49. ROTCH

O dile sat in the white armchair with the white robot on its back in her lap, poking a white Mondrian pencil into its mechanism of plastic gears and black rubber bands. “They break, these thing.”

“Who made it?” Hollis asked, from her own chair. Legs folded beneath her bathrobe. They were drinking room-service coffee. Nine in the morning, after what for Hollis had been a surprisingly undisturbed night.

“Sylvia Rotch,” Odile said, levering with her pencil. Something clicked. “Bon,” said Odile.

“Rotch? How do you spell that?” Hollis’s own white pencil, poised.

“R-O-I-G,” managed Odile, who struggled with the letters’ English pronunciation.

“Are you sure?”

“Catalan,” said Odile, bending to put the robot right side up on the carpet. “Is difficult.”

Hollis wrote it down. Roig. “The poppies, are they characteristic of her work?”

“She only does the poppies,” said Odile, eyes huge beneath her smooth, serious brow. “She fills the entire Mercat des Flores with the poppies. The old flower market.”

“Yes,” said Hollis, putting down her pencil and pouring herself fresh coffee. “When you left your message, you mentioned that you wanted to talk about Bobby Chombo.”

“Fer-gus-son,” said Odile, making it three distinct syllables.

“Ferguson?”

“His name is Robert Fer-gus-son. He is Canadian. Shombo, it is his art name.”

Hollis took that in over a sip of coffee. “I didn’t know that. Do you think Alberto knows that?”

Odile shrugged, in that complexly French way that seemed to require a slightly different skeletal structure. “I doubt it. I know because my boyfriend worked in a gallery in Vancouver. Do you know it?”

“The gallery?”

“Vancouver! It is beautiful.”

“Yes,” Hollis agreed, though actually the most she’d seen of the place had been their rooms at the Four Seasons and the inside of their rather too-small venue, a repurposed second-story Deco taxi-dance hall on a weirdly traffic-free midtown artery full of theaters. Jimmy had been having a rough time. She’d stayed with him constantly. Not a good time.

“My boyfriend, he knew Bobby as a DJ.”

“He’s Canadian?”

“My boyfriend is French.”

“I mean Bobby.”

“Of course he is Canadian. Fer-gus-son.”

“He knew him well? Your boyfriend, I mean?”

“He buy E from him,” said Odile.

“Was that before he went to Oregon to work on GPSW projects?”

“I don’t know. Yes, I think. Three years? In Paris, my boyfriend sees Bobby’s photo, an opening in New York, Dale Cusak, his memories of Natalie, do you know it?”

“No,” said Hollis.

“Bobby does the geohacking for Cusak. My boyfriend tells me this is Robert Fer-gus-son.”

“Can you be sure, though?”

“Yes. Some other artists, here, they know he is Canadian. It is not so much of a secret, perhaps.”

“But Alberto doesn’t know?”

“Not everyone does. Everyone need Bobby. To work in this new medium. He is the best, for this. But a recluse. Those who know him before, they become very careful. They don’t say what Bobby does not want.”

“Odile, do you know anything about Bobby’s having…moved, recently.”

“Yes,” said Odile, gravely. “His e-mail bounce. Servers aren’t there. Artists cannot contact him for works in progress. They are concern.”

“Alberto told me. Do you know where he might have gone?”

“He is Shombo.” She picked up her coffee. “He may be anywhere. Ollis, will you come to Silverlake with me? To visit Beth Barker?”

Hollis considered it. Odile was an underutilized asset. Definitely, if her boyfriend (ex?) actually knew Bobby Chombo-Ferguson. “She’s the one with the virtually annotated apartment?”

“Eeparespatial tagging,” corrected Odile.

God help me, thought Hollis.

Her cell rang. “Yes?”

“Pamela. Mainwaring. Hubertus asked me to tell you that it looks as though they’re going to Vancouver.”

Hollis looked across at Odile. “Does he know that Bobby is Canadian?”

“Actually,” said Pamela Mainwaring, “yes.”

“I’ve only just learned.”

“Had you discussed his background with Hubertus?”

Hollis thought about it. “No.”

“There you are, then. He suggests you go. To Vancouver.”

“When?”

“If you left immediately, you might make Air Canada’s one o’clock.”

“When’s the latest?”

“Eight tonight.”

“Book for two, then,” she said. “Henry and Richard. I’ll call you back.”

“Done,” said Pamela, and was gone.

“Ollis,” said Odile, “what is that?”

“Can you come to Vancouver for a few days, Odile? Tonight. Entirely on Node’s ticket. Your flights, hotel, any expenses.”

Odile’s eyebrows went up. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“You know, Ollis, Node pays to bring me here, pays for le Standard…”

“There you go, then. How about it?”

“Certainly,” said Odile, “but why?”

“I want you to help me find Bobby.”

“I will try, but…” Odile demonstrated her French shrugging anatomy.

“Excellent,” said Hollis.

50. WHISPERING GALLERY

M ilgrim woke in a narrow bed, beneath a single flannel sheet printed with trout flies, partial riverscapes, and the repeated image of an angler, casting. The pillowcase was made of matching material. On the wall opposite the foot of the bed was a large poster of an American eagle’s head, depicted against the billowing folds of Old Glory. He seemed to have gotten undressed for bed, although he didn’t remember doing it.

He looked at the poster, behind glass in a plain gold plastic frame. He’d never seen anything quite like it. It had a soft, worryingly pornographic quality, as though a Vaselined lens had been involved, though he supposed they no longer really did that, Vaselining lenses. Likely the whole thing had been executed on a monitor. The eagle’s eye, though, was hyperrealist bright and beady, as if rendered to fix on the viewer’s forehead. He thought a slogan would have helped, somehow, some nudge in a specific patriotic direction. Just these sinuous waves of stripes, though, a few stars up in one corner, and the raked and angular head of this really rather murderous-looking bird of prey, was too much, on its own, too purely iconic.

He thought of the peculiar, phoenix-like creature on the front door, downstairs.

But then he remembered eating pizza that Brown had ordered, in the kitchen, downstairs. Pepperoni and three cheeses. And the fridge, which had contained a six-pack of very cold Pepsi and nothing else. He remembered feeling the smooth white circles of the heating elements on the range, something he’d not seen before. Brown had taken his pizza into a sort of study, along with a glass and a bottle of whiskey. Milgrim had never seen Brown drink before. Then he’d heard Brown on the phone, through the closed door, but hadn’t been able to make anything of it. And then, he guessed, he’d treated himself to another Rize.

Sometimes, he observed now, sitting on the edge of the bed in his underwear, a little too much had a way of clearing the air, the morning after. He looked up and encountered the eagle’s gun-muzzle eye. Looking quickly away, he rose, surveyed the room, and began to search it, quietly and with an efficiency born of practice.

It had obviously been decorated to be a boy’s room, and in the style of the rest of the house, though perhaps with a bit less effort. Less Ralph Lauren than some diffusion line. He hadn’t yet seen a single actual antique, aside from the Ur-eagle outside, which might even be original to the house. The furnishings were faux-old, and that rather halfhearted, more likely made in India or China than North Carolina. For that matter, he thought, noting the room’s empty inbuilt bookcase, he hadn’t seen a single book.

He carefully, quietly opened each drawer in the small bureau. All empty, aside from the bottom one, which contained a wire coat hanger clad in tissue, printed with the name and address of a dry cleaner in Bethesda, and two pins. He knelt on the carpet and peered under the bureau. Nothing.

The small, vaguely Colonial desk, finished, like the bureau, in rather robotically distressed blue paint, offered nothing more, other than a dead fly and a black ballpoint pen marked PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT in white. Milgrim tucked the pen into the elastic waistband of his underwear, having at that point no pockets, and carefully opened what he took, correctly, to be a closet door. The hinges squeaked with disuse. Empty coat hangers rattled on a hook. The closet proved to contain nothing but more coat hangers, on one of which hung a small navy blazer with an elaborately gold-embroidered crest. Milgrim went through its pockets, finding a wadded Kleenex and a stub of chalk.

The boy’s jacket and the piece of chalk saddened him. He didn’t like thinking of this as a child’s room. Perhaps there had been other things here once, books and toys, but somehow it didn’t seem like it. The room suggested a difficult childhood, perhaps not too different from the one Milgrim himself had had. He left the closet, closing the door, and went to the blue, ladder-backed chair on which his clothes had been draped. Forgetting the U.S. Government pen, he jabbed himself with it as he was putting on his pants.

Dressed, he approached the drawn striped drapes of the room’s single window. Positioning himself so that he could move the outer edge of one drape as minimally as possible, he discovered what he took to be N Street, on what appeared to be an overcast day. But his angle down also revealed the right front fender of a parked car, black and highly polished. A large car, to judge by what he could see of its fender.

He put on the Paul Stuart coat, discovering his book in its pocket, clipped the government pen into the inside pocket, and tried the room’s door, finding it unlocked.

A paneled, carpeted hallway, illuminated now by a skylight. He looked over a banister and down, two flights, to the softly gleaming gray marble of the hallway they’d entered yesterday evening. One of those central but minimal stairwell-shafts encountered in houses of this age, very long and narrow, running back to front. Beside his ear, a spoon rattled against china. He spun, starting violently. “I appreciate that,” an invisible Brown said, with an uncharacteristic note of gratitude.

The hallway was empty.

“I understand what you have to work with,” said a voice Milgrim had never heard before, the speaker equally close, equally invisible. “You’re using the best men available to you, and finding them lacking. We see that all too often. I’m disappointed, of course, that you weren’t able to apprehend him. In the light of your previous lack of success, I think it would have been wise to arrange to try to photograph him. Don’t you? To be prepared to photograph him in any case, in the event he escaped again.” The man had a lawyer’s cadence, Milgrim thought. He spoke slowly and clearly, and as though he took it for granted that he’d be paid attention to.

“Yes, sir,” said Brown.

“Then we might at least have a chance to learn who he is.”

“Yes.”

Eyes wide, gripping the banister rail as though it were the railing of ship in a storm, Milgrim stared down at the distant, narrow slice of marble floor, tasting his own blood. He’d bitten the inside of his cheek, when that spoon had rattled against that coffee cup. Brown’s breakfast conversation was being reflected off that marble floor, he guessed, or being sucked up this slit of Federal stairwell, or both. Had children stood here a hundred years ago, he wondered, suppressing giggles at some other conversation?

“You say the information intended for him indicates that he still has no tracking ability, hence no knowledge of whereabouts or ability to predict destination.”

“Whoever he has working on it,” Brown said, “doesn’t seem to be getting the job done.”

“And our friends,” the other said, “are they able to determine, when they go over this material, what it is, exactly, that’s being so unsuccessfully searched for?”

“The assessment’s handled by someone who has no knowledge of any of this. It’s just information, to him, and he analyzes classified data constantly.”

“Government?”

“Telco,” Brown said. “You know who handles the decryption. They never look at the product. And our analyst has every reason to pay as little attention as possible to what this might actually be about. I’ve made sure of that.”

“Good. That was my understanding.”

Cutlery rattled loudly on a plate, so seemingly close that Milgrim winced. “So,” the other man said, “are we in a position to bring things home?”

“I believe we are.”

“So the shipment finally comes to port. After all this time.”

“But not in conus,” Brown said.

Conus? Milgrim blinked, terrified for an instant that this entire conversation might all be some unprecedented aural hallucination.

“No,” agreed the other, “not yet on American soil.”

CONUS, thought Milgrim, in Fourth of July capitals. Continental United States.

“And what are the current odds of it being opened for inspection?” the man asked.

“Extremely unlikely,” Brown said. “Slightly more likely to have a gamma scan, but the contents and packing look fine, that way. We actually had it gamma’d ourselves, in a previous port of call, to see how it reads.”

“Yes,” said the other, “I saw those.”

“You agree, then?” asked Brown.

“I do,” said the other. “What steps are being taken in your absence, in New York?”

Brown took a moment to answer. “I sent a team to the IF’s room, for fingerprints and to recover the surveillance device. They found the door open and everything under a coat of fresh latex paint. Even the lightbulb. No fingerprints. And there were none on the iPod, of course. The unit was where I left it, under a coatrack, but they’d dumped that outside.”

“They didn’t find it?”

“If they did find it, they might avoid doing anything to indicate that.”

“Are you any closer to understanding who they are?”

“They’re one of the smallest organized crime families operating in the United States. Maybe literally a family. Illegal facilitators, mainly smuggling. But a kind of boutique operation, very pricey. Mara Salvatrucha look like UPS in comparison. They’re Cuban-Chinese and they’re probably all illegals.”

“Can’t you get ICE to roll them up for you?”

“You have to find them first. We found the kid and followed him home, in the course of trying to find the subject. We found him, to the extent that we ever did, from what you told us about the subject. The rest of them are like ghosts.” Milgrim found that he knew Brown well enough, now, to hear the edge of a certain craziness in his voice. He wondered if the other man did.

“Ghosts?” The other man’s tone was absolutely neutral.

“The problem,” Brown said, “is that they’ve been trained. Really trained. Some kind of intelligence background, in Cuba. I’d need that professional a team, and it hasn’t happened, has it?”

“No,” said the other, “but as you yourself once said, they aren’t really our problem. He is our problem. But if he knows what we’re doing, we now know that he doesn’t know when, or where. Perhaps, later, we can steer adequate professionalism in the direction of your facilitators. When it has nothing to do with us, of course. And we’ll certainly have to find out who our man is, and do something about him.”

China rattled on a table, as someone stood. Milgrim released the banister and made it back into his room in two long, agonized, exaggeratedly careful steps. He closed the door with utmost care, took off his coat, draped it over the chair, removed his shoes, and got under the angling-themed sheet, pulling it up beneath his chin. He closed his eyes and lay perfectly still. He heard the front door close. A moment later he heard an engine start, and a car pull away.

After an indeterminate period of time, he heard Brown open his door. “Wake up,” Brown said. Milgrim opened his eyes. Brown stepped to the bed and tore the sheet away. “How the fuck can you sleep in your clothes that way?”

“I fell asleep,” Milgrim said.

“Bathroom’s down the hall. There’s a robe there, and a garbage bag. Put everything you’re wearing in the garbage bag. Shower, shave, put on the robe, and come down to the kitchen for a haircut.”

“You give haircuts?” Milgrim asked, amazed.

“The housekeeper’s here. He’ll give you a haircut and measure you for some clothes. And if I catch you sleeping in them, you’ll regret it.” Brown turned on his heel and left the room.

Milgrim lay there, looking at the ceiling. Then he got up, got his toiletries out of his coat, and went to take his shower.

51. CESSNA

T ito discovered that he could sleep on an airplane.

This one had a couch and two chairs, behind the smaller, instrument-filled room where the fat, gray-haired pilot sat. Garreth and the old man sat in the two reclining swivel chairs. Tito lay on the couch, looking up at the curved ceiling, which was upholstered, like the couch, in gray leather. This was an American airplane, the old man had told Tito. It had been one of the last of its kind, made in 1985, he had said, as they’d climbed the little stairway on wheels on the runway at East Hampton Airport.

Tito had no idea why the old man would want such an old airplane. Perhaps it had been his, Tito thought, and he’d simply kept it. If it was that old, though, it was like the American cars in Havana, which were also very old, and shaped like whales made of pale ice cream, frosted greens and pinks, dressed with huge chrome teeth and fins, every inch rubbed to a perfect gloss. As they’d walked to it, from the Lincoln, Garreth and the old man each carrying luggage they’d taken from the trunk, Tito, for all his fear, had been taken with its lines, how it gleamed. It had a very long, very sharp nose, propellers built into its wings on either side, and a row of round windows.

The pilot, fat and smiling, had seemed very glad to see the old man, and had said that it had been a long time. The old man had said that it had indeed, and that he owed the pilot one. He didn’t, the pilot had said, not by half, and had taken the two suitcases, and Tito’s bag, and put them into a space built into the wing, behind one of the engines, hidden when he shut it.

Tito had closed his eyes, going up the stairway, and had kept them closed while Garreth had gone to park the car. “Cutting it close,” the pilot had said, from the front of the plane, while Tito sat with his eyes closed on the couch. “Dawn-to-dusk operation, here.” The old man had said nothing.

Taking off had been very nearly as bad for him as the helicopter, but he’d had his Nano ready, and had his eyes closed.

Eventually, he tried opening them. Sunset was filling the windows, dazzling him. The movement of the plane was smooth, and unlike the helicopter, it felt as though it was actually flying, not being carried along, suspended from something else. It was quieter than the helicopter, and the couch was comfortable.

Garreth and the old man turned on small lights, and put on headsets with microphones, and talked to each other. Tito listened to his music. Eventually the two men unfolded small desks. The old man opened a laptop and Garreth unfolded plans of some kind, studying them, marking them with a mechanical pencil.

It grew warm in the cabin, but not uncomfortable. Tito had taken off his jacket, folded it to use as a pillow, and fallen asleep on the gray couch.

When he woke, it was night, and the lights were off. Through the entrance to the room where the pilot sat, he could see many different lights, small screens with lines and symbols.

Were they leaving the United States? How far could an airplane like this fly? Could it fly to Cuba? To Mexico? He didn’t think it likely they were flying to Cuba, but Vianca having said she thought that Eusebio was in Mexico City, in a neighborhood called Doctores, came back to him.

He looked at the old man, whose profile he could just make out against the glow of the instruments’ lights, sleeping, chin down. Tito tried to imagine him with their grandfather, in Havana, a long time ago, when both the revolution and the whalelike cars had been new, but no images came.

He closed his own eyes, and flew through the night, somewhere above the country he hoped was still America.

52. SCHOOL CLOTHES

M ilgrim found the housekeeper in the kitchen, where Brown had said he would be, rinsing breakfast dishes before putting them in the washer. He was a small man, in dark trousers and a crisp white jacket. Milgrim walked into the kitchen barefooted, wrapped in an oversized robe of thick burgundy terry cloth. The man looked at his feet.

“He said you’d give me a haircut,” Milgrim said.

“Sit,” the housekeeper said. Milgrim sat on a maple chair, by the matching table, and watched as the housekeeper tidied the last of the breakfast things into the washer, closed it, and turned it on.

“Any chance of some eggs?” Milgrim asked.

The housekeeper looked at him blankly, then brought out electric clippers, a comb, and a pair of scissors from a black briefcase on the white counter. He covered Milgrim in what Milgrim assumed (jam spots) had been the breakfast tablecloth, ran the comb through Milgrim’s damp hair, then began to cut it, as if he knew what he was doing. When he was done with the scissors, he used the clippers on the back and sides of Milgrim’s neck. He stepped back, considering, then used comb and scissors for a few minor adjustments. He used a napkin to swipe Milgrim’s hair clippings off the tablecloth, onto the floor. Milgrim sat there, waiting to be presented with the mirror. The man brought a broom and long-handled dustpan, and started sweeping up the hair. Milgrim stood up, thinking that there was always something sad about seeing one’s own hair on the floor, removed the tablecloth, shook it out, and put it on the table. He turned to go.

“Wait,” said the housekeeper, still sweeping. When the floor was clean again, he put his barber things back in the briefcase and brought out a yellow cloth measuring tape, a pen, and a notebook. “Take off robe,” he said. Milgrim did, glad that he hadn’t followed Brown’s orders too literally, and was wearing his underpants. The housekeeper quickly and efficiently took his measurements. “Shoe size?”

“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 skinned volumes. No, this was a single piece of leather, molded over a wooden form shaped like the spines of individual books. There were no actual titles, or authors’ names, in the carefully faded gold stamping across these. It was a very elaborate artifact, mass-produced by artisans of one culture in vague imitation of what had once been the culture of another. He opened it. The shelf behind was empty. He quickly closed it.

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 running. He sits down with that thing at any time of the day or night, and starts reading. I tell him it’s not like there’s anything he can do about any of it anyway.”

“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.

The maids, she discovered, had actually saved and folded the bubble wrap that had come in the box from Blue Ant. It was on the shelf in the closet. Instant tip-upgrade. She put the wrapping, the box, and the helmet on the tall kitchenette table.

Doing this, she noticed the Blue Ant figurine that had come with it, standing on one of the coffee tables. She’d leave that, of course. She looked back at it, and knew she couldn’t. This was some part of her that had never grown up, she felt. A grown-up would not be compelled to take this anthropomorphic piece of molded vinyl along when she left the room, but she knew she would. And she didn’t even like things like that. She wouldn’t leave it, though. She walked over and picked it up. She’d take it along and give it to someone, preferably a child. Less because she had any feeling for the thing, which was after all only a piece of marketing plastic, than because she herself wouldn’t have wanted to be left behind in a hotel room.

But she decided not to take it carry-on. She didn’t want the TSA people publicly hauling it out of the box with the helmet. She tossed it into the Barneys bag that held her dressier clothes.


ODILE WAS UNHAPPY that they weren’t going to a hotel, in Vancouver. She liked North American hotels, she said. She liked the Mondrian more than the Standard. The idea of a borrowed flat disappointed her.

“I think it might be really something, from what they said,” Hollis told her. “And nobody lives there.”

They were in the back of a Town Car Hollis had arranged with the hotel, billed to her room. When she’d returned the Jetta, the boy who’d almost recognized her hadn’t been there. They were nearing LAX now, she knew; through smoked windows, she could see those weird bobbing oil-well things on a hillside. They’d been there since she’d first come here. As far as she knew, they never stopped moving. She checked the time on her phone. Almost six.

“I called my mother,” Hollis said. “I did it because you mentioned yours.”

“Where is she, your mother?”

“Puerto Vallarta. They go there in the winter.”

“She is well?”

“She complains about my father. He’s older. I think he’s okay, but she thinks he’s obsessed with American politics. She says it makes him too angry.”

“If this were my country,” Odile said, wrinkling her nose, “I would not be angry.”

“No?” Hollis asked.

“I would drink all the time. Take pill. Anything.”

“There’s that,” said Hollis, remembering dead Jimmy, “but I wouldn’t think you’d want to give them the pleasure.”

“Who?” asked Odile, sitting up, suddenly interested. “Who would I pleasure?”

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