Zero History Page 15

  He opened the browser, then his webmail. Could Sleight see him do that? he wondered. His address, the first and only e-mail address he’d had, was a Blue Ant address. He opened Twitter. If he understood this correctly, Sleight might be able to know what he had opened, but would be unable to see what he was doing there. He entered his user name and password.

  And Winnie was there. Or had been. “Whr R U?” An hour ago.

  “Still Paris. Need to talk.”

  He refreshed the browser. No reply.

  The girl in the cotton dress, having finished dusting, was looking at him. Reminding him, as he found certain young people did, of one of those otherwise fairly realistic Japanese cartoon characters, the ones with oversized Disney eyes. What was that about? It seemed to be international, whatever it was, though not yet universal. This was the sort of thing he’d gotten used to being able to ask Bigend about. Bigend actively encouraged this, because, he said, he valued Milgrim’s questions. Milgrim had arrived from a decadelong low-grade brownout, and was, according to Bigend, like someone stepping from a lost space capsule. Smooth clay, awaiting the telltale imprint of a new century.

  “It is the Mac Air?” the girl asked.

  Milgrim had to check the branding, at the bottom of the screen. “Yes,” he said.

  “It is very nice.”

  “Thank you,” said Milgrim. Self-consciously, he carefully plunged the rod-and-ball atop the tea press, forcing clear fluid through a surgical grade of white nylon mesh. He poured some out, into the even more fragile-looking glass cup. Took a sip. Complexly metallic. Not much like tea. Though perhaps in a good way. “Do you have croissants?”

  “Non,” said the girl, “petites madeleines.”

  “Please,” said Milgrim, gesturing to his white table.

  Proust cookies. It was literally all he knew of Proust, though he’d once had to listen to someone’s lengthy argument that Proust had either described madeleines incorrectly or been describing something else entirely.

  It was time for his medication. While the girl fetched his madeleines, from the rear of the shop, he took the bubble-pack from his bag and popped the day’s ration of white capsules through the foil at the back of their individual bubbles. Out of long habit, he held them concealed in his palm. He’d replaced the bubble-pack by the time she returned, his three cookies on a square white plate. One plain, one lightly drizzled with something white, another with dark chocolate.

  “Thank you,” he said. He dunked the plain one briefly in his tea, perhaps out of some vague, Proust-related superstition, then quickly ate them all, as is. They were very good, and the white-drizzled one was almond. Finished, he washed the capsules from Basel down with white pear tea.

  Then he remembered to refresh the browser again.

  “R U there?” Two minutes ago.

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  Refresh.

  “Ur phons nt secure”

  “Borrowed laptop. Lost phone.” He hesitated. “I think Sleight was tracking me with it.”

  Refresh.

  “U lost?”

  “Got rid of it.”

  Refresh.

  “Why??”

  He had to think about that. “S was telling follower where I was.”

  Refresh.

  “So??”

  “Tired of it.”

  Refresh.

  “No jack moves OK? B cool”

  “Didn’t want him to know where we’re staying.”

  Refresh.

  “Where R U?”

  “Staying,” he completed, aloud, then wrote: “Hotel Odeon, by Odeon Metro.”

  Refresh.

  “Bak nxt AM?”

  “As far as I know.”

  Refresh.

  “Whts yr partner want??”

  “Jeans.”

  Refresh.

  “LOL! B cool B N touch bye”

  “Bye,” said Milgrim, less than impressed with his new federal agent handler. It felt like having a disinterested young mother.

  He logged out of Twitter and went to the bookmarks, clicking for the page he’d marked earlier. Foley modeling a zip-front jacket and an old-fashioned porn rectangle. What was that about? He skipped through the site, things starting to come together. Remembering another of the French girl’s PowerPoint presentations, back in Soho. The market’s fetishization of elite special forces, “operators.” She’d cited the Vietnam War as the tipping point for this, and had illustrated her argument with collages of small ads from the back pages of long-extinct Fifties mens’ magazines, True and Argosy: hernia aids, mail-order monkeys huddled in tea cups, courses in lawn mower repair, X-Ray Specs … These ads, she’d said, constituted a core sample of the mass unconscious of the American male, shortly after WWII. Aside from the ubiquitous trusses and truss substitutes (and what, Milgrim had wondered, had accounted for that epidemic of herniation among postwar American men?), this record differed very little from the equivalent record to be found in the back pages of comic books of the same era. While pointing out that anyone, then, could order exactly the same Italian surplus rifle that had later been used to assassinate JFK (for under fifteen dollars, including postage), she’d said that the postwar American male’s valorization of things military could be assumed to have been balanced by recent actual memories of the reality of war, though one that been quite definitively won. Vietnam had changed that, she’d said, as she’d moved into a new set of collages. Vietnam had shifted something in the American male psyche. Milgrim couldn’t remember exactly what that was supposed to have been, but he knew she’d connected it with what he assumed to be the culture that produced websites like this one.

  Foley was wearing his black porn rectangle to protect his identity, the assumption on the viewer’s part intended to be that Foley himself was a member of some military elite. She’d actually mentioned that as a marketing technique.

  He went back to the image of Foley. Foley wasn’t particularly scary. Milgrim knew a number of kinds of scary, from his decade on the street. The man with the mullet, in the mothballed restaurant outside of Conway, had been quite a special kind of scary. That kind of scary, which he had no name for, was difficult to conceal, and impossible to fake. He’d first seen it in New York, in a young Albanian in the heroin business. Suggestions of a military background, other things. A similar calm, the same utter lack of wasted motion. Foley, he began to suspect, studying the mouth under the black rectangle, might be the kind of scary that was about meanness, rather than strength. Though he’d also seen the two coexist, more or less, in the same individual, and that hadn’t been good at all.

  He clicked back through the site. Bigend would be interested in this, though probably his team had already shown it to him. It was exactly the sort of thing they were looking at. Noticing neither a brand name nor prices. The site’s URL a string of letters and numbers. Not a site so much as a dummy, a mockup? The “About Us” page blank, also the “Order” page.

  A deeper throbbing of exhaust, outside. He looked up to see a black motorcycle pass, slowly, the rider’s yellow helmet turning a smooth sweep of dark plastic visor his way, then forward again, rolling on. Revealing, for an instant, on the helmet’s back, broad, white diagonal scratches in the yellow gel-coat.

  Exactly the kind of detail that Bigend would congratulate him for noticing.

  29. SHIVER

  Sleight,” Bigend said, as though the name tired him, “is asking about Milgrim. Is he with you?”

  “No,” Hollis said, stretched on the bed, post-shower, partially wrapped in several of the hotel’s not-so-large white towels. “Isn’t he in New York? Sleight, I mean.”

  “Toronto,” said Bigend. “He keeps track of Milgrim.”

  “He does?” She looked at the iPhone. She had no iconic image for Bigend. Maybe a blank rectangle of Klein Blue?

  “Milgrim initially required quite a lot of keeping track of. That fell to Sleight, for the most part.”

  “Does he keep track of me?” She looked ove
r at the blue figurine.

  “Would you like him to?”

  “No. It would be, in fact, a deal-breaker. For you and me.”

  “That was my understanding, of course. Where did you buy your phone?”

  “The Apple Store. SoHo. New York SoHo. Why?”

  “I’d like to give you another one.”

  “Why do you care where I bought this one?”

  “Making certain you bought it yourself.”

  “The last phone you gave me let you keep track of where I was, Hubertus.”

  “I won’t do that again.”

  “Not with a phone, anyway.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She gave the figurine a flick with her finger. It wobbled on its round base.

  “You know my concerns with integrity of communication,” he said.

  “I don’t know where Milgrim is,” she said. “Is that all you wanted?”

  “Sleight’s suggesting he’s left Paris. Done a runner, perhaps. Do you think that likely?”

  “He’s not that easy to read. Not for me.”

  “He’s changing,” Bigend said. “That’s the interesting thing, about someone in his situation. There’s always more of him arriving, coming online.”

  “Maybe something’s arrived that doesn’t want Sleight knowing where it is.”

  “If you see him,” Bigend said, “would you ask him to ring me, please?”

  “Yes,” she said, “goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Hollis.”

  She picked up the figurine. It weighed no more than she recalled it having weighed before, which was very little. It was hollow, and apparently seamless. There was no way to see what might be inside it.

  She sat up on the bed, wrapped in slightly damp towels, as her phone rang again. The black-and-white photo of Heidi. “Heidi?”

  “I’m at the gym. Hackney.”

  “Yes?”

  “One of my sparring partners here, he says he knows about your guy.”

  The gold squiggles of bullshit faux-Chinese calligraphy on the wall opposite seemed to shimmer and detach, drifting toward her. She blinked. “He does?”

  “You never told me his last name.”

  “No,” said Hollis.

  “Begins with W, ends with s?

  “Yes.”

  An uncharacteristic pause. Heidi never thought about what she was going to say. “When did you last hear from him?”

  “Around the time of my U.K. book launch. Why?”

  “When are you back here?”

  “Tomorrow. What’s this about?”

  “Making sure Ajay and I are talking about the same guy.”

  “Ajay?”

  “He’s Indian. Well, English. I’ll find out what I can, then you and I will talk.” And she hung up.

  Hollis wiped her eyes with the corner of one of the towels, restoring the golden brushwork to its place on the blood-colored wallpaper, and shivered.

  30. SIGHTING

  Milgrim left the white tea shop, walking in what he imagined as the direction of the Seine, favoring streets that ran approximately perpendicular to the one where he’d had his tea. Wondering exactly how he’d been followed here from the Salon du Vintage. Directly, quite likely, on a motorcycle.

  If the yellow helmet was really the one he’d seen in London, his motorcyclist was the dispatch rider who’d delivered the printout of Winnie, the photo he’d assumed Sleight had taken in Myrtle Beach. Pamela had sent it, after he’d seen Bigend, on the way back to the hotel. Did they know who Winnie was, he wondered, or what she was? They all took pictures of one another, and now they had him doing it as well.

  Now he seemed to have found a street of expensive-looking African folk art. Big dark wooden statues, in small galleries, beautifully lit. Nail-studded fetishes, suggesting terrible emotional states.

  But here was a small camera shop as well. He went in, bought a Chinese card-reader from a pleasant Persian man in gold-rimmed glasses and a natty gray cardigan. Put it in his bag with Hollis’s laptop and her book. Continued on.

  He began to feel less anxious, somehow, though the elation he’d felt after giving the Neo the slip wasn’t likely to return.

  The question now, he decided, was whether the motorcyclist, if he hadn’t been mistaken about the helmet, worked for Sleight or Bigend, or both. Had Bigend sent him here, or Sleight? For that matter, how to be certain that Bigend really mistrusted Sleight? Bigend, as far as he knew, had never lied to him, and Sleight had always seemed fundamentally untrustworthy. Built from the ground up for betrayal.

  He thought of his therapist. If she were here, he told himself, she’d remind him that this situation, however complexly threatening or dangerous, was external, hence entirely preferable to the one he’d been in when he’d arrived in Basel, a situation both internal and seemingly inescapable. “Do not internalize the threat. When you do, the system floods with adrenaline, cortisol. Crippling you.”

  He reached for the Neo to check the time. It was no longer there.

  He walked on, shortly finding himself in what an enameled wall-sign informed him was the Rue Git-le-Coeur. Narrower, possibly more medieval. A few drops of rain began to fall, the sky having clouded over while he’d been having his tea. He checked reflections for a yellow helmet, though of course a professional might park the bike, leave the helmet behind. Or, more likely, be part of a team. He saw a magical-looking bookshop, stock piled like a mad professor’s study in a film, and swerved, craving the escape into text. But these seemed not only comics, unable to provide his needed hit of words-in-row, but in French as well. Some of the them, he saw, were the French kind, very literary-looking, but just as many seemed to be the ones where everyone looked something like the girl in the tea shop, slender and big-eyed. Still, a bookstore. He had a powerful urge to burrow. Work his way back into the stacks. Pull a few piles over behind him and hope never to be found.

  He sighed and hurried on.

  When Git-le-Coeur ended, he found a pedestrian light and crossed the heavy traffic of what he now remembered was the Quai des Grands Augustins, then hurried down a tall steep flight of stone steps. Which he also remembered. A sunny day, years before.

  There was a narrow walkway directly beside the river. Once on this, one could only be seen from above by someone craning over. He looked up, waiting, anticipating the appearance of a helmet, head, or heads.

  He became aware of an engine, on the water. He turned. A dark wooden sailboat with green trim was passing, its mast horizontal, piloted by a woman in shorts, a yellow slicker, and sunglasses, looking very alert at the wheel.

  He looked back up at the balustrade. Nothing. The stairs were still vacant as well.

  Noticing a shallow recess, he sheltered there from the increasingly insistent rain.

  And then a longer, wider boat emerged, from an archway beneath a bridge whose name he no longer remembered. Like the boats that carried tourists, for Parisian children to spit on from the bridges, but this one equipped with a long plasma screen, running almost its full length, and perhaps a dozen feet high. And on this screen, as it passed, he saw the agreeably simian-looking young man Hollis had been talking with at the Salon Du Vintage, his features unmistakable, playing an organ or piano, his deep-set eyes shadowed in stage lighting, part of a band. There was no sound, other than the quiet drumming of the boat’s engine, and then the pixels spasmed, collapsing the image, then unfolding it again, to reveal those two tedious Icelandic blondes, the twins Bigend sometimes mysteriously appeared with. The Dottirs, contorting in sequined sheathes on the rain-wet screen, mouths open as in silent screams.

  He set his bag down, carefully, on the paving beneath the archway, and stretched his aching shoulder, watching the Dottirs pass, mysteriously, on the dark water.

  When the rain stopped, and still no one had appeared, he shifted the bag to his other shoulder and walked on, toward the bridge. He trudged up a different but equally long stone stair, then recrossed the busy Grands Augustins
and reentered the Latin Quarter, headed in the approximate direction he had come.

  The cobbles were slick and shining, the street furniture semi-unfamiliar, evening settling rapidly in. And it was here, nearing another randomly angled intersection, that he had the experience.

  In a setting, as they had said, of clear reality.

  He had always been repulsed by the idea of hallucinogens, psychedelics, deliriants. His idea of a desirable drug had been a one that made things more familiar, more immediately recognizable.

  In Basel, they had questioned him closely, during early withdrawal, about hallucinations. Had he been having any? No, he’d said. No … bugs? No bugs, he’d assured them. They’d explained that a possible symptom of his withdrawal might be what they called “hallucinations in a setting of clear reality,” though he’d wondered how they could assume that his reality, at that point, was clear. The bugs, whatever those might have been, had never come, to his considerable relief, but now he saw, however briefly but with peculiar clarity, an aerial penguin cross the intersection ahead of him.

  Something wholly penguin-shaped, apparently four or five feet long, from beak-tip to trailing feet, and made, it seemed, of mercury. A penguin wrapped in fluid mirror, reflecting a bit of neon from the street below. Swimming. Moving as a penguin moves underwater, but through the Latin Quarter air, at just above the height of second-story windows. Moving down the center of the street that crossed the one he walked on. So that it was revealed only as it crossed the intersection. Swimming. Propelling itself, in a gracefully determined but efficient fashion, with its quicksilver flippers. Then a bicycle crossed, on the street, going in the opposite direction.

  “Did you see that?” Milgrim asked the cyclist, who of course was already gone, and in any case could never have heard him.

  31. SECRET MACHINERIES

  She did her best to put away the clinging unease, after the conversation with Heidi. Put on hose, the dress she’d brought, shoes, makeup. The bathroom was no more than a sort of alcove, less floor space than the Wellsian shower in Cabinet.