that’s something else . . .”
8
R eg’s paranoia has the side effect of warping his judgment about places to eat. Maxine finds him in the strange crowded neighborhood around the Queensboro Bridge, sitting by the street window of something called Bagel Quest, eyeballing the foot traffic for undue interest in himself, behind him a dark, perhaps vast, interior from which no sound or light seems to emerge, and waitstaff rarely.
“So,” Maxine sez.
There’s a look on his face. “I’m being followed.”
“You’re sure?”
“Worse, they’ve been in my apartment too. Maybe on my computer.” Scrutinizing, as if for evidence of occupancy, a cheese danish he has impulsively bought.
“You could just let this go.”
“I could.” Beat. “You think I’m crazy.”
“I know you’re crazy,” sez Maxine, “which doesn’t mean you’re wrong about this. Somebody’s been showing some interest in me too.”
“Let’s see. I start looking under the surface at Ice’s company, next thing I know, I’m being followed, now they’re following you? You wantto tell me there’s no connection? I shouldn’t be freaking out in fear of my life or anything.” With a suspended chord also, about to resolve.
“There’s something else,” she noodges. “Any of my business?”
A rhetorical question Reg ignores. “You know what a
hawala
is?”
“Sure . . . yeah, uh, in the movie
Picnic
(1956), right, Kim Novak comes floating down the river, all these local people put their hands up in the air and go—”
“No, no, Maxi please, it’s . . . they tell me it’s a way to move money around the world without SWIFT numbers or bank fees or any of the hassle you’d get from Chase and them. A hundred percent reliable, eight hours max. No paper trail, no regulation, no surveillance.”
“How is this possible?”
“Mysteries of the Third World. Family-type operations usually. All depending on trust and personal honor.”
“Gee, I wonder why I never ran across this in New York.”
“
Hawaladars
around here tend to be in import-export, they take their fees in the form of discounts on prices and stuff. They’re like good bookies, keep it all in their heads, something Westerners can’t seem to do, so at hashslingrz somebody has been hiding a lot of major transaction history down behind multiple passwords and unlinked directories and so forth.”
“You heard about this from Eric?”
“He has a tap in a back office at hashslingrz.”
“Somebody’s in there wearing a wire?”
“It’s, actually it’s a Furby.”
“Excuse me, a—”
“Seems there’s a voice-recognition chip inside that Eric was modifying—”
“Wait, the cute fuzzy little critter every child in town including my own had to have a couple of Christmases back, that Furby? this genius of yours
hacks Furbys
?”
“Common practice in his subculture, seems to be a low tolerancethere for cuteness. At first Eric was only looking for ways to annoy the yups—you know, teach it some street language, emotional-outburst chops, so forth. Then he noticed how many Furbys were showing up in the cubicles of code grinders over where he works. So we took the Furby he was messing with, upgraded the memory, put in a wireless link, I brought it in to hashslingrz, sat it on a shelf, now when I want I can stroll by with a pickup inside my Nagra 4 and download all kinds of confidential stuff.”
“Such as this
hawala
that hashslingrz is using to get money out of the country.”
“Over to the Gulf, it turns out. This particular
hawala
is headquartered in Dubai. Plus Eric’s been finding that to even get to where hashslingrz’s books are stashed, they put you through elaborate routines written in this, like, strange Arabic what he calls Leet? It’s all turning into a desert movie.”
This is true. An offshore angle, with more dimensions than angles are supposed to have, has not escaped Maxine’s attention. She has found herself consulting
8
R eg’s paranoia has the side effect of warping his judgment about places to eat. Maxine finds him in the strange crowded neighborhood around the Queensboro Bridge, sitting by the street window of something called Bagel Quest, eyeballing the foot traffic for undue interest in himself, behind him a dark, perhaps vast, interior from which no sound or light seems to emerge, and waitstaff rarely.
“So,” Maxine sez.
There’s a look on his face. “I’m being followed.”
“You’re sure?”
“Worse, they’ve been in my apartment too. Maybe on my computer.” Scrutinizing, as if for evidence of occupancy, a cheese danish he has impulsively bought.
“You could just let this go.”
“I could.” Beat. “You think I’m crazy.”
“I know you’re crazy,” sez Maxine, “which doesn’t mean you’re wrong about this. Somebody’s been showing some interest in me too.”
“Let’s see. I start looking under the surface at Ice’s company, next thing I know, I’m being followed, now they’re following you? You wantto tell me there’s no connection? I shouldn’t be freaking out in fear of my life or anything.” With a suspended chord also, about to resolve.
“There’s something else,” she noodges. “Any of my business?”
A rhetorical question Reg ignores. “You know what a
hawala
is?”
“Sure . . . yeah, uh, in the movie
Picnic
(1956), right, Kim Novak comes floating down the river, all these local people put their hands up in the air and go—”
“No, no, Maxi please, it’s . . . they tell me it’s a way to move money around the world without SWIFT numbers or bank fees or any of the hassle you’d get from Chase and them. A hundred percent reliable, eight hours max. No paper trail, no regulation, no surveillance.”
“How is this possible?”
“Mysteries of the Third World. Family-type operations usually. All depending on trust and personal honor.”
“Gee, I wonder why I never ran across this in New York.”
“
Hawaladars
around here tend to be in import-export, they take their fees in the form of discounts on prices and stuff. They’re like good bookies, keep it all in their heads, something Westerners can’t seem to do, so at hashslingrz somebody has been hiding a lot of major transaction history down behind multiple passwords and unlinked directories and so forth.”
“You heard about this from Eric?”
“He has a tap in a back office at hashslingrz.”
“Somebody’s in there wearing a wire?”
“It’s, actually it’s a Furby.”
“Excuse me, a—”
“Seems there’s a voice-recognition chip inside that Eric was modifying—”
“Wait, the cute fuzzy little critter every child in town including my own had to have a couple of Christmases back, that Furby? this genius of yours
hacks Furbys
?”
“Common practice in his subculture, seems to be a low tolerancethere for cuteness. At first Eric was only looking for ways to annoy the yups—you know, teach it some street language, emotional-outburst chops, so forth. Then he noticed how many Furbys were showing up in the cubicles of code grinders over where he works. So we took the Furby he was messing with, upgraded the memory, put in a wireless link, I brought it in to hashslingrz, sat it on a shelf, now when I want I can stroll by with a pickup inside my Nagra 4 and download all kinds of confidential stuff.”
“Such as this
hawala
that hashslingrz is using to get money out of the country.”
“Over to the Gulf, it turns out. This particular
hawala
is headquartered in Dubai. Plus Eric’s been finding that to even get to where hashslingrz’s books are stashed, they put you through elaborate routines written in this, like, strange Arabic what he calls Leet? It’s all turning into a desert movie.”
This is true. An offshore angle, with more dimensions than angles are supposed to have, has not escaped Maxine’s attention. She has found herself consulting
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