“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
Tito 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
Milgrim 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 anym
ore.”
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
Inchmale’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 dres
sier 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?”
54. ICE
Tito woke as the Cessna’s wheels touched down. Sunlight through the windows. Grabbing the back of the couch. They sped along on the ground, the pitch of the engines changing. The plane slowed. Eventually, its propellers stopped. He sat up in the sudden silence, blinking out at flat fields, rows of low green.
Spook Country Page 21
