Spook Country

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.”

“I wouldn’t say that that’s any indication of lesbianism, particularly.”

“No?”

“Heidi constitutes a sort of a gender preference unto herself. For some people. And lots of them are male.”

He smiled. “That’s true. I’d forgotten.”

A chord sounded.

“The mothership,” said Inchmale.

Hollis watched as Ollie Sleight wheeled a tinkling, cloth-covered cart in. He was back in his expensive chimney-sweep outfit, she saw, but now was clean-shaven. “We weren’t sure you’d have eaten,” he said. And then, to Hollis, “Hubertus would like you to call him.”

“I’m still processing,” she told him. “Tomorrow.”

“You’re serving breakfast,” said Inchmale, hand coming down on Ollie’s shoulder, cutting off any response to Hollis. “If you’re going to make a go of this, and move up from being a Civil War reenactor”—he flipped the lapel of the chimney-sweep suit—“you’re going to have to learn to stay on task.”

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I have to sleep now. I’ll call him tomorrow, Ollie.”

She went upstairs. Dawn was well under way, lots of it, and there was nothing in sight that resembled a blind or drape. She got out of her jeans, climbed up on Bigend’s maglev bed, pulled the covers over her head, and fell asleep.