Bleeding Edge - Pynchon Thomas - Страница 63
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Which sets off a game-show buzzer, actually, for if Maxine’s not mistaken, she’s already run into this Platt customer, a financial-community big shot and fixer of some repute with upper-echelon access and what strikes her as a sense, finely calibrated as an artillery map, of where his best interests lie. Over the years they’ve met at various functions at the junction between East Side largesse and West Side guilt, and as it’s coming back to her now, Chandler may even once have grabbed her tit briefly, more of a reflex than anything, some cloakroom situation, no harm no foul. She doubts he even remembers.
And, well, there are fixers and fixers. “This genius of his—it extends to knowing how to dummy up?”
“Ah. One cannoli hope, as the Godfather always sez.”
• • •
CHANDLER PLATT HAS a roomy corner office midtown, at the high-muzzle-velocity law firm of Hanover, Fisk, up in one of the glass boxes along the Sixth Avenue corridor, with a view conducive to delusions of grandeur. Dedicated elevator, a traffic-flow design that makes it impossible to tell how much, forget what kind of, business is afoot. There seems to be a lot of deep amber and Czarist red in the picture. An Asian child intern shows Maxine into the presence of Chandler Platt, who is installed behind a desk made of 40,000-year-old New Zealand kauri, more like a piece of real estate than a piece of furniture, leading the casual observer, even one with a vanilla view of these matters, to wonder how many secretaries might fit comfortably beneath it and what amenities the space would be furnished with—restroom conveniences, Internet access, futons to allow the li’l cuties to work in shifts? Such unwholesome fantasies are only encouraged by the smile on Platt’s face, uneasily located between lewd and benevolent.
“A pleasure, Ms. Loeffler, after how long’s it been?”
“Oh . . . last century sometime?”
“Wasn’t it that clambake at the San Remo for Eliot Spitzer?”
“Might be. Never could figure you at a Democratic fund-raiser.”
“Oh, Eliot and I go back. Ever since Skadden, Arps, maybe longer.”
“And now he’s Attorney General and he’s going after you guys as much he ever went after the mob.” If there’s a difference, she almost adds. “Ironic, huh?”
“Costs and benefits. On balance he’s been good for us, put away some elements that would have eventually turned and bit us.”
“Cornelia did imply that you have friends all over the spectrum.”
“In the long run, it’s less to do with labels than with everyone coming out happy. Some of these folks really have become my friends, in the pre-Internet sense of the term. Cornelia, certainly. Long ago I briefly courted her mother, who had the good judgment to show me the door.”
Maxine has brought Reg’s DVD and a tiny Panasonic player, which Platt, not sure of where the wall outlets are exactly, allows her to plug in. He beams at the little screen in a way that makes her feel like a grandchild showing him a music video. But about the time the Stinger crew get set up,
“Oh. Oh, wait just a minute, is this the pause button here, would you mind—”
She pauses it. “Problem?”
“These weapons, they’re . . . Stinger missiles or something. A bit out of my ground, I hope you appreciate.”
And if she wanted a runaround, she’d be over in Central Park. “Right, I keep forgetting, you people tend to be Mannlicher-Carcano types.”
“Jackie and I were dear friends,” he replies coolly, “and I’m not sure I oughtn’t to resent that.”
“Resent, resent, please, I knew this was a mistake.” She’s on her feet, picking up her Kate Spade bag, noticing an unaccustomed lightness. Naturally, the one fucking day she probably should have brought the Beretta. Reaches to eject the DVD. By now Platt’s diplomatic reflexes have taken over, or maybe WASP control freakery. Murmuring something like “There, there,” he hits a hidden call button, which rapidly brings in the intern with a pot of coffee and an assortment of cookies. Maxine wonders if Girl Scouts were inappropriately involved in this. Platt watches the rest of the rooftop footage in silence.
“Well. Provocative. Perhaps if you could spare me a couple of minutes?” Withdrawing to an inner office and leaving Maxine with the intern, who is leaning in the doorway now gazing at her, she wants to say inscrutably, but that would be racist. Absent a full ingredient list, she is of course not about to start scarfing cookies.
“So . . . how’s the job? your first step in a legal career here?”
“I hope not. What I really am is a rap artist.”
“Like uh, who, Jay-Z?”
“Well, actually I’m more of a Nas person. As you may know they’re in this feud at the moment, that old Queens-versus-Brooklyn thing again, hate to take sides, but—“The World Is Yours,” how can anything even compare?”
“You perform in public, like clubs?”
“Yeah. Got a club date coming up soon, in fact, here, check this out.” From somewhere he has produced a TB-303 clone with built-in speakers, which he now plugs in and powers up, and starts fingering a major pentatonic bass line. “Dig it,”
Tryin to do Tupac and Biggie thangs
With red velvet Chairman Mao piggy banks,
like Screamin Jay in Hong Kong
jumpin to wrong conclusions
old-movie confusions, yo who be dat
Scandinavian brand of Azian
ya dig wid some Sigrid be
the daughter of Kublai Khan,
Warner Oland, Charlie Chan, General Yan
bitter tea, for her stupidity pullin rank
Bette Davis shanked by Gale Sondegaard
like they was on the yard
or down in some forgotten cell
far, far from the corner of
Mott and Pell—
“Yes oh and Darren,” Chandler Platt reentering a little brusquely, “when you have a chance, could you please bring me those copies of the Braun, Fleckwith side letter? And get Hugh Goldman for me over there?”
“Mad cool, yo,” unplugging his digital bass and heading for the door.
“Thanks, Darren,” Maxine smiles, “nice song—from what little Mr. Platt has allowed me to hear.”
“Actually, he’s unusually tolerant. Not everyone in his demographic goes for what we like to think of as Gongsta Rap.”
“Y— I thought I might have caught one or two, I’m not sure, racial overtones . . .”
“Preemptive. They gonna be give me all rice-nigga remarks and shit, this way I beat ’em to it.” He hands her a disc in a jewel case. “My mix tape, enjoy.”
“He gives them away,” Chandler Platt blinking his eyes at regular intervals and without motive, like faces in low-budget cartoons. “I made the mistake of asking him once how he expects to make money. He said that wasn’t the point, but has never explained what is. To me, I’m appalled, it strikes at the heart of Exchange itself.” He reaches for and sits contemplating a chocolate-chip cookie. “Back when I was getting into the business, all ‘being Republican’ meant really was a sort of principled greed. You arranged things so that you and your friends would come out nicely, you behaved professionally, above all you put in the work and took the money only after you’d earned it. Well, the party, I fear, has fallen on evil days. This generation—it’s almost a religious thing now. The millennium, the end days, no need to be responsible anymore to the future. A burden has been lifted from them. The Baby Jesus is managing the portfolio of earthly affairs, and nobody begrudges Him the carried interest . . .” Suddenly, and from the cookie’s point of view, rudely, chomping into it and scattering crumbs. “Sure you won’t have one, they’re quite . . . No? All right, thanks, don’t mind if I . . .” Grabbing another, two or three actually, “I just spoke with some people. A most puzzling conversation, I have to say. At least they picked up.”
“Not the standard corporate chitchat, then.”
“No, something else, something . . . peculiar. Not out loud, or in so many words, but as if . . .”
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