Zero history

45. SHRAPNEL, SUPERSONIC

Heidi, legs strong and white in black cyclist’s shorts, shoulders square in her more complexly black majorette jacket, once again crouched gargoyle-fashion on the edge of the Piblokto Madness bed, black-nailed toes prehensile. Two pale silvery darts were tucked like bullets in a bandolier, into the thick cording of the jacket’s frogged front, their blood-red, paper-thin plastic flights pointing toward Number Four’s ceiling.

She rolled a third between thumb and forefinger, as if she might decide to smoke it. “Tungsten,” she said, “and rhenium. Alloyed, they’re superheavy.” She sighted along the dart’s black tip, almost invisible in this light. The heavy, multilayered drapes were drawn against the night, and only the tiny, focused, supernally brilliant Swiss bulbs, in the birdcage library, lit the room and its artifacts. “Place Ajay knows. Cost a hundred pounds apiece. You want to make supersonic shrapnel, you make it with this stuff.”

“Why would you?” asked Hollis, barefoot as well, from the striped armchair nearest the foot of the bed.

“Penetration,” said Heidi, flicking the dart past Hollis and into the eye, ten feet away, of a glossy black Congolese fetish.

“Don’t,” said Hollis. “I wouldn’t want to have to pay for that. I think it’s ebony.”

“Dense,” said Heidi, “but no match for wolfram. Old name for tungsten. Should’ve been a metal band: Wolfram. They wind the strings of some instruments with it. Need the density. Jimmy told me.”

The name of their dead friend and bandmate hung momentarily in the air.

“I don’t think this job with Bigend is working out,” Hollis said.

“No?” Heidi drew a second dart, which she held up like a fairy sword, between her eye and the birdcage lights, admiring the point.

“Don’t throw that,” Hollis warned. “I’m supposed to find someone for him. The woman who designed this jacket. Though he may not know she’s a woman.”

“So you have? Found her?”

“I’ve found someone who met her. Meredith, George’s girlfriend.”

Heidi arched an eyebrow. “Small world.”

“Sometimes,” Hollis said, “I think something about Bigend condenses things, pulls them together…”

“Reg,” said Heidi, drawing the dart’s black tip perilously close to her eye, “just says Bigend’s a producer. The Hollywood kind, not the music kind. A giant version of what fuckstick said he’d like to be, but without the hassle of having to make movies.” She lowered the second dart, looked seriously at Hollis. “Maybe that was what he was thinking of with the Ponzi scheme, huh?”

“You had no idea he was doing that?”

“I don’t think he did either, most of the time. He was good at delegation. Delegated that to some module of himself he didn’t have to hear from too often. Reg says he embodied the decade that way.”

“Have you seen Reg yet?”

“We had lunch when you were in Paris.”

“How was that?”

Heidi shrugged, the jacket’s black-fringed left epaulet rising half an inch, falling back. “Okay. I don’t usually have too much trouble with Reg. There’s a trick to that.”

“What is it?”

“I ignore everything he says,” said Heidi, with an uncharacteristically upbeat seriousness. “Dr. Fujiwara taught me.” Then she frowned. “But Reg, he had his doubts about you working for Bigend.”

“But he was the one who suggested it. It was his idea.”

“That was before he decided Bigend’s up to something.”

“Bigend’s defined by being up to something.”

“This is different,” said Heidi. “Inchmale doesn’t know what it is, right? Otherwise, he’d tell. Can’t keep a secret. But his wife’s been getting the signals at work, some kind of London PR hive-mind thing. Wires are humming, she says. Wires are hot, but there’s no actual signal. Kind of subsonic buzz. PR people dreaming of Bigend. Imagining they see his face on coins. Saying his name when they mean someone else. Omens, Reg says. Like before a quake. He wants to talk to you about that. Just not on the phone.”

“There’s something going on at Blue Ant. Corporate spook stuff. Hubertus doesn’t seem that concerned about it.” She remembered what he’d said about a long-term project nearing fruition, his frustration with the timing of Sleight’s apparent defection.

“You don’t want to tell him who makes those jackets?”

“Fortunately, I don’t know who she is. But I’ve already told him that Meredith knows. If she won’t tell me, and she won’t, because she doesn’t want to, and I don’t want her to, he’ll go after her. He already has something she really wants, or he could have it, if he hasn’t found it already.”

“Something changed your mind?”

“Something changed hers. She was going to do it, tell me. Then she decided not to. Then she told me why. Told me a story.” It was Hollis’s turn to shrug. “Just like that, sometimes.” She put her feet down on the carpet and stood, stretching. Walked to the shelf, where the dart was centered perfectly, an instant and quite convincing Dadaist assemblage, in one deep orbit of the rectilinear ebony head. When she tried to pull it out, the head moved toward the edge of the shelf. “That’s really in there.” She steadied the sculpture with her left hand, twisting the dart out with her right.

“It’s the mass. Behind a force-localizer.”

Hollis bent, peering into the head’s left eye socket. A tiny round hole. “How did you learn to do that?”

“I didn’t. I don’t. It wants to happen. I get out of the way. I told Ajay that, he said he loves me.”

“Does he?” Hollis looked at the dart’s black tip.

“He loves that. How about your boyfriend?”

“Obviously,” Hollis said, “he hasn’t called.”

“Call him again.”

“Doesn’t feel right.” She crossed to the bed, offered Heidi the dart. Heidi took it.

“You fight with him?”

“No. I’d say we drifted apart, but it wasn’t like that. When we were together, it was like we were both on vacation. On vacation from ourselves, maybe. But he didn’t have a project. Like an actor between films. And then he did, but it was gradual. Like an atmosphere. Some kind of fog. He became harder to see. Less present. And I was starting to work on the book. I took that much more seriously than I would have expected to.”

“I know,” said Heidi, tucking the two darts back into the frogging, beside the third, with seemingly no regard for where the black needlepoints might go. “I remember going up to see you in the Marmont. All that stuff laid out on tables. Seeing you were really doing it.”

“It helped me make sense of what I’d been through. Working for Bigend, being with Garreth… I think there’s a way in which I may be able to look at that book, one day, and make a different kind of sense out of what happened. Not that there’s anything there that’s about that. I told that to Reg, last month, and he said it was a palimpsest.”

Heidi said nothing. Canted her head slightly, her black hair a raptor’s wing, swinging a precise inch, no more.

“But not now,” Hollis said. “I don’t want to look at it now, and it wouldn’t tell me anything if I did. And leaving him a second message would be like that. I left the first one. I did what he told me to do, except that I didn’t do it because knowing him had gotten me in trouble. I did it because I heard he’d been hurt. I’m not not calling him out of some kind of pride.”

“Magical thinking,” said Heidi. “That’s what Reg would say about that. But hey, he totally navigates by that shit. We know that.”

The room phone’s sclerotic mechanical cricket chirped. Again. Hollis was lifting the heavy receiver from the rosewood cube as it rang a third time. “Hello?”

“We need to talk,” said Bigend.

“We just did.”

“I’m sending Aldous for you, with Milgrim.”

“Fine,” said Hollis, deciding she might as well use this as an opportunity to quit. She hung up.

“Muskrat man,” said Heidi.

“I have to meet him,” Hollis said, “but I’m going to quit.”

“Okay,” said Heidi, rolling back, then over and off the bed, straightening smoothly to her full height. “Take me.”

“I don’t think he’d like that,” said Hollis.

“Good,” said Heidi. “You want to quit? I’ll get your ass fired.”

Hollis looked at her. “Okay,” she said.