Part 51 (1/2)
”No idea. Phoned a friend in Was.h.i.+ngton? But then, I never cease to be amazed at how the oddest things float about.”
”And they arrested Gracie and the others?”
He sat up, doubled the yellow bungee in front of his chest, and slowly pulled his fists apart. ”A special kind of detention.”
”Nothing in the news.”
”Nothing,” he agreed, still stretching.
”Pep put something in their car. Then locked it up again.”
”Yes.” The bungee at full extension now, quivering.
”The other party favor.”
He relaxed, the yellow elastic drawing his fists together. ”Yes.”
”What was in it?”
”Molecules. The sort you don't want a bomb-sniffer to find. They were sampled from a particular batch of Semtex that the IRA were heavily invested in. Plastic explosive. Distinctive chemical signature. Still a few tons of it out there, as far as anyone knows. And the card from a digital camera. Photographs of mosques, all over Britain. The dates on the images were a few months old, but not over sell-by, as suggestive evidence goes.”
”And when you said you were using something 'off the shelf,' that was it?”
”Yes.”
”Who was it originally for?”
”Not important now. No need to know. When I jumped off the Burj, silly t.i.t, I blew the window of opportunity on that one. But then I had a girlfriend in trouble. Vinegar and brown paper.”
”Vinegar?”
”Improvised fix. Whatever's handiest.”
”I'm not complaining. But what about Gracie? Won't he tell them about us?”
”The beauty of that,” he said, putting his hand on her hip, ”is that he doesn't know about us. Well, you a bit, possibly, through Sleight, but Sleight's without a governor now, with Gracie a secret guest of Her Majesty. Sleight's busy getting himself well away from all of it, I'd imagine. And it's looking better than that, actually, according to the old man.”
”How better?”
”American government seems not to like Gracie. They're turning up all sorts of things on their end. He's getting major interagency attention, so the old boy hears. I imagine ours will eventually decide he's been the victim of a practical joke, but then he'll have genuine problems back home. Huge ones, I hope. I'm more worried about your Big End in the long run, myself.”
”Why?”
”Something's happening there. Too big to get a handle on. But the old man says that that's it exactly: Big End, somehow, is now too big to get a handle on. Which may be what they mean when they say something's too big to fail.”
”He's found Meredith's last season of shoes. Tacoma. Bought them, given them to her. Via some weird new ent.i.ty of his that targets and a.s.sists creatives.”
”I'd watch the 'targets,' myself.”
”And he's paid me. My accountant phoned this morning. I'm worried about that.”
”Why?”
”Hubertus paid me exactly the amount I received for my share of licensing a Curfew song to a Chinese car company. That's a lot of money.”
”Not a problem.”
”Easy for you to say. I don't want to be in his debt.”
”You aren't. If it hadn't been for you, he might not have gotten Chombo back, because I wouldn't have turned up. And if he had gotten him back, swapping Milgrim, he'd have eventually had to deal with Sleight and Gracie, down the road. I wasn't just putting the wind up him with that. He knows that. You're being rewarded for your crucial role in getting him wherever he's now gotten.”
”On his way to Iceland, that would be.”
”Let him go. How are you at kitchens?”
”Cooking? Minimal skills.”
”Designing them. I have a flat in Berlin. East side, new building, old was entirely asbestos so they knocked it down. One very big room and a bathroom. No kitchen, just the stumps of pipes and ganglia sticking up from the floor, more or less in the middle. We'd need to fill that in, if we were going to live there.”
”You want to live in Berlin?”
”Provisionally, yes. But only if you do.”
She looked at him. ”When I was leaving Cabinet,” she said, ”following you out to the Slow Foods van, Robert congratulated me. I didn't ask him what for, just said thanks. He'd been odd since you turned up. Do you know what that was about?”
”Ah. Yes. When I first struck up a conversation with him, when I was waiting for you, I told him that I was there to ask you to marry me.”
She stared at him. ”And you were lying.”
”Not at all. Moment never presented itself. I a.s.sume he thinks we're engaged.”
”Do you?”
”Your call, traditionally,” he said, putting down the bungee.
86. DOILIES
Fiona was getting her hair cut.
Milgrim stayed in the cabin, finis.h.i.+ng Hollis's book, then digging deeper into the archival subbas.e.m.e.nt of Cabinet's website, where he might learn, for instance, that the watercolors in the hallways leading to Hollis's room were early twentieth-century, by the expatriate American eccentric Doran Lumley. Cabinet owned thirty of these, and rotated them regularly.
He looked up at the decor of the cabin, remembering Hollis's room at Cabinet, how much he'd liked it. Designers from Hermes had based these cabins on ones in transatlantic prewar German airs.h.i.+ps, though n.o.body was making much of a point of that. Frosted aluminum, laminated bamboo, moss-green suede, and ostrich in one very peculiar shade of orange. The three windows were round, portholes really, and through them, if he looked, an empty sea, gone bronze with the setting sun.
The ekranoplan reminded Milgrim of the Spruce Goose Spruce Goose, which he'd toured in Long Beach as a high school student, but with its wings largely amputated. Weird Soviet hybrids, the ekranoplans; they flew, at tremendous speeds, about fifteen feet above the water, incapable of greater alt.i.tude. They had been designed to haul a hundred tons of troops or cargo, very quickly, over the Black or Baltic Sea. This one, an A-90 Orlyonok, had, like all the others, been built in the Volga s.h.i.+pyard, at Nizhni Novgorod. Milgrim already knew more about them than he cared to, as he was supposed to be translating a four-inch stack of technical and historical doc.u.ments for Bigend. With Fiona here, he hadn't made much progress.