Spook Country (23 page)

“It gives him something to think about. You know it’s good for people your age to have interests.”

“You aren’t the one who has to listen to him.”

“Give him my love, and I’ll check on you soon. Either from Canada or when I’m back.”

“Was it Toronto?”

“Vancouver. I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too, dear.”

She went to the window, looked down at the traffic on Sunset. Her parents had never been very comfortable with her singing career. Her mother, in particular, had treated it as though it were some sort of nuisance disease, something nonfatal that nonetheless interfered with your life in serious ways, preventing you having a real job, and for which there was no particular cure, other than simply letting it run its course and hoping for the best. Her mother had seemed to regard any income from singing as a kind of disability pay, something you received for having to put up with the condition. Which hadn’t really been that far off Hollis’s own attitude to art and money, though unlike her mother she knew that you could have the condition yet never qualify for any compensation whatever. If being the kind of singer and writer she’d been had ever proven absolutely too difficult, she was fairly certain, she’d simply have stopped doing it. And perhaps that was really what had happened. The sudden arc of her career, the arc of the Curfew, had taken her completely by surprise. Inchmale had been one of those people who’d apparently known since birth exactly what he was supposed to do. It had been different for him, although maybe the plateau, after the arc up, hadn’t been that different. Neither of them had really wanted to see what an arc down might look like, she thought. With Jimmy’s addiction as a punctuation point, a blank, heroin-colored milestone driven into whatever that plateau had been made of, and with the band stalled creatively, they’d all opted to drop it. She and Inchmale had tried to go on to other things. As had Heidi-Laura, she supposed. Jimmy had just died. Inchmale seemed to have managed it best. She hadn’t gotten that positive a feeling about Heidi’s life, seeing her this time, but then Heidi was as difficult to read as any human Hollis had ever known.

The maids, she discovered, had actually saved and folded the bubble wrap that had come in the box from Blue Ant. It was on the shelf in the closet. Instant tip-upgrade. She put the wrapping, the box, and the helmet on the tall kitchenette table.

Doing this, she noticed the Blue Ant figurine that had come with it, standing on one of the coffee tables. She’d leave that, of course. She looked back at it, and knew she couldn’t. This was some part of her that had never grown up, she felt. A grown-up would not be compelled to take this anthropomorphic piece of molded vinyl along when she left the room, but she knew she would. And she didn’t even like things like that. She wouldn’t leave it, though. She walked over and picked it up. She’d take it along and give it to someone, preferably a child. Less because she had any feeling for the thing, which was after all only a piece of marketing plastic, than because she herself wouldn’t have wanted to be left behind in a hotel room.

But she decided not to take it carry-on. She didn’t want the TSA people publicly hauling it out of the box with the helmet. She tossed it into the Barneys bag that held her dressier clothes.

ODILE WAS UNHAPPY that they weren’t going to a hotel, in Vancouver. She liked North American hotels, she said. She liked the Mondrian more than the Standard. The idea of a borrowed flat disappointed her.

“I think it might be really something, from what they said,” Hollis told her. “And nobody lives there.”

They were in the back of a Town Car Hollis had arranged with the hotel, billed to her room. When she’d returned the Jetta, the boy who’d almost recognized her hadn’t been there. They were nearing LAX now, she knew; through smoked windows, she could see those weird bobbing oil-well things on a hillside. They’d been there since she’d first come here. As far as she knew, they never stopped moving. She checked the time on her phone. Almost six.

“I called my mother,” Hollis said. “I did it because you mentioned yours.”

“Where is she, your mother?”

“Puerto Vallarta. They go there in the winter.”

“She is well?”

“She complains about my father. He’s older. I think he’s okay, but she thinks he’s obsessed with American politics. She says it makes him too angry.”

“If this were my country,” Odile said, wrinkling her nose, “I would not be angry.”

“No?” Hollis asked.

“I would drink all the time. Take pill. Anything.”

“There’s that,” said Hollis, remembering dead Jimmy, “but I wouldn’t think you’d want to give them the pleasure.”

“Who?” asked Odile, sitting up, suddenly interested. “Who would I pleasure?”

T ito woke as the Cessna’s wheels touched down. Sunlight through the windows. Grabbing the back of the couch. They sped along on the ground, the pitch of the engines changing. The plane slowed. Eventually, its propellers stopped. He sat up in the sudden silence, blinking out at flat fields, rows of low green.

“Here long enough for a stretch and a pee,” said the pilot, getting out of his seat. He passed Tito on his way back through the cabin. He unfastened the door, and leaned out, swinging it open. “Hey, Carl,” he called, grinning, to someone Tito couldn’t see, “thanks for coming out.” Someone propped the top of an ordinary aluminum ladder against the bottom of the door, and the pilot climbed down it, moving slowly, deliberately.

“Stretch your legs,” Garreth said to Tito, getting out of his chair. Tito sat up, watching as Garreth started down the ladder. Tito rubbed his eyes and stood.

He climbed down to the packed earth of a straight road running in either direction through the flat green fields. The pilot and a man in blue coveralls and a straw cowboy hat were unrolling a black rubber hose from a reel on the back of a small tanker truck. He looked back and saw the old man descending the ladder.

Garreth produced a bottle of mineral water, a toothbrush, and a tube of toothpaste. He began to brush his teeth, pausing to spit white foam on the ground. He rinsed his mouth from the bottle of water. “Got a toothbrush?”

“No,” said Tito.

Garreth brought out an unopened toothbrush and passed it to him, along with the bottle of water. While Tito brushed his teeth, he watched the old man walk a distance down the road, then stand, his back to them, urinating. Finishing with the toothbrush, Tito poured what was left of the water over its bristles, shook it dry, and tucked it into the inner pocket of his jacket. He wanted to ask where they were, but the protocol of dealing with clients prevented him.

“Western Illinois,” Garreth said, as if reading his mind. “Belongs to a friend.”

“Of yours?”

“The pilot’s. The friend flies, keeps avgas here.” The man with the cowboy hat yanked a cord on the back of the truck, starting up the engine of a pump. They moved away from a sudden billowing reek of fuel.

“How far can it fly?” Tito asked, looking at the plane.

“A little under twelve hundred miles on a full tank. Depending on weather and number of passengers.”

“That seems not so far.”

“Piston-engine prop. We have to keep hopping, this way, but it keeps us under all kinds of radar. We won’t see any airport. All private runways.”

Tito didn’t think he meant actual radar.

“Gentlemen,” said the old man, joining them, “good morning. You seemed to sleep quite well, finally,” he said to Tito.

“Yes,” Tito agreed.

“Why did you lift that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement badge, Tito?” the old man asked.

ICE. Tito remembered Garreth saying “ice,” when he’d handed him the thing. Now he had no idea why he’d done that. And Eleggua, not he, had taken the badge-case from the man’s belt. He couldn’t tell them that. “I felt it on his belt as he tried to hold me,” he said. “I thought it might be a weapon.”

“Then you thought to use the Bulgarian salt?”

“Yes,” Tito said.

“I’m curious to learn what happened to him. I imagine, though, that he was taken briefly into custody, causing a jurisdictional pissing match. Until some entity, sufficiently high up in the DHS, ordered his release. You probably did your man a favor, Tito, taking that badge. It’s unlikely it was really his. You saved him having to refuse to explain it, until his fix came through.”

Tito nodded, hoping the subject was now closed.

They stood, then, watching the fueling of the plane.

M iller,” said Brown, from his enormous white leather recliner, across ten feet of off-white shag carpet. “Your name is David Miller. Same birthday, same age, same place of birth.”

They were in a Gulfstream jet on a runway at Ronald Reagan. Milgrim had his own white leather recliner. He hadn’t been to this airport since it had been National. Across a bridge from Georgetown. He knew this was a Gulfstream because there was an elaborately engraved brass plate that said “Gulfstream II” on the high-gloss wooden surround of the window beside his chair. Bird’s-eye maple, he thought, but too shiny, like the trim in a limo that was really trying. There was a lot of that in this cabin. And a lot of white leather, polished brass, and off-white shag. “David Miller,” he repeated.

“You live in New York. You’re a translator. Russian.”

“I’m Russian?”

“Your passport,” said Brown, holding one up, navy blue with pale gold trim, “is American. David Miller. David Miller is not a junkie. David Miller, upon entering Canada, will neither be in possession of nor under the influence of drugs.” He checked his watch. He was wearing the gray suit and a white shirt again. “How many of those pills are you holding?”

“One,” said Milgrim. It was too serious a matter to lie about.

“Take it,” said Brown. “I want you straight for customs.”

“Canada?”

“Vancouver.”

“Aren’t there going to be more passengers?” Milgrim asked. The Gulfstream looked like it could sit twenty or so. Or serve as the set for a porn feature, as most of the seating consisted of very long white leather divans, plus a bedroom in the back that looked like a natural for your more formal money shots.

“No,” said Brown, “there aren’t.” He slipped the passport back into his suit coat, then patted the place on his right hip where he kept his gun. Milgrim had seen him do this five times since they’d left N Street, and the micro-expression that always accompanied it convinced him that Brown had left his gun behind. Also his black nylon bag. Brown was suffering from phantom gun syndrome, Milgrim thought, like an amputee itching to scratch toes that were no longer there.

The Gulfstream’s engines fired up, or started, or whatever you called it. Milgrim looked around the back of his white leather chair, to the front of the cabin, where a corrugated white leather curtain sealed off the cockpit. There was evidently a pilot up there, though Milgrim had yet to see him.

“When we land,” said Brown, raising his voice against the engines, “customs officers drive out to the plane. They come aboard, say hello, I hand them the passports, they open them, hand them back, say goodbye. An aircraft like this, that’s what happens. Our passport numbers, and the pilot’s, went through when he filed our flight plan. Don’t behave as though you’re expecting them to ask you any questions.” The plane began to taxi.

When it rushed forward, the roar of its engines deepening, and seemed to leap almost straight up into the air, Milgrim was completely unprepared. Nobody had even told them to fasten their seat belts, let alone about oxygen masks or life jackets. That seemed not only wrong, but deeply, almost physically, anomalous. As did the steepness of this climb, forcing Milgrim, who was facing backward, to cling desperately to the white, padded arms.

He looked out the window. And saw Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport recede, more quickly than he would have thought possible, and as smoothly as if someone had zoomed a lens in reverse.

When they leveled out, Brown removed his shoes, stood, and padded toward the back of the plane. Where, Milgrim assumed, there would be a toilet.

From behind, he saw Brown’s hand touch the place where his gun wasn’t.

A pale boy with a very thin beard was holding a rectangle of white cardboard inscribed with HENRY & RICHARD in green marker, as they left the customs hall. He wore a dusty-looking, no doubt expensively Dickensian chimney-sweep suit. “That’s us,” said Hollis, stopping their luggage cart beside him and offering him her hand. “Hollis Henry. This is Odile Richard.”

“Oliver Sleight,” he said, tucking his sign under his arm. “Like sleight of hand,” offering his to shake, first with Hollis, then Odile. “Ollie. Blue Ant Vancouver.”

“Pamela told me there was no office, up here,” Hollis said, pushing the cart toward the exit. It was a few minutes after eleven.

“No office,” he said, walking beside them, “but that doesn’t mean there’s no work. This is a game design center, and we have clients through other offices, so there’s still a need for hands-on. Let me push that for you.”

“No need, thanks.” They went out through an automatic door, and past a crowd of post-flight smokers working back up to functional blood-nicotine levels. Odile was evidently one of a new generation of nonsmoking French, and had been delighted that Hollis no longer smoked, but Sleight, Ollie, as they followed him across a striped section of covered roadway, produced a yellow pack of cigarettes, lighting up.

Hollis started to remember something, but then the difference in the air struck her, after Los Angeles. It was like a sauna, but cool, almost chilly.

They went up a ramp, into a covered parking lot, where he used a credit card to pay for parking, then led them to his car, an oversized Volkswagen like the one Pamela had driven. It was pearlescent white, with a small stylized Blue Ant glyph to the left of the rear license plate. He helped them stow their bags and her cardboard carton in the trunk. He dropped his half-smoked cigarette and crushed it with an elongated, elaborately distressed shoe that she supposed went with his look.

Odile opted for shotgun, which seemed to please him, and soon they were on their way, something half-remembered scratching fitfully in Hollis’s head. They cruised past large, airport-related buildings, like toys on some giant’s tidy, sparsely detailed hobby layout.

“You’re going to be the fourth-ever residents in our flat,” he said. “The Sultan of Dubai’s public relations team were there, last month. They had their own business here, but wanted to meet with Hubertus, so we put them up there, and Hubertus came up. Before that, twice, we had people in from our London office.”

“It’s not Hubertus’s place, then?”

“I suppose it is,” he said, changing lanes for the approach to a bridge, “but one of many. The view’s extraordinary.”

Hollis saw uncomfortably bright lights on tall poles, beyond the bridge’s railings, overlooking a visual clutter of industry. Her cell rang. “Excuse me,” she said. “Yes?”

“Where are you?” said Inchmale.

“In Vancouver.”

“I, however, am in the lobby of your achingly pretentious hotel.”

“I’m sorry. They sent me up here. I tried to reach you, but your cell wasn’t answering, and your hotel said you were gone.”

“Hotbed of locative art?”

“I don’t know yet. Just got here.”

“Where are you staying?”

“In a flat that Blue Ant has.”

“You should insist on serious hotels.”

“Well,” she said, glancing at Ollie, who was listening to Odile, “I’m told we’ll like it.”

“Is that the royal ‘we’?”

“A curator from Paris, who specializes in locative art. They brought her to Los Angeles for the piece. She’ll be very helpful, up here. Has contacts.”

“When are you back here?”

“I don’t know. Shouldn’t be long. How long are you there?”

“As long as it takes to produce the Bollards. Tomorrow we’re having a first look at the studio.”

“Which one?”

“Place on West Pico. After our time. Much is.”

“Is what?”

“After our time. Why, for instance, are there these types with Star Wars helmets, standing at the foot of the Marmont’s driveway, staring as if transfixed? I saw them earlier, when I checked in.”

“They’re viewing a monument to Helmut Newton. I know the artist, Alberto Corrales.”

“But there’s nothing there.”

“You need the helmet,” she explained.

“Dear God.”

“You’re at the Marmont?”

“I will be, when I’ve gotten back across Sunset.”

“I’ll call you, Reg. I should go.”

“Bye, then.”

Long past the first bridge, and still on the wide street they’d turned onto, they drove through a stretch of carefully styled shops and restaurants. Jimmy Carlyle, who’d spent two years playing bass with a band in Toronto, before joining the Curfew, had told her that Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television. But American cities didn’t have this many galleries, she decided, after counting five in a few blocks, and then they were on another bridge.

Her phone rang again. “Sorry,” she said. “Hello?”

“Hello,” said Bigend. “Where are you?”

“In the car, with Ollie and Odile, going to your flat.”

“Pamela told me you’d taken her along. Why?”

“She knows someone who knows our friend,” she said. “Speaking of whom, why didn’t you tell me he was Canadian?”

“It didn’t seem important,” said Bigend.

“But now I’m here. Is he here?”

“Not quite. Doing paperwork with a customs broker in Washington State, we’re guessing. GPS matches up to a broker’s address.”

“Still. You know what I told you about being honest with me.”

“Being Canadian,” said Bigend, “even in today’s fraught world, isn’t always the first thing I’d mention about someone. When we were discussing him, initially, I had no idea he’d be headed that way. Later, I suppose it slipped my mind.”

“Do you think he’s bailing out?” She watched their driver.

“No. I think something’s up, up there.”

“What?”

“What the pirates saw,” he said.

They came off the bridge into a sudden low canyon of much more downscale nightlife. She imagined Bobby’s luminous wireframe cargo container suspended above the street, more enigmatic than any neon-skinned giant squid.

“But we’ll find a better way to discuss it, shall we?”

He doesn’t trust phones either, she thought. “Right.”

“Do you have any piercings?” he asked.

They took a right.

“Excuse me?”

“Piercings. If you do, I must warn you about the bed in the master bedroom. The top floor.”

“The bed.”

“Yes. Apparently you don’t want to crawl under it if you have any magnetic bits. Steel, iron. Or a pacemaker. Or a mechanical watch. The designers never mentioned that, when they showed me the plans. It’s entirely about the space underneath, visually. Magnetic levitation. But now I have to warn each guest in turn. Sorry.”

“I’m entirely as God made me, so far,” she told him. “And I don’t wear a watch.”

“Not to worry, then,” he said, cheerfully.

“I think we’re here,” she told them, as Ollie turned off a street where everything seemed to have been built the week before.

“Very good,” he said, and hung up.

The Volkswagen rolled down a ramp as a gate rose. They entered a parking garage, brilliantly lit with sun-toned halogens above a pale, glassy concrete floor devoid of the least oil stain. The car’s tires squeaked as Ollie pulled in beside another oversized Volkswagen in pearly white.

When she got out, she could smell the fresh concrete.

They got their things out of the truck and Ollie gave them each a pair of white unmarked magstrip cards. “This one’s for the elevator,” he said, taking Hollis’s and swiping it beside doors of brushed stainless, “and access to the penthouse levels.” Inside, he swiped it again, and they rose, swiftly and silently.

“I suppose I don’t want to get this under the bed,” Hollis said, visibly puzzling Odile, as he handed it back to her.

“No,” he said, as the elevator stopped and its doors opened, “nor your credit cards.”

They followed him along a short, carpeted hallway that a van could have been driven through. “Use the other card,” he told her. She shifted the carton to her left arm and swiped the second card. He opened the very large ebony door, which she saw was a good four inches thick, and they stepped into a space that might have been the central concourse in the national airport of some tiny, hyperwealthy European nation, a pocket Liechtenstein founded on the manufacture of the most expensive minimalist light fixtures ever made.

“The flat,” she said, looking up.

“Yes indeed,” said Ollie Sleight.

Odile dropped her bag and started walking toward a curtain of glass wider than an old-fashioned theater screen. Uprights broke the view at intervals of fifteen feet or so. Beyond it, from where Hollis stood, there was only an undifferentiated gray-pink glow, with a few distant points of red light.

“Formidable,” exclaimed Odile.

“Good, isn’t it?” He turned to Hollis. “You’re in the master bedroom. I’ll show you.” He took the carton, and led her up two flights of giddily suspended stairs, each tread a two-inch slab of frosted glass.

Bigend’s bed was a perfect black square, ten feet on a side, floating three feet above the ebony floor. She walked over to it and saw that it was tethered, against whatever force supported it, with thin, braided cables of black metal.

“I think I might make something up on the floor,” she said.

“Everyone says that,” he said. “Then they try it.”

She turned to say something, and in doing so saw him asking the girl at the counter, in the Standard’s restaurant, for American Spirit cigarettes. Same yellow pack. Same beard. Like moss around a drain.