She reached over and gave Milgrim’s balled double fist a squeeze. His hands were very cold. “Relax. I’ll help you. We’ll do it together.” She saw that his eyes were closed.
“Draw Your Brakes” briefly filled the truck. “Aldous,” Aldous said into his iPhone. “Yes sir. Miss Henry, Mr. Milgrim, and Miss…?” He glanced back at Hollis.
“Give me the phone.”
He passed it back to her.
“Heidi’s with us,” she said.
“I wasn’t expecting her,” said Bigend, “but she can play with the balloons. We do need to talk.”
“She’ll understand.” She handed the phone back to Aldous. He held it to his ear. “Yes sir,” he said, and slipped it into his black suitcoat.
“Milgrim and I have to have a talk with Hubertus,” Hollis said to Heidi.
Heidi turned. “I thought you wanted some help with that.”
“I did,” said Hollis, “but it’s gotten more complicated.” She rolled her eyes in Milgrim’s direction.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing,” said Hollis.
“Don’t let him fuck with you,” said Heidi, reaching back to prod Milgrim in the knee, causing his eyes to snap wide with terror. “He’s full of shit,” she insisted, “they all are.” Leaving Hollis to wonder, as Aldous pulled the truck over, who they all were. Male authority figures, she guessed, from having known Heidi. Whatever had once made her serial liaisons with professional boxers so relentlessly lively, and had required her separation, as much as had been possible, from label executives.
Aldous pressed various switches on the truck’s dash, with resulting clunks and clanks. He opened his own door, climbed down, closed it, opened the one beside Hollis, and helped her down, his hand large and warm. Milgrim scrambled down behind her, flinching when Aldous heaved the door shut. Heidi, meanwhile, had opened her own door and jumped down. She was wearing gray-green leather plus-fours and knee-high black boots whose brogue-style uppers were soled with sections of tank tread, more loot from the ongoing punitive demolition of fuckstick’s remaining credit cards.
Hollis looked up at the building they were parked in front of. It resembled a European countertop appliance from the Nineties, something by Cuisinart or Krups, metallic gray plastic, its corners blandly rounded. Aldous pressed something on a black key-fob, causing the truck to clunk multiply and give an almost visible shiver of heightened awareness.
They followed him to the building’s entrance, where his equally tall but less-charming colleague, whose name Hollis had never gotten, waited inside.
“I hope he doesn’t want a urine sample,” Milgrim seemed to say, inexplicably, though she opted to pretend she hadn’t heard him.
They were passed through the door, then, from one Jamaican to another, the door locked behind them, and led out into the center of the Cuisinart Building’s determined but rather miniature atrium. Hollis, having some vague idea of what City real estate was worth, supposed they must have agonized over this empty, purely American volume of space, every square centimeter of which, otherwise, might have been filled with usable, windowless office-hive. As it was, it rose a mere five floors, wrapped at each level with a walk-around interior balcony of the same metallic-looking plastic, or plastic-looking metal, that sheathed the exterior. Like a model, to only partial scale, of some hotel in the Atlanta core.
Bigend, in his trench coat, stood at its center, holding an iPhone with both hands, arms extended, squinting, thumbs moving slightly.
“I need to speak with Hollis and Milgrim,” Bigend said to Heidi, offering her the iPhone, “but you’ll enjoy this. The controls are highly intuitive. The video-feed, of course, is from its nose-camera. Start with the manta, then try the penguin.” He pointed, up. They all looked up. Near the atrium’s uniformly glowing, paneled ceiling hung a penguin and a manta ray. The penguin, silvery, looked only approximately like a penguin, but the manta, merely a black, devilishly dynamic-looking blot, seemed considerably more realistic. “Try them,” Bigend said. “Delightful, really. Relaxing. The only other people in the building, at the moment, are employees of mine.”
Heidi craned up at the balloons, if that was what they were, then looked at the iPhone, which she now held in much the way Bigend had been holding it. Her thumbs began to move. “Damn,” she said appreciatively.
“This way,” said Bigend. “I’ve leased two floors of offices here, but they’re very busy now. We can sit here…” He led them to an L-shaped bench of dull aluminum mesh, in the shadow of a hanging stairway, the sort of place that would have been a smoking-nest, when people smoked in office buildings. “You recall the Amsterdam dealer we bought your jacket from? His mysterious picker?”
“Vaguely.”
“We’ve gone back to that. Or, rather, a strategic business intelligence unit I’ve hired in the Hague has. An example of Sleight pushing me out of my comfort zone. I’ve never trusted private security firms, private investigators, private intelligence firms, at all. In this case, though, they have no idea who they’re working for.”
“And?” Hollis, seated now, Milgrim beside her, was watching Bigend closely.
“I’m sending you both to Chicago. We think the Hounds designer is there.”
“Why?”
“Our dealer has had subsequent dealings with the picker who brought him the jacket. Both picker and jacket came from Chicago.”
“Are you certain?”
He shrugged.
“Who is the designer?”
“I’m sending you to find that out,” said Bigend.
“Milgrim,” said Hollis, “has something he needs to tell you.” It was the only thing she could think of that might change the subject, give her time to think.
“Do you, Milgrim?” Bigend asked.
Milgrim made a brief, strange, high-pitched sound, like something burning out. Closed his eyes. Opened them. “The cop,” he said, “in Seven Dials. The one who took my picture. The one from Myrtle Beach.”
Bigend nodded.
“She’s an agent. From,” and he closed his eyes again, “the Defense Criminal Investigative Service.” Milgrim opened his eyes, tentatively discovering himself not dead.
“Who are, I confess,” said Bigend, after a pause, “entirely new to me. American, I take it?”
“It was the pants,” said Milgrim. “She was watching the pants. Then we showed up, and she thought we might be involved with Foley, and Gracie.”
“Which we are, of course, courtesy of Oliver.”
Hollis hadn’t heard Bigend use Sleight’s first name for a while.
“She wants me to tell you about Gracie,” said Milgrim.
“I’d like you to do that,” said Bigend, “but perhaps things would be simplified by my speaking with her myself. I’m not entirely unaccustomed to dealing with Americans.”
“She has to go back,” said Milgrim. “She isn’t going to learn what she needs to learn here. You aren’t what she thought you were. You’re just competition for Foley and Gracie. But she wants you to know about Gracie. That Gracie won’t like it that you’re competing.”
“He already didn’t,” said Bigend. “He turned Sleight, probably at that Marine Corps trade fair in Carolina. Unless Sleight volunteered, which I regard as a possibility. And did she give you a reason for her wanting me to know all this, your unnamed, perhaps nameless federal agent?”
“Winnie Tung Whitaker,” said Milgrim.
Bigend stared at him. “Hyphenated?”
“No,” said Milgrim.
“Did she? Suggest why she might want me to know about this person?”
“She said that you’re rich and have lawyers. That if she can roll you in front of him, she might as well. I don’t think she’s been getting any closer to popping him. Sounded frustrated.”