy, asked, Conkling looked embarrassed. “Swap meets . . . New Jersey . . . you know how there’s always Nazi memorabilia . . . Look, there could be an explanation—it could still be a genuine Nazi propaganda photo, right? which they altered themselves, for a poster or . . .”

“You’d still need to get it expertized— Oh, Conkling, there’s somebody on the other line here, I have to take this.”

Maxine has tried since to keep their conversations professional. Conkling does ease up some with the Hitler references, but it only makes Maxine nervous. Wild talents like uberschnozz here, she learned long ago at the New York campus of Fraud University, can often be nutcases also.

Heidi of course thinks it’s cute. When Conkling slides off to the toilet, she leans till their heads are touching and murmurs, “So Maxine, is there an issue here?”

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