Spook Country (11 page)

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.”

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.

B rown left Milgrim in the Korean’s laundry for a very long time. Eventually a younger Korean, perhaps the proprietor’s son, arrived with a brown-bagged Chinese meal, which he presented to Milgrim with no comment. Milgrim cleared a space among the magazines on the plywood coffee table and unpacked his lunch. Plain rice, boneless chicken nuggets in red dye no. 3, fluorescent-green vegetable segments, finely sliced brown mystery meat. Milgrim preferred the plastic fork to the chopsticks. If you were in prison, he encouraged himself, you’d find this food a treat. Unless you were in a Chinese prison, some less-cooperative part of himself suggested, but he worked his way through it all, methodically. With Brown, it was best to eat what you could when the opportunity presented itself.

As he ate, he thought about the twelfth-century heresy of the Free Spirit. Either God was everything, believed the brethren of the Free Spirit, or God was nothing. And God, to them, was very definitely everything. There was nothing that wasn’t God, and indeed how could there be? Milgrim had never been one for metaphysics, but now the combination of his captivity, medication on demand, and this text was starting to reveal the pleasure to be had from metaphysical contemplation. Particularly if you were contemplating these Free Spirit guys, who seemed to have been a combination of Charlie Manson and Hannibal Lecter.

And insofar as everything was equally of God, they taught, those who were most in touch with the Godness in every last thing would make it a point to do anything at all, particularly anything still forbidden by those who hadn’t yet gotten the Free Spirit message. To which end they went around having sex with anybody they could get to hold still for it, or not, as the case might be—rape being viewed as particularly righteous, and murder equally so. It was like a secret religion of mutually empowered sociopaths, and Milgrim thought it was probably the gnarliest single example of human behavior he’d ever heard of. Someone like Manson, for instance, simply wouldn’t have been able to get any traction, had he landed among the brothers and sisters of the Free Spirit. Probably, Milgrim guessed, Manson would’ve hated it. What good would it be to be Charlie Manson in a whole society of serial killers and rapists, each one convinced that he or she was directly manifesting the Holy Spirit?

But the other aspect of the Free Spirit that fascinated him, and this applied to the whole text, was how these heresies would get started, often spontaneously generating around some single medieval equivalent of your more outspoken homeless mumbler. Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.

The rattle of the door distracted him from these thoughts. He looked up from the remains of his lunch and witnessed the entrance of an extremely large black man, very tall and very wide, who wore a stout thigh-length black leather coat, double-breasted and belted, and a black wool watch cap, pulled low around his ears. The watch cap put Milgrim in mind of the knitted woolen headgear Crusaders wore beneath their helmets, and that in turn made the leather barnstormer resemble a sort of elongated cuirass. A black knight stepping into the laundry from the early evening cold.

Milgrim wasn’t sure that there had actually been black knights, but couldn’t a Moor have converted, some African giant, and been made a knight in the service of Christ? Compared to that Free Spirit, it seemed the likeliest of scenarios.

Now the black knight had stepped up to the Korean’s counter, and was asking him if he could clean furs. The Korean couldn’t, he said, and the knight nodded, accepting that. The knight looked over and met Milgrim’s gaze. Milgrim nodded too, unsure why.

The knight left. Through the window, Milgrim saw him join a second and remarkably similar black man, in yet another black, double-breasted, belted leather coat. They turned south, down Lafayette, in their matching black wool skullcaps, and instantly were gone.

As Milgrim tidied away his empty foam bowl and his foil dishes, he experienced a nagging sensation of having failed to pay adequate attention to something. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember what that might have been.

It had been a very long day.