“Eric, what’s this, did you just . . . come, on my feet?”

“Um, yeah? well not ‘on’ exactly, coz I’m wearing a condom?”

“You’re worried about what, funguses?”

“No offense, I just like condoms, sometimes I’ll wear one just to have it on, you know?”

“OK . . .” Maxine glances quickly at his dick, and her contacts flip inside out and go sailing across the room. “Eric, excuse me, is that some loathsome skin disease?”

“This? oh it’s a designer condom, from the Trojan Abstract Expressionist Collection I believe, here—” He takes it off and waves it at her.

“No need, no need.”

“Was that OK for you?”

Why, the sweetheart. Well? Was it? She angles her head and smiles, she hopes not too sitcomically.

“You don’t do this a lot.”

“Not that often, as Daddy Warbucks always sez . . .” Now he has that attentive kid-on-a-date look. So Maxine don’t be a schmuck all your life, “Listen. Eric. Total honesty here, all right?” She tells him about her arrangements with Reg.

“What? You came out to that strip joint deliberately, to look for me? Hey Reg, thanks buddy. What’s he doing, he’s checking up on me?”

“Rest easy, just think of me as the straightworld version of you, see what I’m saying. You’re the one gets to be the outlaw, adventures down in the Deep Web, which of us do you think’s having more fun?”

“Sure.” He flicks a quick look at her—she’s been watching him, otherwise she wouldn’t have seen it. “You think it’s fun, maybe sometime I should bring you down there. Show you around.”

“OK. It’s a date.”

“Really?”

“It could be romantic.”

“Most of the time it ain’t, just pretty straightforward, directories you have to access and search by yourself, because no crawler knows how to, no links into it exist. Now and then it can get weird, stuff somebody like hashslingrz wants to keep hidden. Or sites lost to linkrot, to bankruptcy, to who-gives-a-shit-anymore . . .”

The Deep Web is supposed to be mostly obsolete sites and broken links, an endless junkyard. Like in The Mummy (1999), adventurers will come here someday to dig up relics of remote and exotic dynasties. “But it only looks that way,” according to Eric—“behind it is a whole invisible maze of constraints, engineered in, lets you go some places, keeps you out of others. This hidden code of behavior you have to learn and obey. A dump, with structure.”

“Eric . . . say there was something down there I might want to hack into . . .”

“Ehhh. Here I thought you loved me for my psychosexual profile. Should’ve known. Story of my life.”

“Sh-sh, no, nothing like that—the site I’m thinking about, it may not even be there, one of those old Cold War sites, maybe some fringe fantasy, time travel, UFOs, mind control—”

“Sounds awesome so far.”

“It could be heavily encrypted. If I did want to get in, I’d need some alphageek crypto whiz.”

“Sure, that’d be me, but . . .”

“Hey, I’ll hire you, I’m legit, Reg will vouch.”

“Sure he will, he’s the one who fixed us up. He should be charging me a finder’s fee.” Holding one of her shoes now in you could say a hopeful way.

“You weren’t planning to . . .”

“I was, but if you have to get back, I understand, here, let me just slide these back on for you . . .”

“I mean, these are a little too casual anyway, don’t you think? You seem like more of a Manolo Blahnik person.”

“Actually, there’s this guy Christian Louboutin? Does these five-inch stilettos? Awesome.”

“Think I’ve seen knockoffs around.”

“Hey, knockoffs, no problem.”

“Next time, maybe . . .”

“Promise?”

“No?”

When she gets home, the phone is ringing. Off the hook. A number of previous messages on the machine, all from Heidi.

Who basically wants to know where Maxine’s been.

“Networking. Something important, Heidi?”

“Oh. Just wondering . . . who’s the new fella?”

“The . . .”

“You were seen over at the Chinese-Dominican joint the other day. Quite intense, it is reported, eyes only for each other.”

“Like,” she probably shouldn’t be blurting, “he’s FBI or something, Heidi, it was work . . . I put it on Travel & Entertainment.”

“You put everything on T&E, Maxine, breath mints, newsstand umbrellas, the thing neither Carmine nor I can understand is why you keep asking us for so much help getting into the NCIC database, especially if you’re seeing Eliot Ness and whatever.”

“Which reminds me actually . . .”

“What, again? Carmine, not that he begrudges, far from it, is wondering if possibly you might like to return some of these favors he’s doing you.”

“By . . . ?”

“Well, for instance in connection with The Deseret corpse and this mafioso you’re apparently also dating concurrently?”

“Who—Rocky Slagiatt? he’s some kind of a suspect now? What do you mean, dating?”

“Well of course we assumed you and Mr. Slagiatt are . . .” Heidi by now with that trademark smirk all over her voice.

Maxine drops for a minute into one of Shawn’s visualizing exercises in which her Beretta, within easy reach, has been transformed to a colorful California butterfly dedicated, like Mothra, to purposes of peace. “Mr. Slagiatt has been helping me with an embezzlement beef, mutual trust here being of the essence, which I doubt would include ratting him out to the authorities, do you think, Heidi.”

“Carmine only wants to know,” Heidi implacable, “is, has Mr. Slagiatt ever mentioned his former client the late Lester Traipse.”

“VC talk? We don’t do much of that, sorry.”

“Wrecks the afterglow, I quite understand, though where you find the time for some D.C. bureaucrat on the side—”

“Maybe he’s more interesting than that—”

“‘Interesting.’ Ah.” The annoying staccato Heidi ah. “And Hitler was a good dancer, a wonderful sense of humor, I can’t fuckin believe this, we watch the same movies on the Lifetime channel, these are always the ones who turn out to be the sociopathic rat, shtupping the receptionist, embezzling the children’s lunch money, slowly poisoning the innocent bride with the bug spray in the breakfast food.”

“That’s like . . .” innocently, “a cereal killer?”

“Just ’cause I once pitched you a commercial about cops? You believed that?”

“He’s not a cop. We’re not newlyweds. Remember? Heidi, chill, for goodness sakes.”

21

After a day of wandering around in the vast shopping basin of the SoHo-Chinatown-Tribeca interface, Maxine and Heidi find themselves one evening in the East Village looking for a bar where Driscoll is supposed to be singing with a nerdcore band called Pringle Chip Equation, when sudden gusts of smell, not yet at this distance intense but strangely contoured in their purity, begin as they walk through the humid twilight to accost them. Presently from down the block, screaming in panic, dramatically clutching their noses and occasionally heads, civilians come running. “I think I saw the movie,” Heidi sez. “What’s that smell?”

Turns out to be Conkling Speedwell, packing his Naser tonight, which looks in fact to’ve been recently deployed, its LED-studded delivery cone blinking truculently. He is accompanied by a small detachment of corporate security in designer fatigues each with a shoulder patch shaped like a flask of Chanel No. 5, with FRAGRANCE FORCE written across the stopper part and on the label the mirrored-C logo flanked by a couple of Glocks.

“Sting operation,” Conkling explains. “Truckful of Latvian counterfeit product, we were supposed to make a buy, but it all went stinko.” He nods at a forlorn trio of Pardaugava mini-mobsters semiconsciously collapsed in a doorway. “They’ll be OK, just aldehyde shock, caught ’em with the main lobe, maximized the prewar nitro musk and jasmine absolute, right?”