Free Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon Page B

it . . . but then Gracie I suppose would never talk to me again. The girls either.”
    “Hmm, maybe not.”
    “Also thought about a snatch-and-grab, can’t afford even that. Sooner or later I’d have to go to work, Social Security number and they’ve got me again, and it’s lawyers dealt into what’s left of my life. And ol’ Pointy-Hair gets the girls back anyway, and I’m forbidden ever to see them again. So my latest thinkin is, is maybe I should go out there and make nice instead.”
    “Uh huh and . . . they’re expecting you?”
    “Maybe I’ll find a job first, then surprise everybody. Just don’t want you thinkin too badly of me. I know it looks like I’m running away fromsomething, but New York is really where I’ve been running away, and now there’s about to be a whole continent between me and my kids. Too far.”
    •   •   •
     
    IT IS MAXINE’S practice when checking into little start-ups like hwgaahwgh.com to also have a look at any investors in the picture. If somebody stands to lose money, there’s always a chance, emergency-vehicle exhaust-fume issues or whatever, they’ll want to hire Maxine. The name that keeps popping up in connection with hwgaahwgh is a VC down in SoHo, doing business as Streetlight People. As in “Don’t Stop Believing,” Maxine imagines. Among whose listed clients—coincidence, no doubt—also happens to be hashslingrz.
    Streetlight People is located in a cast-iron-front ex-factory space somewhat off the major shopping routes around SoHo. Karmic echoes of the sweatshop era long smoothed away by portable soundbreaks, screens and carpeting, passed into a neutral, unhaunted hush. Buddy Nightingale seating in a spectrum of hesitant aquas, daffodils, and fuchsias, brushed-nickel workstations custom-designed by Zooey Chu, punctuated now and then with black leather bosses’ chairs by Otto Zapf.
    If asked, Rockwell “Rocky” Slagiatt would explain that losing the vowel at the end of his name was the price of smoothness and rhythm in doing business, like lyrics in an opera. Actually he thought it would sound more Anglo, though for special visitors, of whom Maxine today seems to be one, he is known to suddenly flip polarity and become disingenuously ethnic again.
    “Hey! You want sum’na eat? Peppuhvr-n-egg sangwidge.”
    “Thanks, but I just—”
    “My
mothuh’s
peppuhvr-n-egg sangwidge.”
    “Well, Mr. Slagiatt, that depends. Do you mean it’s your mother’s recipe? or, it’s, like, her personal pepper-and-egg sandwich, that for some reason she keeps in that credenza there instead of a fridge where it should be?” From her studies with Shawn, Maxine is trained in the exoticAsian technique known as “False Eating,” so if it comes to it, she’ll only have to
make believe
eat the pepper-and-egg sandwich, which despite its authentic appearance could be poisoned with almost anything.
    “’t’s ahright!” grabbing back the object, now seen actually to have an unnatural wobble to it. “It’s plastic!” throwing it in a desk drawer.
    “Little hard to chew.”
    “You’re a sport, Maxi, it’s OK I call you that, Maxi?”
    “Sure. OK if I don’t call you Rocky?”
    “Your choice, no rush,” suddenly, for a moment, Cary Grant. What? Somewhere on Maxine’s perimeter, long-disused antennas quiver and begin to track.
    He picks up the phone. “Hold my calls, OK? What? Talk to me . . . Nah. Nah, the drag-along is set in cement. The full ratchet, maybe doable, but see Spud on that.” Ringing off, summoning a file onto his screen. “OK. This is about the recently belly-up hwgaahwgh dotcom.”
    “For whom you are, or should I say were, their VC.”
    “Yeah, we did their Series A. Since then we been tryin to evolve to more of a mezz posture here, early stages are way too easy, the real challenge,” busy tapping keys, “comes in structuring the tranches . . . valuing the company, where you get the Wayne Gretzky Principle of where