Zero History

  “I wouldn’t want either of you to think I’ll be any less willing to help you with Inchmale,” said Hollis, “regardless of what you may or may not be able to tell me about Hounds.”

  Milgrim saw George glance quickly at Meredith. “We appreciate that,” George said, though Milgrim wasn’t sure that Meredith did. Perhaps George was using the band “we.”

  “All you really need with Inchmale is someone to tell you where you are in his process,” Hollis said. “And that’s all I can do, anyway. You can’t change the process, and if you try hard enough, long enough, he’ll leave. So far, you’re right on track.”

  None of this meaning anything to Milgrim, who was enjoying the salmon, in some light chilled sauce.

  “I’m sorry,” Meredith said, “but you’re going to have to tell us who you’re working for.”

  “If I were better at this sort of thing,” said Hollis, “I’d start by telling you about my book. It’s about locative art.”

  “I don’t know the term,” Meredith said.

  “It’s what they’re calling augmented reality now,” said Hollis, “but art. It’s been around since before the iPhone started to become the default platform. That was when I wrote about it. But I meant that if I were going to lie to you, I’d tell you about that, then tell you that I was writing another, on esoteric denim, or mad marketing strategies. But I won’t. I’m working for Hubertus Bigend.”

  The last bite of salmon caught in Milgrim’s throat. He drank water, coughed into his napkin.

  “Are you choking?” asked George, who looked as though he could perform a really optimal Heimlich maneuver.

  “No, thanks,” said Milgrim.

  “Blue Ant?” asked Meredith.

  “No,” said Hollis. “We’re freelance. Bigend wants to know who’s behind Gabriel Hounds.”

  “Why?” Meredith had put down her fork.

  “Possibly because he thinks someone’s outdoing him at something he considers to have been his own game. Or so he suggested. Do you know him?”

  “Only by reputation,” said Meredith.

  “Is Blue Ant doing your band’s publicity?” Milgrim asked George, after some more water.

  “Not that I know of,” said George. “Too small a world already.”

  “I’m not a Blue Ant employee,” said Hollis. “Bigend’s hired me to look into Gabriel Hounds. He wants to know who designs it, how their antimarketing scheme works. I’m only prepared to go so far. I’m not prepared to lie to you about it.”

  “How about you?” Meredith asked Milgrim.

  “I don’t have a badge,” Milgrim said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “To open the door,” Milgrim said. “At Blue Ant. Employees have those badges. I’m not on salary.”

  First-course dishes were removed. Second courses arrived. Milgrim’s was pork tenderloin, stacked like a corpulent chess piece, a rook of pork. It toppled as he began to eat it.

  “How badly does Bigend want to know?” Meredith’s knife and fork were poised.

  “He wants to know everything, basically,” said Hollis, “all the time. Right now, he wants to know this quite badly. Next month? Maybe not so much.”

  “He must have a lot of resources. For information.” Meredith cut into her roundel of beef.

  “Prides himself on it,” Hollis said.

  “I mentioned that I believe most of my last season of shoes are in a warehouse in Seattle. Tacoma, possibly.”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know where. Can’t find them. The lawyers say they could make a very convincing case for my ownership, if we could locate them. We’re fairly certain they haven’t been sold off, otherwise at least a few would have surfaced on eBay. None have. Could Bigend find them for me?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hollis. “But if he couldn’t, I don’t know who could.”

  “I don’t know what I could find out for you,” said Meredith, “but assuming I found something, I’d consider an exchange. Otherwise, not.”

  Milgrim looked from Meredith to Hollis, back.

  “I’m not authorized to make that sort of deal,” said Hollis, “but I can certainly take him the proposal.”

  This reminded Milgrim of the closing rhythm of certain very backstage drug deals, the kind in which one party may know of someone with an Aerostar van, full of some precursor chemical, while another is aware of the approximate whereabouts of a really efficient pill-pressing machine.

  “Please do,” said Meredith, smiling, then taking a first sip of her wine.

  >>>

  “That was very good,” Milgrim said to Hollis, after saying good night to Meredith and George outside the restaurant. “The timing. When you told them about Bigend.”

  “What choice did I have? If I’d told them otherwise, I’d already have been lying to them. The hotel’s this way.”

  “I was never good at that sort of timing,” said Milgrim, then remembered the penguin, and glanced up.

  “What was that about UFOs, when you first walked in?”

  “I don’t know,” said Milgrim. “I thought I’d seen something. It’s been a long day. I have your computer. Would you mind if I kept it overnight? I have to check something.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Hollis. “I only have it for a book I haven’t started writing. I have my iPhone. What did you think you saw?”

  “It looked like a penguin.”

  Hollis stopped. “A penguin? Where?”

  “In the street. That way.” He pointed.

  “In the street?”

  “Flying.”

  “They can’t fly, Milgrim.”

  “Swimming. Through the air. Level with the second-story windows. Using its flippers to propel itself. But it looked more like a penguin-shaped blob of mercury. It reflected the lights. Distorted them. It may have been a hallucination.”

  “Do you get those?”

  “P-A-W-S,” said Milgrim, spelling it out.

  “Paws?”

  “Post-acute withdrawal syndrome.” He shrugged, started for the hotel again, Hollis following. “They were worried about that.”

  “Who were?”

  “The doctors. In the clinic. In Basel.”

  “What about the man at the Salon? The one in the pants? The one you thought you’d seen in Selfridges? Did he follow you?”

  “Yes. Sleight was telling him where I was.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why not?”

  “I left the Neo with someone else. He followed them.” He needed to clean his teeth. There was pear galette between his upper rear molars. It still tasted good.

  “It’s been a long day,” said Hollis as they reached what he took to be their hotel. “I spoke with Hubertus. He wants you to call him. Sleight thinks you’ve run away.”

  “I feel like I have.” He held the door for her.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Monsieur Milgrim?” A man, behind a vaguely pulpit-like counter.

  “Mister Milgrim’s room is on my card,” said Hollis.

  “Yes,” said the clerk, “but he must still register.” He produced a printed white card and a pen. “Your passport, please.”

  Milgrim brought out his Faraday pouch, then his passport.

  “I’ll call you in the morning, in time for breakfast here, then the train,” said Hollis. “Good night.” And she was gone, around a corner.

  “I will photocopy this,” said the clerk, “and return it to you when you are finished in the lobby.” He gestured with his head, to Milgrim’s right.

  “The lobby?”

  “Where the young lady is waiting.”

  “Young lady?”

  But the clerk had vanished, through a narrow doorway behind the counter.

  The lights were out in the small lobby. Folding wooden panels partially screened it from the reception area. Streetlight reflected on china, set out for breakfast service. And on the yellow curve of t
he helmet, from the low oval of a glass coffee table. A small figure rose smoothly to its feet, in a complex rustle of waterproof membranes and cycle-armor. “I’m Fiona,” she said sternly, her jawline delicate above the stiff buckled collar. She stuck out her hand. Milgrim shook it automatically. It was small, warm, strong, and callused.

  “Milgrim.”

  “I know that.” She didn’t sound British.

  “Are you American?”

  “Technically. You too. We both work for Bigend.”

  “He told Hollis he wasn’t sending anybody.”

  “Blue Ant didn’t send anybody. I work for him. So do you.”

  “How do I know you really work for Bigend?”

  She tapped the face of a phone like Hollis’s, listened, handed it to him.

  “Hello?” said Bigend. “Milgrim?”

  “Yes?”

  “How are you?”

  Milgrim considered. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Run it past Fiona after we’ve spoken. She’ll relay it to me.”

  “Did you have Sleight tracking me with the Neo?”

  “It’s part of what he does. He called from Toronto, said you’d left Paris.”

  “I slipped someone the phone.”

  “Sleight’s wrong,” Bigend said.

  “Not about the phone leaving Paris.”

  “That’s not what I mean. He’s wrong.”

  “Okay,” said Milgrim. “Who’s right?”

  “Pamela,” said Bigend. “Fiona, whom you’ve just met. We’ll be keeping it at that until the situation sorts itself out.”

  “Is Hollis?”

  “Hollis is unaware of any of this.”

  “Am I?”

  There was a silence. “Interesting question,” said Bigend, finally. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t like Sleight. Don’t like the man he had following me.”

  “You’re doing well. More proactive than I asked for, but that’s interesting.”

  “I saw a penguin. Penguin-shaped. Something. I may need to go back to the clinic.”

  “That’s our Festo air penguin,” Bigend said, after a pause. “We’re experimenting with it as an urban video surveillance platform.”

  “Festive?”

  “Festo. They’re German.”

  “What’s going on? Please?”

  “Something that happens periodically. It has to do with the kind of talent Blue Ant requires. If they’re any good at what I hire them for, they tend to have an innate tendency to go rogue. That or sell out to someone who already has. I expect this to happen. It can actually be quite productive. Fiona was on the train with you, this morning. She’ll be on the train back, tomorrow. Put Hollis in a cab to Cabinet.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Where she’s staying. Then wait near the cab rank. Fiona will bring you to me. Give her a rundown of your day now, then get some sleep.”

  “Okay,” Milgrim said, then realized Bigend was gone. He handed the phone back to Fiona, noticing that she wore something on her left wrist, about six inches long, that looked like a doll’s computer keyboard. “What’s that?”

  “Controls the penguin,” she said. “But we’re switching over to iPhones for that.”

  33. BURJ

  She got the iPhone out of her purse in the little bronze elevator, hit Heidi’s cell number as she stepped out. It was ringing as she walked along the hallway, doors to her right, weird twisted brown medieval timbers to her left. Heidi picked up as she was fiddling the key into the lock.

  “Fuck—” Against a wash of what sounded to Hollis like exclusively male pub ruckus.

  “Tell me what’s happened to Garreth. Now.” She opened the door. Saw white towels where she’d left them on the bed, the Blue Ant figurine on the built-in bedside table, big crazy gold fake Chinese scribbles on the blood-red walls. It was like stepping into a life-size Barbie’s Shanghai Brothel kit.

  “Hold on. Get the fuck over! Not you. Had to get out of that bench thing.”

  “I thought you weren’t drinking.”

  “Red Bull. Cutting it with ginger ale.”

  “Tell me. Now.”

  “Don’t look on YouTube.”

  “At what, on YouTube?”

  “Burj Khalifa world-championship base jump.”

  “That hotel? Looks like an Arabian Nights sailboat? What happened?”

  “That’s Burj Al Arab. Burj Khalifa’s the world’s tallest building—”

  “Shit—”

  “The jump on YouTube, that wasn’t him. That was earlier. That guy high-pulled, they say here. That’s when—”

  “What happened to Garreth?”

  “The guy on YouTube holds the world’s record now for jumping out of a building. Your boy figured a way to get in and go off it higher up. They still hadn’t finished closing all the windows at the top. There was this crane—”

  “Oh God—”

  “And the security had of course gotten lots tighter, since YouTube guy did his, but your boy’s an expert at—”

  “Tell me!”

  “He was on the way up, however he was managing that, and they got onto him. He got up to the point where the windows weren’t installed, and went off from there. Actually a little lower than YouTube guy—

  “Heidi!”

  “Did the bat-suit thing. Took it really far out, really low, probably pissed that he’d jumped from below the record point. Trying for points on style.”

  Hollis was crying now.

  “Had to come down on a freeway. Four in the morning, there was a vintage Lotus Elan—”

  Hollis started sobbing. She was sitting on the bed now, but didn’t know how she’d gotten there.

  “He’s okay! Well, he’s alive, okay? My boy says he must’ve been super well connected, because the ambulance that picked him up put him straight on an air ambulance, a jet, into a high-end trauma center in Singapore. Where you go, there, if you need shit-hot medical attention.”

  “He’s alive? Alive?”

  “Fuck yes. I told you already. Leg’s messed up. I know he was in Singapore, six weeks, then it gets fuzzy. Some people say he went to the States from there, to get stuff done they couldn’t do in Singapore. Military doctors. You said he wasn’t military.”

  “Connected. The old man …”

  “Story is, that air ambulance had some kind of local royal crest.”

  “Where is he?”

  “These boys at my gym, they’re ex-military. Maybe ex-. Fuzzy. Doesn’t matter how much they drink, the story just trails off, at a certain point. Runs up against some prime directive. They know who he is, but from the jumping. They’re big fans of that. Also because he’s English. Tribal thing. That secret-life shit you told me about, I don’t think they’d get that. Or maybe they would. They’re all batshit in their own way.”

  Hollis was wiping her face, mechanically, with a towel smeared with makeup. “He’s alive. Say he’s alive.”

  “They think he went into some funny arrangement, Stateside, where they work on messed-up Delta Force guys, like that. That impresses them deeply. Then they order another round, talk football, and I fall asleep.”

  “That’s all you’ve been able to find out?”

  “All? I’ve done everything short of trying to fuck it out of them, and I wouldn’t say they’d made it exceptionally easy not to do that either. You were the one told me to leave the civilians alone, weren’t you?”

  “Sorry, Heidi.”

  “It’s okay. They never ran into anybody thought they were civilians before. Kind of worth it. You know how to get in touch with him?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Now you’ve got an excuse. Gotta go. They want me to throw darts. They bet. Take care of yourself. You back tomorrow? We’ll have dinner.”

  “You’re sure he’s alive?”

  “I think these guys would know, if he wasn’t. He’s like a football player to them. They’d hear. Where are you?”

  “At the hotel.??
?

  “Get some sleep. Tomorrow.”

  “Bye, Heidi.”

  The pale gold bullshit ideograms still swimming in tears.

  34. THE ORDER FLOW

  Milgrim woke as some large vehicle groaned past in the street, or perhaps in dream, chains rattling. He’d slept with the windows open.

  He sat up and looked at the blank screen of Hollis’s laptop, on the cushioned ledge beneath the windows. The battery needed a charge, but she hadn’t given him the charger. He guessed he had enough power left to check for Winnie’s reply to his message of the night before. He’d intended to send Pamela the photos of Foley as well, and had bought the cable he’d need to do that, but after his conversation with Bigend he wasn’t sure about Blue Ant’s e-mail system. He imagined Sleight had been in charge of all of that. How complicated could that ultimately become, for Bigend?

  With no Neo, and the laptop off, he had no way of knowing the time. The television suspended from the ceiling could tell him, he supposed, but he decided to shower instead. If it was time to go, Hollis would call him.

  The shower was one of those telephone-handle arrangements, the stall largely conceptual. He brushed his teeth with one hand while rinsing his torso with the other, his battery-powered toothbrush loud in the small space. Toweling off, he thought of how Bigend seemed to regard what was going on in Blue Ant as a sort of expected burn-off, like some brushfire on the Nature Channel, brought on by an otherwise essential excess of intelligence and ambition.

  He put on his new socks and underwear from Galeries Lafayette, and an unworn but creased shirt from Hackett. He remembered the Russians in the elevator. Foley. Winced. He tucked the memory card, with his pictures of Foley on it, down into the top of his left sock.

  He edged around the bed, stood looking down at Parisians passing on the sidewalk opposite. A graying, leonine man in a long dark coat. Then a tall girl in very nice boots. He looked for Fiona, half expecting to see her astride her motorcycle, keeping watch. He looked up then, but didn’t see the penguin either.