Bleeding Edge (3 page)

The long-standing practice at these AMBOPEDIA get-togethers is to visit literal geographical borderlines, a different one every year. Shopping tours at Mexican
maquiladora
outlets. Gambling-addiction indulgence at the casinos of Stateline, California. Pennsylvania Dutch pig-outs along the Mason-Dixon Line. This year the destination borderline is between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, uneasy with melancholy karma
dating back to the days of the Perejil Massacre, little of which has found its way into the brochure. As the
Aristide Olt
sails into picturesque Manzanillo Bay, things rapidly grow unfocused. No sooner has the ship tied up to the pier at Pepillo Salcedo than passengers preoccupied with large fish are excitedly chartering boats to go out after tarpon. Others, like Joel Wiener, whom real estate has driven from curiosity into obsession, are soon cruising local agencies and being dragged into the fantasies of those from whose motives greed, not to mention fuck-the-yanqui, must not be ruled out.

Folks ashore talk a combination of Kreyòl and Cibaeño. At the end of the pier, souvenir stands have quickly materialized, snack vendors selling yaniqueques and chimichurros, practitioners of voodoo and Santería with spells for sale, purveyors of mamajuana, a Dominican specialty which comes in gigantic glass jars in each of which what looks like a piece of a tree has been marinating in red wine and rum. For a cross-borderline cherry on the sundae, there’s also been an authentic
Haitian voodoo love spell
laid on each jar of Dominican mamajuana. “Now you’re talking!” cries Reg. He and Maxine join a small group who have begun drinking the stuff and passing jars around, presently finding themselves a few miles out of town at El Sueño Tropical, a half-built and for the moment abandoned luxury hotel, screaming through the corridors, swinging across the courtyard on jungle vines, which have found a purchase overhead, chasing lizards and flamingos not to mention one another, and misbehaving on the moldering king-size beds.

Love, exciting and new, as they used to sing on
The
Love Boat,
Heidi was right on the money, this was Just the Ticket all right, though later Maxine would not be so sure of the details.

Picking up memory’s remote now, she hits
PAUSE
, then
STOP
, then
POWER OFF
, smiling without visible effort. “Peculiar cruise, Reg.”

“You ever hear from any of those folks again?”

“An e-mail now and then, and every holiday season of course
AMBOPEDIA’s after me for a donation.” She peers at him over the rim of her coffee cup. “Reg, did we ever, um . . .”

“I don’t think so, I was mostly with that Leptandra from Indianapolis, and you kept disappearing with the real-estate obsessive.”

“Joel Wiener,” Maxine’s eyeballs, in semi-horrified embarrassment, scanning the ceiling.

“I wasn’t gonna bring that up, sorry.”

“You heard about them pulling my license. That was indirectly Joel. Who, without meaning to, did me such a mitzvah. Like when I was a CFE I was cute, but a defrocked CFE? I’m irresistible. To a certain type. You can imagine what comes in the door, nothing personal.”

The big selling point about a Certified Fraud Examiner gone rogue, she guessed, is a halo of faded morality, a reliable readiness to step outside the law and share the trade secrets of auditors and tax men. Having run into cultists who’d been expelled from their cults, Maxine was afraid for a while it would be that kind of social badlands. But word had gotten around, and soon Tail ’Em and Nail ’Em had more business than ever, more than she could handle. New clients were not of course always as reputable as they’d been in her licensed days. Darkside wannabes oozing out of the damn wallpaper, among them Joel Wiener, for whom she found herself cutting what turned out to be way too much slack.

Regrettably, Joel had somehow forgotten to include in his long recitals of real-estate injustice certain crucial details, such as his habit of committing serial co-op board membership, the beefs resulting over sums entrusted to him, typically, as co-op treasurer, plus the civil RICO indictment in Brooklyn, the wife with a real-estate agenda of her own, “It goes on. Not easy to explain,” wiggling all her fingers above her head, “Antennas. I felt comfortable enough about Joel to share a few tricks of the trade. For me, no worse than an IRS guy moonlighting as a tax preparer.”

But running her gravely afoul of the ACFE Code of Conduct, which
Maxine in fact had been skating up to and all along the posted edges of for years. This time the ice, without creak or visible darkening, had given beneath her. Enough of the review committee saw conflict of interest, not only once but a pattern, where for Maxine it was, still is for that matter, a no-brainer of a choice between friendship and super-picky guideline adherence.

“Friendship?” Reg is puzzled. “You didn’t even like him.”

“A technical term.”

The stationery the decertification letter came on was pretty fancy, worth more than the message, which was basically fuck you, plus canceling all her privileges at The Eighth Circle, an exclusive CFEs’ club over on Park, with a reminder to return her member’s card and settle her bar tab, which showed a balance. There did seem to be a P.S. at the bottom, however, about filing an appeal. They included forms. This was interesting. This would not go into Accounts Shreddable, not just yet. Alarmingly, what Maxine noticed for the first time was the Association seal, which showed a torch burning violently in front of and slightly above an opened book. What’s this? any minute the pages of this book, maybe allegorically The Law, are about to be set on fire by this burning torch, possibly the Light of Truth? Is somebody trying to say something, the Law in flames here, the terrible inflexible price of Truth . . . That’s it! Secret anarchist code messages!

“Interesting thought, Maxine,” Reg trying to talk her down. “So you filed the appeal?”

Actually, no—as days passed, there were always reasons not to, she couldn’t afford the legal fees, the appeals process could all be just for show, and the fact remained that colleagues she respected had thrown her out on her ear, and did she really want back into that kind of vindictive surroundings. Sort of thing.

“A little oversensitive, these guys,” seems to Reg.

“Can’t blame them. They want us to be the one incorruptible still point in the whole jittery mess, the atomic clock everybody trusts.”

“You said ‘us.’”

“The certificate’s put away in storage, but still hanging on the office wall of my soul.”

“Some rogue.”

“Bad Accountant
, it’s a series I’m developing, here, I got a script for the pilot, you wanna read it?”

T
he past, hey no shit, it’s an open invitation to wine abuse. Soon as she hears the elevator doors close behind Reg, Maxine heads for the refrigerator. Where, in this chilled chaos, is the Pinot E-Grigio? “Daytona, we’re out of wine again?”

“Ain’t me drinkin that shit up.”

“Course not, you’re more of a Night Train person.”

“Ooh. Do I really need wine-ism today?”

“Hey, you’re off it so I’m just kidding, right?”

“Therapism!”

“Beg pardon?”

“You think twelve-step people’s a lower class than you, always did, you on some spa program, lay around with the seaweed all on your face and shit, you don’t even know what it’s like—well, and I am telling you . . .” Pausing dramatically.

“You are not going,” Maxine prompts.

“I am telling you, it is work, girl.”

“Oh, Daytona. Whatever this is, I’m sorry.”

So it all comes plotzing forth, the usual emotional cash-flow statement, full of uncollected receivables and bad debts. Bottom line, “Do
not, ever, associate with nobody from Jamaica the island, he thinks joint custody means who brought the ganja.”

“I was lucky with Horst,” Maxine reflects. “Weed never had any effect on him at all.”

“Figures, it’s that white food y’all eat, white bread and that,” paraphrasing Jimi Hendrix, “mayonnaise! All in your brain—every one of y’all,
terminally
honky.” The phone has been blinking patiently. Daytona gets back to work, leaving Maxine to wonder why Rasta drug preferences should have anything to do with Horst. Unless Horst is somehow on her mind, which she can’t say he has been, not that much, not for a while.

Horst. A fourth-generation product of the U.S. Midwest, emotional as a grain elevator, fatally alluring as a Harley knucklehead, indispensable (God help her) as an authentic Maid-Rite when hunger sets in, Horst Loeffler to this day has enjoyed a nearly error-free history of knowing how certain commodities around the world will behave, long enough before they themselves do to have already made a pile by the time Maxine came into the picture, and to watch it keep growing higher while struggling to remain true to some oath he apparently took at thirty, to spend it as fast as it comes in and keep partying for as long as he can hold out.

“So . . . the alimony’s good?” inquired Daytona, her second day on the job.

“Isn’t any.”

“What?” having a good long stare at Maxine.

“Anything I can help you with?”

“That is the craziest crazy-white-chick story I have heard yet.”

“Get out more,” Maxine shrugged.

“You got some problem with a man partying?”

“Of course not, life is a party isn’t it Daytona, yes and Horst was fine with that, but as he happened to think marriage is a party also, well, that’s where we found we had different thoughts.”

“Her name was Jennifer and shit, right?”

“Muriel. Actually.”

By which point—part of the Certified Fraud Examiner skill set being a tendency to look for hidden patterns—Maxine began to wonder . . . might Horst actually have a preference for women named after inexpensive cigars, was there perhaps a Philippa “Philly” Blunt stashed in London he’s playing FTSE with, some alluring Asian arbitrix named Roi-Tan in a cheongsam and one of those little haircuts . . . “But don’t let’s dwell, because Horst is history.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I got the apartment, of course he got the ’59 Impala in cherry condition, but there I go, whining again.”

“Oh, I thought it was this fridge.”

Daytona is an angel of understanding, of course, next to Maxine’s friend Heidi. The first time they really got to sit down and chat about it, after Maxine had gone on at a length that embarrassed even her.

“He called me up,” Heidi pretended to blurt.

Right. “What, Horst? Called . . .”

“He wanted a date?” eyes too wide for total innocence.

“What’d you tell him?”

A perfect beat and a half, then, “Oh, my God, Maxi . . . I’m so sorry?”

“You? and Horst?” It seemed odd, but not much more than that, which Maxine took as a hopeful sign.

But Heidi seemed upset. “God forgive me! All he did was talk about you.”

“Uh-huh. But?”

“He seemed distant.”

“The three-month LIBOR, no doubt.”

Though this discussion did go on, for a school night, quite late, Heidi’s escapade doesn’t rank as high as some offenses Maxine in fact still finds herself brooding about from back in high school—clothes borrowed but never returned, invitations to nonexistent parties, Heidi-arranged hookups with guys Heidi knew were clinically psychopathic.
Sort of thing. By the time they adjourned for exhaustion, it may have disappointed Heidi a little that her mad fling had somehow only found its natural place among other episodes of a continuing domestic series, begun long ago in Chicago, which is where Horst and Maxine originally met.

Maxine, in on some overnight CFE chore, found herself at the bar in the Board of Trade building, the Ceres Cafe, where the physical size of the drinks had long been part of the folklore. It was happy hour. Happy? My goodness. Irish, which for some says it all. You ordered a “mixed drink,” you got this gigantic glass filled up to the brim with, say, whiskey, maybe one or two tiny ice cubes floating in it, then a separate twelve-ounce can of soda, and then a
second glass
to mix it all in. Maxine somehow got in an argument with a local bozo about Deloitte and Touche, which the bozo, who turned out to be Horst, insisted on calling Louche & De Toilet, and by the time they had this sorted, Maxine wasn’t sure she could even stand up let alone find her way back to the hotel, so Horst kindly saw her into a taxi and apparently slipped her his card also. Before she had a chance to deal with her hangover, he was on the phone snake-oiling her into the first of what would be many ill-fated fraud cases.

“Sister in distress, nobody to turn to,” and so forth, Maxine went for the pitch, as she would continue to, took the case, pretty straightforward asset search, routine depositions, almost forgotten till one day there it was in the
Post
, S-S-S-PLOTZVILLE!
SERIAL GOLD DIGGER STRIKES AGAIN, HUBBY DUMBFOUNDED.

“Says here it’s the sixth time she’s cashed in this way,” Maxine thoughtfully.

“Six that we know of,” Horst nodded. “That’s not a problem for you, is it?”

“She marries them and—”

“Marriage agrees with some people. It has to be good for something.”

Oooh.

And why, really, go into the list? From check kiters and French-roundoff artistes to get-even dramas that have pinned her revenge detector way over in the blind, forget-but-never-forgive, sooner-or-later-felonious end of the scale, still she kept going for it, every time. Because it was Horst. Fuckin Horst.

“Got another one for you here, you’re Jewish, right?”

“And you’re not.”

“Me? Lutheran. Not sure what kind anymore ’cause it keeps changing.”

“And my own religious background comes up because . . .”

Kashruth fraud in Brooklyn. Seems a goon squad of fake
mashgichim
or kosher supervisors have been making their way around the neighborhoods pulling surprise “inspections” on different shops and restaurants, selling them fancy-looking certificates to put in the window while rooting through their inventory stamping jive-ass
hechshers
or kosher logos on everything. Mad dogs. “Sounds like more of a shakedown racket,” to Maxine. “I just look at books.”

“Thought you might have a rapport.”

“Try Meyer Lansky—no wait, he’s dead.”

So . . . some kind of Lutheran, huh. Way too early for any
shaygetz
-dating issues to arise of course, still, there it was, the outside-your-faith thing. Later on, deep in the first romantic onset, Maxine was to hear a certain amount of wild—for Horst—talk about converting to Judaism. How ironic that “Jew” also rhymes with “clue.” Eventually Horst became aware of prerequisites such as learning Hebrew and getting circumcised, which triggered the sort of rethink you’d expect. Cool with Maxine. If it’s a truth universally acknowledged that Jews don’t proselytize, Horst certainly was and remains a prime argument for why not.

At some point he offered her a consultancy contract. “I could really use you.”

“Hey, anytime,” a piece of lighthearted industry repartee which this time, however, would prove fateful. Later on, post-nup, she grew much more careful with the blurting, reaching, in fact, along toward the
windup there, almost to the point of silence, while Horst sat grimly pecking at a spreadsheet application he’d found in some Software Etc bargain bin, called Luvbux 6.9, totaling up sums in the range Hefty to Whopping he had spent for the sole purpose of getting Maxine to fall silent. To torture himself further, he then opened a feature that would calculate what it had been costing him per minute of silence actually obtained. Aaahh! bummer!

“Once I realized,” as Maxine presented it to Heidi, “that if I complained enough, he’d give me whatever I wanted? just to shut me up? well, the romance, I don’t know, somehow went out of it for me.”

“As a natural kvetch, it got too easy for you, I understand,” Heidi cooed. “Horst is such a pushover. The big alexithymic lug. You never saw that about him. Or rather, you—”

“—saw it too late,” Maxine joined in on the chorus of. “Yes, Heidi, and yet despite it all sometimes I would almost welcome somebody that accommodating in my life again.”

“You, ah, want his number? Horst?”

“You have it?”

“No, uh-uh, I was going to ask you.”

They shake their heads at each other. Without needing a mirror, Maxine knows they look like a couple of depraved grandmas. An untypical adjustment to have to make, their roles being usually a little more glamorous. At some point early in their relationship, which has been forever, Maxine understood that she was not the Princess here. Heidi wasn’t either, of course, but Heidi didn’t know that, in fact she
thought she was
the Princess and furthermore has come over the years to believe that Maxine is the Princess’s slightly less attractive
wacky sidekick
. Whatever the story of the moment happens to be, Princess Heidrophobia is always the lead babe while Lady Maxipad is the fastmouthed soubrette, the heavy lifter, the practical elf who comes while the Princess is sleeping or, more typically, distracted, and gets the real work of the princessipality done.

It probably helped that they both had East European roots, for even
in those days you could still find on the Upper West Side certain long-lived intra-Jewish distinctions being drawn, least enjoyable maybe the one between Hochdeutsch and Ashkenazi. Mothers were known to shanghai their recently eloped children down to Mexico for quickie divorces from young men with promising careers in brokerage or medicine, or from ravishing tomatoes with more brains than the guy they thought they were marrying, whose fatal handicap was a name from the wrong corner of the Diaspora. Something like this happened in fact to Heidi, whose surname, Czornak, set off all kinds of alarms, though the matter didn’t get quite as far as the airplane. On that caper it was the Practical Elf who acted as agent and presently bagperson, holding up the Strubels for a sum nicely in excess of what they had initially offered to buy Heidi, the little Polish snip, off. “Galician, actually,” Heidi remarked. It was not for her the issue of conscience Maxine had been afraid of, for Evan Strubel turned out to be a feckless putz who lived in reflexive fear of his mother, Helvetia, whose timely entrance that day in a St. John suit and a snappish mood prevented Evan from putting further moves on Maxine herself, is how serious he was about Heidi to begin with. Not that Maxine shared details of young Strubel’s perfidy with the Princess, settling for “I think he sees you mostly as a way to get out of the house.” Heidi was far, further than Maxine expected, from desolated. They sat at her vast kitchen table counting the Strubels’ money, eating ice-cream sandwiches and cackling. Now and then down the line, under the influence of assorted substances, Heidi would relapse into blubbering, “He was the love of my life, that evil bigoted woman destroyed us,” for which the Wacky Sidekick would always be there with a witty remark like “Face it, babe, her tits are bigger.”

Certain lobes of Heidi’s spirit may have been compromised—because Mrs. Strubel had perhaps only casually threatened Mexican divorce, for example, Heidi presently found herself in a struggle with the Spanish tongue rivaling that of Bob Barker at a Miss Universe pageant. The language question in turn spilled over into other areas. Heidi’s idea
of the echt Latina seemed to be Natalie Wood in
West Side Story
(1961). It did no good to point out, as Maxine has done again and again with dwindling patience, that Natalie Wood, born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, came from a somewhat Russian background and her accent in the picture is possibly closer to Russian than to
boricua
.

Putzboy went on into a Wall Street apprenticeship, and has probably been through several more wives by now. Heidi, relieved to be single, pursued a career in academia, having recently been given tenure at City College in the pop-culture department.

“You totally pulled my meatloaf out of the microwave on that one,” Heidi airily, “don’t think I’m not eternally grateful.”

“What choice did I have, you always thought you were Grace Kelly.”

“Well, I was. Am.”

“Not career Grace Kelly,” Maxine points out. “Only, specifically,
Rear Window
Grace Kelly. Back when we used to surveil the windows across the street.”

“You sure about that? You know what that makes you.”

“Thelma Ritter, yeah, but maybe not. I thought I was Wendell Corey.”

Teen mischief. If there can be haunted houses, there can also be karmically challenged apartment buildings, and the one they liked to spy on, The Deseret, has always made The Dakota look like a Holiday Inn. The place has obsessed Maxine for as long as she can remember. She grew up across the street from where it still looms over the neighborhood, trying to pass as just another stolid example of Upper West Side apartment house, twelve stories and a full square block of sinister clutter—helical fire escapes at each corner, turrets, balconies, gargoyles, scaled and serpentine and fanged creatures in cast iron over the entrances and coiled around the windows. In the central courtyard stands an elaborate fountain, surrounded by a circular driveway big enough to allow a couple of stretch limos to sit there and idle, with room left over for a Rolls-Royce
or two. Film crews come here to shoot features, commercials, series, blasting huge volumes of light into the unappeasable maw of the entranceway, keeping everybody for blocks around up all night. Though Ziggy claims to have a classmate who lives there, it’s far from Maxine’s social circle, key money even for a studio in The Deseret said to run $300,000 and up.