Spook Country

She heard Inchmale pick up the phone in Buenos Aires.

“Bigend,” he said.

From Sunset, she heard brakes, impact, breaking glass. “What was that?”

“Bigend. Like ‘big’ and ‘end.’ Advertising magnate.”

The wobble of a car alarm.

“The one who married Nigella?”

“That’s Saatchi. Hubertus Bigend. Belgian. Firm’s called Blue Ant.”

“And?”

“Ange says your Node’s a Bigend project, if indeed it’s a magazine. Node’s one of several small firms he has in London. She had some dealings with his agency, when she was on the magazine, now I think about it. Some run-in with them.” She heard the alarm cut out, and then the wail of an approaching siren. “What’s that?” Inchmale asked.

“Accident on Sunset. I’m at the Mondrian.”

“Do they still use a casting director to hire the bellmen?”

“Looks like it.”

“Is Bigend paying?”

“Absolutely,” she said. Very close, she heard another squeal of brakes, and then the siren, which had gotten very loud, died.

“Can’t be all bad,” he said.

“No,” she said, “it can’t.” Could it?

“We miss you. You should stay in touch.”

“I will, Reg. Thanks. And thank Angelina.”

“Goodbye.”

“’Bye, then.”

Another siren was approaching, as she hung up. An ambulance this time, she guessed. She decided that she wasn’t going to look. It hadn’t sounded too bad, but she really didn’t want any bad at all, right then.

With a perfectly sharpened Mondrian pencil she wrote BIGEND in block caps in the dark, on a square block of embossed white Mondrian notepaper.

She’d Google him later.

8. CREEPING HER OUT

S he watched Alberto trying to explain the helmet and the laptop to Virgin security. These two blandly uniformed functionaries didn’t look like they were much into the locative. At this point, she had to admit, neither was she.

Alberto had some kind of Jim Morrison piece he wanted to show her, up on Wonderland Avenue, and that just wasn’t going to work for her. Even if it somehow managed to bypass the Lizard King’s iconic churlishness, and focus on, say, Ray Manzarek’s calliope pieces, she still didn’t want to have to write about invisible virtual monuments to the Doors, any of them. Though as Inchmale had several times pointed out, back when they themselves had been in a band, Manzarek and Krieger had worked wonders, neutralizing the big guy’s sodden crankiness.

Standing out here in the evening hydrocarbon, in this retail complex on the corner of Crescent Heights and Sunset, watching Alberto Corrales argue that she, Hollis Henry, really should be allowed to view his virtual rendition of Scott Fitzgerald’s heart attack, she felt a sort of detachment descend, some extra slack-cutting—due, quite possibly, to her new haircut, executed to her complete satisfaction by a charming and talented young man in the Mondrian’s salon.

It hadn’t been fatal, Fitzgerald’s heart attack. Missing Alberto’s depiction of it wouldn’t be fatal for her article, either. Or missing most of it, as she had in fact been afforded a brief glimpse: a man in a tweed jacket, clutching his chest at a chromed Moderne counter, a pack of Chesterfields in his right hand. The Chesterfields, she decided, had been in slightly higher resolution than the rest of the place, which had seemed interestingly detailed, down to the unfamiliar shapes of the vehicles out on Sunset, but Virgin security’s unhappiness with anyone do

Odile might have been cute enough to charm these guards, but she’d succumbed to an attack of asthma, she’d said, brought on either by the airborne biomass of the previous night’s storm or by the near critical mass of aromatherapy product to be variously encountered in the Standard.

And still this calm descended on Hollis, oddly; this unexpected clarity, this moment perhaps of what the late Jimmy Carlyle, the Curfew’s Iowan bass player, prior to departing this vale of heroin, had called serenity. Where in (this calm) she knew herself to be that woman of the age and the history that were hers, here, tonight, and was more or less okay with it, all of it, at least up till Node had come calling, the week before, with an offer she could neither refuse nor, really, understand.

If Node was, as the youthful but metallic Rausch had described it, a technology magazine with a cultural twist (a technology magazine, as she thought of it, with interesting trousers), did it really follow that she, former vocalist for the Curfew and sometime obscure journalist, would be hired for seriously good money to write about this witheringly geeky art trend?

But no, said something at the still heart of her moment’s calm. No indeed. And the core anomaly here was embodied, revealed almost certainly, in Rausch having injected that apparent order to meet Bobby Chombo, whoever or whatever he might be, and having met him, to watch for something to do with shipping, “patterns of global shipping.” That, she saw, was it, whatever “it” in this case might be, and likely had nothing to do with Odile Richard and the rest of these people.

And then, her gaze on the passing stream of Sunset, she saw the Curfew’s drummer, Laura “Heidi” Hyde, driving what Hollis, never really a car person, took to be a smallish SUV of German extraction. If further confirmation had been needed, she knew that Heidi, with whom she hadn’t spoken in almost three years, lived in Beverly Hills now, and worked in Century City, and had almost certainly been glimpsed, just now, heading home at day’s end.

“Fascist dipshits,” Alberto protested, flustered, stepping up beside her with his laptop under one arm, the visor under the other. Somehow he seemed too serious-looking to say something like that, and for an instant she imagined him as a character in a some graphically simplified animation.

“It’s okay,” she assured him. “Really, it’s okay. I got a look. I saw it. Got the general idea.”

He blinked at her. Was he on the verge of tears?

“BOBBY CHOMBO,” she said, when they were settled in Hamburger Hamlet, to which she had had Alberto drive them from Crescent Heights.

Concern creased Alberto’s brow.

“Bobby Chombo,” she repeated.

He nodded, grimly. “I use him for all my pieces. Brilliant.”

She was looking at the crazily elaborated black-letter work down the outside of both his forearms. She could make absolutely no sense of it. “Alberto, what does that actually say, on your arms?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“It was designed by an artist in Tokyo. He does these alphabets, abstracts them till they’re completely unreadable. The actual sequence was generated randomly.”

“Alberto, what do you know about Node, the magazine I’m writing for?”

“European? New?”

“Did you know Odile, before she turned up to do this?”

“No.”

“Had you ever heard of her, before?”

“Yes. She curates.”

“And she got in touch with you, about getting together with me, for Node?”

“Yes.” Their server arrived with two Coronas. She picked hers up, clinked the neck of his, and drank from the bottle. After a pause he did the same. “Why are you asking me this?”

“I haven’t worked for Node before. I’m trying to get a feel for what they’re doing, how they do things.”

“Why did you ask about Bobby?”

“I’m writing about your art. Why wouldn’t I ask about the tech end?”

Alberto looked uncomfortable. “Bobby,” he began, stopped. “He’s a very private person.”

“He is?”

Alberto looked unhappy. “The vision’s mine, and I build the work, but Bobby hacks it for me. Gets it to work, even indoors. And he gets the routers installed.”