“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 tit, 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 entity of his that targets and assists 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 assume 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, finishing Hollis’s book, then digging deeper into the archival subbasement 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 airships, though nobody 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, 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 altitude. 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 Shipyard, 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 documents for Bigend. With Fiona here, he hadn’t made much progress.
He’d tried working in the smallest of the four lounges, on the top deck, directly behind the flight deck (if that was the term, in something that arguably voyaged, rather than flew). There was scarcely anyone there, usually, and he could take the papers and his laptop. But the wifi was excellent onboard, and he’d found himself Googling things there, eating croissants, drinking coffee. That was where he’d discovered Cabinet’s site.
“That’s Cabinet, isn’t it?” the Italian girl had asked, topping up his coffee. “Have you stayed there?”
“No,” Milgrim had said, “but I’ve been there.”
“I used to work there,” she’d said, smiling, and walked back toward the galley, looking very smart in her Jun Marukawa tunic and skirt. Fiona said that Bigend, with the Hermes ekranoplan, had gone totally Bond villain, and that the crew uniforms were the icing on the cake. Still, Milgrim had thought, no denying the girl looked good in her Marukawa.
But when he’d finally settled down to translate what was really quite dreadful prose, Bigend had emerged from the flight deck, the Klein Blue suit freshly pressed.
He’d taken a seat opposite Milgrim, at the small round table, the suit contrasting painfully with the orange leather upholstery. He’d proceeded, with no preface whatever, as was his way, to tell Milgrim a great deal about the history of the rifle Gracie had left on Little Wormwood Scrubs. It had, Milgrim had already known, been found, just after dawn, by a dog walker, who’d promptly phoned the police. Stranger things, Milgrim now knew, had been found on the Scrubs, including unexploded munitions, and not that long ago.
He’d learned then that the police who’d responded to the dog walker had been ordinary police, so that the rifle’s serial numbers had been, however briefly, in ordinary police computers. Shortly to evaporate, under the attention of spookier entities, but long enough for Bigend, however he might have done it, to acquire them. He now knew, somehow, that the rifle, Chinese-made, had been captured in Afghanistan two years before, and dutifully logged. After that, a blank, until Gracie had turned up with it, folded, in a cardboard carton. It bothered Bigend, the rifle. It was his theory (or “narrative,” Milgrim’s therapist in Basel might have said) that Gracie had gotten the gun from some opposite number in the British military, after it had been secretly deleted from stores and smuggled back to England. But Bigend’s concern now was just how opposite a number this theoretical person might have been. Might Gracie have had a British partner, someone with similar inclinations? Someone who hadn’t been rolled up by whatever supercops Garreth had called down?