Spook Country

“Nine,” Milgrim told him.

“Narrow?”

“Medium.”

The housekeeper made a note of this. “Go,” he said to Milgrim, making a shooing gesture with his notebook, “go, go.”

“No breakfast?”

“Go.”

Milgrim left the kitchen, wondering where Brown might be. He looked into the office-study, where Brown had taken his whiskey the night before. It was furnished like the rest of the house, but with more dark wood and more vertical stripes. And, he saw, it had books. He stepped to the door, peered around, swiftly crossed to what he’d taken for a bookcase. It was one of those pieces where the doors of a cabinet have been covered with the leather spines of antique books. He bent, taking a closer look at the remains of these ski

In the hallway, he examined the housekeeper’s handiwork in a mirror dotted with faux age spots. Tidy. Hyperconventional. A lawyer’s haircut, or a prisoner’s.

He stood on the cool gray marble, at the foot of the slit of stairwell. He clicked his tongue quietly, imagining the sound sucked up the slit.

Where was Brown?

He went upstairs and collected the plastic garbage bag from the bathroom, along with his razor, toothbrush, and toothpaste. He went to the boy’s bedroom, where he added his underpants to the contents of the bag. Naked under the oversized robe, he removed his book from the Paul Stuart coat draped over the ladder-backed chair. He’d helped himself to the coat from the rack in a deli, shortly before Brown had found him. It hadn’t been new when he’d gotten it, already a season old, and it was past cleaning, now. He put the book on the blue desk, picked up the coat, and took it into the closet. He put it on the hanger closest to the boy’s blue blazer. “I’ve brought you a friend,” he whispered. “You don’t have to be frightened anymore.”

He closed the closet door behind him, and was picking up his book, when Brown opened the door from the hall. He looked at Milgrim’s haircut. He handed him a crisp paper bag from McDonald’s, marked by a few translucent spots of grease, picked up the garbage bag, tied a knot in its neck, and left with it.

Grease from the Egg McMuffin dripped on the robe, but Milgrim decided that that was not his problem.

In what he took to be little more than an hour, the housekeeper entered, carrying two paper shopping bags and a black vinyl hanger-bag, all marked JOS. A. BANK.

“That was quick,” Milgrim said.

“McLean,” said the housekeeper, as if that explained it. He dropped the two bags on the bed, and was turning to the closet door with the hanger-bag when Milgrim took it from him.

“Thanks,” Milgrim said.

The man turned and left.

Milgrim opened the hanger-bag and found a black, three-button jacket, wool-poly blend. He laid it on the bed, atop the hanger-bag, and started unpacking one of the shopping bags. He found two pairs of navy-blue cotton briefs, two pairs of medium-weight gray socks, a white sleeveless undershirt, two blue oxford button-downs, and a pair of dark-gray wool trousers with no belt loops, tabs and buttons at either side of the waistband. He remembered Brown having taken his belt, the first day. The other contained a shoebox. In it was a pair of rather sad rubber-soled leather oxfords, generic office-wear. Also a black leather wallet and a plain black nylon carryall.

Milgrim dressed. The shoes, which he thought visibly cheap, actually helped. They made him feel less like he was heading back to boarding school, or joining the FBI.

Brown entered, a blue and black striped tie in his hand. He was wearing a dark-gray suit and white shirt. Milgrim had never seen him in a suit before, and assumed he’d just now removed the tie. “Put this on. We’re taking your picture.” He watched while Milgrim removed his jacket and knotted the tie. He assumed ties were like belts, as far as he was concerned.

“I need an overcoat,” Milgrim said, pulling on his new jacket.

“You have one.”

“You told me to put everything in the bag.”

Brown frowned. “Where we’re going,” Brown said, “you’ll want a raincoat. Downstairs. You’re having your picture taken.”

Milgrim went downstairs, Brown behind him.

53. TO GIVE THEM THE PLEASURE

I nchmale’s cell wasn’t answering. She tried the W, and was told he was no longer there. Was he on his way? Probably. She hated the idea of missing him, although she assumed he intended to be here for a while, if he was going to be producing an album. Vancouver wasn’t that far away, and she didn’t imagine she’d be there very long.

Odile called from the Standard to ask the name of the hotel in Vancouver. She said she wanted to tell her mother, in Paris. Hollis didn’t know. She called Pamela Mainwaring.

“Where are we staying?”

“The flat. I’ve only seen pictures. All glass. Over the water.”

“Hubertus has a flat?”

“The company. No one lives there. We haven’t opened in Canada. We’re starting in Montreal, next year. Hubertus says we need to start there; he says Quebec is an imaginary country.”

“What does that mean?”

“I only work here,” said Pamela. “But we do have people in Vancouver. One of them will meet you and take you to the flat.”

“May I speak with Hubertus?”

“Sorry,” said Pamela, “he’s in a meeting in Sacramento. He’ll ring you when he can.”

“Thanks,” Hollis said.

She looked at the helmet Bigend had sent her. She supposed she’d better take it with her, in case there was locative art in Vancouver. It didn’t seem like something you could safely check through, though, and it was going to be awkward for carry-on.

Before she started packing she called her own mother, in Puerto Vallarta. Her parents wintered there now, but they were a week from coming back to their place in Evanston. She tried to explain what she was doing in Los Angeles, but she wasn’t sure her mother got it. Still very sharp, but increasingly less interested in things she wasn’t already familiar with. She said that Hollis’s father was fine, except for having contracted, in his late seventies, a fierce and uncharacteristic interest in politics. Which her mother didn’t like, she said, because it only made him angry. “He says it’s because it’s never been this bad,” her mother said, “but I tell him it’s only because he never paid it this much attention before. And it’s the Internet. People used to have to wait for the paper, or for the news on television. Now it’s like a tap ru

“It gives him something to think about. You know it’s good for people your age to have interests.”

“You aren’t the one who has to listen to him.”

“Give him my love, and I’ll check on you soon. Either from Canada or when I’m back.”

“Was it Toronto?”

“Vancouver. I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too, dear.”

She went to the window, looked down at the traffic on Sunset. Her parents had never been very comfortable with her singing career. Her mother, in particular, had treated it as though it were some sort of nuisance disease, something nonfatal that nonetheless interfered with your life in serious ways, preventing you having a real job, and for which there was no particular cure, other than simply letting it run its course and hoping for the best. Her mother had seemed to regard any income from singing as a kind of disability pay, something you received for having to put up with the condition. Which hadn’t really been that far off Hollis’s own attitude to art and money, though unlike her mother she knew that you could have the condition yet never qualify for any compensation whatever. If being the kind of singer and writer she’d been had ever proven absolutely too difficult, she was fairly certain, she’d simply have stopped doing it. And perhaps that was really what had happened. The sudden arc of her career, the arc of the Curfew, had taken her completely by surprise. Inchmale had been one of those people who’d apparently known since birth exactly what he was supposed to do. It had been different for him, although maybe the plateau, after the arc up, hadn’t been that different. Neither of them had really wanted to see what an arc down might look like, she thought. With Jimmy’s addiction as a punctuation point, a blank, heroin-colored milestone driven into whatever that plateau had been made of, and with the band stalled creatively, they’d all opted to drop it. She and Inchmale had tried to go on to other things. As had Heidi-Laura, she supposed. Jimmy had just died. Inchmale seemed to have managed it best. She hadn’t gotten that positive a feeling about Heidi’s life, seeing her this time, but then Heidi was as difficult to read as any human Hollis had ever known.