Spook Country

“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 Bladeru

“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. “Hootena

“‘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 stubbor

“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.