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Aires.
    “Bigend,” he said.
    From Sunset, she heard brakes, impact, breaking glass. “What was that?”
    “Bigend. Like ‘big’ and ‘end.’ Advertising magnate.”
    The wobble of a car alarm.
    “The one who married Nigella?”
    “That’s Saatchi. Hubertus Bigend. Belgian. Firm’s called Blue Ant.”
    “And?”
    “Ange says your Node’s a Bigend project, if indeed it’s a magazine. Node’s one of several small firms he has in London. She had some dealings with his agency, when she was on the magazine, now I think about it. Some run-in with them.” She heard the alarm cut out, and then the wail of an approaching siren. “What’s that?” Inchmale asked.
    “Accident on Sunset. I’m at the Mondrian.”
    “Do they still use a casting director to hire the bellmen?”
    “Looks like it.”
    “Is Bigend paying?”
    “Absolutely,” she said. Very close, she heard another squeal of brakes, and then the siren, which had gotten very loud, died.
    “Can’t be all bad,” he said.
    “No,” she said, “it can’t.” Could it?
    “We miss you. You should stay in touch.”
    “I will, Reg. Thanks. And thank Angelina.”
    “Goodbye.”
    “’Bye, then.”
    Another siren was approaching, as she hung up. An ambulance this time, she guessed. She decided that she wasn’t going to look. It hadn’t sounded too bad, but she really didn’t want any bad at all, right then.
    With a perfectly sharpened Mondrian pencil she wrote BIGEND in block caps in the dark, on a square block of embossed white Mondrian notepaper.
    She’d Google him later.

8. CREEPING HER OUT
    S he watched Alberto trying to explain the helmet and the laptop to Virgin security. These two blandly uniformed functionaries didn’t look like they were much into the locative. At this point, she had to admit, neither was she.
    Alberto had some kind of Jim Morrison piece he wanted to show her, up on Wonderland Avenue, and that just wasn’t going to work for her. Even if it somehow managed to bypass the Lizard King’s iconic churlishness, and focus on, say, Ray Manzarek’s calliope pieces, she still didn’t want to have to write about invisible virtual monuments to the Doors, any of them. Though as Inchmale had several times pointed out, back when they themselves had been in a band, Manzarek and Krieger had worked wonders, neutralizing the big guy’s sodden crankiness.
    Standing out here in the evening hydrocarbon, in this retail complex on the corner of Crescent Heights and Sunset, watching Alberto Corrales argue that she, Hollis Henry, really should be allowed to view his virtual rendition of Scott Fitzgerald’s heart attack, she felt a sort of detachment descend, some extra slack-cutting—due, quite possibly, to her new haircut, executed to her complete satisfaction by a charming and talented young man in the Mondrian’s salon.
    It hadn’t been fatal, Fitzgerald’s heart attack. Missing Alberto’s depiction of it wouldn’t be fatal for her article, either. Or missing most of it, as she had in fact been afforded a brief glimpse: a man in a tweed jacket, clutching his chest at a chromed Moderne counter, a pack of Chesterfields in his right hand. The Chesterfields, she decided, had been in slightly higher resolution than the rest of the place, which had seemed interestingly detailed, down to the unfamiliar shapes of the vehicles out on Sunset, but Virgin security’s unhappiness with anyone donning a mask or masklike visor in the world music aisle had put a stop to that, with Hollis quickly handing the visor-rig to Alberto and hustling straight on out of there.
    Odile might have been cute enough to charm these guards, but she’d succumbed to an attack of asthma, she’d said, brought on either by the airborne biomass of the previous night’s storm or by the near critical mass of aromatherapy product to be variously encountered in the Standard.
    And still this calm descended on Hollis, oddly; this unexpected clarity, this moment perhaps of