“That,” she said, “is magic.”
The cabinet next to the refrigerator held a few basics, and he boiled pasta and heated some sauce. She watched him work at the stovetop.
“This is the most fucked-up date I’ve ever been on,” she said, and he smirked.
He served her at the counter. She’d slung her purse up beside her, and it yawned open, showing an overstuffed wallet, a zippered makeup bag, the blue fold of a passport.
While she ate, he walked behind her, squatted above the Storm Case, and started putting away the nonlinear junction detector.
“Can I get something to drink?”
Right on schedule.
The raised lid of the case hid his hand from view as he plucked a tiny glass vial from the foam lining.
“There’s a machine in the lobby,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
He headed out, took the elevator down, fed a couple of bills into the Coke machine, and chose the darkest shade of Powerade — fruit punch. He took the stairs back up, pausing on an empty landing, and lifted the tiny vial to the light. Inside, a thin layer of what looked like fine black sand shifted as he angled the vial. They were microchips — silicon with trace amounts of copper and magnesium. The technology, developed by the biopharmaceutical industry, had been pirated from a Phase II drug designed to regulate diabetes. Once ingested, the sensors massed, generating a slight voltage when digestive juices were stimulated. This voltage sent a signal to the patient’s skin, where a patch relayed the blood-sugar readings to the cell phone of the treating physician. The variation Evan had acquired conveyed instead the GPS bearings of its carrier. If not replenished, it broke down in the body and passed from the system within several days.
Evan poured the particles into the plastic bottle and swished them around, dispersing them until they were lost to the dark red liquid. He continued upstairs.
When he entered the loft, Katrin was behind the counter, cleaning up her dishes. He twisted the cap, pretending to break the seal for her, and offered the bottle.
She shook her head. “Don’t drink that stuff.”
“Stress burns electrolytes,” he said. “Drink.”
She studied him for a moment, then took the bottle, gulped it halfway down, and left the rest on the counter. Stifling a yawn, she trudged toward the futon. “I feel like I haven’t slept in a month,” she said.
Fully clothed, she burrowed beneath the fluffy white comforter. He put the bottle in the fridge and walked over to her. “I’ll leave a stack of cash on the counter,” he said. “Same rules as the hotel with regard to ordering food, going out, everything. I will be back sometime tomorrow.”
“Okay, got it,” she said, her voice slurred with exhaustion. She lay on her side, facing away at the tinted window. Across a river of headlights, the Staples Center glowed Lakers purple.
From the inside of the vial’s cap, he peeled off a skin-colored patch the size of a dot and readied it on his knuckle so the sticky edge hung halfway off. He crossed to the futon and tucked her in, letting his hand nudge just behind her ear, the patch transferring to her skin beside the three tattooed stars. It was waterproof, thinner than Saran Wrap and just as transparent. It disappeared beautifully.
As he pulled away, she squeezed his wrist and rolled over sleepily. “I don’t know how I’ll ever thank you,” she said.
He gave a little nod and adjusted the sheets over her. She rocked back onto her side and let her eyes close.
On the way out, he lifted her passport from her purse.
25
Business of a Certain Type
It was full dark by the time Evan reached Northridge, the moon a bullet hole through the black dome of the sky. Maneuvering a grid of streets on the flat floor of the Valley, he arrived at the industrial park just off Parthenia. The layout had a movie-studio vibe, blocky buildings scattered like sound stages.
The Taurus’s tires crackled across the asphalt between businesses, all of them shuttered for the night. Except one.
A single point of light glowed above the entrance to the last building in the complex. It was a Victorian streetlamp, rising like a prop from a bed of begonias. In place of a light, the streetlamp held a backlit sign that in turn featured a streetlamp illustration, beneath which was written “CraftFirst Poster Restoration” in old-timey letters. The Magritte-meta conceit was an appropriate one, as the brick façade housed a business behind a business.
He parked and rang a buzzer on a call box. A moment later the door clicked open and he entered, passing through a brief foyer with periwinkle walls exhibiting Italian noir posters from the forties. Another door, another buzzer, and then he was through into the vast workspace.
Industrial shelving units lined the perimeter, crammed with all order of supplies. Jars of paints, rubber-cement thinner, fine-tipped brushes with tape-padded handles, palette knives, and X-Acto blades. Rolls of army duck canvas, Mylar, and fine-texture poster backing. Jumbles of corner brackets and frame stretcher bars. The space resembled a factory floor, with various conservators bent over giant square plywood worktables, restoring vintage posters and prints. The rolling tables, positioned haphazardly wherever elbow room was afforded, rose only to the workers’ thighs, allowing them ready access to their tasks.
Most of the painters were plugged into iPods, big clamp headphones hugging their skulls. Every last one wore eyeglasses; this kind of work strained the vision. A shiny-haired man adjusted a crinkled British three-sheet of The Day of the Jackal between blotter sheets and slipped it into a nineteenth-century cast-iron screw press. Next to him at a wet table, a worker sprayed an olive German M poster with a retrofitted insecticide atomizer while his partner sponged at a stained spot gently with Orvus soap, a pure, fragrance-free surfactant used for livestock and posters. It made water wetter, the better to penetrate paper fibers. The two men quickly whisked the poster onto a suction table, which roared to life, a vacuum wicking the moisture from below before it could spread out.
“Evan! Over here! You have to see this.”
Melinda Truong, a lithe woman with a curtain of black hair reaching her lower back, popped up from a cluster of men around a workstation and waved him across the floor. As he wove his way to her, a mounted TV blared the ten-o’clock news. Evan glanced up to see if it was carrying the story of the motel shooting, but it was a feature about some assemblyman gone missing.
The ring of workers parted deferentially as he approached. Melinda took his face in both of her hands and kissed him on either cheek close to the edge of his lips. She wore a fitted sweater, yoga pants, and bright orange sneakers of elaborate design. Tucked behind her ear was a 000 paintbrush — the finest make — with its handle wrapped in pink tape. At her waist, slung in an actual holster, was an Olympos double-action airbrush, which looked like a 1970s take on a ray gun. Its grip was also padded with pink tape. The only woman in the operation, she color-coded her tools to keep her men from borrowing them.
She tugged his hand, turning him toward the table around which the little group had gathered. “This poor girl was stripped from a cinema display case in Paris. She lay in a dank warehouse for years after the war, then was shoved into a trunk until last June. She came to us in intensive care.”
He stared down at the object of her affection, a Ginger Rogers insert from Lady in the Dark, sandwiched between Mylar sheets. It had multiple tears, pinholes, and fold wear. “She looks tattered,” he said.
“You should’ve seen her before we got our hands on her. She had to be demounted, washed, the tape adhesive residue removed with Bestine. We’re patching her with vintage paper now. She’ll be worth six figures when we’re done — her owner’ll be thrilled. Of course, we’re only billing him at one twenty-five an hour.” The long lashes of one eye dipped in a graceful wink. “Not like for our special services.”