Spook Country (33 page)

“Yes,” said the old man, as the light changed and the truck and container crossed the intersection, up Clark and out of sight, “it is.”

A nd you’re writing your thesis on Baptists, Mr. Milgrim?” Mrs. Meisenhelter set a two-slice silver toast-rack on the table.

“Anabaptists,” Milgrim corrected. “These are really delicious scrambled eggs.”

“I use water, rather than butter,” she said. “The pan is a little more trouble to clean, but I prefer them that way. Anabaptists?”

“They do come into it, yes,” Milgrim said, breaking his first piece of toast, “though really I’m concentrating on revolutionary messianism.”

“Georgetown, you say?”

“Yes.”

“That’s in Washington.”

“It is.”

“We’re delighted to have a scholar with us,” she said, though as far as he knew she managed this bed-and-breakfast on her own, and he seemed to be the only guest.

“I’m happy to have found such a quiet and pleasant place,” he said. And he was. He’d wandered through a deserted Chinatown, into what Mrs. Meisenhelter told him was the city’s oldest residential neighborhood. Not a very affluent one, that was evident, but it was also evident that that was starting to change. A place in the process of doing what Union Square had done, he guessed. Mrs. Meisenhelter’s bed-and-breakfast was part of that transition. If she could get guests in to help her pay for it, she might do very well, later, when things had gone upscale.

“Do you have plans for the day, Mr. Milgrim?”

“I have to see to my lost luggage,” he said. “If it hasn’t turned up, I’ll need to do a little shopping.”

“I’m sure they’ll find it, Mr. Milgrim. If you’ll excuse me, I have to see to the laundry.”

When she had gone, Milgrim finished his toast, carried his breakfast things to the sink, rinsed them, and went up to his room, the thick flat sheaf of hundreds like an oddly shaped paperback in the left side pocket of his Jos. A. Banks trousers. It was the only thing he’d kept from the purse, aside from the phone, a small LED flashlight, and a pair of Korean-made nail-clippers.

The rest, including whatever that was that the phone had been plugged into, he’d deposited in a red mailbox. She hadn’t had any Canadian cash, the handsome, vaguely familiar-looking woman on the New York State driver’s license, and credit cards were more trouble than they were worth.

He needed to buy a loupe today, and a small ultraviolet light. A currency-testing pen, if he could find one. The bills looked good, but he needed to make sure. He’d already seen two signs declining American hundreds.

But first the secret flagellants of Thuringia, he decided, sitting on the edge of the candlewick bedspread and loosening the laces of his shoes.

His book was in the drawer of the bedside table, along with the phone, his U.S. Government pen, the flashlight, and nail-clippers. His place in the book was marked with the only scrap of the envelope he’d kept, the upper left-hand corner, marked “HH” in faint red ballpoint. It seemed part of something, somehow.

He remembered getting on the bus, the night before, with the purse under his arm, beneath his jacket. He’d already gotten change, at the Princeton, as planned earlier, had inquired about buses and fares, and had had exactly the right amount ready, in unfamiliar, oddly blank-looking coins.

He’d sat, almost the only passenger, midway back, by a window, while his hand, as stealthy as if expecting attack, had explored what at first had seemed the very ordinary and unpromising reaches of the purse.

Now, rather than picking up the book, he picked up the phone. It had been on, when he’d found it, and he’d immediately turned it off. Now he turned it on. A New York number. Roaming. Almost a full charge. The phone book seemed to list mostly New York numbers as well, by first names only. The ring was set for silent. He set it on vibrate, to be sure that it was working. It was.

He was about to silence it again when it began to vibrate in his hand.

His hand opened it and put it to his ear.

“Hello?” he could hear someone, a man, saying, “Hello?”

“You have the wrong number,” he said, in Russian.

“This is definitely the correct number,” said the man on the other end, in accented but serviceable Russian.

“No,” said Milgrim, still in Russian, “it is the wrong number.”

“Where are you?”

“Thuringia.” He closed the phone, immediately opening it again and turning it off.

His hand opted for the morning’s second Rize, entirely reasonable under the circumstances.

He put the phone back in the drawer. It didn’t seem a good thing to have kept, now. He’d dispose of it later.

He was opening his book, ready to pick up where he’d left off on the story of Margrave Frederick the Undaunted, when he suddenly saw St. Marks Place, that past October. He’d been talking with Fish, in front of a used-record store, the sort of place that actually sold records, the vinyl kind, and through the window, in black and white, a woman’s face had regarded him from the wall. And for an instant, settling back on the pillows, he knew who that was, and that he also knew her in some different way.

But then he began to read.

I t’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

Document ID: e73e4ac7-6d00-4cf0-813b-8dd6f9da565e

Document version: 1

Document creation date: 17 December 2009

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