“I don’t understand why you’d want to see me,” Hollis said. “Under the circumstances.”
The woman smiled. “I was a huge fan of the Curfew, by the way, though that’s not it.” She sat. Glanced down at the iPhone’s glowing screen, then looked at Hollis. “I think it was my sense of once having been where you are.”
“Which is…?”
“I worked for Bigend myself. Identical arrangement, from what Mere tells me. There was something he wanted, the missing piece of a puzzle, and he talked me into finding it for him.”
“Did you?”
“I did. Though it wasn’t at all what he’d imagined. Eventually he did do something, repurposing aspects of what I’d helped him learn. Something ghastly, in marketing. I used to be in marketing myself, but then I wasn’t, after him.”
“What did you do, in marketing?”
“I had a very peculiar and specific talent, which I didn’t understand, never have understood, which now is gone. Though that hasn’t been a bad thing, the gone part. It stemmed from a sort of allergy I’d had, since childhood.”
“To what?”
“Advertising,” the woman said. “Logos, in particular. Corporate mascot figures. I still dislike those, actually, but not much more than some people dislike clowns, or mimes. Any concentrated graphic representation of corporate identity.”
“But don’t you have your own now?”
The woman looked down at her iPhone, stroked the screen. “I do, yes. Forgive me for keeping this on. I’m doing something with my kids. Difficult to keep in touch, with the time difference.”
“Your logo worries me, a little.”
“It was drawn by the woman Bigend had sent me to find. She was a filmmaker. She died, a few years after I found her.”
Hollis was watching emotion in the woman’s face, a transparency that easily trumped her beauty, which was considerable. “I’m sorry.”
“Her sister sent me some of her things. There was this unnerving little doodle, at the bottom of a page of notes. When we had the notes translated, they were about the legend of the Gabriel Hounds.”
“I’d never heard of them.”
“Neither had I. And when I began making my own things, I didn’t want a brand name, a logo, anything. I’d always removed branding from my own clothes, because of that sensitivity. And I couldn’t stand anything that looked as though a designer had touched it. Eventually I realized that if I felt that way about something, that meant it hadn’t been that well designed. But my husband made a compelling case for there being a need to brand, if we were going to do what I was proposing to do. And there was her squiggle, at the bottom of that page.” She looked down at the horizonal screen again, then up at Hollis. “My husband is from Chicago. We lived there, after we met, and I discovered the ruins of American manufacturing. I’d been dressing in its products for years, rooting them out of warehouses, thrift shops, but I’d never thought of where they’d come from.”
“Your things are beautifully made.”
“I saw that an American cotton shirt that had cost twenty cents in 1935 will often be better made than almost anything you can buy today. But if you re-create that shirt, and you might have to go to Japan to do that, you wind up with something that needs to retail for around three hundred dollars. I started bumping into people who remembered how to make things. And I knew that how I dressed had always attracted some attention. There were people who wanted what I wore. What I curated, Bigend would have said.”
“He’s curating suits that do retinal damage, these days.”
“He has no taste at all, but he behaves as if he’s had it removed, elective surgery. Perhaps he did. That search he sent me on somehow removed my one negotiable talent. I’d been a sort of coolhunter as well, before that had a name, but now it’s difficult to find anyone who isn’t. I suspect he’s responsible for that, somehow. Some kind of global contagion.”
“And you began to make clothing, in Chicago?”
“We were having children.” She smiled, glanced down at the screen, stroked it with a fingertip. “So it wasn’t as though I had much time. But my husband’s work was going well. So I could afford to experiment. And I discovered I really loved doing that.”
“People wanted the things you made.”
“That was frightening, at first. I just wanted to explore processes, learn, be left alone. But then I remembered Hubertus, ideas of his, things he’d done. Guerrilla marketing strategies. Weird inversions of customary logic. That Japanese idea of secret brands. The deliberate construction of parallel microeconomies, where knowledge is more congruent than wealth. I’d have a brand, I decided, but it would be a secret. The branding would be that it was a secret. No advertising. None. No press. No shows. I’d do what I was doing, be as secretive as I could about it, and avoid the bullshit. And I was very good at being secretive about it. I’d gotten that from my father as well.”
“It seems to have worked.”
“Too well, possibly. It’s at that point, now, where it either has to go to another level or stop. Does he know? That it’s me?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Does he suspect?”
“If he does, he’s doing a good job of pretending he doesn’t. And right now he’s focused on a crisis that has nothing to do with either of us.”
“He must be in his element, then.”
“He was. Now I’m not so sure. But I don’t think he’s giving Gabriel Hounds much attention.”
“He’ll know it’s me soon enough. We’re coming out. It’s time. Tonight’s pop-up is part of a that.”
“He’ll still be dangerous.”
“That’s exactly what I wanted to say to you. When Mere told me about you, I realized you’d already had the Bigend experience, but you were back for more, even though you struck her as a good person.”
“I never planned it that way.”
“Of course not. He has a kind of dire gravity. You need to get further away. I know.”
“I’ve already taken steps.”
The woman looked at her carefully. “I believe you. And good luck. We have the pop-up starting now, and I have to help Bo, but I wanted to thank you personally. Mere told me what you did, or rather what you weren’t willing to do, and of course I’m very grateful.”
“I only did what I had to do. Didn’t do what I couldn’t do, more like it.”
They both stood.
“Totally fucking next level,” Hollis heard Clammy declare, from beyond the noren.
70. DAZZLE
The penguin smelled of Krylon, an aerosol enamel Fiona had used to camouflage it, so to speak. Milgrim knew more about camouflage, now, than he would ever have expected to, via Bigend’s interest in military clothing. Prior to that, he had only been familiar with two kinds, the one with the Lava Lamp blobs in nature shades, that the U.S. Army had featured when he was a boy, and the creepy photorealist turkey-hunter stuff that a certain kind of extra-scary New Jersey drug dealer sometimes affected. What Fiona called “dazzle,” though, was new to him. Fiona said it had been invented by a painter, a Vorticist. He’d Google it, when he had time. It had been Garreth’s suggestion, and Fiona had told Milgrim that it didn’t actually make a lot of sense, in their situation, though anything was better than silver Mylar. She liked Garreth having suggested it, though, because it seemed to her to be part of some performance-art aspect of what he was doing. She said she’d never seen anything quite like it, what Garreth was doing, and particularly the speed with which it was being put together.
Out in the bike yard, she’d sprayed the penguin’s silver Mylar with black, random, wonky geometrics, their edges fuzzy, like graffiti. Real dazzle had sharp edges, she said, but there was no way to mask the inflated balloon. She used a piece of brown cardboard, cut in a concave curve, to mask approximately, then went back with a dull gray, to fill in the remaining silver. When that had dried a little, she’d further confused it with an equally dull beige, ghosting lines in with the cardboard mask. The result wouldn’t conceal the penguin against any background at all, particularly the sky, but broke it up visually, made it difficult to read as an object. Still a penguin, though, a swimming one, and now with the Taser and the extra electronics that Voytek had taped to its tummy.