Spook Country (12 page)

V otive candles had been lit in her darkened room. Beside the luminous cottons of the all-white bed, the water pitcher had been filled. She put the carton, dead Jimmy Carlyle’s envelope of hundred-dollar bills, and her makeshift evening purse on the long-legged marble-topped table in the kitchenette.

She used the small unsharpened blade in the handle of the kitchenette’s corkscrew to slit the transparent tape sealing the carton.

There was a note, in an oddly Sumerian-looking script, on a rectangle of plain gray card, resting on a fold of bubble wrap. “You need your own. Press On. H.”

She set that aside and lifted the fold of bubble wrap. Something black and matte silver. She drew out what she took to be a more aggressively styled version of the wireless helmet she’d used to view the squid at Bobby Chombo’s. Through the cutaway shell, she saw the same few simple touch pads. She turned the thing over, looking for a manufacturer’s logo, but found none. She did find MADE IN CHINA in minute bas-relief, but then most things were.

She tried it on, intending to do no more than glance at herself in a candlelit mirror, but she must have touched one of the control surfaces. “A locative installation, in your room,” Odile said, sounding as if she were inches from Hollis’s ear. She found herself atop the turned-down bed, clutching Bigend’s headgear, so unexpected had this been. “Monet’s poppies. Rotch.” Rotch? “The poppies and whatever background, they are equiluminant.”

And there they were, quivering slightly, reddish orange, arrayed as a field that filled her room, level with the height of the bed.

She moved her head from side to side, scanning the effect. “This becomes part of a series. The artist’s Argenteuil series. Rotch.” There it was again. “She fill spaces everywhere with Monet’s poppies. Call me when you have received this. We must talk, also about Chombo.” She pronounced it “Shombo.”

“Odile?” But it had been a recording. Still crouching on the bed, she sat down and ran her left hand through the poppies she knew weren’t there. She almost thought she could feel them. She swung her legs over the side and found the floor, poppies around her knees. Wading through them, toward the layered drapes, she felt momentarily as though they floated atop captive, unmoving water. The artist might not have intended that, she thought.

Reaching the window, she held the drapes aside with her forearm and peered down at Sunset, half expecting to discover that Alberto had littered the street with dead celebrities, more tableaux of fame and misadventure, but there was nothing evident.

She took it off, returned to the table through the sudden absence of poppies, and touched various surfaces inside until a green LED went off. As she was putting it back in the carton, she noticed something else, amid the bubble wrap.

She pulled out a molded vinyl figurine of the Blue Ant ant. She stood it on the marble tabletop, picked up the evening’s purse, and took that into the bathroom. While she ran a tub of hot on top of the day’s allotment of shower gel, she emptied the purse and transferred its usual contents back into it.

She tested the water, undressed, and got into the tub, settling herself on her back.

She was no longer certain why Jimmy had needed to borrow that much money in Paris, why she’d been willing to part with it, or how it was that she’d been able to lay her hands on cash.

She’d given it to him in francs. It had been that long ago.

The water was deep enough that it rose along the sides of her face as she settled the back of her head against the bottom of the tub. A child-sized island of face above water. Isla de Hollis.

Odile’s poppies. She remembered Alberto’s description of how he sculpted and skinned-up a new celebrity misadventure. She guessed Odile’s poppies were another, simpler kind of skin. They could be anything, really.

She raised her sunken head partially out of the water and began to work shampoo into her hair. “Jimmy,” she said, “you really piss me off. The world is already weirder and stupider than you could ever have guessed.” She lowered her shampooed hair back into the water. The bathroom kept on filling with the absence of her dead friend, and she’d started to cry before she could start to rinse.

V ianca sat cross-legged on Tito’s floor with his Sony plasma screen across her knees. Wearing a disposable hairnet and white knit cotton gloves, she was going over the Sony with an Armor All wipe. When she’d wiped it completely down, it would go back into its factory packaging, which in turn would be wiped.

Tito, in his own hairnet and gloves, sat opposite her, wiping the keys of his Casio. A carton of cleaning supplies had been waiting for them in the hall, beside a new and expensive-looking vacuum cleaner Vianca said was German. Nothing came out of this vacuum but air, she said, so there would be no stray hairs or other traces left behind. Tito had helped his cousin Eusebio with exactly this procedure, though Eusebio had mainly had books, each of which had needed, according to protocol, to be flipped through for forgotten insertions, then wiped. The reasons for Eusebio’s departure had never been made clear to him. That too was protocol.

He looked up at the symmetrically spaced holes in the wall, where the Sony had been mounted. “Do you know where Eusebio is?”

Vianca raised her eyes from her wiping, eyes narrowing beneath the white paper band of the hairnet. “Doctores,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Doctores. In the Federal District. A neighborhood. Or maybe not.” She shrugged, and went back to wiping.

Tito hoped he wouldn’t have to go to Mexico, to Mexico City. He had not left the United States since being brought here, and he had no desire to. These days, returning here might be more difficult still. There were family members in Los Angeles. That would be his choice, not that he would have one. “We used to practice systema, Eusebio and I,” he said, turning the Casio over and continuing to wipe.

“He was my first boyfriend,” Vianca said, which seemed impossible until he remembered that she wasn’t really a teenager.

“You don’t know where he is?”

She shrugged. “Guessing, Doctores. But better not to be sure.”

“How do they decide, where you go?”

She put her wipe down, on top of the Armor All container, and picked up a foam packing segment. It fit perfectly over one end of the Sony. “It depends on who they think might be looking for you.” She picked up the segment for the other end.

Tito looked over at the blue vase. He’d forgotten about that. He’d have to find a place for it. He thought he knew where.

“Where did you go, after 9/11,” she asked, “before you moved here?”

He had been living below Canal, with his mother. “We went to Sunset Park. With Antulio. We rented a house, red brick, with very small rooms. Smaller than this. We ate Dominican food. We walked in the old cemetery. Antulio showed us Joey Gallo’s grave.” He put the Casio aside and stood, removing the hairnet. “I’m going up to the roof,” he said, “I have something to do there.”

Vianca nodded, sliding his foam-braced Sony into its carton.

He put on his coat, picked up the blue vase, and put it, still wearing the white cotton gloves, into his side pocket. He went out, closing the door behind him. He stopped in the hallway, unable to give a name to what he felt. Fear, but that was in its place. Something else. Edges, territories, a blind vastness? He went on, through the fire door and up the stairs. When he reached the sixth floor, he climbed a final flight to the roof.

Concrete covered with asphalt, gravel, secret traces of the World Trade Center. Alejandro had suggested that last, once, when he’d been up here. Tito remembered the pale dust, thick on the sill of his mother’s bedroom window, below Canal. He remembered fire escapes, far from the fallen towers, filled with office papers. He remembered the ugliness of the Gowanus Expressway. The tiny front yard of the house where they’d stayed with Antulio. The N train from Union Square. His mother’s wild eyes.

The clouds were like an engraving in some ancient book. A light that robbed the world of color.

The door to the roof faced south, opening out of the slant-backed structure that supported its frame. Against this structure’s wedge-shaped, east-facing wall had been constructed shelving of unpainted timber, long gone gray, and on this had been arranged, or abandoned, a variety of objects. A corroded bucket on casters, with a foot-powered mop-squeezing unit. Mops themselves, heads gone bald and gray, the peeling paint on their wooden handles faded to delicate pastels. White plastic kegs that warned with a black skeleton hand in a black-and-white diamond, but were empty. Several rusted iron hand tools of so great an age as to be unidentifiable, at least by Tito. Rusted gallon paint cans whose paper labels had faded past reading.

He took the vase from his pocket and polished it between his cotton gloves. Ochun must have countless homes like this one, he thought, countless windows. He stood the vase on a shelf, shifted a can aside, put the vase against the wall, then moved the can back, leaving the vase concealed between two cans. In the way of these rooftops, it might be found tomorrow, or remain untouched for years.

She rules over the world’s sweet waters. Youngest of the female orishas, yet her title is Great Queen. Recognizing herself in the colors yellow and gold, in the number five. Peacocks are hers, and vultures.

Tia Juana’s voice. He nodded to the shelf, the hidden altar, then turned and descended the stairs.

Letting himself back into his room, he found Vianca removing the drive from his PC tower. She looked up at him. “You copied what you wished to keep?”

“Yes,” he said, touching the Nano around his neck. A charm. His music stored there.

He removed his coat, hung it on the rack, and put his hairnet back on. Settling himself opposite his cousin, he began again the ritual disassembly, this meticulous scrubbing out of traces, erasure. As Juana would say, the washing of the threshold of the new road.

S ometimes, if Brown was hungry at the end of the day, and in a certain mood, they’d go to Gray’s Papaya for the Recession Special. Milgrim always got the orangeade with his, because it seemed more honestly a drink, less juice-like. You could get actual juices there, but not with the Recession Special, and juice didn’t seem like part of the Gray’s experience, which was about grilled beef franks, soft white buns, and watery, sugary drinks, consumed standing up, under brilliant, buzzing fluorescent light.

When they were staying at the New Yorker, as it seemed they were again, tonight, Gray’s was only two blocks up Eighth Avenue. Milgrim was comforted by Gray’s Papaya. He remembered when the two franks and drink that were the Recession Special had been $1.95.

Milgrim doubted that Gray’s comforted Brown, exactly, but he did know that Brown could become relatively talkative there. He’d have the nonalcoholic piña colada with his franks and lay out the origins of cultural Marxism in America. Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown, but it was really cultural Marxism, and had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II, in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School, as they’d called themselves, had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipositors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old-school American academia. Milgrim always enjoyed this part; it had an appealing vintage sci-fi campiness to it, staccato and exciting, with grainy monochrome Eurocommie star-spawn in tweed jackets and knit ties, breeding like Starbucks. But he’d always be brought down, as the rant rolled to a close, by Brown’s point that the Frankfurt School had been Jewish, all of them. “Every. Last. One.” Dabbing mustard from the corners of his mouth with a precisely folded paper napkin. “Look it up.”

Which was exactly what had happened, this time, after Milgrim’s long day in the laundry. Brown had just said that, and Milgrim had nodded, and continued to chew the last of his second dog, glad of something in his mouth to preclude answering.

When they’d both finished their Specials, it was time to walk back down Eighth to the New Yorker. The traffic was moderate and there was something like a touch of spring in the air, a slight premonitory warmth that Milgrim suspected of being hallucinatory, but welcomed nonetheless. When the yellow Hummer cruised past, in the nearest lane, as they were walking south, he noticed it. You would, he’d tell himself later. Not that it was a real Hummer, just one of those half-assed ones, and not just that it was yellow, but because it was a Hummer and it was yellow, and it had those goofy counterweighted hubcaps that didn’t rotate with the hubs, just sort of rocked there. And these were yellow, matching yellow, and had a Happy Face on each one, or at least on the two on the sidewalk side, the two Milgrim could see.

But what really held Milgrim’s attention, after the northbound yellow vehicle flicked past, was how closely its driver and passenger had resembled his two Moorish knights of the laundry, down on Lafayette. Black knit skullcaps snugged low over massy skulls, and sofa-like chest expanses of black, button-studded leather.

Gilbert and George, in the front seats of a Hummer.

H eld psychically together by the thick white Mondrian robe, her sunglasses, and a room-service breakfast of granola, yogurt, and a watermelon liquado, Hollis sat back in one wide white armchair, put her feet up on the shorter of the two marble-topped coffee tables, and regarded the vinyl Blue Ant figurine on the chair arm. It was eyeless; or rather its designer had chosen not to represent its eyes. It had a determined smirk, the expression of a cartoon underdog fully aware of its own secret status as superhero. Its posture conveyed that too, arms slightly bent at its sides, fists balled, feet in a martial artist’s ready T-stance. Its stylized cartoon-Egyptian apron and sandals, she judged, were a nod to the hieroglyphic look of the company’s logo.

Inchmale said that when you were presented with a new idea, you should try to turn it over, to look at the bottom. She picked the figure up, expecting to find it copyrighted Blue Ant, but the bottoms of its feet were smooth and blank. Nicely finished. It wasn’t a toy, not for kids anyway.

It reminded her of the time their soundman, Ritchie Nagel, had dragged a militantly disinterested Inchmale to see Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden. Inchmale had returned with his shoulders hunched in thought, deeply impressed by what he’d witnessed but uncharacteristically unwilling to talk about it. Pressed, he would only say that Springsteen, onstage, had channeled a combination of Apollo and Bugs Bunny, a highly complex act of physical possession. Hollis had subsequently waited, uneasily, for Inchmale to manifest anything at all Boss-like onstage, but that had never happened. This Blue Ant’s designer, she thought, as she stood the thing back on the chair arm, had aspired to something like that: Zeus and Bugs Bunny. Her cell rang.

“Morning.” Inchmale, as if called forth by her having thought of him.

“You sent Heidi.” Only neutrally accusatory.

“Did she walk on her hind legs?”

“Did you know about Jimmy’s money?”

“Your money. I did, but I’d forgotten. He told me he had it, that he was going to give it to you. I told him to give it to Heidi, if he couldn’t give it to you. Otherwise, it would vanish down that hole in his arm without a hiccup.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“I forgot. With major effort. Repressed the whole sorry episode, in the wake of his not-unexpected demise.”

“When did you see him?”

“I didn’t. He phoned me. About a week before they found him.”

Hollis turned in the armchair, looking back over her shoulder at the sky above the Hollywood hills. Absolutely empty. When she turned back, she picked up the rest of her liquado. “It’s not like I don’t need it. I’m not sure what to do with it, though.” She took a swallow of watermelon juice and put the glass down.

“Spend it. I wouldn’t try to bank it.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t know where it’s been.”

“I don’t even want to know what you’re thinking of.”

“The U.S. hundred is the international currency of bad shit, Hollis, and by the same token the number-one target of counterfeiters. How long are you going to be in L.A.?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Because I’m due in there day after the day after tomorrow. Found out about twenty minutes ago. I can vet those bills for you.”

“You are? You can?”

“The Bollards.”

“Excuse me?”

“Bollards. I may produce them.”

“Do you really know how to check for counterfeit money?”

“I live in Argentina, don’t I?”

“Are Angelina and the baby coming?”

“They may later, if the Bollards and I are go. And you?”

“I met Hubertus Bigend.”

“What’s that like?”

“Interesting.”

“Oh dear.”

“We had drinks. Then he drove me down to where they’re building new offices. In a kind of Cartier tank.”

“In a what?”

“Obscene car.”

“What does he want?”

“I was about to say it’s complicated, but actually it’s vague. Extremely vague. If you have time off from the Pillocks, I’ll tell you then.”

“Please.” He hung up.

The phone rang in her hand. “Yes?” Expecting an Inchmale afterthought.

“Allo? Ollis?”

“Odile?”

“You have experience the poppies?”

“Yes. Beautiful.”

“The Node man calls, he says you have a new helmet?”

“I do, thanks.”

“This is good. You know Silverlake?”

“Roughly.”

“Rough—?”

“I know Silverlake.”

“The artist Beth Barker is here, her apartment. You will come, you will experience the apartment, this environment. This is an annotated environment, do you know it?”

“Annotated how?”

“Each object is hyperspatially tagged with Beth Barker’s description, with Beth Barker’s narrative of this object. One simple water glass has twenty tags.”

She looked at the white orchid blooming on the taller coffee table, imagined it layered with virtual file cards. “It sounds fascinating, Odile, but it will have to be another day. I need to make some notes. Absorb what I’ve seen so far.”

“She will be desolate, Beth Barker.”

“Tell her chin up.”

“Chin—?”

“I’ll see it another day. Really. And the poppies are wonderful. We must talk about them.”

“Ah. Very well.” Cheered. “I will tell Beth Barker. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye. And Odile?”

“Yes?”

“Your message. You said you wanted to talk about Bobby Chombo.”

“I do, yes.”

“We will, then. Bye.”

She stood up quickly, as if doing so would keep the phone, which she thrust into one of the robe’s pockets, from ringing again.

“HOLLIS HENRY.” The boy at the no-name rental lot a short walk down Sunset looked up from her license. “Have I seen you on TV?”

“No.”

“Do you want full collision?”

“Yes.”

He X’d the contract three times. “Signature, initials twice. Movies?”

“No.”

“Singer. In that band. Bald guy with the big nose, guitar, English.”

“No.”

“Don’t forget to fill it up before you bring it back,” he said, staring up at her now with mild if unabashed interest. “That was you.”

“No,” she said, picking up the keys, “it wasn’t.” She went out to her rented black Passat, the carton from Blue Ant under her arm, and got in, putting it in the passenger seat beside her.