Spook Country (4 page)

H ollis 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 work-arounds. 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.

“Accident on Sunset. I’m at the Mondrian.”

“Do they still use a casting director to hire the bellmen?”

“Looks like it.”

“Is Bigend paying?”

“Absolutely,” she said. Very close, she heard another squeal of brakes, and then the siren, which had gotten very loud, died.

“Can’t be all bad,” he said.

“No,” she said, “it can’t.” Could it?

“We miss you. You should stay in touch.”

“I will, Reg. Thanks. And thank Angelina.”

“Goodbye.”

“’Bye, then.”

Another siren was approaching, as she hung up. An ambulance this time, she guessed. She decided that she wasn’t going to look. It hadn’t sounded too bad, but she really didn’t want any bad at all, right then.

With a perfectly sharpened Mondrian pencil she wrote BIGEND in block caps in the dark, on a square block of embossed white Mondrian notepaper.

She’d Google him later.

S he watched Alberto trying to explain the helmet and the laptop to Virgin security. These two blandly uniformed functionaries didn’t look like they were much into the locative. At this point, she had to admit, neither was she.

Alberto had some kind of Jim Morrison piece he wanted to show her, up on Wonderland Avenue, and that just wasn’t going to work for her. Even if it somehow managed to bypass the Lizard King’s iconic churlishness, and focus on, say, Ray Manzarek’s calliope pieces, she still didn’t want to have to write about invisible virtual monuments to the Doors, any of them. Though as Inchmale had several times pointed out, back when they themselves had been in a band, Manzarek and Krieger had worked wonders, neutralizing the big guy’s sodden crankiness.

Standing out here in the evening hydrocarbon, in this retail complex on the corner of Crescent Heights and Sunset, watching Alberto Corrales argue that she, Hollis Henry, really should be allowed to view his virtual rendition of Scott Fitzgerald’s heart attack, she felt a sort of detachment descend, some extra slack-cutting—due, quite possibly, to her new haircut, executed to her complete satisfaction by a charming and talented young man in the Mondrian’s salon.

It hadn’t been fatal, Fitzgerald’s heart attack. Missing Alberto’s depiction of it wouldn’t be fatal for her article, either. Or missing most of it, as she had in fact been afforded a brief glimpse: a man in a tweed jacket, clutching his chest at a chromed Moderne counter, a pack of Chesterfields in his right hand. The Chesterfields, she decided, had been in slightly higher resolution than the rest of the place, which had seemed interestingly detailed, down to the unfamiliar shapes of the vehicles out on Sunset, but Virgin security’s unhappiness with anyone donning a mask or masklike visor in the world music aisle had put a stop to that, with Hollis quickly handing the visor-rig to Alberto and hustling straight on out of there.

Odile might have been cute enough to charm these guards, but she’d succumbed to an attack of asthma, she’d said, brought on either by the airborne biomass of the previous night’s storm or by the near critical mass of aromatherapy product to be variously encountered in the Standard.

And still this calm descended on Hollis, oddly; this unexpected clarity, this moment perhaps of what the late Jimmy Carlyle, the Curfew’s Iowan bass player, prior to departing this vale of heroin, had called serenity. Where in (this calm) she knew herself to be that woman of the age and the history that were hers, here, tonight, and was more or less okay with it, all of it, at least up till Node had come calling, the week before, with an offer she could neither refuse nor, really, understand.

If Node was, as the youthful but metallic Rausch had described it, a technology magazine with a cultural twist (a technology magazine, as she thought of it, with interesting trousers), did it really follow that she, former vocalist for the Curfew and sometime obscure journalist, would be hired for seriously good money to write about this witheringly geeky art trend?

But no, said something at the still heart of her moment’s calm. No indeed. And the core anomaly here was embodied, revealed almost certainly, in Rausch having injected that apparent order to meet Bobby Chombo, whoever or whatever he might be, and having met him, to watch for something to do with shipping, “patterns of global shipping.” That, she saw, was it, whatever “it” in this case might be, and likely had nothing to do with Odile Richard and the rest of these people.

And then, her gaze on the passing stream of Sunset, she saw the Curfew’s drummer, Laura “Heidi” Hyde, driving what Hollis, never really a car person, took to be a smallish SUV of German extraction. If further confirmation had been needed, she knew that Heidi, with whom she hadn’t spoken in almost three years, lived in Beverly Hills now, and worked in Century City, and had almost certainly been glimpsed, just now, heading home at day’s end.

“Fascist dipshits,” Alberto protested, flustered, stepping up beside her with his laptop under one arm, the visor under the other. Somehow he seemed too serious-looking to say something like that, and for an instant she imagined him as a character in a some graphically simplified animation.

“It’s okay,” she assured him. “Really, it’s okay. I got a look. I saw it. Got the general idea.”

He blinked at her. Was he on the verge of tears?

“BOBBY CHOMBO,” she said, when they were settled in Hamburger Hamlet, to which she had had Alberto drive them from Crescent Heights.

Concern creased Alberto’s brow.

“Bobby Chombo,” she repeated.

He nodded, grimly. “I use him for all my pieces. Brilliant.”

She was looking at the crazily elaborated black-letter work down the outside of both his forearms. She could make absolutely no sense of it. “Alberto, what does that actually say, on your arms?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“It was designed by an artist in Tokyo. He does these alphabets, abstracts them till they’re completely unreadable. The actual sequence was generated randomly.”

“Alberto, what do you know about Node, the magazine I’m writing for?”

“European? New?”

“Did you know Odile, before she turned up to do this?”

“No.”

“Had you ever heard of her, before?”

“Yes. She curates.”

“And she got in touch with you, about getting together with me, for Node?”

“Yes.” Their server arrived with two Coronas. She picked hers up, clinked the neck of his, and drank from the bottle. After a pause he did the same. “Why are you asking me this?”

“I haven’t worked for Node before. I’m trying to get a feel for what they’re doing, how they do things.”

“Why did you ask about Bobby?”

“I’m writing about your art. Why wouldn’t I ask about the tech end?”

Alberto looked uncomfortable. “Bobby,” he began, stopped. “He’s a very private person.”

“He is?”

Alberto looked unhappy. “The vision’s mine, and I build the work, but Bobby hacks it for me. Gets it to work, even indoors. And he gets the routers installed.”

“Routers?”

“At this point, each piece needs its own wireless.”

“Where’s the one for River?”

“I don’t know. The one for the Newton’s in a flower bed. The Fitzgerald’s really complicated, not always there.”

“He wouldn’t want to talk to me?”

“I don’t think he’d like it that you’ve even heard of him.” He frowned. “How did you?”

“My editor at Node, in London, the one supervising the piece? His name is Philip Rausch. He said he thought you’d know him, but probably Odile wouldn’t.”

“She doesn’t.”

“Can you get Bobby to talk with me, Alberto?”

“It’s not…”

“He’s not a Curfew fan?” Something inside her cringed at playing the card.

Alberto giggled. It came bubbling out of his big frame like carbon dioxide. He grinned at her, happily starstruck again. He took another drink. “Actually,” he said, “he does listen to you. The Curfew’s music is something we were able to bond around.”

“Alberto, I like your work. I like what I’ve seen. I look forward to seeing more. Your River Phoenix piece was my first experience of the medium, a powerful one.” His face went very still, expectant. “I need your help, Alberto. I haven’t done a piece like this before. I’m trying to get a feel for how things work at Node, and Node is asking me to talk with Bobby. There’s no reason I should expect you to trust me—”

“I do,” he said, with a remarkably groomly cadence. Then: “I do trust you, Hollis, it’s just…” He winced. “You don’t know Bobby.”

“Tell me. About Bobby.”

He put a forefinger on the white cloth, tracing a line. Crossed it with another, at a right angle. “The GPS grid,” he said.

She felt minute hairs shift, on the small of her back, just above the waistband.

Alberto leaned forward. “Bobby divides his place up into smaller squares, within the grid. He sees everything in terms of GPS gridlines, the world divided up that way. It is, of course, but…” He frowned. “He won’t sleep in the same square twice. He crosses them off, never goes back to one where he’s slept before.”

“You find that strange?” She did, certainly, but had no idea what passed for eccentric, for Alberto.

“Bobby is, well, Bobby. Strange? Definitely. Difficult.”

This wasn’t going where she wanted it to. “I also need to know more about how you make your pieces.” That should do it, she thought. He brightened immediately.

Their burgers arrived. He looked as though he wanted to brush his aside, now.

“I start with a sense of place,” he began. “With event, place. Then I research. I compile photographs. For the Fitzgerald, of course, there were no images of the event, precious little in the way of accounts. But there were pictures of him taken in roughly the same period. Wardrobe notes, haircut. Other photographs. And everything I could find on Schwab’s. And there was a lot on Schwab’s, because it was the most famous drugstore in America. Partly because Leon Schwab, the owner, kept claiming that Lana Turner was discovered there, sitting on a stool at his soda fountain. She used to deny that there was any truth to the story, and it seems like Schwab made it up to get customers into the store. But it got the place photographed for magazines. Lots of detail.”

“And you make the photographs…3-D?” She wasn’t sure how to put it.

“Are you kidding? I model everything.”

“How?”

“I build virtual models, then cover them with skins, textures I’ve sampled, or created myself, usually for that specific piece. Each model has a virtual skeleton, so I can pose and position the figure in its environment. I use digital lights to add shadows and reflections.” He squinted at her, as if trying to decide whether she was really listening. “The modeling is like pushing and pulling clay. I do that over an inner structure of joints—the skeleton, with a spine, shoulders, elbows, fingers. It’s not that different from designing figures for a game. Then I model multiple heads, with slightly different expressions, and combine them.”

“Why?”

“It’s more subtle. The expressions don’t look made-up, if you do that. I color them, then each surface in the model is wrapped with a texture. I collect textures. Some of my textures are real skin, scanned in. The River piece, I couldn’t get the skin right. Finally I sampled a very young Vietnamese girl. It worked. People who knew him, they said so.”

She put her burger down, swallowed. “I didn’t imagine you doing all that. Somehow I thought it would all just…happen? With…technology?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I get that a lot. All the work I have to do, it seems sort of old-fashioned, archaic. I have to position virtual lights, so shadows will be cast correctly. Then there’s a certain amount of ‘fill,’ atmosphere, for the environment.” He shrugged. “The original only exists on the server, when I’m done, in virtual dimensions of depth, width, height. Sometimes I think that even if the server went down, and took my model with it, that that space would still exist, at least as a mathematical possibility, and that the space we live in…” He frowned.

“Yes?”

“Might work the same way.” He shrugged again, and picked up his burger.

You, she thought, are seriously creeping me out.

But she only nodded gravely and picked up her own burger.