probably.
“Why have you decided to interest yourself in journalism, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Looking for a way to make a living. Curfew royalties don’t amount to much. I haven’t been that talented an investor.”
“Few people are,” he said. “If they’re successful at it, of course, then they imagine they are. Talented. But they’re all doing the same things, really.”
“I wish someone had told me what they’re doing, in that case.”
“If you need to earn money, there are more lucrative fields than journalism.”
“Are you discouraging me?”
“Not at all. I’m simply encouraging you in a broader way. I’m interested in what motivates you, and how you understand the world.” He glanced sideways at her. “Rausch tells me you’ve written about music.”
“Sixties garage bands. I started writing about them when I was still in the Curfew.”
“Were they an inspiration?”
She was watching a fourteen-inch display on the Maybach’s dash, the red cursor that was the car proceeding along the green line that was Sunset. She looked up at him. “Not in any linear way, musically. They were my favorite bands. Are,” she corrected herself.
He nodded.
She glanced back down at the dash display and found the street map gone, replaced by wireframe diagrams of a helicopter, its bulbous profile unfamiliar. Now it appeared above the wireframe profile of a ship. Either a small ship or quite a large helicopter. Cut to video of the actual aircraft in flight. “What’s this?”
“The Hook, so-called. It’s an older, Soviet-made helicopter, one with tremendous lifting capacity. Syria owns at least one of them.”
The Hook, or another just like it, was lifting a Soviet tank now, as if in demonstration. “Drive,” she ordered. “Don’t be watching your own Power-Point.”
Cut to a colorful, simplified animation, illustrating how a helicopter (not looking very Hook-like) could shuffle cargo containers on the deck and in the holds of a freighter. “The container in your story,” she began.
“Yes?”
“Did they say whether it was very heavy?”
“It’s not, that we know of,” said Bigend, “but it’s sometimes at the center of a stack of much heavier containers. That’s a very secure position, as there’s ordinarily no way at all, at sea, to access a container in that position. The Hook, though, would allow you to do that. Plus you could have arrived from somewhere else, another ship say, with your container Hooked. Decent cruising range, reasonably fast.”
He got on the 101 Freeway, southbound. The Maybach’s suspension turned the pockmarked pavement into something silken, smooth as warm fudge. She could sense the car’s power now, held effortlessly in check. On the dash display, lines symbolizing signals were being emitted by a shipping container. They rose at a sharp angle, to be intercepted by a satellite, which bounced them back down, past the curve of the earth. “Where are we going, Mr. Bigend?”
“Hubertus. To the agency. It’s a better place to discuss things.”
“Agency?”
“Blue Ant.”
And here on the display, now, unmoving and crisply hieroglyphic, was that insect itself. Blue. She looked back up at him.
His profile vaguely reminded her of someone.
18. ELEGGUA’S WINDOW
T ia Juana sent him walking, crosstown along 110th, to Amsterdam and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the better to consult Eleggua. The owner, she said, of the roads and doors in this world. Lord of the crossroads, intersection of the human and the divine. For this reason, Juana maintained, there had secretly been raised a window to him and a place of devotion, in this great church in Morningside Heights.
“Nothing can be done in either world,” she said, “without his permission.”
It had begun to snow, as he walked uphill, past chicken wire and poster-crusted plywood, where the retaining wall of the cathedral’s grounds had been brought down, long ago, by rain. He
“Why have you decided to interest yourself in journalism, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Looking for a way to make a living. Curfew royalties don’t amount to much. I haven’t been that talented an investor.”
“Few people are,” he said. “If they’re successful at it, of course, then they imagine they are. Talented. But they’re all doing the same things, really.”
“I wish someone had told me what they’re doing, in that case.”
“If you need to earn money, there are more lucrative fields than journalism.”
“Are you discouraging me?”
“Not at all. I’m simply encouraging you in a broader way. I’m interested in what motivates you, and how you understand the world.” He glanced sideways at her. “Rausch tells me you’ve written about music.”
“Sixties garage bands. I started writing about them when I was still in the Curfew.”
“Were they an inspiration?”
She was watching a fourteen-inch display on the Maybach’s dash, the red cursor that was the car proceeding along the green line that was Sunset. She looked up at him. “Not in any linear way, musically. They were my favorite bands. Are,” she corrected herself.
He nodded.
She glanced back down at the dash display and found the street map gone, replaced by wireframe diagrams of a helicopter, its bulbous profile unfamiliar. Now it appeared above the wireframe profile of a ship. Either a small ship or quite a large helicopter. Cut to video of the actual aircraft in flight. “What’s this?”
“The Hook, so-called. It’s an older, Soviet-made helicopter, one with tremendous lifting capacity. Syria owns at least one of them.”
The Hook, or another just like it, was lifting a Soviet tank now, as if in demonstration. “Drive,” she ordered. “Don’t be watching your own Power-Point.”
Cut to a colorful, simplified animation, illustrating how a helicopter (not looking very Hook-like) could shuffle cargo containers on the deck and in the holds of a freighter. “The container in your story,” she began.
“Yes?”
“Did they say whether it was very heavy?”
“It’s not, that we know of,” said Bigend, “but it’s sometimes at the center of a stack of much heavier containers. That’s a very secure position, as there’s ordinarily no way at all, at sea, to access a container in that position. The Hook, though, would allow you to do that. Plus you could have arrived from somewhere else, another ship say, with your container Hooked. Decent cruising range, reasonably fast.”
He got on the 101 Freeway, southbound. The Maybach’s suspension turned the pockmarked pavement into something silken, smooth as warm fudge. She could sense the car’s power now, held effortlessly in check. On the dash display, lines symbolizing signals were being emitted by a shipping container. They rose at a sharp angle, to be intercepted by a satellite, which bounced them back down, past the curve of the earth. “Where are we going, Mr. Bigend?”
“Hubertus. To the agency. It’s a better place to discuss things.”
“Agency?”
“Blue Ant.”
And here on the display, now, unmoving and crisply hieroglyphic, was that insect itself. Blue. She looked back up at him.
His profile vaguely reminded her of someone.
18. ELEGGUA’S WINDOW
T ia Juana sent him walking, crosstown along 110th, to Amsterdam and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the better to consult Eleggua. The owner, she said, of the roads and doors in this world. Lord of the crossroads, intersection of the human and the divine. For this reason, Juana maintained, there had secretly been raised a window to him and a place of devotion, in this great church in Morningside Heights.
“Nothing can be done in either world,” she said, “without his permission.”
It had begun to snow, as he walked uphill, past chicken wire and poster-crusted plywood, where the retaining wall of the cathedral’s grounds had been brought down, long ago, by rain. He
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