“Don’t tell me—the old penis-in-the popcorn-box-routine. Just to keep in the fifties spirit.”

“Maxi, hopelessly-West-Side-liberal Maxi, if you only knew what you were missing with these law-enforcement guys. Believe me, once you’ve tried cop, you never want to stop.”

“Yes but tell me Heidi, what happened to your obsession with Arnold Vosloo from The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, and, and the interviews you keep trying to set up with his office—”

“Envy,” supposes Heidi, “is so often all that stands between some of us and a sad, empty life.”

Today Maxine is halfway through her file of take-out menus when Heidi sticks her head in with the latest episode of a continuing purse drama. Having survived an identity crisis brought on by her old Coach model, which has had observers attentive to bag signifiers mistaking her for various sorts of Asian, she is now deep in the basic princessly exercise of whether to go for a class image with Longchamps, for example, and live with never being able to find anything inside it, or schlep around a more comparmentalized model and accept a slight downgrade to her hipness rating.

“But that’s history now, Carmine bless him has solved all that.”

“Carmine is . . . he’s some kind of . . . purse fetishist, Heidi?”

“No, but the man does pay attention. Look, check out what he bought me.” It’s an inexpensive tote in some autumnal print, with a gold-tone heart on it. “Fall and winter, right? Now watch.” Heidi reaches inside and turns the whole thing inside out, presenting a totally different bag, light-colored and floral. “Spring and summer! it’s convertible! you get a twofer, see?”

“How inventive. A bipolar bag.”

“And well then of course it’s a piece of living history also.” Down in one corner Maxine reads MADE ESPECIALLY FOR YOU BY MONICA.

“New one on me, unless . . . oh. No, Heidi, wait. ‘Monica’. He didn’t get this at, at Bendel’s?”

“Yep, right off the truck—it’s the ol’ Portly Pepperpot herself. Do you realize what this will fetch on eBay in a couple of years?”

“A Monica Lewinsky original. Tough call, but I’d err on the side of good taste is timeless.”

“And who’d know better than you Maxi, all the seasons you’ve seen come and go.”

“Oh but of course it’s a hint isn’t it, Carmine is suggesting a particular act, now let me think, what can that be, something you may not’ve been all that eager to perform . . .”

It’s a fairly lightweight handbag, but Heidi does her best to assault Maxine with it in a meaningful way. They chase around the apartment screaming for a while before deciding to take a supper break and order in from Ning Xia Happy Life, whose take-out menus keep getting shoved under everybody’s back door.

Heidi squints at the options. “There’s a breakfast menu? Long March Szechuan Muesli? Magic Goji Longevity Shake? what, excuse me, the fuck?”

The delivery guy who shows up is not Chinese but Latino, which gets Heidi further confused. “Seguro usted tiene el correcto apartmento? We were waiting for a Chinese delivery? Foodo Chineso?”

Unpacking the bags, they can’t remember ordering half of it. “Here, try this,” passing Heidi a dubious egg roll.

“Strange . . . exotic burst of flavor . . . This is . . . meat? what kind, do you suppose?”

Pretending to look at the menu, “All it said was ‘Benji Roll’? Sounded intriguing, so—”

“Dog!” Heidi jumping up and running over to the sink to spit out what she can. “Oh God! Those people eat dog over there! You ordered this, how could you? You never saw the movie? What kind of a childhood did you— Aaaahhh!”

Maxine shrugs. “You want me to help induce vomiting, or can you remember how to do that OK?”

The Twelve Flavors Drunken Squid is a little overdone. They settle for dropping pieces from different heights onto their plates to see how high they’ll bounce. The Green Jade Energetic Surprise comes in a plastic container molded to look like a jade box from the Qing dynasty. “The surprise,” Heidi nervously, “is a shrunken head inside.” It turns out to be mostly broccoli. The Gang of Four Vegetarian Combo, on the other hand, is exquisite, if mysterious. Anybody eating it at the physical Ning Xia restaurant impulsive enough to ask what’s in it will only get a glare. The Chinese fortune-cookie fortunes are even more problematic.

“‘He is not who he seems to be,’” Heidi reads.

“Carmine, obviously. Oh, Heidi.”

“Please. It’s a fortune cookie, Maxi.”

Maxine cracks open her cookie. “‘Even the ox may bear violence in his heart.’ What?”

“Horst, obviously.”

“Nah. Could be anybody.”

“Horst never got . . . abusive with you, or anything . . . ?”

“Horst? a dove. Well, maybe except for that one time he started choking me . . .”

“He what?”

“Oh? He never told you about that.”

“Horst actually—”

“Put it this way, Heidi—he had his hands around my neck, and he was squeezing? What would you call that?”

“What happened?”

“Oh, there was a game on, he got distracted, Brett Favre or somebody did something, I don’t know, anyway he relaxed his grip, went off to the fridge, got a beer. Can of Bud Light, I believe. We kept arguing, of course.”

“Wow, close call.”

“Not really. I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers.” A quick paradiddle with her chopsticks on Heidi’s head.

•   •   •

DETECTIVE CARMINE NOZZOLI, with access to the federal crime database, turns out to be an unexpectedly obliging resource, allowing Maxine for example to run a quick make on Tallis’s fiber-salesman BF. On first glance, Chazz Larday is an average lowlife from down in the U.S. someplace, come to NYC to make his fortune, having emerged out of a silent seething Gulf Coast petri dish of who knows how many local-level priors, a directoryful of petty malfeasance soon enough escalating into Title 18 beefs including telemarketing rackets via the fax machine, conspiracy to commit remanufactured toner cartridge misrepresentation, plus a history of bringing slot machines across state lines to where they are not necessarily legal, and cruising up and down the back roads of heartland suburbia peddling bootleg infrared strobes that will change red lights to green for rounders and assorted teenage offenders who don’t like stopping for nothing, all at the behest allegedly of the Dixie Mafia, a loose confederacy of ex-cons and full-auto badasses very few of whom know or even like one another.

Carmine just shakes his head. “Mob arrangements I can understand, strong respect for family—but these good old boys, it’s shocking.”

“Has this Chazz guy done time?”

“Only for a couple of the little ones, county jail time, sheriff’s wife bringin him casseroles and so forth, but all the big ones, he walked. Seems to have resources behind him. Then and now.”

Mrs. Plibbler, high-school drama teacher from hell, once again must Maxine invoke thee here as guardian spirit of fraud police accredited and otherwise. “Oh hi, I’m calling from hashslingrz? Is this Mr. Larday?”

“You guys don’t have this number.”

“Uh huh, well this is Heather, from Legal? Trying to clear up one or two details about some arrangements you have with our company comptroller, Mrs. Ice?”

“Mizzis Ice.” Pause. After some time in fraud work, you learn to read phone silences. They come in different lengths and depths, room ambiences and front-edge attacks. This one is telling Maxine that Chazz knows he shouldn’t have blurted what he just did.

“I’m sorry, is that information not correct? Do you mean the arrangements are with Mister Ice?”

“Darlin, you are either so out of the loop or else you’re one of these fuckin bloggers runnin a gossip page, either way be advised we have a trace on this instrument, we know who you are and where you are and our people will not hesitate to come after you. You have a good day now, you hear?” He hangs up and when she redials, there’s no answer.