So Yesterday (19 page)

She waved away Jen's question as though it were an
annoying mosquito. "You wouldn't think this was so funny if you were
purple."

"I don't think it's. . . ," Jen started,
then spread her hands. "Well,
aspects
of it are funny."

Hillary groaned. "This has been fun, Hunter. But
I think you two are leaving." She stabbed at a wireless intercom next to
the empty Bloody Mary glass, and a distant buzzer sounded from within the
apartment.

"Listen," I said, "I'm sorry I didn't
warn you about the dye, Hillary. But we can find the people who did this to
you."

She glared at me. "Too late to help."

"But if we find these guys," Jen said,
"we might find the antidote."

The servant returned, hovering at the door to the
garden while Hillary's narrowed eyes tried to burn a hole through Jen.

"Antidote?"

Jen shrugged. "Maybe there's a way to wash it
off."

"Another Bloody," Hillary commanded, shaking
the ice in the empty glass, her gaze still locked on Jen. The servant
evaporated.

After a moment of purple calculation she said,
"What do you need?"

"To learn the names of everyone who paid for the
Hoi Aristoi
subscriber list," I
said.

"The mailing list? Okay, I'll make some
calls." She leaned forward, removing the straw from her empty drink and
pointing it at me threateningly. "But this time around you better keep me
in the loop, Hunter. Or you're going to wake up with something worse than a
purple head."

CHAPTER 28

WE WAITED
FOR THE CALL DOWNTOWN, BACK AT OUR FAVORITE

coffee shop, sitting on our musty couch, shoulders
touching. It should have felt wonderful.

"What's bumming you out?"

I looked down at my purple hands. "Hillary being
right. I should have told someone about the shampoo last night after I found
out it was dye. The whole party was a trap, and we just let everybody walk into
it."

Jen leaned her weight into me comfortingly. "Come
on. We were too busy not getting caught. And I mean really caught, not dyed
purple or photographed behaving badly. Didn't you have to run for your
life?"

"Yeah, twice in one day. But I still wish I'd
said something to Hillary."

"You feel guilty about Hillary's purple head?
News update, Hunter: She'll live. We went to that party to investigate a
kidnapping, not rescue a bunch of spoiled rich kids."

I pulled away to get a better look at the smirk just
visible on Jen's lips. "You like these guys, don't you?" I said.
"The anti-client."

"Well, I wouldn't say I
like
them." She leaned back
into the musty couch and sighed. "I think they're probably dangerous, and
I'm worried about Mandy. And I definitely don't want to get caught by
them."

"But
...
?"

"But I
do
like their style," she said, then smiled.
"Don't you?"

I opened my mouth, then closed it. It was true: the
anti-client did have style. They were cool, and they were using cool in a
strange new way. I'd spent years studying how Innovators changed the world, and
the process was always indirect, suggestive, filtered through cool hunters and
Trendsetters and ultimately giant companies while the Innovators remained
invisible. As in an epidemic, Patient Zero was always the hardest guy to find.
So there was something fascinating about an Innovator taking direct action. The
anti-client was shooting advertisements, taking over launch parties, creating
their own weird marketing campaign.

I wanted to see what they would do next.

"Maybe," I admitted. "But what do you
think they want?"

"In the long run?" Jen sipped some coffee.
"I think you were right about the cobblestones."

"The anti-client wants to throw rocks?"

"No. Well, maybe a few, now and then. But I think
mostly they want to loosen the mortar, the glue that holds the street
down."

I frowned; this line of thinking was bringing on a
paka-paka headache. "Could you maybe unmix this metaphor a little?"

Jen took my hand. "You know what glue I mean. The
stuff that controls how everyone thinks, how they see the world."

"Advertising?"

"Not just advertising, but the whole system:
marketing categories, tribal boundaries, all the formations that people get
trapped in. Or locked out of."

I shook my head. "I don't know. Issue zero of
Hoi Aristoi
takes on a pretty easy target.
And I mean, what are they saying? Rich, spoiled kids are laughable? Not exactly
a revolutionary concept."

"So you're going to tell Hillary Hyphen about
what you saw at Movable Hype? With her connections, she could probably stop the
whole thing before it ever hits a printing press."

I laughed. "Hell, no."

"Exactly. Because you want to see it get mailed
out. You want to see what happens. Everyone who gets their hands on a copy will
devour every page, even the unlucky people in those pictures. Because it's
information from outside the system. And we're all starving for it."

"But what good does it do?" I asked.

"Like I said, it loosens the mortar that holds
the cobblestones down."

"So they can throw more rocks?"

"No, Hunter. Don't you get it? The anti-client
doesn't just want to throw rocks. They want the whole street to come up. They
want to make it so
everyone
starts throwing rocks."

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

A few minutes later a horn sounded outside; a stretch
limo waited on the street in the lengthening shadows of early evening. As we
approached, a darkened rear window opened a few inches and a purple hand
reached out, clutching a single sheet of paper. I felt the cold breath of the
car's air-conditioning and glimpsed an even colder stare: a young and purple
hoi aristoi
glaring out at me from the
backseat.

He disappeared as the window slid closed. Jen scanned
the paper as I watched the car easing into traffic, taking its occupant back to
the well-guarded precincts of the Upper East Side.

"Well, this is a no-brainer," Jen announced,
handing over our prize.

The short list was on
Hoi Aristoi
stationery, apple-green paper
embossed with gold, printed in rich purple ink. It included all the usual
suspects: a certain maker of overpriced handbags, a bank in a certain tropical
country known for its absence of tax laws, the national committee of a certain
political party. But one stood out from among the rest, as inconspicuous as a
black widow spider on a piece of Wonder Bread.

"Two-by-Two
Productions."

"Sound familiar?"
Jen said.

I remembered Hiro's words when
he'd recounted the in-line-skating split with Mwadi Wickersham:
Two-by-two or death.

 
I had to laugh. "Maybe this
is
all about the wheels."

CHAPTER 29

WHEN
ENGLISH GENTLEMEN WENT HUNTING A LONG TIME AGO,

they would occasionally cry at the top of their lungs,
"Soho!" (I'm not sure why. Maybe Soho was Tallyho's brother or
something like that.) Much later, when some fine hunting grounds near London
were paved over to build shops, theaters, and nightclubs, some real-estate
genius decided to call this cool new neighborhood "Soho."

Rather later still, a derelict bit of industrial New
York just south of Houston Street was being rebuilt with shops, theaters, and
nightclubs, and yet another real-estate genius decided to rebrand this cool new
neighborhood "SoHo," meaning "South of Houston."

Soon everyone was getting into the act. The folks
north of Houston said they lived in "NoHo," lower Broadway went by
"LoBro," and the area North Of Where Holland's Entrance Removes
Exhausted Suburbanites began to be called, fittingly, NOWHERESville.

So many real-estate geniuses, so little dengue fever.

These days, when young, cool types are hunting for
shops, theaters, and nightclubs, they have been known to cry out,
"Dumbo!" which stands for Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass, a
landscape of crumbling factories and industrial vistas that is the last refuge
of the truly cool. This week.

Here's how to get there:

We rode the F train to York Street, the cutting edge
of Brooklyn. The train was pretty quiet, just the usual coolsters carrying
guitar cases and laptops, decorated with tattoos and metal and all coming home
from their jobs as designers/writers/artists/fashion designers. I even
recognized one of them from our coffee shop, probably one of those guys writing
a first novel set in a coffee shop.

Jen and I climbed out of the station and walked up
York. To our left, the span of Manhattan Bridge stretched back over the river.
For once I didn't have that vague discomfort of not being in Manhattan. Given
that the anti-client was made up of renegade cool hunters, it made sense that
the hunt was winding up here. Most of the obvious hipsters on the train had
gotten off with us, lighting up cigarettes and cell phones as they disappeared
down the old streets and into restored industrial buildings. I earnestly hoped
that this neighborhood would still be cool when I moved out from my parents'
place, but I doubted it. I would probably be letting out a hunting cry of
"NewJerZo" by the time I could afford a place of my own.

York Street curled to the west, leading us to Flushing
Avenue and past the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the home of Two-by-Two Productions.

I'd seen old pictures of the yard in the Museum of
Natural History, during my time among the meteorites. The giant hunk of space
iron that had concealed me had spent a few years here about a century ago as
people tried to figure out what to do with thirty-four tons of extraterrestrial
souvenir. I wondered if it had pulled the compasses of passing ships toward it
and if this corner of Brooklyn was one of those mystic spots that had always
attracted weird stuff. It was named after a flying elephant, after all.

These days the Brooklyn Navy Yard has no meteorites,
no navy, no ships at all. The huge ship-construction buildings have been turned
into film studios, offices, and giant open spaces for the companies who create
sets for Broadway musicals.

"I wonder why the anti-client needs this much
room," Jen said as we walked along.

"Scary question. You could hide anything out
here. A fleet of airships, a plague of locusts
...
a suburban house and lawn."

"Jesus. And you think
I'm
wired funny."

We wandered into a security office and asked how to
find Two-by-Two Productions. The guard pulled his eyes from his tiny TV and
looked us up and down.

"Are they casting again?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Thought they were moving out on Monday."

"That's still the plan," Jen said, nodding.
"But they said they wanted to see us right away."

"Okay." He reached for a stack of
photocopied maps of the navy yard, scrawled a red
X
on the top one, and handed it
over as his eyes drifted back toward the television.

Outside, Jen was incensed. "Casting? I can't
believe he thought we looked like actors." (Most Innovators don't like
actors, who are, by definition, imitators.)

"I don't know, Jen. You gave a pretty convincing
performance in there."

She glared at me.

"Of course," I added, "they could be
shooting an ad for the shoe."

"Well, I'd be into that, I guess. But the thought
that we came over from central casting
..."
She shivered.

The navy yard was almost empty on a Saturday, the open
spaces dizzying after the narrow streets of Manhattan. We walked under giant
arches of rusted metal speckled with flaking paint, crossed paved-over railroad
tracks that raised long ripples in the asphalt. We wandered between ancient,
empty factories and prefab metal hangars lined with the growling butts of air
conditioners.

"Here it is," I said.

The name Two-by-Two Productions was stenciled on a
huge sliding door set into an old brick building you could have hidden a
battleship in.

I felt my nerves starting to tingle: this was the
moment where Jen would take over, leading us through some roundabout,
dangerous, and probably illegal means of entry.

But there was no point resisting fate.

"So how do we get in?" I asked.

"Maybe this way?" Jen pulled at the huge
handle of the door, and it slid open. "Yeah, that worked."

"But that means
..."

Jen nodded and held up her Wi-Fi bracelet, which
sparkled. She fingernailed a tiny switch to douse its light and whispered,
"It means that they're here, probably packing up for the move. Better be
quiet."

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

Inside, it was pitch black.

We crept among formless shapes, engulfed in a
lightless silence. Jen bumped into something that scraped angrily against the
concrete floor. We both froze until the echo trailed away, suggesting a vast
space around us.

As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, the
cluster of objects around me felt somehow familiar, as if I had visited this
place before. I forced my eyes to resolve shapes from the darkness. We were
passing through a small group of tables, a few overturned chairs resting on
them.

I reached out and brought Jen to a halt with a tug.

"What does this look like
to you?" I whispered.

"I don't know. A closed
restaurant?"

"Or a set that's supposed to look like a
restaurant. Sort of like the one in the Poo-Sham ad." I ran my fingers
across one of the chairs, trying to recall the advertisement. "Where the
guy orders lack of ram."

She looked around. "Are
you sure?"

"No." I squinted into the darkness, letting
shapes form before my eyes. "Are those old theater seats over there?

"Why would they be?"

"There was a scene in a
theater. Where the usher gets all tongue-tied."

"Why would they build a theater on a sound
stage?" Jen shook her head. "We're in New York, land of theaters, and
they couldn't go on location?"

"Huh." I crossed to the group of seats. It
was only five or so rows, maybe ten seats across, with a red velvet curtain
hanging as a backdrop. But Jen was right. It seemed like a crazy expense in a
city full of real theaters, not to mention restaurants. "Maybe they
wanted a controlled situation. Absolute secrecy."

"Maybe they're just
nuts," Jen said.

"That's one thing I'm
pretty sure—"

"Shhh.
"Jen stood stock-still in the darkness. She
cocked her head and pointed to our left.

I heard a voice echoing across
the cavernous space.

"Is that who I think it
is?" Jen whispered.

I peered through the gloom toward the sound, listening
intently. The barest sliver of light glimmered from the other side of the
cavernous studio, a band of illumination creeping from under a door, wavering
along its length as someone walked past on the other side. The voice continued,
the words consumed by the distance but the strident tone utterly familiar.

It was Mandy Jenkins, sounding
very annoyed.

Chapter 30

I LOWERED
MY VOICE BELOW A WHISPER, JUST BREATH: "KEEP QUIET."

Among the shadowy, jumbled shapes, quiet meant slow.
We moved like deep-sea divers, taking slow-motion steps, waving our hands in
front of us in the darkness. As we grew nearer, eyes still adjusting, the glow
from under the door seemed to grow brighter. The texture of the concrete floor
became clearer, its pitted surface lit by the sidelong light like craters on
the moon.

Gradually I began to make out that there were other
doors along this wall of the studio. Most were dark, but a few showed glints of
light under them. More sounds came dully through the wall, grunts and scrapes,
the movement of heavy objects across the rough floor. A few metal ladders
disappeared up into darkness above us, where a catwalk wound its way around the
outside of the studio, accessing a steel framework hung with movie lights and
sound equipment.

The door we'd first spotted stood out, the light
around its edges glowing fiercely, and I imagined a blinding interrogation
lamp pointed at Mandy's face across a bare table.

A sentence formed out of the muffled hum of her voice.
"I think you've got this all wrong!"

The reply was too quiet and steady for me make out any
words, but it sounded coolly threatening.

The scrape of a chair came from behind the door, then
footsteps.

Jen threw herself behind some huge piece of equipment,
waving frantically for me to follow. The sliver of light grew darker as
someone approached.

I took a few panicked, silent steps to join Jen,
crouching beside her just as the door opened, spilling an arc of light across
the huge studio. Cowboy boots and red-and-white client shoes swept across my
view— NASCAR Man (also known as Futura Garamond) escorting Mandy across the
gray concrete expanse.

Darkness wrapped itself around them as the door swung
closed, but then illumination poured from overhead, a row of work lights
popping on. Jen pulled me farther back behind our hulking piece of equipment
just as Futura Garamond looked our way, his hand still on the switch.

I swallowed, pressed hard against Jen, my heart
beating frantically. Had he heard my footsteps? Seen us?

"Hello?" he called.

We stayed frozen until he shook his head and guided
Mandy to another door a dozen yards away, pulling it open. She went in alone,
and Garamond let it swing closed behind her with a
click.

"I'll be back," he said through the door,
then turned and disappeared up one of the ladders, cowboy boots clanking on
metal. Peering upward through the catwalk, we watched him clomp right over our
heads. Then his footsteps faded.

Jen and I stayed still for a moment, still clinging to
each other. Was he still up there, looking down? Waiting for us to emerge? Or
did the catwalk lead off into some other part of the building?

After long seconds of waiting Jen said, "Come
on."

We crept toward the door through which Mandy had
disappeared, me looking up at the dangling work lights. I felt naked in the
light, but Garamond, wherever he was, might notice if they clicked off again.

When we got to the door, Jen reached out and softly
grasped the knob, turning it as carefully as a safecracker.

She shook her head. Locked.

I put my ear to the cold metal and heard nothing. This
must be where they kept Mandy between interrogations. What were they trying to
do? Learn the client's marketing secrets? Dig up dirt on their overseas operations?
Find out more about
me?