So Yesterday (18 page)

"Hang on." She shifted her weight on the
sill, leaning farther out. I leaned back as if Jen was a rope in a tug-of-war,
propping my feet against the wall just below her. She managed to pull the
opposite window open another foot.

"Okay, you can let go now."

"Why?"

"So I can go over, silly."

I thought about refusing, just standing there holding
her wrist until my hands wore out, keeping her on the sane side of the air
shaft. But she would just outwait me. And cutting off the circulation in one of
her hands wasn't much of an answer to the certain-death issue.

"Okay, letting go." I straightened,
releasing Jen gradually, and she shook out her wrist.

"Ow. But thanks."

"Just be careful."

She smiled again and swung the other leg out.
"Duh."

Keeping a white-knuckled grip on the near window with
one hand, she slowly slid her weight from the sill, planting one black trainer
in the corner of the air shaft. Her other hand reached out and grasped the
other sill, then she pulled herself across.

In the seconds when her weight was equidistant between
the windows, I felt my stomach flip inside out and then twist once around. I
wanted to grab her hand again but knew that my sweat-slick palms were the last
thing she needed contact with at this exact moment. Then she was across, both
hands on the far sill, her feet scrabbling on the outside wall to push her up
through the open window.

The red laces disappeared inside with a muffled crash.

"Jen?"

I leaned out, not looking down at the vertiginous
drop.

Her face appeared in the
window, all grins.

"Wow. That was
cool!"

I took a deep breath, adrenaline still pounding
through me. Now that Jen was safely over the air shaft, I realized that I was
itching to get across myself. Funny how that happens: a minute ago I'd thought
the idea was completely nuts, but once I'd seen an Innovator do it, I was dying
to be next in line.

I remembered my resourcefulness in the meteorite room,
my mighty escape through the valley of the Poo-Sham flashes. I had no bangs and
I was ready for danger.

I hooked one leg out. The air shaft seemed to tug at
me, calling me to cross it.

"Uh, Hunter
..."

"No, I want to get in
there too."

"Of course, but—"

"I can make it!"

She nodded. "I'm sure,
but I
could
just
unlock the door, you know."

I froze, my weight poised
evenly atop the sill, one hand clutching the near window in a grip of death,
the other reaching out over oblivion
   

"Yeah, I guess you could
do that."

I pulled myself back in and padded down the hall to
the slightly less challenging entrance of Movable Hype. The metal-jacketed door
rattled once for every keyhole, then opened.

"You're not going to
believe this," Jen said.

CHAPTER 26

THE WALLS
WERE COVERED WITH THEM. PAGES AND PAGES.

They weren't the usual Futura Garamond layouts. For
once he had reined himself in, mimicking exactly the pseudo-hip but
unthreatening style of a certain magazine for rich young trust-funders.

"Hoi Aristoi,"
Jen
said.

"Sort of." I looked closer. The photographs
in the layouts were all from the party, penguins and penguinettes looking drunken
and wild-eyed, almost animal in their petty squabbles, overt jealousies,
posturings for status. You could read the body language like a neon sign. The
crumpled dresses and crooked bow ties were also crystal clear. As the pictures
progressed, the whole machine of privilege and power became unglued before your
eyes—as pathetic as a cummerbund spattered with Noble Savage. By contrast, the
occasional stuffed caribou glimpsed in the background seemed intelligent and
sane.

Thousands of printed photos were piled on a long
workbench along the wall, the booty of five hundred cameras, an embarrassment
of riches. As per Jen's theory, every photo taken on the giveaway cameras had
been wirelessly captured by the anti-client.

"Futura must have come back here after the party
and worked all night," I said, looking nervously at the entrance to the
office. "You suppose he went home to sleep or just out for coffee?"

"He'll probably be back soon," Jen said.
"These pages must have already been laid out, just waiting for the photos.
Which means they want a quick turnaround."

"Okay," I said, edging toward the door.
"Speaking of quick turnarounds
..."

"But what's this going to be?" Jen asked.
"A fake issue of
Hoi Aristoi
or a real one?"

I shrugged. "It's
whatever people decide it is, I guess."

"The cover must be this
way."

She followed the wall, counting down the page numbers.
I despaired of a hasty exit and went after her. The job was completely
professional: Futura Garamond wasn't going for parody; he had created an exact
imitation. He had even added real advertisements lifted from the first issue.
Of course, the ads were as essential to the magazine as anything else.

At the far end of the office we reached the masthead
and cover. The headlines read:
Launch Party Exclusive! Special Subscribers-Only
Issue!

"Issue zero," Jen said, pointing at the
upper-right corner of the cover.

"That's what they usually call trial issues of
new magazines. But
Hoi Aristoi
already tested their prototype. The free one we got in
our gift bags was issue number one."

"So this isn't real."

"No, but it looks real enough," I said.
Except for the grotesque photographs, it would have fooled anybody.

"Well, I guess you were right—this isn't
blackmail. It's something much weirder. But
what,
exactly?"

"Good question."

We looked around the office. The late-afternoon sun
slanted in through the windows, filling the loft with warm light, revealing the
inevitable layer of dust on darkened computer screens. High-end printers waited
to feed on wide spools of paper, and stacks of big hard drives flickered away
in semi-sleep. A few laptops sat around a pile of wireless base stations. No
doubt they had captured the launch party photos from the Wi-Fied Poo-Sham
cameras.

I found a few issues of Futura Garamond-designed magazines
from the past, a mocked-up bottle of Poo-Sham, and a few sketches for the label
of Noble Savage rum. So that had been a fake too. I wondered how strong the
stuff in the bottles was and if it had been just alcohol or something more.
There was nothing to suggest that Movable Hype had any real clients. Garamond
was working for the anti-client full time.

"Check this out," Jen said. She was holding
a thick, accordion-folded printout. "Names and addresses. Phone numbers,
too."

"A mailing list. I wonder if it's
the
mailing list."

Jen looked up at me. "You mean all the
Hoi Aristoi
subscribers?"

I nodded. "See if you can find Hillary
Winston-Smith. She's under
W,
not 5."

Jen flipped to the end of the mailing list.
"Yeah. Here she is."

"So it
is
the
Hoi Aristoi
mailing list." I glanced over Jen's shoulder to
scan the addresses and confirmed my theory. Every third one was on Fifth
Avenue—a few of them actually lacked apartment numbers. Owning an entire house
in Manhattan is like having your own airport anywhere else: it means you are
rich.
Hillary Winston-hyphen-Smith's
address was no slouch, for that matter: she resided in a certain Upper East
Side building famous as a home for movie stars, oil sheiks, and arms dealers.

"They bought the subscriber list," I said.

"So they're going to send out copies to all their
victims," Jen said, chuckling. "That's friendly of them."

"And all the wannabe subscribers as well, just to
show them what aristocrats are really like. I bet the press gets issues
too." I shook my head. "But why? All this money just for a practical
joke?"

Jen nodded. "What did you say to me after I
pissed off Mandy at the focus group? Messing things up takes talent,
right?"

"Yeah." I looked around. "Garamond's
got plenty of talent, that's for sure."

"And he's got a plan, too, which I'm starting to
figure out. Sort of."

"Please, let me in on it."

She shook her head. "I'm not totally sure yet.
But we're getting closer. It would help if we knew who else was behind
this." She pointed at the mailing list. "How much would that
cost?"

I leafed through the printout, pondering the question.
Whether they're about snowboards, pet ferrets, or the latest gadgets, most magazines
make more money from selling their subscriber list than they do off newsstand
sales. It's big business to know how people perceive themselves, how much they
earn, and how they're likely to spend it. A magazine may just be wrapping for
advertisements, but it's also a bible for a lifestyle: it tells readers what's
going on, what to think about it, and, most importantly, what to buy next.
That's why you get a ton of new junk mail every time you subscribe to a
magazine—you've pigeonholed yourself as a snowboarder, ferret lover, or gadget
buyer.

Advertisers divide humanity into marketing categories,
tribes with names like Shotguns and Saddles, Inner City, or Bohemian Mix.
Magazine subscriptions are the easiest way to tell who's what. In my hand I was
holding a list of high-grade, uncut Blue Bloods. Hot property.

"Very pricey, like the
rest of this operation."

"Well, I bet you Movable
Hype didn't pay for it."

"Why not? Futura's made
decent money over the years.

She nodded. "Sure, he has. But would he want
everyone to know he was behind a job like this?" Her gesture took in the
pages stretching along the walls. "Something so unoriginal and tame? Even
if it's a great practical joke, it's pure imitation."

"Yeah, and also pretty likely to guarantee he
never works in the magazine industry again."

"So somebody else paid
for it. Someone involved with the anti-client."

I shrugged. "Even if we could find out who paid
for the mailing list, wouldn't it just be a front company or something? Like
Poo-Sham, Inc.?"

Jen nodded. "Maybe. But whoever's putting up the
cash had to pay for the really expensive stuff in those gift bags: hundreds of
bottles of Poo-Sham and Noble Savage, not to mention all those wireless
cameras. Those aren't things you can just stick on your credit card. There must
be some kind of money trail."

"Okay." I looked at the front door of the
office, imagining keys jingling at any moment. At least this would get us out
of here. "Where do we start?"

She lifted up the mailing list. "With this.
Doesn't your friend Hillary work for
Hoi Aristoi?"

"Hillary doesn't work for them; she just did some
PR. And she's not my friend."

"Still, she'd tell you
what she knows, wouldn't she?"

"Give me private
information about a client? Why would Hillary do that?"

Jen grinned. "Because she's probably dying to
find out who turned her head purple."

CHAPTER 27

START WITH
A MOLLUSK, WIND UP WITH AN EMPIRE.

Sounds tricky, but the Phoenicians managed it about
four thousand years ago. Their tiny sliver of a kingdom was wedged between the
Mediterranean Sea and a vast desert: no gold mines, no olive trees, no amber
waves of grain anywhere in sight. The only thing the Phoenicians had going for
them was a certain species of shellfish, commonly found lying around down at
the beach. These shellfish were tasty but had one problem—if you ate too many
of them, your teeth turned purple.

Naturally, most people were annoyed by this. They
probably said stuff like, "Those shellfish aren't bad, but who wants
purple teeth?" and didn't think much more about it.

Then one day an ancient
Innovator got this crazy idea
     

Okay, imagine you live in Egypt or Greece or Persia
back then and you're rich. You've got all the gold, olive oil, and grain you
want. But all you ever get to wear is cloth robes that come in the following
colors: light beige, medium beige, dark beige. You've seen the Bible movies:
everyone's totally decked out in earth tones—that's all they had, that's all
they could imagine having.

Then one day along comes a boatload of Phoenicians,
and they're selling purple cloth.
Purple!

Throw that beige wardrobe away!

For a while, purple is
the
thing, the biggest fad since
that whole wheel craze. After a lifetime spent wearing sixteen shades of beige,
everyone's lining up to buy the cool new cloth. The price is crazy high, partly
due to demand and partly because it happens to take about 200,000 shellfish to
make one ounce of dye, and pretty soon the Phoenicians are rolling in dough
(actually, they're rolling in gold, olive oil, and grain, but you get the
picture).

A trading empire is born. And talk about branding:
Phoenicia
is the ancient Greek word for
"purple." You are what you sell.

After a while, however, an interesting thing happens.
The people in charge decide that purple is too cool for just anyone to wear.
First they tax purple cloth; then they pass a law forbidding the hoi polloi to
wear purple (as if they could afford it); and finally, they make purple robes
the sole property of kings and queens.

Over the centuries this dress code becomes so
widespread and so ingrained that even now, four thousand years later, the color
purple is still associated with royalty throughout Europe. And all this because
an Innovator who lived forty centuries ago figured he could make something cool
out of the purple-teeth problem. Not bad.

But why am I telling you all this?

A few days after the
Hoi Aristoi
launch party, as rumors about
purple-headed Blue Bloods spread across New York and big chunks of the wealthiest
segment of society disappeared to the Hamptons to wait out the dye in royal
isolation, some concerned parent had a half-empty bottle of Poo-Sham tested to
see what was in it. The shampoo was discovered to contain water, MEA-lauryl
sulfate, and awesome concentrations of medically safe, environmentally sound,
and righteously staining shellfish dye.

One thing about the anti-client: they knew their
history.

************************************

Hillary Winston-hyphen-Smith
was not receiving visitors.

We were in the lobby of an upper-Fifth Avenue building
that was home to sport-star millionaires, software billionaires, and a certain
recording artist who goes by only one name. (And come to think of it, that name
is royalty-related, and the guy really likes purple. Go figure.) The concierge
of the building was wearing a tasteful purple uniform that matched the rich
purple upholstery of the chairs in the marble-and-gold-filigreed lobby, proving
that things hadn't really changed that much in the last four thousand years.

"Miss Winston-Smith isn't feeling well," the
concierge confided.

"Oh, that's terrible," I said. "Uh,
have you seen her today, by any chance?"

He shook his head. "She hasn't been down."

"You sure you can't call up for us?" Jen
asked.

"Some friends came by earlier, and she said she
wouldn't be coming down today." The concierge cleared his throat.
"Actually, Miss Winston-Smith said she wouldn't be down this
year.
You know how she gets."

I did. And if Hillary was genuinely suffering from
Poo-Sham head, I was quite relieved not to be allowed into her august presence.

"Well, that's too bad...," I started, taking
a polite step backward.

Then I heard the beeping of Jen making a call. The
concierge and I turned to watch her, both paralyzed by astonishment. I hadn't
noticed Jen getting Hillary's phone number from the mailing list, and he'd
probably never heard anyone speak to Miss Winston-Smith this way.

"Hillary? This is Jen—you met me two days ago at
Mandy's meeting. You better be screening this, because Hunter and I are
standing at the front desk of your building, and we have a pretty good idea how
to find the counteragent for the shampoo you used this morning. We just need a
moment of your time and we may be able to help you with the, uh, purple issue.
But we're headed out the door now, so unless you—"

The intercom behind the desk popped to life, and a
scratchy and crumpled Hillary voice boomed across the lobby.

"Reginald? Would you send them up, please?"

Reginald blinked in surprise, only belatedly
remembering to answer Miss Winston-Smith, and pointed toward the elevators.

"Twentieth floor," he said, his eyes full of
admiration.

************************************

Hillary was in the garden, a large balcony overlooking
Central Park, swaddled in a bathrobe and a towel turban, her skin wrinkly and
fingertips puckered from what had evidently been a day of showers and baths,
her eyes puffy from crying. Her face, hands, forearms up to the elbow, and the
few stray locks of hair that emerged from her turban were all extraordinarily,
vibrantly, royally purple.

It was a good look for her. The dye had settled evenly
across her skin and looked unexpectedly stunning against her blue eyes. Hillary
had achieved her cool status as an eye-candy interviewer for a certain
music-video cable channel. Her features were as blue-blooded as her social connections,
and although she'd always looked way too commercial for my liking, turning purple
had lent her a certain downtown credibility.

"How come you're normal, Hunter?" she said
as Jen and I stepped out into the sun. I heard the servant who'd ushered us
through the immense, many-floored apartment retreat quickly behind us.

"Normal how?" I asked.

"Not purple!"

I held up my hands, which still bore the stain of my
brief exposure to Poo-Sham.

"Wait, that's right. . . ." Her purple brow
furrowed, as if she was through a thick hangover to remember the night before.
"I asked you about your hands last night."

"Right," I agreed, wondering what her point
was.

"Hunter! You already had that crap on your hands
when I saw you last night. Why didn't you
warn
me?"

I opened my mouth, then closed it. Good question. I
suppose I'd been more worried about joining Mandy in captivity than saving a
bunch of Blue Bloods from purple heads. (But frankly, the concept of raising an
alarm hadn't crossed my mind.)

"Well, things were kind of complicated last
night, and—"

"We were working undercover," Jen said.
"Trying to figure out who's behind all this."

"Undercover?" Hillary raised a purple
eyebrow. "What the hell are you talking about? Who
are
you, anyway?"

"You met me the other—"

"I
know
where we met, but where did you come from? And why is
everything so weird since you showed up?"

Hillary's violet fury brought
me up short. Things
had
been odd since I'd known Jen—I'd already noticed that
myself once or twice. But in a moment of mental clarity, I realized that this
would all be happening far
j
away from my little world if
I'd never met her. I never would have gone to ) the launch party or snuck into
Movable Hype. For that matter, if Jen
I
hadn't brought up the
missing-black-woman formation at the meeting, Mandy wouldn't have taken us to
the abandoned building. Maybe Mandy [ wouldn't even have gone herself that
particular morning and might still : be around, running focus groups and taking
pictures of guys in berets instead of
...
being gone.

But Hillary's purple features weren't actually Jen's
fault. The
Hoi Aristoi
party had been planned for months. Jen wasn't a
bad-luck charm making all this stuff happen; she was more like a compass,
unerringly guiding me toward the weird. Or something like that.

I decided to work it out later. "Like Jen said,
we were working undercover. Mandy disappeared yesterday, and we've been trying
to find her."

"Mandy?" Hillary lifted a Bloody Mary from
the table beside her lounge chair and emptied it. Hair of the dog. Even dyed
purple, Hillary was looking a little green around the gills, probably the result
of too much Noble Savage, "what's this got to do with her?"

"We're not quite sure," I said. "In
fact, we're completely not sure."

Hillary rolled her eyes. "Gee, Hunter. I'm so
thrilled you guys are on the case."

"Like I said, it's complicated. But we think we
can track down the people behind Poo-Sham. We just need some information from
you."

"But you didn't even
..."
She blinked, and for a moment I thought she was going
to cry. I looked away, past exotic plants and potted trees, across the park to
the jagged Midtown skyline, looking like broken teeth rising out of a forest.

Hillary sobbed once. "You just walked away from
me, Hunter. You must have known it was dye."

"Well, yeah, I guess. But I really didn't have
any idea what was going on. I mean, all those flashing lights were freaking me
out—"

"Let me ask you one question, Hillary," Jen
said. "When you stepped out of the shower and saw yourself, did you
immediately sit down and call all your friends to warn them?"

"I—," she started, but her words dissolved
into purple bemusement. "Maybe not right away. But that was
this morning.
Hunter knew there was
something up last night at the party."

"And your point is
...
?"