Zero History

45. SHRAPNEL, SUPERSONIC
Heidi, legs strong and white in black cyclist’s shorts, shoulders square in her more
complexly black majorette jacket, once again crouched gargoyle-fashion on the edge of
the Piblokto Madness bed, black-nailed toes prehensile. Two pale silvery darts were
tucked like bullets in a bandolier, into the thick cording of the jacket’s frogged front, their
blood-red, paper-thin plastic flights pointing toward Number Four’s ceiling.
She rolled a third between thumb and forefinger, as if she might decide to smoke it.
“Tungsten,” she said, “and rhenium. Alloyed, they’re superheavy.” She sighted along the
dart’s black tip, almost invisible in this light. The heavy, multilayered drapes were drawn
against the night, and only the tiny, focused, supernally brilliant Swiss bulbs, in the
birdcage library, lit the room and its artifacts. “Place Ajay knows. Cost a hundred pounds
apiece. You want to make supersonic shrapnel, you make it with this stuff.”
“Why would you?” asked Hollis, barefoot as well, from the striped armchair nearest the
foot of the bed.
“Penetration,” said Heidi, flicking the dart past Hollis and into the eye, ten feet away, of
a glossy black Congolese fetish.
“Don’t,” said Hollis. “I wouldn’t want to have to pay for that. I think it’s ebony.”
“Dense,” said Heidi, “but no match for wolfram. Old name for tungsten. Should’ve
been a metal band: Wolfram. They wind the strings of some instruments with it. Need the
density. Jimmy told me.”
The name of their dead friend and bandmate hung momentarily in the air.
“I don’t think this job with Bigend is working out,” Hollis said.
“No?” Heidi drew a second dart, which she held up like a fairy sword, between her eye
and the birdcage lights, admiring the point.
“Don’t throw that,” Hollis warned. “I’m supposed to find someone for him. The
woman who designed this jacket. Though he may not know she’s a woman.”
“So you have? Found her?”
“I’ve found someone who met her. Meredith, George’s girlfriend.”
Heidi arched an eyebrow. “Small world.”
“Sometimes,” Hollis said, “I think something about Bigend condenses things, pulls
them together …”
“Reg,” said Heidi, drawing the dart’s black tip perilously close to her eye, “just says
Bigend’s a producer. The Hollywood kind, not the music kind. A giant version of what
fuckstick said he’d like to be, but without the hassle of having to make movies.” She
lowered the second dart, looked seriously at Hollis. “Maybe that was what he was
thinking of with the Ponzi scheme, huh?”
“You had no idea he was doing that?”