“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.

There was an arming sequence, on the iPhone now, that required a thumb and forefinger, with the other forefinger needed to fire the thing. Milgrim hadn’t been entirely sure what a Taser was before, but he was getting an idea. If he accidentally fired it, here in the Vegas cube, a pair of barbed electrodes would shoot out, on two thin fifteen-foot cables, propelled by compressed gas. That was strictly once-only, the barb-shooting. If the barbs went into Bigend’s spotless plasterboard wall, the penguin was anchored there, he supposed, and there was a lot of fine cable around. But if you tapped the iPhone again, in the firing circle on the screen, the wall got shocked. Which wouldn’t bother the wall, but if those barbs happened to get into anybody, which was what they were actually for, that person got a shock, a big one. Not the kind that would kill you, but one that could knock you down, stun you. And there was more than one shock stored in the toy airship cabin Voytek had taped under there.

Fiona said that he wouldn’t have to worry about any of that when he flew the penguin. She said it was just extra bells and whistles, something Garreth had tossed in because he’d happened to run across the Taser. That was what Voytek had indicated, grumpily, on his way out, when they’d gotten back here on the Yamaha.

But that wasn’t what Garreth had told him, in Hollis’s hotel room. Garreth had said that he needed Fiona to operate the other drone, the one with the little helicopters, so he needed Milgrim to operate the penguin. To keep an eye on the general area, he said. When Milgrim asked which area that was, Garreth had said that he didn’t know yet, but that he was sure Milgrim would do very well. Milgrim, remembering the pleasure he’d taken in rolling the black ray, decided that simply nodding was the best course. Though the idea of anyone wanting him to operate anything was new. Other people operated things, and Milgrim observed them doing it. But, he supposed, he was really only being asked to observe something, whatever it was, through the cameras in the penguin, and it was best, as Fiona suggested, to regard the Taser as a random add-on.

It was harder to get the penguin to do anything, in the constrained space of the Vegas cube, than it had been to get the ray to do those rhythmic somersaults, but he was starting, now, to manage a repeated stationary roll. If he bumped the wall, Fiona noticed, and didn’t like it, so he tried to be as careful as he could. She said that the robotics in the wings were fragile, and the penguin was helpless without them. It didn’t really fly, because penguins don’t, and it was a balloon; rather, it swam, through air instead of water, and once you had it going where you wanted it to, it knew how to swim by itself. He was careful to keep that overridden now. He wished they could take the thing out and really fly it, the way he’d seen her fly the other one in Paris, but she said that they couldn’t, because people might see it and get excited, and because Garreth had ordered her to keep him inside.