Spook Country

“Still. You know what I told you about being honest with me.”

“Being Canadian,” said Bigend, “even in today’s fraught world, isn’t always the first thing I’d mention about someone. When we were discussing him, initially, I had no idea he’d be headed that way. Later, I suppose it slipped my mind.”

“Do you think he’s bailing out?” She watched their driver.

“No. I think something’s up, up there.”

“What?”

“What the pirates saw,” he said.

They came off the bridge into a sudden low canyon of much more downscale nightlife. She imagined Bobby’s luminous wireframe cargo container suspended above the street, more enigmatic than any neon-ski

“But we’ll find a better way to discuss it, shall we?”

He doesn’t trust phones either, she thought. “Right.”

“Do you have any piercings?” he asked.

They took a right.

“Excuse me?”

“Piercings. If you do, I must warn you about the bed in the master bedroom. The top floor.”

“The bed.”

“Yes. Apparently you don’t want to crawl under it if you have any magnetic bits. Steel, iron. Or a pacemaker. Or a mechanical watch. The designers never mentioned that, when they showed me the plans. It’s entirely about the space underneath, visually. Magnetic levitation. But now I have to warn each guest in turn. Sorry.”

“I’m entirely as God made me, so far,” she told him. “And I don’t wear a watch.”

“Not to worry, then,” he said, cheerfully.

“I think we’re here,” she told them, as Ollie turned off a street where everything seemed to have been built the week before.

“Very good,” he said, and hung up.

The Volkswagen rolled down a ramp as a gate rose. They entered a parking garage, brilliantly lit with sun-toned halogens above a pale, glassy concrete floor devoid of the least oil stain. The car’s tires squeaked as Ollie pulled in beside another oversized Volkswagen in pearly white.

When she got out, she could smell the fresh concrete.

They got their things out of the truck and Ollie gave them each a pair of white unmarked magstrip cards. “This one’s for the elevator,” he said, taking Hollis’s and swiping it beside doors of brushed stainless, “and access to the penthouse levels.” Inside, he swiped it again, and they rose, swiftly and silently.

“I suppose I don’t want to get this under the bed,” Hollis said, visibly puzzling Odile, as he handed it back to her.

“No,” he said, as the elevator stopped and its doors opened, “nor your credit cards.”

They followed him along a short, carpeted hallway that a van could have been driven through. “Use the other card,” he told her. She shifted the carton to her left arm and swiped the second card. He opened the very large ebony door, which she saw was a good four inches thick, and they stepped into a space that might have been the central concourse in the national airport of some tiny, hyperwealthy European nation, a pocket Liechtenstein founded on the manufacture of the most expensive minimalist light fixtures ever made.

“The flat,” she said, looking up.

“Yes indeed,” said Ollie Sleight.

Odile dropped her bag and started walking toward a curtain of glass wider than an old-fashioned theater screen. Uprights broke the view at intervals of fifteen feet or so. Beyond it, from where Hollis stood, there was only an undifferentiated gray-pink glow, with a few distant points of red light.

“Formidable,” exclaimed Odile.

“Good, isn’t it?” He turned to Hollis. “You’re in the master bedroom. I’ll show you.” He took the carton, and led her up two flights of giddily suspended stairs, each tread a two-inch slab of frosted glass.

Bigend’s bed was a perfect black square, ten feet on a side, floating three feet above the ebony floor. She walked over to it and saw that it was tethered, against whatever force supported it, with thin, braided cables of black metal.

“I think I might make something up on the floor,” she said.

“Everyone says that,” he said. “Then they try it.”

She turned to say something, and in doing so saw him asking the girl at the counter, in the Standard’s restaurant, for American Spirit cigarettes. Same yellow pack. Same beard. Like moss around a drain.

57. POPCORN

C ommercial airliners were like buses, Milgrim decided, staring at the textured ceiling in his room in this Best Western. But a Gulfstream was like a taxi. Or like having a car. He wasn’t ordinarily impressed by wealth, but his Gulfstream experience, Vegas decor aside, had left him struggling with issues of scale. Most people, he assumed, would never set foot on one. It was the sort of thing you knew existed, that you took for granted, however theoretically, as something some people owned. But most people, he now suspected, would never have to get their heads around the reality of the thing.

And he didn’t know what going through ordinary Canadian customs was like, but everything had gone exactly as Brown had said it would, in the Gulfstream version. They’d landed at a large airport, then taxied to a dark place with nothing much at all outside. An SUV with lights on top had driven up, and two uniformed men had gotten out of it. When they’d come aboard, one in a jacket with gold buttons and the other in a tight, ribbed pullover with cloth patches over the shoulders and elbows, they’d accepted the three passports the pilot had handed them, opened each one, compared it to a printout, said thanks, and left. The one with the commando sweater was East Indian, and looked like he lifted weights. That was it. The pilot had pocketed his passport and gone back into the cockpit. Milgrim had never even heard him speak. He and Brown got their bags and left, walking down a long stairway that someone must have rolled up to the plane.

It had been cold, the air damp and full of the sound of planes. Brown had led them to a parked car, had felt under the front bumper, and come up with keys. He opened it and they got in. Brown had driven slowly away as Milgrim, beside him, had looked back at the lights of a tanker truck, rolling toward the Gulfstream.

They’d driven past an odd, pyramidal building and stopped at a chain-link gate. Brown had gotten out and punched numbers into a keypad. The gate had started rattling aside as Brown got back into the car.

The city had been very quiet, as they drove in. Deserted. Scarcely a pedestrian. Strangely clean, lacking in texture, like video games before they’d learned to dirty up the corners. Police cars that looked as though they had nowhere in particular to go.

“What about the plane?” Milgrim had asked, as Brown drove fast across a long multilaned concrete bridge over what he took to be the second of two rivers.

“What about it?”

“Does it wait?”

“It goes back to Washington.”

“That’s quite a plane,” Milgrim had said.

“That’s what money will buy you, in America,” Brown had said, firmly. “People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?”

“Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part.

“Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason.”

Milgrim thought about that now as he lay looking up at the ceiling. It was textured with those crumbs of rigid foam, the size of the last few pieces left in an empty bag of popcorn. They were stuff, those texturizing bits, and so was a Gulfstream. But almost anybody got those bits, during the course of an ordinary life. He supposed you needed money just to get away from some kinds of stuff. A Gulfstream, though, was another kind of stuff. It bothered him, in some unaccustomed way, that Brown had access to such things. Brown belonged to the New Yorker, Milgrim felt, or to this Best Western. Low-pixel laminate. The Gulfstream, the Georgetown townhouse with the housekeeper who cut hair, that felt wrong, somehow.