Zero History

  “It’s perfect timing,” Hollis said. “I’ve just seen him. He’d be delighted to have a team of Blue Ant researchers look for your shoes.”

  “Provided I give him the identity of the Gabriel Hounds designer.”

  “Yes,” said Hollis.

  “I can’t,” said Meredith. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “You can’t?”

  “Sorry. Attack of conscience. Well, not an attack. My conscience is in fairly decent shape. That’s the problem. I was trying to do a run around it, because I want my shoes. George and I were up all night, discussing it, and it became apparent that it’s just not something I’m willing to do. George agrees, of course. As much as he wants your advice about working with Inchmale.”

  “He has that,” Hollis said. “I thought I’d made that clear, in Paris. I’m a one-woman sisterhood that way. Counseling the stricken.”

  Meredith smiled. The Italian girl arrived with coffee. It was something like the cocktail hour now, Hollis supposed, and the room, while not crowded, was filling with a peculiar murmur, leaning by undetectable increments toward the later evening’s full rout. “That’s kind of you,” Meredith said. “Do you know Japan?”

  “Tokyo, mainly. We played there. Huge venues.”

  “I went there when I was putting my second season together. The first season, all the shoes had been leather. I was more comfortable with that. For the second season, I wanted to do some in fabric. A classic summer sneaker. I needed some kind of artisanal canvas. Dense, long-wearing, but a great hand. Special.”

  “Hand?”

  “How it feels, to the touch. Someone had suggested I talk to this couple in Nagoya. They had an atelier there, above a little warehouse on the outskirts of a place called Ichinomiya. I can tell you that because they’re no longer there. They were making jeans there, in deadstock fabric from a mill in Okayama. Depending on the length of the roll, they might get three pairs of jeans, they might get twenty, and once the roll was gone, it was gone. I’d heard they’d also been buying canvas from that same mill, Sixties stuff. I wanted to see it and, if it was good, talk them into selling me a few rolls. They’d tried it for jeans, but it was too heavy. They were lovely people. There were stacks of samples of their jeans. Old photographs of American men in workwear. All of their machines were vintage, except the one they used for riveting. They had a German Union Special chain-stitching machine. A 1920s belt-loop machine.” She smiled. “Designers become machine nerds. Machines define what you can do. That and finding the right operators for them.” She added sugar to her black coffee, stirred it. “So I’m up in the loft, very top of the building, where they had these rolls of canvas, on shelves, lots of them. They’re all different, the light’s not great, and I realize I’m not alone. The Japanese couple are downstairs, on the second floor, making jeans, and they haven’t said anything about anyone else being there. I can hear the machines they’re using. Below them, there’s a place that makes cardboard cartons. They have machines too, a sort of distant thumping undertone. But I can hear a woman singing, like she’s singing to herself. Not loud. But close. From toward the back of the building. Up in the loft, with me. The jeans people haven’t said anything about anybody else, but they barely speak English. Absolute focus on their work. They make two or three pairs a day, just the two of them. Self-taught. So I put the roll I’m looking at back on the shelf. Old metal shelves, about four feet deep, and I follow the sound of her singing.” She took a sip of her coffee. “And at the very back of the loft, there’s light, good light, over a table. Actually it’s a hollow-core door, on a couple of big cardboard cartons. She’s working on a pattern. Big sheets of tissue, pencils. Singing. Black jeans, a black T-shirt, and one of those jackets you’re wearing. She looks up, sees me, stops singing. Dark hair, but she’s not Japanese. Sorry, I say, I didn’t know anyone was here. That’s okay, she says, American accent. Asks me who I am. I tell her, and tell her I’m there to look at canvas. What for? Shoes, I tell her. Are you a designer? Yes, I say, and show her the ones I’m wearing. Which are my shoes, from the first season, cowhide, from the Horween factory, Chicago, big white vulcanization, like deck shoes, but really they’re like the very first skate shoes, the ones the first Vans took off from. And she smiles at me, and steps out from behind the table, so I can see she’s wearing them, the same shoes, my shoes, but in the black. And she tells me her name.”

  Hollis was holding her coffee with both hands, leaning forward in her chair, across the low table.

  “Which I now know I can’t tell you,” Meredith said. “And if you go there, the couple aren’t there, and neither is she.”

  “She liked your shoes.”

  “She really got them. I’m not sure anyone else ever did, to the same extent. She got what I was trying to get away from. The seasons, the bullshit, the stuff that wore out, fell apart, wasn’t real. I’d been that girl, walking across Paris, to the next shoot, no money for a Métro card, and I’d imagined those shoes. And when you imagine something like that, you imagine a world. You imagine the world those shoes come from, and you wonder if they could happen here, in this world, the one with all the bullshit. And sometimes they can. For a season or two.”

  Hollis put her cup down. “I want you to know,” she said, “that it’s okay not to tell me any more. I’ll understand.”

  Meredith shook her head. “We wound up having dinner, drinking sake, in this little place down the street. All the sake cups were different, used, old, like someone had chosen them from a charity shop. That was after she’d helped me choose my canvas. That was the Hounds designer. She doesn’t need anyone like your Mr. Bigend.”

  “He’s not my Mr. Bigend.”

  “Of all the people in the world, she doesn’t need that.”

  “Okay.”

  “And that’s why I can’t trade her name for my shoes. As much as I want my shoes.”

  “If I tell him you won’t tell me, he’ll try to find those shoes himself. And when he has them, he’ll send someone else, to negotiate. Or come himself.”

  “I’ve thought of that. It’s my own fault, really. For having considered betraying a friend.” She looked at Hollis. “I haven’t seen her since. Or been in touch, really. Just those e-mails announcing drops. I sent her a pair of the shoes she helped choose the canvas for. To the place in Ichinomiya. So I just can’t do it.”

  “I wouldn’t either,” Hollis said. “Look, this is just a job for me, one I wish I didn’t have. Not even a job. Just Bigend bribing me to do something for him. The best thing, for you, would be for me not to tell him we’ve had this conversation. You’ve stopped returning my calls. Have George tell Reg to tell Bigend to leave you alone.”

  “Would that work?”

  “It might,” said Hollis. “Bigend values Reg’s take on certain things. Reg advises him on music. I think Reg actually likes him. If he thinks Bigend’s unsettling you, which in turn unsettles George, jeopardizing the next Bollards album, he’ll do everything he can to get Bigend to back off. But that’s not only my best plan, it’s my only one.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’ll tell him I’ve been unable to contact you.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” said Meredith. “Will you still be looking for her?”

  “That’s a good question,” said Hollis.

  44. THE VERBALS

  Milgrim stood at the window of his room, watching someone on the canal path being given what Aldous would call the verbals. Which was to say harsh criticism, pointed verbal violence, probably with added threat of the physical. The recipient, whom Milgrim instinctively identified with, was an insubstantial figure in a pale grubby thigh-length raincoat, his verbalizer a slablike individual in a bright green exercise suit, one of those silky two-piece outfits sometimes still worn here, Milgrim guessed, out of nostalgia for an extinct American style of triumphal ghetto criminality. The verbals, Milgrim now saw, were being punctuated with fisted thumb-jabs to the smaller man’s ribs and sternu
m. Milgrim forced himself to turn away, absently rubbing a hand across his own ribs.

  He’d walked with Winnie down the street called Parkway (wasn’t that in Monopoly?) to the High Street and the station, quizzed by her along the way on Michael Preston Gracie, and then she’d said goodbye, handshake firm, and ridden off down a very long escalator.

  He’d continued back along the High Street, looking still more like a fair midway in some state in which youth-market footwear and alcohol were the main products, through buzzing young throngs outside several pubs, and home to the Holiday Inn.

  He didn’t want to call Bigend, but Winnie had specifically ordered him to do that, and he’d said he would. He opened the envelope the driver had given him earlier, looked at the variously sized white capsules in their foil-backed transparent bubbles, the tiny, maniacally precise hand-labeling in purple Rapidograph ink, an hour and date and day of the week for each bubble. He had no more idea who had prepared this than he had of what the capsules contained. He felt as though he were between two worlds, vast and grinding spheres of influence, Bigend’s and Winnie’s, a wobbly little moon, trying to do as he’d been told by both. Trying, he supposed, to avoid the verbals.

  He should call Bigend now. But no longer had the Neo, he remembered, and that meant he no longer had a number for him. He could look up Blue Ant and try to go through the switchboard, but under current circumstances that didn’t seem a good idea. A reprieve, of sorts. He went into the bathroom instead, and prepared to clean his teeth, the full four-stage operation, noting that he was still without the special mouthwash. He’d just inserted a fresh conical brush tip between his rearmost upper right molars when the room’s phone rang. Unwilling to remove the brush, he left the bathroom with it still in place, and answered the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Why do you sound that way?” asked Bigend.

  “Sorry,” Milgrim said, extracting the brush, “something in my mouth.”

  “Go down to the lobby. Aldous will be there shortly. You’ll pick up Hollis on your way to me. We need to talk.”

  “Good,” said Milgrim, before Bigend could hang up, but then began to worry about whether he could deliver Winnie’s message about Gracie in front of Hollis.

  He went back into the bathroom, to finish cleaning his teeth.

  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?”

  “I don’t think he did either, most of the time. He was good at delegation. Delegated that to some module of himself he didn’t have to hear from too often. Reg says he embodied the decade that way.”

  “Have you seen Reg yet?”

  “We had lunch when you were in Paris.”

  “How was that?”

  Heidi shrugged, the jacket’s black-fringed left epaulet rising half an inch, falling back. “Okay. I don’t usually have too much trouble with Reg. There’s a trick to that.”

  “What is it?”

  “I ignore everything he says,” said Heidi, with an uncharacteristically upbeat seriousness. “Dr. Fujiwara taught me.” Then she frowned. “But Reg, he had his doubts about you working for Bigend.”

  “But he was the one who suggested it. It was his idea.”

  “That was before he decided Bigend’s up to something.”

  “Bigend’s defined by being up to something.”

  “This is different,” said Heidi. “Inchmale doesn’t know what it is, right? Otherwise, he’d tell. Can’t keep a secret. But his wife’s been getting the signals at work, some kind of London PR hive-mind thing. Wires are humming, she says. Wires are hot, but there’s no actual signal. Kind of subsonic buzz. PR people dreaming of Bigend. Imagining they see his face on coins. Saying his name when they mean someone else. Omens, Reg says. Like before a quake. He wants to talk to you about that. Just not on the phone.”

  “There’s something going on at Blue Ant. Corporate spook stuff. Hubertus doesn’t seem that concerned about it.” She remembered what he’d said about a long-term project nearing fruition, his frustration with the timing of Sleight’s apparent defection.

  “You don’t want to tell him who makes those jackets?”

  “Fortunately, I don’t know who she is. But I’ve already told him that Meredith knows. If she won’t tell me, and she won’t, because she doesn’t want to, and I don’t want her to, he’ll go after her. He already has something she really wants, or he could have it, if he hasn’t found it already.”

  “Something changed your mind?”

  “Something changed hers. She was going to do it, tell me. Then she decided not to. Then she told me why. Told me a story.” It was Hollis’s turn to shrug. “Just like that, sometimes.” She put her feet down on the carpet and stood, stretching. Walked to the shelf, where the dart was centered perfectly, an instant and quite convincing Dadaist assemblage, in one deep orbit of the rectilinear ebony head. When she tried to pull it out, the head moved toward the edge of the shelf. “That’s really in there.” She steadied the sculpture with her left hand, twisting the dart out with her right.

  “It’s the mass. Behind a force-localizer.”

  Hollis bent, peering into the head’s left eye socket. A tiny round hole. “How did you learn to do that?”

  “I didn’t. I don’t. It wants to happen. I get out of the way. I told Ajay that, he said he loves me.”

  “Does he?” Hollis looked at the dart’s black tip.

&nb
sp; “He loves that. How about your boyfriend?”

  “Obviously,” Hollis said, “he hasn’t called.”

  “Call him again.”

  “Doesn’t feel right.” She crossed to the bed, offered Heidi the dart. Heidi took it.

  “You fight with him?”

  “No. I’d say we drifted apart, but it wasn’t like that. When we were together, it was like we were both on vacation. On vacation from ourselves, maybe. But he didn’t have a project. Like an actor between films. And then he did, but it was gradual. Like an atmosphere. Some kind of fog. He became harder to see. Less present. And I was starting to work on the book. I took that much more seriously than I would have expected to.”

  “I know,” said Heidi, tucking the two darts back into the frogging, beside the third, with seemingly no regard for where the black needlepoints might go. “I remember going up to see you in the Marmont. All that stuff laid out on tables. Seeing you were really doing it.”

  “It helped me make sense of what I’d been through. Working for Bigend, being with Garreth … I think there’s a way in which I may be able to look at that book, one day, and make a different kind of sense out of what happened. Not that there’s anything there that’s about that. I told that to Reg, last month, and he said it was a palimpsest.”

  Heidi said nothing. Canted her head slightly, her black hair a raptor’s wing, swinging a precise inch, no more.

  “But not now,” Hollis said. “I don’t want to look at it now, and it wouldn’t tell me anything if I did. And leaving him a second message would be like that. I left the first one. I did what he told me to do, except that I didn’t do it because knowing him had gotten me in trouble. I did it because I heard he’d been hurt. I’m not not calling him out of some kind of pride.”