“Hi, Maxi, listen, while you’re in there could you do me a favor—”

“You just broke up with somebody,” this being the kind of place you’d naturally choose for that, “and want to know how she’s doing. Sure. What’s her name?”

“Cassidy, but how did you—”

“And where is it?”

Back through the kitchen, down some stairs, around a couple of corners. Lit no more brightly than upstairs, and some would call this being considerate. There is a smell of cannabis purposefully alight. Maxine scans the short row of stalls. No blood coming from under the doors, no sounds of uncontrollable sobbing, good, good . . . “Yo Cassidy?”

“Who’s that?” from inside one of the stalls. “The bitch he’s dumping me for, no doubt.”

“Nah, thanks for the guess, but I’m in enough trouble already. Just gonna go in here for a minute,” stepping into the stall next to Cassidy’s.

“I should have known what was up the minute I saw this place,” Cassidy sez. “Better if we’d handled everything out in the street.”

“Lucas is having a little guilt, wants to know if you’re OK.”

“Not a problem, I came in here to piss, not open a vein. Lucas who?”

“Oh.”

“Figures, these fuckin clubs I keep ending up in. He told me Kyle.”

They sit there side by side, mutually invisible, the partition between inscribed in marker pen, eye pencil, lipstick later rubbed at and smeared by way of commentary, gusting across the wall in failing red shadows, phone numbers with antiquated prefixes, cars for sale, announcements of love lost, found, or wished for, racial grievances, unreadable remarks in Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, a web of symbols, a travel brochure for night voyages Maxine has not yet thought about making. Meantime Cassidy is outlining some unsold pilot about dysfunctional dating south of 14th Street in which Lucas, near as Maxine can tell, only gets a walk-on. That’s until, inexplicably though only so for a moment, Cassidy is on to the topic of DeepArcher.

“Yeah, that splash screen,” Maxine kvells, “it’s awesome.”

“I designed it. Like that chick who did the tarot deck. Awesome and don’t forget hip,” half, but only half, ironic.

“Wait, awesome and hip, where have I heard that.”

Yep, turns out when she first met Lucas, Cassidy was working for hwgaahwgh.com.

“Did you have any kind of a contract with Lucas, Kyle, whatever?”

“No and I wasn’t doing it out of love, either. Hard to explain. It was all just coming from somewhere, for about a day and a half I felt I was duked in on forces outside my normal perimeter, you know? Not scared, just wanted to get it over with, wrote the file, did the Java, didn’t look at it again. Next thing I remember is one of them saying holy shit it’s the edge of the world, but frankly I can’t see a way they’re going to build any traffic. If I was a new user, coming to it cold, I’d be like, Public Void Close in a real hurry and try to forget about it. Better if they go for the single customer, Gabriel Ice or somebody.”

Presently, through strange toilet ESP, the ladies emerge at the same moment from their stalls and have a look at each other. Maxine is not too surprised to find tats, piercings, hair of an orchid shade not on any map of the human genome, an age somewhat south of legal for anything. The way Cassidy’s looking back meanwhile makes Maxine feel like Hillary Clinton or something.

“Can you check upstairs and see if he’s still there?”

“Happy to.” She ascends into the murky bummersphere again. Yes he’s still there.

“Startin to get worried about both of you.”

“Lucas, she’s twelve. And you better start paying her royalties.”

9

Now and then a taxing entity like the NYC Finance Department will hire an outside examiner, especially when there’s a Republican mayor, given that party’s curious belief that private sector always equals good and public bad. Maxine gets back to the office in time for a call from Axel Quigley down at John Street, with the latest on another heartrendingly sad case of sales-tax evasion, taking it personally as always, even though it’s been going on for a while. Axel’s whistle-blowers tend to be disgruntled employees, he and Maxine in fact met at a Disgruntled Employee Workshop led by Professor Lavoof, generally acknowledged godfather of Disgruntlement Theory and developer of the influential Disgruntled Employee Simulation Program for Audit Information and Review, aka DESPAIR.

According to Axel, somebody at a restaurant chain called Muffins and Unicorns has been using phantomware to falsify cash-register receipts. Sales-suppression devices are either factory-installed in the cash registers themselves or being run off of a custom application known as a zapper, kept externally on a CD. Evidence points to a high-level manager, maybe owner. Axel’s most likely suspect is Phipps Epperdew, better known as Vip because he always looks like he’s just emerged from a Lounge or flashed a Discount Card with that acronym on it.

The interesting thing for Maxine about zapper fraud is the face-to-face element. You don’t learn it from a manual, because there’s nothing in print. Features written into the software that you don’t find in the manual are meant instead to be passed on in person, orally, from cash-register vendor to user. The way certain kinds of magical lore go from rogue rabbis to apprentices in kabbalah. If the manual is scripture, phantomware tutorials are the secret knowledge. And the geeks who promote it—except for one or two little details, like the righteousness, the higher spiritual powers—they’re the rabbis. All strictly personal and in a warped way even romantic.

Vip is known to be doing business with shadowy elements in Quebec, where the zapper industry is flourishing at the moment. Back in the dead of last winter, Maxine got added to a city budget line, on the QT as always, and flown to Montreal to chercher le geek. Manifested into Dorval, checked in to the Courtyard Marriott on Sherbrooke, and went schlepping around the city, one fool’s errand after another, down into random gray buildings where many levels below the street and down the corridors you’d hear cafeteria sounds, round a corner and here’d be le tout Montréal having lunch in a lengthy series of eating rooms, strung in an archipelago across the underground city, which in those days seemed to be expanding so rapidly that nobody knew of a reliable map for it all. Plus shopping enough to challenge Maxine’s nausea threshold, back ends of Metro stations, bars with live jazz, crepe emporia and poutine outlets, vistas of sparkling new corridor just about to be tenanted by even more shops, all without any need to venture up into the snowbound subzero streets. Finally, at a phone number obtained off a toilet wall at a bar in Mile End, she located one Felix Boïngueaux, who’d been working out of a basement apartment, what they call a garçonnière, off of Saint-Denis, for whom Vip’s name didn’t just ring a bell but threatened to kick the door in, since there were apparently some late-payment issues. They arranged to meet at an Internet-enabled laundromat called NetNet, soon to be a legend on the Plateau. Felix looked almost old enough to drive.

Once they were past enchantée, like everybody else in town Felix had no problem shifting clutchlessly into English. “So you and Mr. Epperdew, you’re colleagues?”

“Neighbors, actually, in Westchester.” Pretending to be another bent businessperson interested in the “hidden delete options” for her point-of-sale network, only out of technical curiosity, of course.

“I might be down your way soon, looking for financing.”

“I think in the States there might be a legal problem?”

“No, actually it’d be for starting up a PCM project.”