Bleeding Edge

Maxine has noticed that at least once a week, as soon as she has Fiona safely delivered at Kugelblitz, Vyrva is off on the 86th Street crosstown bus headed for yet another Beanie Baby transaction. She has compiled a list of retailers on the East Side who get the critters shipped all but directly in from China by way of certain shadowy warehouses adjoining JFK. ’Suckers don’t just fall off the truck, they parachute out of the airplane. Vyrva buys them up dirt cheap on the East Side, then rushes back to various West Side toy and variety stores whose delivery schedules she has carefully recorded, sells them for a price somewhat lower than what the stores will pay when their own truck shows up, and everybody pockets the difference. Meantime Fiona, though not much of a collector, gets to keep on accumulating Beanie Babies.

“And that’s just short-term,” Vyrva has explained, quite, it seems to Maxine, enthusiastically. “Ten, twelve years down the line, college looming, you know what these are go

“Lots?” Maxine guesses.

“Uncomputable.”

Ziggy’s not so sure. “Except for one or two special editions,” he points out, “there’s no packaging on Beanie Babies, which is important to collectors, and also means that 99–plus percent are out there loose in the environment, getting trampled, chewed apart and drooled on, lost under the radiator, eaten by mice, in ten years there won’t be one in collectible condition, unless Mrs. McElmo is stashing them in archival plastic someplace besides Fiona’s room. Like dark and temperature-controlled would be nice. But that’ll never occur to her, because it makes too much sense.”

“You’re saying . . .”

“She’s crazy, Mom.”

5

As a paid-up member of the Yentas With Attitude local, Maxine has been snooping diligently into hashslingrz, before long finding herself wondering what Reg has gotten himself into and, worse, what he’s dragging her uncomfortably toward. The first thing that jumps out of the bushes, waggling its dick so to speak, is a Benford’s Law anomaly in some of the expenses.

Though it’s been around in some form for a century and more, Benford’s Law as a fraud examiner’s tool is only begi

So when Maxine goes through these disbursement numbers from hashslingrz, counting up how often each first digit appears, guess what. Nowhere near the Benford curve. What in the business one refers to as False Lunchmeat.

Soon enough, drilling down, she begins to pick up other tells. Consecutive invoice numbers. Hash totals that don’t add up. Credit-card numbers failing their Luhn checks. It becomes dismayingly clear that somebody’s taking money out of hashslingrz and starbursting it out again all over the place to different mysterious contractors, some of whom are almost certainly ghosts, ru

The most recent of these problematical payees is a little operation downtown calling itself hwgaahwgh.com, an acronym for Hey, We’ve Got Awesome And Hip Web Graphix, Here. Do they? Somehow, doubtful. Hashslingrz has been sending them regular payments, always within a week of each almost certainly dummy invoice, till all of a sudden the little company goes belly-up, and here are all these huge fuckin payments still going to the operating account, which somebody at hashslingrz has naturally been taking steps to conceal.

She hates it when paranoia like Reg’s gets real-world. Probably worth a look, though.

•   •   •

MAXINE APPROACHES the address from the other side of the street, and as soon as she catches sight of it, her heart, if it does not sink exactly, at least cringes more tightly into the one-person submarine necessary for cruising the sinister and labyrinthine sewers of greed that run beneath all real-estate dealings in this town. Thing is, is it’s such a nice building, terra-cotta facing, not as ornate as commercial real estate could get a century ago when this unit was going up, but tidy and strangely welcoming, as if the architects had actually given some thought to the people who’d be working there every day. But it’s too nice, a sitting duck, asking to get torn down someday soon and the period detailing recycled into the decor of some yup’s overpriced loft.

The directory in the lobby lists hwgaahwgh.com up on the fifth floor. Maxine knows old-school fraud investigators who’ll admit to walking away at this point, satisfied enough, only to regret it later. Others have advised her to keep going no matter what, until she can actually stand in the haunted space and try to summon the ghost vendor out of its nimbus of crafted silence.

On the way up, she watches floors flash by out the porthole in the elevator door—folks in workout gear gathered by a row of snack machines, artificial bamboo trees framing a reception desk of wood blonder than the blonde stationed behind it, kids in school jackets and ties sitting blank-faced in the waiting area of some SAT tutor or therapist or combination thereof.

She finds the door wide open and the place empty, another failed dotcom joining the officescape of the time—tarnished metallic surfaces, shaggy gray soundproofing, Steelcase screens and Herman Miller workpods—already begi

Well, almost empty. From some distant cubicle comes a ti

She creeps toward the plaintive folk tune, reaching it just as an ingenue voice goes “Shit,” and silence follows. Seated in a half-lotus on the scuffed and dusty floor of a cubicle is a young woman in nerd glasses holding a portable game console and glaring at it. Beside her is a laptop, lit up, plugged into a phone jack on a wire emerging from the carpeting.

“Hi,” sez Maxine.

The young woman looks up. “Hi, and what am I doing here, well, just downloading some shit, 56K’s a awesome speed, but this still takes some time so I’m working on my Tetris skills while the ol’ unit’s crankin along. If you’re lookin for a live terminal, I think there’s still a few scattered a round these other cubes. Maybe a couple pieces of hardware ain’t been looted yet, RS232 shit, co

“I was hoping to find somebody who works here. Or who used to work here’s more like it I guess.”

“I did do some temping here off and on back in the day.”

“Rude surprise, huh?” gesturing around at the emptiness.

“Nah, it was obvious from the jump they were spending way over their head tryin to buy traffic, the classic dotcommer delusion, before you know it here’s another liquidation event and one more bunch of yups goes blubberin down the toilet.”

“Do I hear sympathy? Concern?”

“Fuck ’em, they’re all crazy.”

“Depends what tropical beach they’re lounging around on as we continue to work our ass off.”