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what the late Jimmy Carlyle, the Curfew’s Iowan bass player, prior to departing this vale of heroin, had called serenity. Where in (this calm) she knew herself to be that woman of the age and the history that were hers, here, tonight, and was more or less okay with it, all of it, at least up till Node had come calling, the week before, with an offer she could neither refuse nor, really, understand.
    If Node was, as the youthful but metallic Rausch had described it, a technology magazine with a cultural twist (a technology magazine, as she thought of it, with interesting trousers), did it really follow that she, former vocalist for the Curfew and sometime obscure journalist, would be hired for seriously good money to write about this witheringly geeky art trend?
    But no, said something at the still heart of her moment’s calm. No indeed. And the core anomaly here was embodied, revealed almost certainly, in Rausch having injected that apparent order to meet Bobby Chombo, whoever or whatever he might be, and having met him, to watch for something to do with shipping, “patterns of global shipping.” That, she saw, was it, whatever “it” in this case might be, and likely had nothing to do with Odile Richard and the rest of these people.
    And then, her gaze on the passing stream of Sunset, she saw the Curfew’s drummer, Laura “Heidi” Hyde, driving what Hollis, never really a car person, took to be a smallish SUV of German extraction. If further confirmation had been needed, she knew that Heidi, with whom she hadn’t spoken in almost three years, lived in Beverly Hills now, and worked in Century City, and had almost certainly been glimpsed, just now, heading home at day’s end.
    “Fascist dipshits,” Alberto protested, flustered, stepping up beside her with his laptop under one arm, the visor under the other. Somehow he seemed too serious-looking to say something like that, and for an instant she imagined him as a character in a some graphically simplified animation.
    “It’s okay,” she assured him. “Really, it’s okay. I got a look. I saw it. Got the general idea.”
    He blinked at her. Was he on the verge of tears?

    “BOBBY CHOMBO,” she said, when they were settled in Hamburger Hamlet, to which she had had Alberto drive them from Crescent Heights.
    Concern creased Alberto’s brow.
    “Bobby Chombo,” she repeated.
    He nodded, grimly. “I use him for all my pieces. Brilliant.”
    She was looking at the crazily elaborated black-letter work down the outside of both his forearms. She could make absolutely no sense of it. “Alberto, what does that actually say, on your arms?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Nothing?”
    “It was designed by an artist in Tokyo. He does these alphabets, abstracts them till they’re completely unreadable. The actual sequence was generated randomly.”
    “Alberto, what do you know about Node, the magazine I’m writing for?”
    “European? New?”
    “Did you know Odile, before she turned up to do this?”
    “No.”
    “Had you ever heard of her, before?”
    “Yes. She curates.”
    “And she got in touch with you, about getting together with me, for Node?”
    “Yes.” Their server arrived with two Coronas. She picked hers up, clinked the neck of his, and drank from the bottle. After a pause he did the same. “Why are you asking me this?”
    “I haven’t worked for Node before. I’m trying to get a feel for what they’re doing, how they do things.”
    “Why did you ask about Bobby?”
    “I’m writing about your art. Why wouldn’t I ask about the tech end?”
    Alberto looked uncomfortable. “Bobby,” he began, stopped. “He’s a very private person.”
    “He is?”
    Alberto looked unhappy. “The vision’s mine, and I build the work, but Bobby hacks it for me. Gets it to work, even indoors. And he gets the routers installed.”
    “Routers?”
    “At this point, each piece needs its own wireless.”
    “Where’s the one for River?”
    “I don’t know. The one