Spook Country

“Not immediately. I don’t like being gamed, and your man’s all game.”

Hollis nodded.

“I was having lunch with Heidi. I ran it by her. And of course she bit. Became worried about you. And I caught it, then. Even though I could see that it would be to his advantage to get us both up here, bit of harmless adventure, then he’d pitch it to the two of us.”

“Pitch what?”

“The Chinese car commercial. He wants us to rerecord ‘Hard to Be One’ with different lyrics. Chinese car lyrics. But I was getting this secondhand paranoia off our different drummer over there. So then she and I are in her car, headed for Burbank. I think it took us longer to drive to Burbank than it took the plane to get up here. I had my passport, she had her driver’s license, and we both got here with what we were standing up in.”

“And she bought an ax-handle?”

“We got to that neighborhood where you’d left the car, and she didn’t like it. I said she was misreading it completely, missing the cultural subtexts, and that it wasn’t actually dangerous, not that way. But she stopped at a lumberyard and tooled up. Didn’t offer me one.”

“It wouldn’t suit you.” She reached under her jacket and scratched her ribs, hard. “Come on. I need a shower. I was where there was ground glass, earlier. And cesium.”

“Cesium?”

She stood, picking up the two blank white cards that Ollie had left.

79. ARTIST AND REPERTOIRE

W here’d you say you’re from?” asked the man from Igor’s label, offering Tito an open bottle of beer.

“New Jersey,” said Tito, who hadn’t. When they’d reached the rehearsal space, he’d phoned Garreth and told him the job was done, but that he thought he should stay off the street tonight. He hadn’t mentioned the helicopter, but he’d had a feeling that Garreth knew.

He accepted the beer, pressing the cold bottle against his forehead. He’d enjoyed playing. The Guerreros had come, briefly, at the end.

“Amazing,” said the label man. “Is that where your family’s from?”

“New York,” said Tito.

“Right,” said the A&R man, and sipped his own beer. “Amazing.”

80. MONGOLIAN DEATH WORM

B usiness-class lounge for Air Asshole,” declared Inchmale, enthusiastically, taking in the central area of the first floor of Bigend’s flat.

“Has the bedroom to match, upstairs,” Hollis told him. “I’ll show you, after I’ve had a shower.”

Heidi put her ax-handle down, still wrapped, on the counter beside Hollis’s laptop.

“Ollis!” Odile stood at the head of the floating glass stair-slabs, in what Hollis supposed might be a very large hockey jersey. “Bobby, you have found him?”

“Sort of. It’s complicated. Come down and meet my friends.”

Odile, in bare feet, descended the slabs.

“Reg Inchmale and Heidi Hyde. Odile Richard.”

“Ça va? What is that?” Noticing the ax-handle.

“A gift,” said Hollis. “She hasn’t found anyone to give it to, yet. I have to shower.”

She went upstairs.

The Blue Ant figurine was where she’d left it, on the ledge, still poised for action.

She undressed, checked herself for the rash that fortunately didn’t seem to be there, and took a long, very thorough shower.

What would Garreth and the old man be up to now, she wondered. Where had Tito gone, after they’d dropped him off? Why was her purse, or Bigend’s scrambler at least, afoot on the street? What constituted the Mongolian Death Worm, in her current situation? She didn’t know.

Had she just seen a hundred million dollars irradiated, with. 30-caliber pellets of medical cesium? She had, if Garreth had been telling the truth. Why would you do that? She was soaping herself down, for the third time, when it came to her.

To make it impossible to launder. The cesium. It wouldn’t come out in the wash.

She hadn’t even thought to ask him, as he’d packed up to leave the studio. She hadn’t asked him anything, really. She’d understood that he needed, absolutely, to be doing what he was doing, doing it rather than talking about it. He’d been so utterly focused, checking things with the dosimeter, making sure nothing was left behind.

She was certain she hadn’t left her purse up there. Someone must have taken it from the van, when she’d carried the duffel over to give it to the dustmen.

She toweled off, dressed, checked to see that her passport was where she’d left it, then dried her hair.

When she came back down, Inchmale was seated at one end of a twenty-foot couch, its leather very nearly the color of the seats in Bigend’s Maybach, reading messages on his phone. Heidi and Odile were what felt like half a block of polished concrete away, taking in the view, darkness and lights, like figures inserted into an architectural drawing to illustrate scale.

“Your Bigend,” he said, looking up from the phone.

“He’s not my Bigend. He’ll be your Bigend, though, if you sell him the rights to ‘Hard to Be One’ for a car commercial.”

“I can’t do that, of course.”

“For reasons of artistic integrity?”

“Because the three of us would have to agree. You, me, Heidi. We own the rights jointly, remember?”

“I say it’s up to you.” Sitting beside him on the couch.

“And why is that?”

“Because you’re still in the business. Still have a stake.”

“He wants you to write it.”

“Write what?”

“The changes to the lyrics.”

“To turn it into a car jingle?”

“A theme. An anthem. Of postmodern branding.”

“‘Hard to Be One’? Seriously?”

“He’s texting me every half-hour. Wants to pin it down. He’s the sort of man I could get sick to the back teeth of. Actually.”

She looked at him. “Where’s the Mongolian Death Worm?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be most afraid of, now. Do you? You used to tell me about the Death Worm when we were touring. How it was so deadly that there were scarcely any descriptions of it.”

“Yes,” he said. “It might spit venom, or bolts of electricity.” He smiled. “Or ichor,” he said.

“And it hid in the dunes. Of Mongolia.”

“Yes.”

“So I adopted it. Made it a sort of mascot for my anxiety. I imagined it as being bright red…”

“They are bright red,” said Inchmale. “Scarlet. Eyeless. Thick as a child’s thigh.”

“It became the shape I’d give to any major fear I couldn’t quite get a handle on. In L.A., a day or two ago, the idea of Bigend and his magazine that doesn’t quite exist, this level of weirdness he’s nosed himself into, and taken me with him, that I can’t even tell you about, that all felt like the Death Worm. Out there in the dunes.”

He looked at her. “It’s good to see you.”

“Good to see you, Reg. But I’m still confused.”

“If you weren’t, these days,” he said, “you’d probably be psychotic. The worst really are full of passionate intensity now, aren’t they? But what strikes me is that you don’t seem actually frightened now. Confused, but I don’t feel the fear.”

“I’ve just seen someone, some people,” she told him, “tonight, do the single strangest thing I imagine I’ll ever see.”

“Really?” He was suddenly grave. “I envy you.”

“I thought it was going to be terrorism, or crime in some more traditional sense, but it wasn’t. I think that it was actually…”

“What?”

“A prank. A prank you’d have to be crazy to be able to afford.”

“You know I’d love to know what that was,” he said.

“I know. But I’ve given my word once too often in this thing. I gave it to Bigend, then gave it again to someone else. I’d tell you that I’ll tell you eventually, but I can’t. Except that I might be able to. Eventually. It depends. Understand?”

“Is that young Frenchwoman a lesbian?” asked Inchmale.

“Why?”

“She seems physically attracted to Heidi.”