Spook Country

What she needed, she knew, however belatedly, was a second career. Helping Hubertus Bigend exercise his curiosity wasn’t going to be it, and neither, she knew absolutely, was anything else Blue Ant might offer her. She had always, she’d reluctantly come to know, wanted to write. During the Curfew’s heyday, she’d frequently suspected that she was one of very few singers who spent a certain part of every interview wishing she were on the other side of the microphone. Not that she wanted to be interviewing musicians. She was fascinated by how things worked in the world, and why people did them. When she wrote about things, her sense of them changed, and with it, her sense of herself. If she could do that and pay the grocery bills, the ASCAP check could pay the rent, and she’d see where that could go.

She had, during the Curfew days, written a few pieces for Rolling Stone, a few more for Spin. With Inchmale, she’d written the first in-depth history of the Mopars, their mutual favorite sixties garage band, though they hadn’t been able to find anyone willing to pay them to publish it. In the end, though, it had run in Jardine’s record store’s in-house magazine, its publication one of the few things she’d gotten out of that particular investment.

Inchmale, she guessed, was sitting up in business class, headed for New York, reading the Economist, a magazine he read exclusively on airplanes, swearing that on arrival he promptly and invariably forgot every word.

She sighed. Let go, she told herself, though she had no idea of what.

Alberto’s virtual monument to Helmut Newton appeared, in her mind’s eye. Silver-nitrate girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny.

“Let go,” she said, aloud, and fell asleep.

NO BORDERS of glare edged the multiple layers of drapes, when she woke. Already evening. She lay there in her sheet-tube, no longer needing it in the same way. The edge of her anxiety had receded, not quite past the horizon but sufficient to have restored her curiosity.

Where was Bobby Chombo, now? Had he been hauled off, along with his equipment, by the Department of (as Inchmale called it) Homemade Security? Charged (or not) with dicking around with some scheme to smuggle weapons of mass destruction? Something about the quietly deep peculiarity of those two cleaners led her to think not. Rather, she thought, he’d done a ru

Somewhere, she thought, looking up at the almost invisible whiteness of the darkened room’s ceiling, there was, supposedly, the container. A long, rectangular box of…were they made of steel? Yes, she decided, steel. She had had carnal knowledge of an Irish architect in one, on his rural property in Derry. He’d converted it into a studio. Oversized portholes cut with a torch, glass framed in with plywood. Definitely steel. His had been insulated originally for refrigeration, she remembered him telling her; the simpler ones too chilly, prone to condensation of human breath.

She’d never really thought about them, before. You glimpsed them from freeways, sometimes, stacked tightly as Odile’s robotic Lego. An aspect of contemporary reality so common as to remain unconsidered, unquestioned. Almost everything, she supposed, traveled in them now. Not raw materials, like coal or grain, but manufactured things. She remembered news items about them being lost at sea, in storms. Breaking open. Thousands of Chinese rubber duckies bobbing gaily along the great currents. Or sneakers. Something about hundreds of left sneakers washing up on the beach, the rights having been shipped separately to prevent pilferage. And someone else, on a yacht in the harbor at Ca

She seemed to have cycled through most of the fear she’d felt, before. Curiosity hadn’t replaced it entirely, but she had to admit she was curious. One of the scary things about Bigend, she supposed, was that with him you stood an actual chance of finding some things out. And then where would you be? Were there things that were, in themselves, deeply problematic to learn? Definitely, though it would depend on who knew you knew them, she decided.

But then the small dry sound of an envelope being slid under the door, familiar from her life on tour, suddenly triggered, as it always had, the atavistic mammalian fear of nest invasion.

She turned on a light.

The envelope, when she retrieved it from the carpet, contained a color printout, on unexceptional paper, of a photograph of the white truck, parked beside the loading bay of Bobby Chombo’s rented factory.

She turned it over, finding, inscribed in Bigend’s vaguely cuneiform hand: “I’m in the lobby. Let’s talk. H.”

Curiosity. Time she satisfied some. And time, she knew, to decide whether or not she was willing to go on with this.

She went into the bathroom, to ready herself to meet Bigend again.

39. TOOLMAKER

M ilgrim remembered Union Square from twenty years before, when it had been a place of broken benches and litter, where a corpse might go unremarked amid the huddled and unmoving bodies of the homeless. It had been a flagrant drug bazaar, in those days, when Milgrim himself had had no need of such a place. But now it was Barnes & Noble, Circuit City, Whole Foods, Virgin, and he, Milgrim, had gone equally far, it sometimes seemed, in the opposite direction. Addicted, not to put too fine a point on it, to substances countering a tension at the core of his being; something wound too tightly, perpetually threatening to collapse his person; imploding, as though a Buckminster Fuller tensegrity structure contained one element that perpetually tightened itself counter to the balance of forces required to sustain it.

That was the experiential nature of the thing, though he was still capable, in the abstract, of considering the possibility that the core anxiety as he knew it today was in part an artifact of the substance.

Be that as it may, he decided, as Brown parked the silver Corolla on the south side of East Seventeenth, just short of Union Square West, the extra dose of Japanese pharmaceutical he’d treated himself to had certainly brightened things up, not to mention the unexpectedly fine weather.

Could Brown park here, Milgrim wondered. It didn’t look like it, but after a