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.
But then he wondered if Brown might not actually have the DEA connections he’d imagined he might have. Maybe he borrowed the plane from the people he got the Rize from? They seized things from serious dealers, didn’t they? Boats. Planes. You read about that.
That would explain the shag carpeting, too.