Advertisers divide humanity into marketing categories, tribes with names like Shotguns and Saddles, Inner City, or Bohemian Mix. Magazine subscriptions are the easiest way to tell who's what. In my hand I was holding a list of high-grade, uncut Blue Bloods. Hot property.
"Very pricey, like the rest of this operation."
"Well, I bet you Movable Hype didn't pay for it."
"Why not? Futura's made decent money over the years.
She nodded. "Sure, he has. But would he want everyone to know he was behind a job like this?" Her gesture took in the pages stretching along the walls. "Something so unoriginal and tame? Even if it's a great practical joke, it's pure imitation."
"Yeah, and also pretty likely to guarantee he never works in the magazine industry again."
"So somebody else paid for it. Someone involved with the anti-client."
I shrugged. "Even if we could find out who paid for the mailing list, wouldn't it just be a front company or something? Like Poo-Sham, Inc.?"
Jen nodded. "Maybe. But whoever's putting up the cash had to pay for the really expensive stuff in those gift bags: hundreds of bottles of Poo-Sham and Noble Savage, not to mention all those wireless cameras. Those aren't things you can just stick on your credit card. There must be some kind of money trail."
"Okay." I looked at the front door of the office, imagining keys jingling at any moment. At least this would get us out of here. "Where do we start?"
She lifted up the mailing list. "With this. Doesn't your friend Hillary work for Hoi Aristoi?"
"Hillary doesn't work for them; she just did some PR. And she's not my friend."
"Still, she'd tell you what she knows, wouldn't she?"
"Give me private information about a client? Why would Hillary do that?"
Jen grinned. "Because she's probably dying to find out who turned her head purple."
Chapter 27
START WITH A MOLLUSK, WIND UP WITH AN EMPIRE.
Sounds tricky, but the Phoenicians managed it about four thousand years ago. Their tiny sliver of a kingdom was wedged between the Mediterranean Sea and a vast desert: no gold mines, no olive trees, no amber waves of grain anywhere in sight. The only thing the Phoenicians had going for them was a certain species of shellfish, commonly found lying around down at the beach. These shellfish were tasty but had one problem—if you ate too many of them, your teeth turned purple.
Naturally, most people were annoyed by this. They probably said stuff like, "Those shellfish aren't bad, but who wants purple teeth?" and didn't think much more about it.
Then one day an ancient Innovator got this crazy idea
Okay, imagine you live in Egypt or Greece or Persia back then and you're rich. You've got all the gold, olive oil, and grain you want. But all you ever get to wear is cloth robes that come in the following colors: light beige, medium beige, dark beige. You've seen the Bible movies: everyone's totally decked out in earth tones—that's all they had, that's all they could imagine having.
Then one day along comes a boatload of Phoenicians, and they're selling purple cloth. Purple!
Throw that beige wardrobe away!
For a while, purple is the thing, the biggest fad since that whole wheel craze. After a lifetime spent wearing sixteen shades of beige, everyone's lining up to buy the cool new cloth. The price is crazy high, partly due to demand and partly because it happens to take about 200,000 shellfish to make one ounce of dye, and pretty soon the Phoenicians are rolling in dough (actually, they're rolling in gold, olive oil, and grain, but you get the picture).
A trading empire is born. And talk about branding: Phoenicia is the ancient Greek word for "purple." You are what you sell.
After a while, however, an interesting thing happens. The people in charge decide that purple is too cool for just anyone to wear. First they tax purple cloth; then they pass a law forbidding the hoi polloi to wear purple (as if they could afford it); and finally, they make purple robes the sole property of kings and queens.
Over the centuries this dress code becomes so widespread and so ingrained that even now, four thousand years later, the color purple is still associated with royalty throughout Europe. And all this because an Innovator who lived forty centuries ago figured he could make something cool out of the purple-teeth problem. Not bad.
But why am I telling you all this?
A few days after the Hoi Aristoi launch party, as rumors about purple-headed Blue Bloods spread across New York and big chunks of the wealthiest segment of society disappeared to the Hamptons to wait out the dye in royal isolation, some concerned parent had a half-empty bottle of Poo-Sham tested to see what was in it. The shampoo was discovered to contain water, MEA-lauryl sulfate, and awesome concentrations of medically safe, environmentally sound, and righteously staining shellfish dye.
One thing about the anti-client: they knew their history.
Hillary Winston-hyphen-Smith was not receiving visitors.
We were in the lobby of an upper-Fifth Avenue building that was home to sport-star millionaires, software billionaires, and a certain recording artist who goes by only one name. (And come to think of it, that name is royalty-related, and the guy really likes purple. Go figure.) The concierge of the building was wearing a tasteful purple uniform that matched the rich purple upholstery of the chairs in the marble-and-gold-filigreed lobby, proving that things hadn't really changed that much in the last four thousand years.
"Miss Winston-Smith isn't feeling well," the concierge confided.
"Oh, that's terrible," I said. "Uh, have you seen her today, by any chance?"
He shook his head. "She hasn't been down."
"You sure you can't call up for us?" Jen asked.
"Some friends came by earlier, and she said she wouldn't be coming down today." The concierge cleared his throat. "Actually, Miss Winston-Smith said she wouldn't be down this year. You know how she gets."
I did. And if Hillary was genuinely suffering from Poo-Sham head, I was quite relieved not to be allowed into her august presence.
"Well, that's too bad…," I started, taking a polite step backward.
Then I heard the beeping of Jen making a call. The concierge and I turned to watch her, both paralyzed by astonishment. I hadn't noticed Jen getting Hillary's phone number from the mailing list, and he'd probably never heard anyone speak to Miss Winston-Smith this way.
"Hillary? This is Jen—you met me two days ago at Mandy's meeting. You better be screening this, because Hunter and I are standing at the front desk of your building, and we have a pretty good idea how to find the counteragent for the shampoo you used this morning. We just need a moment of your time and we may be able to help you with the, uh, purple issue. But we're headed out the door now, so unless you—"
The intercom behind the desk popped to life, and a scratchy and crumpled Hillary voice boomed across the lobby.
"Reginald? Would you send them up, please?"
Reginald blinked in surprise, only belatedly remembering to answer Miss Winston-Smith, and pointed toward the elevators.
"Twentieth floor," he said, his eyes full of admiration.
Hillary was in the garden, a large balcony overlooking Central Park, swaddled in a bathrobe and a towel turban, her skin wrinkly and fingertips puckered from what had evidently been a day of showers and baths, her eyes puffy from crying. Her face, hands, forearms up to the elbow, and the few stray locks of hair that emerged from her turban were all extraordinarily, vibrantly, royally purple.