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HAVING LATELY DISCOVERED in the yuppie collectors’ market a credulity that may be limitless, a gang of cigar forgers have been working out of a smoke shop on West 30th, offering “smuggled” Cuban cigars for $20 a pop, an attractive price for the time, along with a line of “rare antique” cigars, including alleged selections from J. P. Morgan’s private stock, original chewed-on props from Groucho Marx movies, and cigar incunabula such as Christopher Columbus’s first Cuban, mentioned by de las Casas in Historia de las Indias. Incredibly, these fakes are all fetching their asking prices, and a boutique hedge fund in town has been paying these knockoff artists huge sums, writing it off to travel and entertainment, then taking what when the media get hold of it will be called Lavish Kickbacks. One morning a couple days later, Maxine is just getting comfortable with this perennially active ticket when Daytona comes in shaking her head back and forth, with her eyes angled downward and to the right. Recalling a neurolinguistic workshop she once attended in Atlantic City, Maxine observes, “You’re talking to yourself again.”

“Don’t be playin that woowoo shit on me, call’s on line one. See if you can talk his ass down.”

Connected to the phone these days, thanks to her brother-in-law, Avi, Maxine now has a miraculous Israeli voice analyzer, whose algorithm is supposed to be able to tell the difference between “offensive” and “defensive” lying, plus Only Kidding Around. No telling what kind of routine Windust has been up to with Daytona, but whatever is bothering him today, it does not fall into the category of playful.

“You’ve read the material I left you?”

How about I had such a nice time the other day, haven’t been able to get you out of my mind, so forth? Terminate this fucking conversation forthwith, why don’t you. Instead, Miss Congeniality, “I knew most of it already, but thanks.”

“You knew about Ice being Jewish.”

“Yes and Superman too, so what, excuse me, it’s 1943 again? what’s the obsession with you people?”

“He did hire your brother-in-law.”

“So? You’re saying these Jews, they really stick together? That’s it?”

“The thing about Mossad—they’re America’s allies, but only up to a point. They cooperate, and they don’t cooperate.”

“Yes Jewish Zen, quite common, Al Jolson in blackface one minute, singing in temple the next, remember that one? Let me invite your attention to Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, which should clear up any lingering questions you might have, plus allow me to get back to a demanding workday which does not grow any less so with phone calls like this one. Unless you would like to just what we call spit it out?”

“We know how much money Ice has been diverting, where it’s going, we’re almost sure of who it’s going to. But so far we still only have the separate threads. You’ve read those pages, you see how scattered it all is. We need somebody with fraud-investigating skills to weave it together into some shape we can take upstairs.”

“Please, I’m struggling here, that is so fucking lame. Are you saying that nowhere in your own vast database can you find contact information for even one professional liar? It’s what you people do, it’s your hometown industry.” Try to remember also, Maxine noodged herself, romantic history aside, this is the party who was there when Lester Traipse got dumped underneath the pool at The Deseret.

“Oh and by the way.” Casual as a sanitation truck. “You’ve heard of the Civil Hackers’ School in Moscow?”

“No, uh-uh.”

“According to some of my colleagues, it was created by the KGB, it’s still an arm of Russian espionage, its mission statement includes destroying America through cyberwarfare. Your new best friends Misha and Grisha are recent graduates, it seems.”

Surveillance, OK, russophobic reflexes to be expected, and yet what goes on here, the chutzpah. “You don’t like me socializing with Russkies. Excuse me, I thought all that Cold War drama was over. Is it mob allegations, what?”

“These days the Russian mob and the government share many interests. I’m only advising you to be more reflective about the company you keep.”

“Worse than high school, I swear, one date they think they own you.”

An exasperated click and the line goes dead.

25

Waiting for her at home in the mailbox is a small square jiffy bag with a postmark from somewhere out in the deep interior of the U.S. Some state beginning with an M maybe. At first she thinks it’s from the kids or Horst, but there’s no note, just a DVD in a plastic sleeve.

She pops the disc into the DVD player, and abruptly onto the screen comes a Dutch-angled view of a rooftop, somewhere on the far West Side, and the river and Jersey beyond. Early-morning light. A burned-in time stamp reads 7:02:00 A.M., a week or so back, staying frozen for a moment before it begins to increment. On comes a track full of broken sound, distant ambulance sirens, garbage collection down in the street, a helicopter passing or maybe hovering. The shot is from either behind or inside some piece of structure that houses the building’s water tank. Out on the roof are two men with a shoulder-mounted missile, maybe a Stinger, and a third who is spending most of his time hollering into a cellular phone with a long whip antenna.

There are time gaps when nothing much is happening. The dialogue isn’t too clear, but it’s in English, the accents not especially local, from someplace out between the coasts. Reg (it has to be Reg) is back to his old zoom-happy ways, taking note of every passenger jet that shows up in the sky before returning to the standby routine on the roof.

At around 8:30, noticing movement on the roof of another building close by, the camera pans over toward it and zooms in on a figure with an AR15 assault rifle, who now attaches a bipod, gets down in prone firing position, gets up, removes the bipod, goes over to the roof parapet and uses that for support instead, moving around this way to different positions till he finds one he likes. His only targets appear to be the Stinger guys. Even more interesting, he is making no efforts at concealment, as if the Stinger guys know he’s there, all right, and aren’t doing anything about it.

A short while later, the guy with the mobile points into the sky and everything tightens into action, the crew aiming at and acquiring their target, which looks like a Boeing 767, heading south. They track the plane and go through motions like they’re preparing to fire, but they don’t fire. The plane continues, presently vanishing behind some buildings. The guy on the phone yells “OK, let’s wrap it,” and the crew pack up everything and they all vacate the roof. The shooter on the other roof has likewise vanished. There’s wind noise and a brief spell of silence from below.

Maxine gets on the phone to March Kelleher. “March, do you know how to post video material on your Weblog?”

“Sure, bandwidth allowing. You sound strange, got something interesting?”

“Something you ought to see.”

“Come on over.”

March lives between Columbus and Amsterdam a few blocks away, on a cross street that Maxine can’t remember the last time she’s been on. If ever. A cleaner’s, an Indian place she never noticed. This old boricua neighborhood survives, scraped and soiled, driven indoors, done with, its original texts being relentlessly overwritten—the gangs of the fifties, the drug dealing twenty years ago, all publicly fading into yup indifference, as high-rise construction, free of all self-doubt, continues its march northward. Someday very soon this will all be midtown, as one by one the sorrowful dark brickwork, the Section 8 housing, the old miniature apartment buildings with fancy Anglo names and classical columns flanking their narrow stoops, and arch-shaped window openings and elaborate wrought-iron fire escapes rapidly going to rust, are demolished and bulldozed into the landfill of failing memory.