“No,” said Hollis, standing in the middle of the room, feeling trapped. The insectoid wallpaper seemed to have closed in. All the various busts and masks and two-eyed representations staring.
“Bad sign,” said Heidi. “Where is it?”
“In my wallet.”
“You never memorized it.”
“No.”
“It was for emergencies.”
“I never really expected to need it.”
“You just wanted to carry it around. Because he wrote it.”
Hollis looked away, through the open door to the vast bathroom, where fresh towels were hung, warming, on the horizontal pipes of the Time Machine shower.
“Let’s see it,” said Heidi.
Hollis got her wallet out of her purse, her iPhone with it. The little strip of paper, which he’d neatly torn from the bottom of a sheet of Tribeca Grand notepaper, was still there, behind the Amex card she only used for emergencies. She drew it out, unfolded it, and passed it to Heidi.
“American area code?”
“It’ll be a cell. It could be anywhere.”
Heidi dug in a back jeans pocket with her other hand, came up with her own iPhone.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m putting it in my phone.” When she’d finished, she handed the strip of paper back to Hollis. “Have you thought about what you’ll say?”
“No,” said Hollis. “I can’t think about it.”
“That’s good,” said Heidi. “Now do it. But put your phone on speaker.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to hear it. Because you may not remember what you say. I will.”
“Shit,” said Hollis, sitting down on the bed, nearer its foot, and switching on the speaker.
“No shit,” agreed Heidi. “Call him.”
Hollis blankly entered the number.
“Put his name on it,” Heidi said. “Add it to your numbers.”
Hollis did.
“Give it a speed-dial code,” said Heidi.
“I never use that.”
Heidi snorted. “Call him.”
Hollis did. Almost immediately, the room filled with the sound of a ring tone, unfamiliar. Five rings.
“He’s not there,” said Hollis, looking up at Heidi.
“Let it ring.”
After the tenth ring, there was a small, nondescript digital sound. Someone, perhaps a very old woman, began to chatter fiercely, demonstratively, in what might have been an oriental language. She seemed to make three firm statements, increasingly brief. Then silence. Then the record tone.
“Hello?” Hollis winced. “Hello! This is Hollis Henry, phoning for Garreth.” She swallowed, almost coughed. “I just heard about your accident. I’m sorry. I’m worried. Could you call me, please? I hope you get this. I’m in London.” She recited her number. “I-” The record tone sounded again, causing her to jerk.
“Hang up,” said Heidi.
Hollis did.
“That was good,” said Heidi, punching her shoulder softly.
“I feel like throwing up,” said Hollis. “What if he doesn’t call?”
“What if he does?”
“Exactly,” said Hollis.
“Either way, we’ve moved it forward. But he will.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“If you felt like he wouldn’t, you wouldn’t be going through this. You wouldn’t need to.”
Hollis sighed, shakily, and looked at the phone in her hand, which now seemed to have taken on a life of its own.
“I’m not doing Ajay,” Heidi said.
“I wondered,” said Hollis.
“What I am doing, very actively, is not doing Ajay.” She sighed. “Best sparring partner I’ve ever had. You wouldn’t believe the way those squaddies can mix it.”
“What are ‘squaddies’?”
“I don’t know.” Heidi grinned. “I think it might just mean regular soldiers, in which case it’s a joke, because they aren’t that.”
“Where did you find them?”
“The gym. Hackney. Your boy at the front door found it for me. Robert. He’s cute. I went over there in a cab. They laughed at me. Don’t get women there. I had to put some whup-ass on Ajay. Which was not easy. Picked him ’cause he was smallest.”
“What are they?”
“Something. Military. Listening to them, you can’t tell whether they’re still in or not. Bouncers, bodyguards, like that. Moonlighting? Between assignments? Fuck if I know.”
Hollis was still looking at the iPhone.
“You think that was Korean? On his voice mail?”
“I don’t know,” said Hollis. The phone rang.
“There you go,” said Heidi, and winked.
“Hello?”
“Welcome back.” Bigend’s voice filled the room. “I’m on my way back to the office. Can you join me there, please? We should talk.”
Hollis looked up at Heidi, tears starting to come. Then back down at the phone.
“Hello?” said Bigend. “Are you there?”
40. ENIGMA ROTORS
His room here overlooked a canal. He’d only been vaguely aware of London having canals, before. It didn’t have them to the extent that Amsterdam did, or Venice, but it did have them. They were a sort of backdoor territory, evidently. Shops and houses didn’t seem to have faced them. Like a system of aquatic alleys, originally for heavy transport. Now, to judge by the view from his window, they were repurposed as civic and tourist space. Turned into a framework for boat rides, with paths for jogging and cycling. He thought of the boat on the Seine, with its video screen, the Dottirs and George’s band, the Bollards. The boat he’d seen here, earlier, had been much smaller.
The room phone rang. He left the bathroom to answer it. “Hello?”
“I am Voytek,” a man said, with some accent that caused Milgrim, on the off chance, to repeat himself in Russian.
“Russian? I am not Russian. You are?”
“Milgrim.”
“You are American.”
“I know,” said Milgrim.
“My shop,” said Voytek, whose name Milgrim now remembered from brunch in Southwark, “is in market, near your hotel. Under, in old stables. You bring your unit now.”
“What’s the name of your shop?”
“Biro Shack.”
“Biro Shack? Like the pen?”
“Biro Shack. And son. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.” Milgrim returned the phone to its cradle.
He sat down at the desk and logged into his Twitter account.
“Get n touch,” Winnie had posted, an hour earlier.
“Camden Town Holiday Inn,” he typed, then added his room number and the telephone number of the hotel. He updated. Refreshed. Nothing.
The phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Welcome back,” said Winnie. “I’m coming over there.”
“I’m just going out,” said Milgrim. “It’s work. I don’t know how long it’s going to take.”
“How’s your evening look?”
“Nothing scheduled yet.”
“Keep it open for me.”
“I’ll try.”
“I’m not that far away. Heading for the general vicinity now.”
“Goodbye,” Milgrim said to the phone, though she was already gone. He sighed.
He’d forgotten to return Hollis’s red dongle, but he didn’t need it here. He’d give it back to her the next time he saw her.
He closed the laptop and put it in his bag, which he’d unpacked on arrival. Bigend had wanted the memory card with the pictures of Foley, and he didn’t have another, so he wouldn’t bother taking the camera.
Walking from his room to the elevator, he wondered why they had decided to build a Holiday Inn here, beside this canal.
In the lobby, he waited at the concierge desk while two young American men received directions to the Victoria and Albert. He looked at them the way he imagined Blue Ant’s young French fashion analyst might. Everything they were wearing, he decided, qualified as what she’d call “iconic,” but had originally become that way through its ability to gracefully patinate. She was big on patination. That was how quality wore in, she said, as opposed to out. Distressing, on the other hand, was the faking of patination, and was actually a way of concealing a lack of quality. Until he’d found himself in Bigend’s apparel-design push, he hadn’t known that anyone thought about clothing that way. He didn’t imagine that anything these two wore was liable to acquire any patina, except under different and later ownership.
When they’d moved on, he asked for directions to Voytek’s Biro Shack, explaining where he’d been told it was.