The doors slid aside, revealing Pamela Mainwaring. Looking, Milgrim thought, like some very tasteful pornographer’s idea of “mature,” her blond hair magnificently banged.
“Welcome back,” she said, ignoring Rausch. “How was South Carolina?”
“Fine,” said Milgrim, who held the red cardboard tube in his right hand, the piccolo in his left. He raised the tube slightly. “Got it.”
“Very good,” she said. “Come in.”
Milgrim followed her into a longish room with a long central table. Bigend was seated at the table’s far end, a window behind him. He looked like something that had gone wrong on a computer screen, but then Milgrim realized that that was the suit he was wearing, in a weirdly electric cobalt blue.
“If you don’t mind,” Pamela said, taking the red cardboard tube and handing it on to Milgrim’s favorite in Bigend’s clothing design team, a French girl, today in a plaid kilt and cashmere pullover. “And the photographs?”
“In my bag,” Milgrim said.
While his bag was placed on the table and opened, motorized shades tracked silently shut across the window behind Bigend. Overhead, fixtures came on, illuminating the table, where Milgrim’s tracings were being carefully unfurled. He’d remembered to leave his camera atop his clothes, and now it was being passed from hand to hand, up the table.
“Your medication,” said Pamela, handing him a fresh bubble-pack.
“Now, then,” said Bigend, rising, “be seated.”
Milgrim took the chair to the right of Pamela’s. They were extremely fine workstation chairs, either Swiss or Italian, and he had to restrain himself from fiddling with the various knobs and levers projecting from beneath the seat.
“I see the Bundeswehr NATO pattern,” someone said. “The legs are pure 501.”
“But not the box,” said the girl in kilt and cashmere. The box, he had learned, was everything, in a pair of jeans, above the top of the leg. “The two small pleats are absent, the rise lower.”
“The photographs,” said Bigend, from behind her chair. A plasma screen, above the window he’d been sitting in front of, flared turquoise, around coppery coyote brown, the Formica counter in Edge City Family Restaurant making itself known in this darkened room in central London.
“Knee pads,” said a young man, American. “Absent. No pockets for them.”
“We hear they have a new pad-retention system,” said the French girl, with a surgeon’s seriousness. “But I don’t see that here.”
They watched, then, silently, while Milgrim’s photographs cycled.
“How tactical are they?” asked Bigend as the first photograph reappeared. “Are we looking at a prototype for a Department of Defense contract?”
A silence. Then: “Streetwear.” The French girl, much more confident than the others. “If these are for the military, it isn’t the American military.”
“He said they needed gussets,” said Milgrim.
“What?” asked Bigend, softly.
“He said they were too tight in the thighs. For rappelling.”
“Really,” said Bigend. “That’s good. That’s very good.”
Milgrim allowed himself a first careful sip of his coffee.
7. A HERF GUN IN FRITH STREET
Bigend was telling a story, over drinks in a crowded Frith Street tapas place Hollis suspected she’d been to before. A story about someone using something called a “herf” gun, high-energy radio frequency, in Moscow, to erase someone else’s stored data, in a drive in an adjacent building, on the opposite side of a party wall. So far the best thing about it was that Bigend kept using the British expression “party wall,” and she’d always found it mildly if inexplicably comical. The herf gun, he was explaining now, the electromagnetic radiation device, was the size of a backpack, putting out a sixteen-megawatt pulse, and she suddenly found herself afraid, boys being boys, of some punch-line involving accidentally baked internal organs. “Were any animals harmed, Hubertus,” she interrupted, “in the making of this anecdote?”
“I like animals,” said Milgrim, the American Bigend had introduced at Blue Ant, sounding as though he were more than mildly surprised to discover that he did. He seemed to have only the one name.
After Clammy had decided to go back to the studio, her white plastic bottle of Cold-FX wedged precariously into a back pocket of his Hounds, departing the Golden Square Starbucks during an unexpected burst of weak but thoroughly welcome sunlight, Hollis had gone out to stand for a few moments amid the puddles in Golden Square, before walking (aimlessly, she’d pretended to herself) back up Upper James to Beak Street. Turning right, crossing the first intersection on her side of Beak, she’d found Blue Ant exactly where she remembered it, while simultaneously realizing that she’d been hoping it somehow wouldn’t be there.
When she’d pressed the annunciator button, a square pattern of small round holes had said hello. “Hollis Henry, for Hubertus.” Was she expected? “Not at all, no.”
A handsome, bearded child, in a corduroy sports coat considerably older than he was, had opened the thick glass door almost immediately. “I’m Jacob,” he’d said. “We’re just trying to find him.” He’d offered his hand.
“Hollis,” she’d said.
“Come in, please. I’m a huge fan of The Curfew.”
“Thank you.”
“Would you like coffee, while you wait?” He’d indicated a sort of guardhouse, diagonally striped in artfully battered yellow and black paint, in which a girl with very short blond hair was polishing an espresso maker that looked set to win at Le Mans. “They sent three men from Turin, to install the machine.”
“Shouldn’t I be being photographed?” she’d asked him. Inchmale hadn’t liked Blue Ant’s new security measures at all when they’d last come here, to sign contracts. But then the phone in Jacob’s right hand had played the opening chords of “Box 1 of 1,” one of her least favorite Curfew songs. She’d pretended not to notice. “In the lobby,” he’d said to the phone.
“Have you been with Blue Ant long?” she’d asked.
“Two years now. I actually worked on your commercial. We were gutted when it fell through. Do you know Damien?” She didn’t. “The director. Gutted, absolutely.” But then Bigend had appeared, in his very blue suit, shoulder-draped in the bivouac-tent yardage of the trench coat, and accompanied by Pamela Mainwaring and a nondescript but unshaven man in a thin cotton sportscoat and wrinkled slacks, a black nylon bag slung over his shoulder. “This is Milgrim,” Bigend had said, then “Hollis Henry” to the man, who’d said “Hello,” but scarcely anything since.
“What kinds of animals?” she asked him now, in a still more naked bid to derail Bigend’s narrative.
Milgrim winced. “Dogs,” he said, quickly, as though surprised in some guilty pleasure.
“You like dogs?” She was sure that Bigend had been paying whatever lowlife had been wielding that herf gun, though he’d never come right out and tell you that, unless he had some specific reason to.
“I met a very nice dog in Basel,” Milgrim said, “at…” A micro-expression of anxiety. “At a friend’s.”
“Your friend’s dog?”
“Yes,” said Milgrim, nodding once, tightly, before taking a sip of his Coke. “You could have used a spark coil generator instead,” he said to Bigend, blinking, “made from a VCR tuner. They’re smaller.”
“Who told you that?” asked Bigend, suddenly differently focused.
“A… roommate?” Milgrim extended an index finger, to touch his stack of tiny, elongated white china tapas dishes, as if needing to assure himself that they were there. “He worried about things like that. Out loud. They made him angry.” He looked apologetically at Hollis.
“I see,” said Bigend, although Hollis certainly didn’t.
Now Milgrim took a pharmacist’s folded white bubble-pack from an inside jacket pocket, flattened it, and frowned with concentration. All of the pills, Hollis saw, were white as well, white capsules, though of differing sizes. He carefully pushed three of them through the foil backing, put them in his mouth, and washed them down with a swig of Coke.
“You must be exhausted, Milgrim,” said Pamela, seated beside Hollis. “You’re on east coast time.”