A tiny garret window popped open, on a building opposite, and a girl with short dark hair thrust her head and shoulders through, into the morning, a cigarette between her lips. Milgrim nodded. Addictions were being serviced. He sat down on the padded bench and checked his Twitter. No Winnie. It was five after seven, he saw, earlier than he’d thought.
He packed his bag, putting the laptop in last. What would he do, once he’d returned it? How would he keep in touch with Winnie? The fact of Winnie made his knowledge of Blue Ant’s internal brushfire feel awkward. Otherwise, he imagined, without her, it would mainly have been interesting, as Bigend didn’t seem particularly worried. Though he’d never seen Bigend worried about anything. Where most people got worried, Bigend seemed to become interested, and Milgrim knew that that could be strangely contagious. Imagining explaining that to Winnie made him uneasy.
He made a last pass for misplaced property, discovering one of his socks under the edge of the bed. He put it in his bag, put the strap over his shoulder, and left the room, leaving the door unlocked. Maids were afoot but he didn’t see them, only their metal carts stacked with towels and tiny plastic bottles of shampoo. He saw the building’s original stairway, winding down, beyond big twisted brown-stained timbers that couldn’t possibly have been as old, in America, as they no doubt were, here.
He descended, passing windows, on each floor, overlooking a courtyard the morning hadn’t reached yet. Scooters and bicycles were parked there, at the bottom of a well of shadow.
On the ground floor he found his brief way around to the lobby, where china was rattling. No Hollis. He took a seat at a table for two, beside the windows, and asked for coffee and a croissant. The Tunisian waitress went away. Someone else brought the coffee immediately, with a small pitcher of hot milk. He was stirring his coffee when Hollis arrived, looking red-eyed and exhausted, the Hounds jacket draped across her shoulders like a short cape.
She sat down, a crumpled tissue in one hand.
“Is something wrong?” asked Milgrim, seized by some substrate of his own childhood fear, sorrow, the cup halfway to his mouth.
“I haven’t slept,” she said. “Found out a friend’s been in an accident. Not in very good shape. Sorry.”
“Your friend? Not in good shape?” He’d set the cup in its saucer. The waitress arrived with his croissant, butter, a miniature jar of jam.
“Coffee, please,” she said to the waitress. “Not a recent accident. I only heard last night.”
“How is she?” Milgrim was having one of those experiences of feeling, as he’d explained to his therapist, that he was emulating a kind of social being that he fundamentally wasn’t. Not that he was unconcerned with the pain he saw in Hollis’s eyes, or with the fate of her friend, but that there was some language required here that he’d never learned.
“He,” corrected Hollis as her coffee arrived.
“What happened?”
“He jumped off the tallest building in the world.” Her eyes widened, as if at the absurdity of what she’d just said, then closed, tightly.
“In Chicago?” asked Milgrim.
“It hasn’t been Chicago for years,” she said, opening her eyes, “has it? Dubai.” She poured milk into her coffee, her movements determinedly businesslike now, precise.
“How is he?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Flown to a hospital in Singapore. His leg. A car hit him. I don’t know where he is.”
“You said he jumped off a building,” said Milgrim, sounding accusing, though he hadn’t intended to.
“He glided down, then opened a chute. Came down in traffic.”
“Why?” Milgrim shifted uneasily in his seat, knowing he was somehow off-script now.
“He’d need somewhere clear, flat, no wires.”
“I mean, why did he jump?”
She frowned. Sipped some coffee. “He says it’s like walking through walls. Nobody can, but if you could, he says, it would feel like that. He says the wall is inside, though, and you do have to walk through it.”
“I’m afraid of heights.”
“So’s he. He says. Said. I haven’t seen him for a while.”
“Was he your boyfriend?” Milgrim had no idea where this came from, but his therapist had had a lot to say about his relative inability to trust certain kinds of instinct.
She looked at him. “Yes,” she said.
“Do you know where he is?”
“No.”
“Do you know how to get in touch with him?”
“I have a number,” she said, “but I’m only supposed to call it if I’m in trouble.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I’m unhappy now. Anxious. Sad. That’s not the same.”
“But do you want to stay that way?” Milgrim felt as though he’d become his therapist, in some weird role-flip, or rather Hollis’s. “How can you expect to feel better if you don’t find out how he is?”
“You should eat that,” Hollis said, sharply, indicating his croissant. “We have a cab coming.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, feeling suddenly miserable. “It’s none of my business.” He fumbled with the paper seal on the lid of the tiny jam jar.
“No, I’m sorry. You’re just trying to help. It’s complicated, for me. And I haven’t slept. And I’d been managing not to think about him, for quite a while.”
“You were good, last night, with Meredith,” Milgrim said, tearing his croissant in half and troweling butter and jam inside both pieces. He bit into one of the halves.
“Now I don’t know whether I can go on with that. I have to find him.”
“Call him. Not knowing is affecting your work. That’s trouble.”
“I’m afraid. Afraid that might not work. Afraid he might not want to hear from me.”
“Use Hubertus,” Milgrim said, around a mouthful of croissant, covering his mouth with his hand. “He can find anyone.”
Her eyebrows rose.
“Like Meredith’s sneakers,” he said. “The price of admission.”
“Meredith’s sneakers wouldn’t be unhappy to be found by Hubertus. My friend would be unhappy to be found by anyone.”
“Would he have to know?”
“Did you learn to think this way from Bigend?”
“I learned it being an addict. Constantly requiring something I wasn’t legally allowed to possess, and which I couldn’t afford. I learned leverage. What you did last night, with Meredith. You could do that with Hubertus, and find your friend.”
She frowned.
“There was someone here, last night,” he said. “From Hubertus. After you went up.”
“Who?”
“Fiona. A girl on a motorcycle. Not someone I’d seen at Blue Ant. Well, I’d seen her. On her motorcycle. Delivering something for Pamela. But I didn’t know she was a girl.”
“Why was she here?”
“So that I could speak with Hubertus, on her phone. He told me that Sleight is either working for or with someone else. He told me that I should regard everyone other than Pamela, and Fiona, as suspect. And you. He said you didn’t know about it. But you do now.”
“How did he seem to be taking that?”
“He seemed … interested? He wants you to take a cab to your hotel when we arrive. Fiona will take me to meet him then.”
“Isn’t she in Paris?”
“She’ll be on the train we take.”
“He cultivates this stuff,” she said. “Makes sure it’s in the mix. Hires people who’ll go off the reservation, lead him somewhere new. Harnessing chaos, Garreth said.”
“Who’s Garreth?”
“My friend. He enjoyed hearing about Hubertus. I think Hubertus made a lot of sense to him. I thought it might be the jumping-off thing. That Hubertus erects his life, and his business, in a way guaranteed to continually take him over the edge. Guaranteed to produce a new edge he’ll have to go over.”
“He believes that stasis is the real enemy,” Milgrim said, glad
to put any space at all between himself and Hollis’s moment of crossness. “Stability’s the beginning of the end. We only walk by continually beginning to fall forward. He told me,” remembering, “that that would be the problem with being able to perceive the order flow. The potential for stasis.”
“The what?’
“The order flow. He was talking about secrets, once. In Vancouver, when I first met him. He loves secrets.”
“I know,” said Hollis.
“But not all secrets are information people are trying to conceal. Some secrets are information that’s there, but people can’t have it.”
“There where?”
“It just is, in the world. I’d asked him what piece of information he’d most want to have, that he didn’t have, if he could learn any secret. And he said that he’d want something nobody had ever been able to have.”
“Yes?’
“The next day’s order flow. Or really the next hour’s, or the next minute’s.”
“But what is it?”
“It’s the aggregate of all the orders in the market. Everything anyone is about to buy or sell, all of it. Stocks, bonds, gold, anything. If I understood him, that information exists, at any given moment, but there’s no aggregator. It exists, constantly, but is unknowable. If someone were able to aggregate that, the market would cease to be real.”
“Why?” She looked out the window, over the taut black wire supporting its gray linen curtain. “Our cab’s here.”
“Because the market is the inability to aggregate the order flow at any given moment.” He pushed his chair back, stood, and popped the last of the croissant into his mouth. Chewing, he bent and picked up his bag. He swallowed, then drank off what was left of his coffee. “I’ll give you your computer on the train.”
She was leaving some change on the tablecloth. “You can have it, if you need it.”
“But it’s yours.”
“I bought it three months ago, thinking I might start another book,” she said, standing. “I’ve opened it about three times. I have a little e-mail on it, but I’ll put that on a thumb drive. If I need a computer, Blue Ant can pay for it.” She started for the desk, where she’d left her bag.
Milgrim followed, order flow forgotten in his surprise at being offered such a gift. Since he’d been with Hubertus, he’d been provided with things, but they all felt like equipment. It wasn’t personal. Hollis was offering him something that he’d thought of as hers.
And she’d already given him her art book, he remembered. He could read more of it on the train to London.
They gave their keys to the man at the desk, and went out to the waiting cab.
35. DONGLE
As the train pulled out of the Gare du Nord, past rain-streaked concrete and intricate calligraphies of spray-paint, she gave Milgrim the Air’s white charger, and two other white cables whose purpose she’d never been sure of. Then she cleaned out what little e-mail she had, copying it to the USB drive on her key ring, shaped like an actual key, purchased in the West Hollywood Staples when she began her book. She changed the machine’s name to “Milgrim’s Mac,” wrote its password on a slip of paper for him, and loaned him the USB modem that Inchmale had talked her into signing up for the month before. She didn’t know how to remove her e-mail account, but she hadn’t given him the password for that, and she could get it sorted in London.
His delight in the gift had a direct and childlike simplicity that saddened her. She suspected he’d not been given a gift in a long time. She’d have to remember to get the dongle back, though, or she’d be paying for his cellular time.
She watched as he sank instantly into whatever it was that he did on the Net, like a stone into water. He was elsewhere, the way people were before their screens, his expression that of someone piloting something, looking into a middle distance that had nothing to do with geography.
She sat back, staring at French vegetation hurtling past, punctuated by a dark staccato of power poles. Bigend wanted her to go straight to Cabinet. That was good. She needed to see Heidi, needed Heidi to get her over the hump, get her to phone Garreth’s emergency number. And if phoning produced no result, she’d do what Milgrim suggested, cut a deal with Bigend. Bigend drove a hard bargain. She couldn’t imagine what she might have that he most wanted, but she didn’t want to find out. And Garreth, she was fairly certain, would be unhappy to have Bigend aware of him. She’d never told anyone anything at all about Garreth, other than Heidi, and now Milgrim. What Garreth and the old man did, insofar as she understood it, was just too peculiarly up Bigend’s alley, she’d always thought. It seemed a bad idea, putting Bigend and Garreth together in any way, and she hoped she could avoid it.
She looked over at Milgrim, lost in whatever he was doing. Whatever he was, she found she trusted him. He seemed peeled, somehow, transparent, strangely free of underlying motive. Seemed used as well. Bigend had created him, or would feel that he had; had cobbled him up from whatever wreckage he’d initially presented. That was what Bigend did, she thought, putting her head back and closing her eyes. She supposed it was what he was doing with her as well, or would, if he could.
She was asleep before they reached the tunnel.
36. VINEGAR AND BROWN PAPER
Milgrim didn’t open Twitter as he settled, opposite Hollis, in their business-class carriage, into what he still thought of as her computer. Instead, he opened the bookmarks menu and selected the URL for the page with the photograph of Foley modeling an olive-drab jacket and a black porn-rectangle.
He scrolled down, past other jackets, modeled by other young men with rectangles, to a shot of black-gloved hands. “Kevlar knit liners,” read the description, “for increased cut-resistance, Velcro closure strap with embossed logo. Superior grip for apprehension and control.”
Having sometimes been an apprehended suspect himself, he blinked. Frowned. Though the gloves actually reminded him more of Fiona, her armor. He saw her pale jawline above the upright belted collar of her black jacket. As if a wing had grazed him.
He glanced guiltily across the table at Hollis, but found her apparently asleep, her eyes swollen. He tried to imagine her boyfriend, jumping off the world’s tallest building, wherever she’d said that was.
He looked back at the specialized apprehender gloves. What would the embossed logo be, exactly? It didn’t say. The whole site was like that. No-name. Sketchy. Half-finished. No contact information. Why was Foley there? How had Winnie known where to find him? He’d heard Bigend refer to “ghost sites,” the sites of defunct businesses or product lines, still sitting there, forgotten, unvisited. Was this one of those, or something unfinished? There was something unconvincing about it, amateurish.
He went to Google, typed in “Winnie Tung Whitaker.” Stopped. Remembering Bigend and Sleight talking about the collection of search terms, about access to that. He imagined Winnie’s PDA alerting her to the fact of someone just having Googled her. Was that possible? On being introduced by Bigend to the current iteration of the internet, Milgrim had decided it was best to assume that anything was possible. Often, he’d been disappointed to learn that something wasn’t. Otherwise, better safe than sorry.
He logged out of Twitter, without checking to see if there was a message from Winnie. He didn’t want to have to see her, not upon arrival in London, anyway. He had his appointment with Bigend. He logged out of his webmail. Stared at Hollis’s interstellar vista. Changed that to a plain medium gray. That was better.
The train entered the tunnel.
He watched as the red dongle launched a window, informing him that the signal was lost.
He couldn’t be reached. Not electronically.
Hollis’s face was scrunched against the side of her headrest now, but her forehead was relaxed. He saw that the Hounds jacket had fallen to the floor. He bent, picking it up. It was heavier than he would have expected, more substantial, stiffer. He buttoned it. Folded it carefully, the way someone in a store would refold a shirt.
It lay on his lap, the focus of one of Bigend’s mysteries. A secret.
The rectangular label was made of heavy, stiff, tan leather, branded with some four-legged animal, its head wrong.
He closed his eyes. Put his head back. He was hurtling through a tube, under the English Channel. Did the French call it that? He didn’t know. Why were these giant projects so relatively common in Europe? He’d grown up with the unquestioned assumption that America was the home of heroic infrastructure, but was it, now? He didn’t think so. How did they pay for these things here? Taxes?
He reminded himself to ask Bigend.
>>>
“You don’t know where you’re going?” Hollis asked, from the cab, as he lifted her bag in.
“No,” said Milgrim, “I’m supposed to wait here.”
“You’ve got my number,” she said. “And thank you. I wouldn’t have wanted to do that alone.”
“Thank you,” said Milgrim. “And for the laptop. I’m still not—”
“Never mind,” she said. “It’s yours. Be careful.” She smiled and pulled the door shut.
He watched the cab pull away, another taking its place. He stepped back, gesturing for the couple behind him to go ahead. “I’m meeting someone,” he said, to no one in particular, glancing around. As Fiona’s horn pipped, just beyond the cab’s black fender. She gestured, urgently, the yellow helmet jerking, astride a large, dirty, gray bike.
She took his bag as he reached her, and began securing it to the gas tank with elastic cords, shoving a black helmet into his hands. The visor of her helmet was up. “Put that on. I’m not supposed to be in here. Get on behind and hold on.” She flipped the visor down.
He fumbled the helmet over his head. It smelled of something. Hairspray? The transparent visor was scratched and thumb-printed, greasy. He didn’t know how to fasten the under-chin thing. Padding rested uncomfortably on the crown of his head.
“Put your arms around me, lean forward, hold on!”
Milgrim did.