But then he began to read.
84 The man who shot Walt Disney
‘It’s not bad,’ said Bobby, spilling a little of his second piso mojado as he leaned back in his chair to see the top of Bigend’s building through Hollis’s helmet. ‘The scale works.’
Inchmale had really had an extraordinary effect on him, Hollis thought. She’d definitely been right about his being an Inchmale fan, but she wouldn’t have expected quite this degree of cessation of anxiety. Although some of that might be his being five days off what she’d come to think of as the money shot, with Garreth and the old man, so she assumed, long gone.
Tito, she knew, though entirely by accident, was still here, or had been, just this afternoon. She’d seen him in the mall beneath the Four Seasons, where she’d moved when Bigend had arrived from L.A. He’d been with a man who might have been an older brother, with straight black center-parted hair to his shoulders. They’d been shopping, to judge by the bags. Tito had seen her, definitely, and had smiled, but then had turned away, down another concourse of heavily trademarked commerce.
‘It’s the lack of detail that I like,’ said Inchmale. ‘Early Disney.’
Bobby removed the helmet, brushing his forelock aside. ‘That’s not Alberto, though. That’s because you wanted it yesterday. If you left Alberto on it, he’d skin it up like something out of a horror movie.’ He put the helmet on the table. They were outside the bar on Mainland, where she’d first gone with Inchmale and Heidi, the night she’d come back with them.
‘These Bollards,’ Odile asked, stressing the second syllable, ‘they have seen it?’
‘Just a frame-grab,’ Inchmale said. He had had the idea, when Hollis and Odile told him about Bobby Chombo deserting the locative artists of L.A., and about Alberto losing his River, of his going to Bobby with a video proposal from the Bollards. The song was called ‘I’m the Man Who Shot Walt Disney,’ Inchmale’s favorite of the material he was to produce for them in L.A. Bobby would direct, and the video would jump a platform, introducing locative art to a wider audience while helmets like Hollis’s were still in the beta-test stage. In order to make certain that Bobby picked up his abandoned obligations in L.A., Inchmale had pretended to be a particular fan of Alberto’s. With Odile as go-between, things had come together very quickly, and they’d managed to make it necessary for Bobby to get everyone else’s work back up on new servers, which he’d already done.
Heidi had gone back to the mysteries of her Beverly Hills marriage, leaving Odile initially disconsolate. Successfully sorting the geohacking issues of at least a dozen artists with Bobby seemed to have taken care of that, though. Hollis assumed that this had afforded the French curator some kind of major status-jump, something good to take home. Not that Odile showed any particular desire to do that. She was still living at Bigend’s, sharing the place with him, while Hollis was at the Four Seasons in the room next to Inchmale’s.
Bobby’s video for the Bollards, with Philip Rausch’s enthusiastic approval, had become part of her still-unwritten article for Node.
She’d decided, after her breakfast at Beenie’s, to tell Bigend that she’d been held captive, albeit very gently and politely, between leaving Bobby’s place and being returned there. It was a scenario that the old man had provided, without intending to; it was what he’d said they’d do if she were unable to accept his terms. Blindfolded, turned over to an unknown third party, and held at an unknown location until Garreth had returned to take her back to Bobby’s. No idea what they had done, that night. Since Bobby didn’t know exactly what they had done either, and since he hadn’t been privy to her agreement with the old man, she didn’t have to worry about him telling Bigend she was lying. And lying about this to Bigend was something she’d decided she just had to do.
And Bigend, for his part, was making that curiously easy. He seemed, with the advent of his zillion-dollar Chinese car commercial, to have put his foray into the secret world on the back burner. If indeed it was still on the stove. She assumed he’d take advantage of having met Bobby, sooner if not later, and extract whatever bits and pieces of the puzzle Bobby might have, but that was not her business. A part of her business, henceforth, she’d decided, would be to be that chimney brick behind which the old man had chosen to hide the secret of what he’d done.
Which apparently was still very much a secret, as nothing at all had appeared anywhere about a truck being seized as it entered Idaho from Canada. They had told her to expect that, though. The whole business had to play out initially in spook country, and might well remain there for a very long time, and that was why he’d entrusted her with it in the first place.
‘Ollis,’ Odile was saying, behind her, ‘you must look at Eenchmale’s willy.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said, turning, to discover a picture of the beautiful Angelina holding a drooling baby Willy Inchmale on a patio in Buenos Aires. ‘He’s bald enough,’ she said, ‘but where’s the beard?’
‘He’s mad for percussion,’ said Inchmale, tossing off the last of his own piso. ‘And tits.’
Hollis reached across for the helmet. Soon, very soon, she’d have to give Inchmale her answer on the Chinese car commercial. That was why they were all up here, in this spring that became daily more ridiculously beautiful, rather than in Los Angeles, where Inchmale had his Bollards temporarily on hold. He wanted to do it. He was a father now, he said, a provider, and if it took ‘It’s Hard to Be One’ selling Chinese cars to do that, so be it.
For her part, she still couldn’t say.
She put the helmet on, turned it on, and looked up, to where Alberto’s giant cartoon rendition of the Mongolian Death Worm, its tail wound through the various windows of Bigend’s pyramidal aerie like an eel through the skull of a cow, waved imperially, tall and scarlet, in the night.
Thanks to
Susan Allison, Norm Coakley, Anton Corbijn, Claire Gibson, Eileen Gunn, Johan Kugelberg, Paul McAuley, Robert McDonald, Martha Millard, R. Trilling, Jack Womack
22 Drum and bass
Pamela Mainwaring, English, with blond bangs entirely concealing her forehead, drove Hollis back to the Mondrian in one of the big silver Volkswagen sedans. She’d worked for Blue Ant previously in London, she volunteered, before leaving to do something else, but then had been invited here to help oversee the expansion of the firm’s local operation. ‘You hadn’t met Hubertus before,’ she suggested, as they headed up the 101.
‘Was it that obvious?’
‘He told me, as he was leaving to meet you. Hubertus loves the opportunity to work with new talent.’
Hollis looked up at the passing, shaggy heads of palms, black against a grayish-pink luminosity. ‘Having met him, I’m amazed that I hadn’t heard of him before.’
‘He doesn’t want you to have heard of him. He doesn’t want people to have heard of Blue Ant, either. We’re often described as the first viral agency. Hubertus doesn’t like the term, and for good reason. Foregrounding the agency, or its founder, is counterproductive. He says he wishes we could operate as a black hole, an absence, but there’s no viable way to get there from here.’ They left the freeway. ‘Do you need anything?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Hubertus wants you to have anything you might need. That’s rather literally anything, by the way, since you’re working on one of his special projects.’
‘"Special"?’
‘No explanations, no goals cited, no budgetary cap, absolute priority in whatever queue. He describes it as a species of dreaming, the company’s equivalent of REM sleep. He believes it’s essential.’ She took a card from a pocket in the VW’s sun visor and passed it to Hollis. ‘Anything. Just call. Do you have a car?’
‘No.’
‘Would you like this one? I can leave it for you.’
‘No thanks.’
‘Cash?’
‘I’ll submit receipts.’
Pamela Mainwaring shrugged.
They rolled in, past the door sculptures. Hollis had her door unlatched before the car had come completely to a halt. ‘Thank you for driving me, Pamela. Nice meeting you. Good night.’
‘Good night.’
Hollis closed the door. The silver sedan swung back out, onto Sunset, the lights of the Mondrian’s entrance diminishing in its bodywork.
A night security man opened the door for her, a sort of decorative grommet clamped through the lobe of his ear. ‘Miss Henry?’
‘Yes?’
‘Message for you at the desk,’ he said, indicating the direction. She headed for the desk, passing a weird cruciform settee upholstered in virginal white leather.
‘Here you are,’ said the shirt model at the desk, when she’d identified herself. She wanted to ask him what he used for his eyebrows, but didn’t. He produced a square brown carton, twenty inches on a side, and had her sign the multicopy form attached to it.
‘Thank you,’ she said, picking it up. It wasn’t very heavy. She turned, heading back toward the elevators.
And saw Laura Hyde, aka Heidi, once the Curfew’s drummer, waiting beside the cross-shaped settee. If nothing else, some quietly methodical part of her noted, this proved that that really had been who she’d thought she’d seen driving past Virgin Records, so much earlier in the evening. ‘Heidi?’ Though there could be no doubt.
‘Laura,’ Hyde corrected. She wore what Hollis took to be Girbaud, a sort of Bladerunner soccer-mom look, probably less out of place in this lobby than many things would be. Her dark hair seemed to have been cut to suit that, though Hollis would’ve been at a loss to explain how.
‘How are you, Laura?’
‘Bagged. Inchmale got my cell number from a friend in New York. Former friend.’ As if that number for Inchmale had put paid to that. ‘He called to tell me you were here.’
‘I’m sorry…’
‘Oh, it isn’t you. Really. Laurence is screening dailies two blocks from here. If I weren’t here, I’d be there.’
‘He’s producing?’
‘Directing.’
‘Congratulations. I didn’t know.’
‘Neither did I.’
Hollis hesitated.
‘Not what I signed on for.’ Her wide, full-lipped mouth went perfectly straight, never a good sign with her. ‘On the other hand, it may not last long.’
Did she mean her husband’s directing, or her marriage? Hollis had never been able to read the drummer very well. Neither had anyone else, according to Inchmale, who maintained that that was why the drumming was necessary, one species of primate signal that could always be seen to work.
‘Would you like a drink, or…’ Hollis turned, with the carton pressed against her chest, clutching her improvised purse in her left hand, and saw that the lobby bar had been transformed, stripped of its votive candles and candelabra and reset for a Japanese breakfast, or in any case a breakfast with black chopsticks, one not yet being served. Profoundly disinclined to invite Heidi up to her room, she allowed herself to keep moving in the direction of the endlessly elongated marble table.
‘No drink,’ Heidi said, settling that. ‘What the fuck’s that about?’ Pointing toward the rear of the space, past the closed and locked bar, its exterior modeled after an enormous rubber-wheeled road case.
Hollis had noticed the instruments before, when she’d checked in. A single conga drum, a set of bongos, and an acoustic guitar and electric bass, these last two hung on cheap chrome stands. These were used instruments, even well used, but she doubted they ever were used, now, or certainly not very often.
Heidi kept walking, her drummer’s shoulders rolling smoothly beneath the matte indigo of her Girbaud blazer. Hollis remembered her biceps in a sleeveless shirt, as the Curfew had taken a stage. She followed her.
‘What is this bullshit?’ Glaring first at the instruments, then at Hollis. ‘We’re supposed to think Clapton’ll drop by? We’re supposed to think they want us to jam after we’ve had our sushi?’
Heidi’s distaste for trickiness in decor, Hollis knew, was actually an extension of her dislike of art in general. The daughter of an Air Force technician, she was the only woman Hollis had ever known who enjoyed welding, but only for the purpose of repairing something essential that was actually broken.
Hollis looked at the no-name wooden guitar. ‘Hootenanny time. I think they’re referencing pre-Beatles Venice. Beach.’
‘"Referencing." Laurence says he’s referencing Hitchcock.’ She made it sound sexually transmissible.
Hollis hadn’t met Laurence yet, and neither expected nor wanted to, and hadn’t seen Heidi since shortly after the Curfew’s cessation. Heidi’s unexpected appearance here, and now this close-up look at Starck’s Boy Scouts of America beatnik jazz tableau, were bringing up all the pain of Jimmy for her. It was as if she expected him to be there, as if he should be there, as if he actually were there, just out of focus, or around some corner. Hadn’t spiritualists arranged instruments this way, in their séance parlors? Though of these four, the electric bass, Jimmy’s instrument, was the only one you couldn’t just pick up and play, were you determined to. No cord, no amp, no speaker. What had happened to Jimmy’s Pignose, she wondered.
‘He came to see me, a week before he died,’ Heidi said, causing Hollis to start. ‘He’d been to that place outside of Tucson, done the twenty-eight days. Said he was going to meetings.’
‘That was here?’
‘Yeah. Laurence and I were just hooking up. I didn’t introduce them. He didn’t feel right, Jimmy. To me, I mean.’ That aspect of Heidi that Hollis was always surprised to remember she was fond of looked out for an instant, from behind her brusqueness, something childlike and startled, then vanished. ‘You were in New York, when he died?’
‘Yes. But not upstate. I was in the city, but I had no idea he’d come back. I hadn’t seen him for almost a year.’
‘He owed you money.’
Hollis looked at her. ‘Yes. He did. I’d almost forgotten that.’
‘He told me about it, borrowing that five thousand from you, in Paris, at the end of the tour.’
‘He always told me he intended to pay it back, but I didn’t see how that was likely to happen.’
‘I haven’t known how to get in touch with you,’ Heidi said, hands in the pockets of her blazer. ‘I supposed you’d turn up eventually. Now here you are. I’m sorry I didn’t get it to you sooner.’
‘Get what?’
Heidi drew a frayed white letter-sized envelope from her blazer pocket and handed it to her. ‘Fifty hundreds. Just the way he gave them to me.’
Hollis saw her own initials in faint red ballpoint, upper-left corner. Her breath caught. She forced herself to sigh. Not knowing what else to do with it, she put the envelope atop the carton and looked over it at Heidi. ‘Thanks. Thanks for keeping it for me.’
‘It was important to him. I didn’t feel like anything else he was talking about really was. The place in Arizona, the recovery program, some offer he’d had to produce, in Japan… But he wanted to be sure you got your money back, and I guess that giving it to me was one way to do that. For one thing’ – she narrowed her eyes – ‘once he’d told me he owed you, he knew I wouldn’t give it back to him to spend on smack.’
