Inchmale said that the Curfew had been built on the literal sonic foundation of Heidi’s stubbornness and militant lack of imagination, but that knowing that had never made it any easier to get along with her, and that that had been true from the very start. Hollis had always thought she’d agreed with that, but just now it seemed more viscerally true than she’d ever felt it to be, before.
‘I’m out of here,’ Heidi said, giving Hollis’s shoulder a quick squeeze, a really exceptional display of warmth, for her.
‘Goodbye… Laura.’
Watching her march back across the lobby, past the cruciform settee and out of sight.
49 Rotch
Odile sat in the white armchair with the white robot on its back in her lap, poking a white Mondrian pencil into its mechanism of plastic gears and black rubber bands. ‘They break, these thing.’
‘Who made it?’ Hollis asked, from her own chair. Legs folded beneath her bathrobe. They were drinking room-service coffee. Nine in the morning, after what for Hollis had been a surprisingly undisturbed night.
‘Sylvia Rotch,’ Odile said, levering with her pencil. Something clicked. ‘Bon,’ said Odile.
‘Rotch? How do you spell that?’ Hollis’s own white pencil, poised.
‘R-O-I-G,’ managed Odile, who struggled with the letters’ English pronunciation.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Catalan,’ said Odile, bending to put the robot right side up on the carpet. ‘Is difficult.’
Hollis wrote it down. Roig. ‘The poppies, are they characteristic of her work?’
‘She only does the poppies,’ said Odile, eyes huge beneath her smooth, serious brow. ‘She fills the entire Mercat des Flores with the poppies. The old flower market.’
‘Yes,’ said Hollis, putting down her pencil and pouring herself fresh coffee. ‘When you left your message, you mentioned that you wanted to talk about Bobby Chombo.’
‘Fer-gus-son,’ said Odile, making it three distinct syllables.
‘Ferguson?’
‘His name is Robert Fer-gus-son. He is Canadian. Shombo, it is his art name.’
Hollis took that in over a sip of coffee. ‘I didn’t know that. Do you think Alberto knows that?’
Odile shrugged, in that complexly French way that seemed to require a slightly different skeletal structure. ‘I doubt it. I know because my boyfriend worked in a gallery in Vancouver. Do you know it?’
‘The gallery?’
‘Vancouver! It is beautiful.’
‘Yes,’ Hollis agreed, though actually the most she’d seen of the place had been their rooms at the Four Seasons and the inside of their rather too-small venue, a repurposed second-story Deco taxi-dance hall on a weirdly traffic-free midtown artery full of theaters. Jimmy had been having a rough time. She’d stayed with him constantly. Not a good time.
‘My boyfriend, he knew Bobby as a DJ.’
‘He’s Canadian?’
‘My boyfriend is French.’
‘I mean Bobby.’
‘Of course he is Canadian. Fer-gus-son.’
‘He knew him well? Your boyfriend, I mean?’
‘He buy E from him,’ said Odile.
‘Was that before he went to Oregon to work on GPSW projects?’
‘I don’t know. Yes, I think. Three years? In Paris, my boyfriend sees Bobby’s photo, an opening in New York, Dale Cusak, his memories of Natalie, do you know it?’
‘No,’ said Hollis.
‘Bobby does the geohacking for Cusak. My boyfriend tells me this is Robert Fer-gus-son.’
‘Can you be sure, though?’
‘Yes. Some other artists, here, they know he is Canadian. It is not so much of a secret, perhaps.’
‘But Alberto doesn’t know?’
‘Not everyone does. Everyone need Bobby. To work in this new medium. He is the best, for this. But a recluse. Those who know him before, they become very careful. They don’t say what Bobby does not want.’
‘Odile, do you know anything about Bobby’s having… moved, recently?’
‘Yes,’ said Odile, gravely. ‘His e-mail bounce. Servers aren’t there. Artists cannot contact him for works in progress. They are concern.’
‘Alberto told me. Do you know where he might have gone?’
‘He is Shombo.’ She picked up her coffee. ‘He may be anywhere. Ollis, will you come to Silverlake with me? To visit Beth Barker?’
Hollis considered it. Odile was an underutilized asset. Definitely, if her boyfriend (ex?) actually knew Bobby Chombo-Ferguson. ‘She’s the one with the virtually annotated apartment?’
‘Eeparespatial tagging,’ corrected Odile.
God help me, thought Hollis.
Her cell rang. ‘Yes?’
‘Pamela. Mainwaring. Hubertus asked me to tell you that it looks as though they’re going to Vancouver.’
Hollis looked across at Odile. ‘Does he know that Bobby is Canadian?’
‘Actually,’ said Pamela Mainwaring, ‘yes.’
‘I’ve only just learned.’
‘Had you discussed his background with Hubertus?’
Hollis thought about it. ‘No.’
‘There you are, then. He suggests you go. To Vancouver.’
‘When?’
‘If you left immediately, you might make Air Canada’s one o’clock.’
‘When’s the latest?’
‘Eight tonight.’
‘Book for two, then,’ she said. ‘Henry and Richard. I’ll call you back.’
‘Done,’ said Pamela, and was gone.
‘Ollis,’ said Odile, ‘what is that?’
‘Can you come to Vancouver for a few days, Odile? Tonight. Entirely on Node’s ticket. Your flights, hotel, any expenses.’
Odile’s eyebrows went up. ‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know, Ollis, Node pays to bring me here, pays for le Standard…’
‘There you go, then. How about it?’
‘Certainly,’ said Odile, ‘but why?’
‘I want you to help me find Bobby.’
‘I will try, but…’ Odile demonstrated her French shrugging anatomy.
‘Excellent,’ said Hollis.
76 Location shoot
Having dropped Tito and driven on, not far at all along this strip of low-lying auto-body repairs and marine supplies, Garreth turned right, into the parking lot of what seemed to be a much taller building, one built on an entirely different scale. Behind it, they pulled in beside a pair of shiny new Dumpsters and a row of content-specific recycling bins. The Dumpsters, she saw, were covered in runny silk-screened multiples of photographic images. She smelled commercial art.
‘We’re location scouts,’ he said, taking an orange cardboard PRODUCTION placard from between the seats and putting it on the dash.
‘What picture?’
‘Untitled,’ he said, ‘but it actually doesn’t have that shabby a budget. Not even by Hollywood standards.’ He got out, so she did the same.
And was stunned to discover the brilliantly floodlit vastness of the port, right there, past twelve feet of chain-link and some railroad tracks. The lights were like the lights on a playing field, but taller. A grimly artificial daylight. Towering rows of concrete cylinders, smoothly conjoined, like abstract sculptures. Grain storage, she guessed. Some other, much more high-tech sculptor, had employed huge, strangely ephemeral-looking black tanks, one of which was steaming, cauldron-like, in the cool air. Beyond these, and far taller, were the titanic Constructivist cranes she’d glimpsed on her drive over. Between the tracks and these large-scale sculptures were windowless geometrics in corrugated metal, and a great many shipping containers, stacked like the blocks of some unusually orderly child. She imagined Bobby’s wireframe container suspended above it all, invisible, like Alberto’s fallen River on the sidewalk below the Viper Room.
It generated white noise, this place, she guessed, on some confusingly vast scale. Iron ambients, perceived in the bone. A day here and you’d stop noticing it.
She turned, looking up at the building he’d parked behind, and was again startled by scale. Eight tall stories, its footprint broad and deep enough to allow its mass to be read as a cube. The scale of an older Chicago industrial building, alien here.
‘Live-work space,’ he said, opening the van’s rear doors. ‘Studio rental.’ He took out the bungee-wrapped dolly, unhooking them, unfolding and extending it. Then the long gray case, which he lay carefully on the pavement beside the dolly. He wasn’t moving too quickly, she thought, but he was moving just as quickly as he could without actually moving too quickly. ‘Would you mind carrying this tripod, and the bag?’ He got a solid grip on the black case, grunting softly as he turned with it and lowered it onto the dolly. He put the gray case on top of it, angled against the extended handle, and began snapping it all together with bungees.
‘What’s in it?’ she asked, meaning the canvas bag, as she pulled the folded tripod out and put it under her arm.
‘A spotting scope. And an apron.’
She picked it up by its canvas handles. ‘Heavy apron.’
He closed and locked the van’s rear doors, bent to grasp the dolly’s handle.
She looked back at the container stacks, thinking of Bigend’s pirate story. Some of them were close enough to read the names of companies. YANG MING. CONTSHIP.
He hauled the loaded dolly up an incline, to a double door that reminded her of Bobby’s factory. She followed him, the heavy canvas bag bumping against her knee, as he used one of a ring of several keys to open one of the doors.
It swung shut behind her, locking, as she entered. Brown ceramic tile floor, crisp white walls, good light fixtures. He was turning another key, this one in a steel elevator panel. He pushed a button, which lit. Wide enameled doors jolted open, revealing a room-sized elevator walled with splintery, unpainted plywood. ‘Serious freight,’ he said, approvingly, wheeling the dolly in, the gray and the black cases bound with black bungees. She put the canvas bag down on the paint-spotted floor of the elevator, beside it. He pushed a button. The doors closed and they began to rise.
‘I loved the Curfew, when I was in college,’ he said. ‘Still do, I mean, but you know what I mean.’
‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘Why did you break up?’
‘Bands are like marriages. Or maybe only good ones are. Who knows why a good one works, let alone why it stops working.’
The elevator stopped, its doors opening to reveal more of the brown tile. She followed him along a white corridor.
‘Have you been here before?’ she asked.
‘No.’ He parked the dolly beside a door and got out his keys. ‘I sent a friend to negotiate an evening’s rental. She’s in film production here, knows what to say. They think we’re scouting it for a night shoot, checking angles.’ He turned the key. ‘But we really are checking angles, so keep your fingers crossed.’ He opened the door and pulled the dolly inside. She followed. He found a light switch.
A tall, partially lofted white space, lit by halogen fixtures strung like stainless-steel clothespins along taut high cables. Someone worked here in glass, she saw. Massive fist-thick slabs of green-edged glass, some of them the size of doors, were racked like CDs in raggedly padded constructions of dull galvanized pipe. There were corrugated foil ducts, HEPA filters, exhaust fans. Live-work didn’t strike her as so attractive, if the work involved ground glass. She put the heavy bag down on a workbench, propped the tripod beside it, and scratched her ribs, under her jacket, thinking of ground glass.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, picking up the tripod, ‘while I play director of photography.’ He crossed to a wide, steel-mullioned window and quickly set up the tripod. ‘Could you open the bag, please, and bring the scope?’ She did, finding a sort of thickly truncated gray telescope atop smooth thick folds of pale blue plastic. She brought it to him, watched as he mounted it on the tripod, removed the black lens caps, and peered through it, making adjustments. He whistled. ‘Oh. Dear. Fuck.’ He whistled. ‘Pardon me.’
‘What?’
‘Very nearly buggered. By that roof peak there. Look.’
She squinted through the scope.
The turquoise container seemed to float, just above the slanted metal roof of a windowless building. She assumed it must be stacked atop others, the way they did that.
‘Shit out of luck, if that roof were a foot taller,’ he said. ‘We’d no idea.’ He was bending over the dolly, unhooking the bungees now. He carried the long case to the workbench and carefully put it down, beside the canvas bag. He returned to the dolly, which lay on the floor now, the black case on top of it. He knelt and took something iPod-sized and yellow from his jacket pocket. He held it near the case, pressed something, then brought it closer, reading a screen.
‘What’s that?’
‘Dosimeter. Russian. Surplus. Excellent value.’
‘What did you just do?’
‘Radiation count. All good.’ He smiled at her, from where he knelt on the floor.
She was suddenly self-conscious, watching him. She glanced around, noting a zippered white tarp taped so that it sealed off the section under the loft. Pretending interest in this, she walked over and partially undid the white nylon zipper, a six-foot fly that curved to one side, near the bottom. She stuck her head through.
Into someone’s life. A woman’s. The contents of a small apartment had been shoehorned into this space. Bed, dresser, suitcases, bookcases, clothes sagging on a spring-loaded rod. Someone’s childhood staring out from a shelf, in stuffed acrylic fur. A lidded paper Starbucks cup forgotten on the corner of the Ikea dresser. The light, through the white tarp, was diffuse and milky. She felt suddenly guilty. Withdrew her head, zipped up.
He’d opened the long gray case.
It contained a rifle. Or some Surrealist’s take on one. Its wooden stock, in deliriously grained tropical hardwood, was biomorphic, counterintuitive somehow, like something from a Max Ernst landscape. The barrel, which she assumed must be blue steel, like the other metal parts, was encased in a long tube of lustrous gray alloy that reminded her of expensive European kitchenware. Like a rolling pin by Cuisinart. But still, somehow, quite undeniably a rifle, one with a scope, and something else slung beneath its Cuisinart muzzle.
He was unfolding a small black cloth bag that seemed to have its own internal plastic framework.
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘Catches the shells, as they’re ejected,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said, ‘that,’ indicating the gun.
‘Thirty-caliber. Ten-twist, four-groove barrel.’
‘He told me you weren’t going to kill anybody.’ Behind him, through the window, she saw the glassy black tanks, so weirdly fragile-looking, with their ragged plumes of steam. What would happen if he shot them?
Her cell rang.
Backing away from him, she fumbled in her purse for it, pulling it out with the scrambler dangling from its stub of cable. ‘Hollis Henry.’
‘Ollie’s outside,’ said Bigend.
Garreth was staring at her, still holding the black cartridge bag, like some esoteric piece of Victorian mourning equipment.
She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
‘We lost you shortly after you left the car,’ Bigend said. ‘It’s still where you left it. Then you came back on, headed north on Clark. Are you safe?’
Garreth tilted his head, raised his eyebrows.
She looked at the dangling scrambler, realizing that it must have another of Pamela’s GPS units in it. Bastard.
