‘Scott Fitzgerald’s heart attack,’ suggested Alberto. ‘It’s down the street.’
She looked at the crowded, oversized, frantically ornate letters inked in jailhouse indigo down both his arms, and wondered what they spelled. ‘But he didn’t die then, did he?’
‘It’s in Virgin,’ he said. ‘By the world music.’
After they’d had a look at Alberto’s memorial to Helmut Newton, which involved a lot of vaguely Deco-styled monochrome nudity in honor of its subject’s body of work, she walked back to the Mondrian through that weird, evanescent moment that belongs to every sunny morning in West Hollywood, when some strange perpetual promise of chlorophyll and hidden, warming fruit graces the air, just before the hydrocarbon blanket settles in. That sense of some peripheral and prelapsarian beauty, of something a little more than a hundred years past, but in that moment achingly present, as though the city were something you could wipe from your glasses and forget.
Sunglasses. She’d forgotten to bring any.
She looked down at the sidewalk’s freckling of blackened gum. At the brown, beige, and fibrous debris of the storm. And felt that luminous instant pass, as it always must.
5 Two kinds of empty
Coming back from the Sunrise Market on Broome, just before they closed, Tito stopped to look in the windows of Yohji Yamamoto, on Grand Street.
A few minutes after ten. Grand was completely deserted. Tito looked each way. Not even the yellow of a cab moving in either distance. Then he looked back at the asymmetrical lapels of a sort of cape or buttoned wrap. He saw his own reflection there, dark eyes and dark clothing. In one hand a plastic Sunrise bag, with its nearly weightless burden of instant Japanese noodles in white foam bowls. Alejandro teased him about these, saying he might as well be eating the white bowls, but Tito liked them. Japan was a planet of benign mystery, source of games and anime and plasma TV.
Yohji Yamamoto’s asymmetrical lapels, though, were not a mystery. This was fashion, and he thought he understood it.
What he sometimes struggled with was some understanding that might begin to hold both the costly austerity of the window he stared into now and the equally but differently austere storefronts he remembered from Havana.
There had been no glass in those windows. Behind each crudely articulated metal grating, at night, a single fluorescent tube had cast a submarine light. And nothing on offer, regardless of daytime function: only carefully swept floors and blotched plaster.
He watched his reflection shrug softly, in Yamamoto’s window. He walked on, glad of his thick dry socks.
Where would Alejandro be now? he wondered. Perhaps in the nameless Eighth Avenue bar he favored, below Times Square, its neon announcing TAVERN and nothing more. Alejandro made his gallery contacts meet him there; he enjoyed taking curators and dealers into that reddish twilight, amid sleepy Puerto Rican transvestites and a few hustlers taking their breaks from Port Authority. Tito disliked the place. It seemed to occupy its own reptilian delta of time, a dead-end continuum of watered drinks and low-level anxiety.
Coming into his room, he saw that one of the socks he’d washed earlier had fallen from where he’d left it to dry, on the wheeled rack. He replaced it.
6 Rize
Milgrim was enjoying the superior brightness of the nitrogen-filled optics in Brown’s Austrian-made monocular well enough, but not the smell of Brown’s chewing gum or his proximity in the back of the chilly surveillance van.
The van had been parked on Lafayette, where one of Brown’s people had left it for them. Brown had run a red light to get up here and into position, after his earphone had told him that the IF was headed this way, but now the IF was staring into the window of Yohji Yamamoto, unmoving.
‘What’s he doing?’ Brown took the monocular back. It matched his gun and his flashlight, that same not-color of grayish green.
Milgrim leaned forward, to get a better unassisted view through his spy-hole. The Econoline had half a dozen of these sawn through its sides, each one covered by a screwed-on, move-able scrap of black-painted plastic. These coincided, on the graffiti-tagged exterior, with solid black areas of the various tags. Assuming those were all genuine tags, Milgrim wondered, collected by leaving the van on the street, would the van’s disguise still fool a tagger? How old were those tags? Were they the urban equivalent of using out-of-season vegetation for camouflage? ‘He’s looking in a window,’ Milgrim said, pointlessly and knowing it. ‘Are you going to follow him home now?’
‘No,’ said Brown. ‘He could notice the truck.’
Milgrim had no idea how many people Brown had had watching the IF stock up on Japanese groceries, while they’d entered his place and changed the bug’s battery. This world of people following and watching other people was new to Milgrim, though he supposed he’d always assumed that it was there, somewhere. You saw it in movies and read about it, but you didn’t think about having to breathe someone else’s condensed breath in the back of a cold van.
Now it was Brown’s turn to lean forward, pressing the monocular’s resilient lip against the van’s cold, sweating skin, for a closer view of the IF. Milgrim wondered idly, almost luxuriously, what it might be like to pick something up, just then, and hit Brown in the head with it. He actually glanced around the back of the van, to see what might be available, but there was nothing but the upended plastic milk crates they both squatted on, and a folded tarp.
Brown, as if reading Milgrim’s thoughts, turned suddenly from the eyepiece of the monocular, glaring.
Milgrim blinked, hoping to convey mildness and harmlessness. Which shouldn’t be that hard, as he hadn’t hit anyone in the head since elementary school, and wasn’t likely to now. Though he’d never been held captive before, he reminded himself.
‘Eventually he’ll send or receive something from that room,’ Brown said, ‘and when he does, you’ll translate it.’
Milgrim nodded dutifully.
They checked into the New Yorker, on Eighth Avenue. Adjoining rooms, fourteenth floor. The New Yorker seemed to be on Brown’s list. This was their fifth or sixth time here. Most of Milgrim’s room was taken up by its double bed, which faced a television mounted in a particleboard cabinet. The pixels in the cabinet’s wood-grain veneer were too large, Milgrim thought, as he took off his stolen overcoat and sat on the edge of the bed. That was something he’d started to notice, how you only got the high-resolution stuff in your better places.
Brown came in and did his trick with the two little boxes, one on the door, one on the doorframe. They were that same shade of gray, like the gun and the flashlight and the monocular. He’d do the same with his own door, and all of this, as far as Milgrim knew, so that he, Milgrim, wouldn’t decide to leave while Brown was sleeping. Milgrim had no idea what the boxes did, but Brown had said not to touch the doors when they were up. Milgrim hadn’t.
Brown tossed what Milgrim took to be a four-pack bubble-card of Ativan down on Milgrim’s flowered bedspread and returned to his own room. Milgrim heard Brown’s television come on. He knew that music, now: Fox News.
He glanced toward the bubble-pack. It wasn’t the boxes on the doors that would keep him here.
He picked it up. ‘RIZE,’ it said, there, and ‘5MG,’ and what looked like, yes, Japanese writing. Or the way Japanese looks when they dress it up for packaging.
‘Hello?’ The connecting door was still open, between their rooms. The sound of Brown’s fingers, on his armored laptop, stopped.
‘What?’
‘What is this stuff?’
‘Your medication,’ said Brown.
‘It says "Rize," and there’s Japanese writing on it. It’s not Ativan.’
‘It’s the same fucking thing,’ Brown said, his delivery slowing threateningly. ‘Same DEA Schedule fucking Four narcotic.’
Milgrim looked at the bubble-card.
‘Now shut the fuck up.’
He heard Brown begin to type again.
He sat back down on the bed. Rize? His first impulse was to phone his man in the East Village. He looked at the phone, knowing that that wasn’t on. His second was to ask Brown if he could borrow his laptop, so that he could Google this stuff. The DEA had a page with all the Schedule Four products, foreign brands too. But then, he thought, if Brown was really a fed, he might even be getting this stuff from the DEA. And borrowing Brown’s laptop, he knew, was no more on than using the phone to call Dennis Birdwell.
And he owed Birdwell money, under awkward circumstances. There was that.
He put the bubble-pack on the corner of the nearest bedside table, aligning its sides with the edges, both of which had black arcs where previous guests had let cigarettes burn down. The shape of the burns reminded him of McDonald’s arches. He wondered if Brown was going to order sandwiches soon.
Rize.
7 Buenos Aires
Hollis dreamed she was in London with Philip Rausch, walking fast down Monmouth Street, toward the needle of Seven Dials. She’d never met Rausch, but now, in the way of dreams, he was also Reg Inchmale. It was daytime, but deep in winter, the sky a directionless gray, and suddenly she was cringing beneath a lurid carnival glow, as above them descended all the vast Wurlitzer bulk of the mothership from Close Encounters – a film released when she was seven, and a great favorite of her mother’s – but here now, hugely and somehow able to fit down into the narrowness of Monmouth Street, like some electric element meant to warm reptiles in their cages, as she and Inchmale cowered, mouths agape.
But then this Rausch-Inchmale said, brusquely releasing her hand, that it was after all only a Christmas ornament, however grand, suspended there between hotel to their right and coffee shop to their left. And yes, now she plainly saw the wires supporting it, but a phone was ringing, through the window of a shop nearby, and she saw that this was some sort of field telephone from the Great War, its canvas case smeared with pale clay, as were the rough wool cuffs of Rausch-Inchmale’s trousers –
‘Hello?’
‘Rausch.’
Rausch yourself, she thought, her open cell to her ear. Los Angeles sunlight gnawed at the edges of the Mondrian’s layering of drapes. ‘I was sleeping.’
‘I need to speak with you. The researchers have turned up someone you need to meet. We doubt Odile knows him yet, but Corrales certainly does.’
‘Who is it, that Alberto knows?’
‘Bobby Chombo.’
‘Chombo?’
‘He’s their king of tech-assist, these locative artists. Their geohacker. GPS signals can’t penetrate buildings. He does workarounds. Triangulates off cellular towers, other systems. Very clever.’
‘You want me to meet him?’
‘If you can’t arrange it through Corrales, phone me. We’ll work something from this end.’
He wasn’t asking. She raised her eyebrows in the dark, nodded silently: Yes, boss. ‘Will do.’
There was a pause. ‘Hollis?’
She sat up in the dark, assuming a loosely defensive lotus position. ‘Yes?’
‘When you’re with him, be specially alert to anything that might reference shipping.’
‘Shipping?’
‘Patterns of global shipping. Particularly in light of the sort of geospatial tagging Odile and Corrales are about.’ Another pause. ‘Or iPods.’
‘iPods?’
‘As a means of data transfer.’
‘How some people use them as drives?’
‘Exactly.’
There was something about this, suddenly, that she really didn’t like, and in some entirely new way. She imagined the bed a desert of white sand. Something circling, hidden, beneath its surface. Perhaps the Mongolian Death Worm that had been one of Inchmale’s imaginary pets.
There are times when saying the least you can is the best thing to do, she decided. ‘I’ll ask Alberto.’
‘Good.’
‘Have you taken care of the billing here, yet?’
‘Of course.’
‘Hold on,’ she told him, ‘I’m phoning the desk on the other line.’
‘Give it ten minutes. I’ll just double-check.’
‘Thanks.’
‘We’ve been talking about you, Hollis.’ That vaguest of managerial ‘we’s.’
‘Yes?’
‘We’re very happy with you. How would you feel about a salaried position?’
She sensed the Mongolian Death Worm draw closer, amid the cotton dunes. ‘That’s a big one, Philip. I’ll need to think about it.’
‘Do.’
She closed her phone.
Exactly ten minutes later, she used the room phone to call the desk, receiving confirmation that her bill, all incidentals included, was now on an Amex card in the name of Philip M. Rausch. She had herself switched to the hotel’s salon, found there was an opening within the hour, and booked an appointment for a cut.
It was just after two, which made it just after five in New York, with Buenos Aires two hours later. She pulled up Inchmale’s number on the screen of her cell, but dialed on the room phone. He answered immediately. ‘Reg? Hollis. I’m in Los Angeles. Are you in the middle of dinner?’
‘Angelina’s feeding Willy. How are you?’ Their one-year-old. Angelina was Reg Inchmale’s Argentinian wife, whose maiden name had been Ryan, and whose grandfather had been a ship’s pilot on the Río Paraná. She’d met Inchmale while employed by either Dazed & Confused or another magazine. Hollis had never been able to keep them straight. Angelina knew as much about magazine publishing in London as anyone Hollis could think of.
‘Complicated,’ she admitted. ‘How are you?’
‘Steadily less so. On good days, anyway. I think fatherhood agrees with me. And it’s so, I don’t know, deeply old-school here. They haven’t sandblasted anything yet. It looks the way London used to look. Black with grime. Or New York, come to think.’
‘Can you ask Angelina something for me?’
‘Would you like to speak to her yourself?’
‘No, she’s feeding Willy. Just ask her what, if anything, she knows about a magazine start-up called Node.’
‘Node?’
‘It wants to be like Wired, but they aren’t supposed to say that. I think the money’s Belgian.’
‘They want to interview you?’
‘They’ve offered me a job. I’m on assignment for them, freelancing. I wondered if Angelina would have heard anything.’
‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Have to put this down. Wired into the wall on a curly-cord…’ She heard him rest the handset on a surface. She lowered her own phone and listened to afternoon traffic on Sunset. She had no idea where Odile’s robot had gotten to, but it was quiet.
She heard Inchmale pick up the phone in Buenos Aires.
‘Bigend,’ he said.
From Sunset, she heard brakes, impact, breaking glass. ‘What was that?’
‘Bigend. Like "big" and "end." Advertising magnate.’
The wobble of a car alarm.
‘The one who married Nigella?’
‘That’s Saatchi. Hubertus Bigend. Belgian. Firm’s called Blue Ant.’
‘And?’
Ange says your Node’s a Bigend project, if indeed it’s a magazine. Node’s one of several small firms he has in London. She had some dealings with his agency, when she was on the magazine, now I think about it. Some run-in with them.’ She heard the alarm cut out, and then the wail of an approaching siren. ‘What’s that?’ Inchmale asked.
