Zero History (13 page)

“I don’t know if I’d describe him that way,” Milgrim said. “But he’s definitely curious.”

“And extremely well connected here. When my Brits ran the registration, I got the feeling, they decided that a tail from the airport and the name of your hotel was about all I’d be getting. Though that might have been all I’d have gotten anyway. But they did ask about the truck.”

“There aren’t that many genuinely eccentric rich people,” Milgrim said. “Evidently. Not even here.”

“Couldn’t prove it by me.”

“No,” Milgrim agreed, and took a tiny, careful sip of his bitter lemon pop.

“Why did they want the specs on those pants?”

“They’re interested in military contracts,” Milgrim said. “Designing. The actual clothing and equipment has to be manufactured in the United States. There’s a law.”

“No kidding,” she said.

“That’s what I’ve been told.”

“No,” she said, “I mean no kidding that they’re looking at contracting?”

“None,” said Milgrim. “They are. It’s a major current project.”

“Fucking hilarious,” she said.

Milgrim looked at his lemon pop, confused.

“Do you have a phone number?”

“I do,” said Milgrim, fishing the Neo from his jacket and showing it to her. “But it’s on this, and Bigend says it’s tapped.”

“Skip that, then. I arrested a serious shitbird who had one of those.”

Milgrim shuddered.

“Not because he had it. Something else. Do you have an e-mail address?”

“A Blue Ant address.”

“How about a Twitter account?”

“A what?”

“Sign up for one,” she said. “As Gay Dolphin Two, all caps, no spaces. Numeral two. From the laptop in the lobby. As soon as you finish your drink. Make your updates private. I’ll ask to follow you. I’ll be Gay Dolphin One. Allow me to follow you, refuse anybody else. It’ll mostly be porn bots anyway.”

“Porn bots? What is it?”

“It’s how I talk to my kids. You’ll register. That will be how we keep in touch. Let’s try to keep you out of trouble.”

Milgrim winced.

“You don’t want to leave town without letting me know. Or change hotels.”

“I have to go where they send me,” Milgrim said. “It’s what I do.”

“Perfect. I’ll be in touch.” She stood. “Thanks for the beer. Don’t forget about that registration. Gay Dolphin Two. Numeral two. All caps. No spaces.”

When she was gone, he continued to sit there, in the club chair. He took her card from his pocket. Held it without looking at it. Fingers on its sharp edges.

“No spaces,” his robot said.

S
he found Heidi in Cabinet’s bar, monochromatically resplendent in a sort of post-holocaust drum majorette jacket, cut from several different shades and textures of almost-black.

“Fuckstick’s cards worked?”

“Two did,” said Heidi, raising a steaming glass of clear liquid in a highball glass. Her fresh-cut hair had been reblackened, likewise in several shades, and she seemed to have hit the makeup counter as well.

“What’s that?” Hollis asked, indicating the glass.

“Water,” Heidi said, and sipped.

“Want to go to Paris with me, tomorrow morning?”

“What for?”

“My day job. There’s a vintage clothing fair. I may have found someone who knows what Bigend wants me to find out. Part of it, anyway.”

“How did you find them?”

“I think she’s dating the keyboard player from the Bollards.”

“Small world,” said Heidi. “And he’s the only cute one. Rest are homunculuses.”

“Homunculi.”

“Little douche bags,” Heidi countercorrected. “I’ll pass. Throat’s bothering me. Fucking planes.”

“No, Eurostar.”

“I mean the one I came over on. When are you back?”

“Day after tomorrow, if I can find her tomorrow. I guess I’ll take Milgrim, then.”

“How was he?”

“Profoundly. Fucking. Peculiar.” Hollis blew gently on the thin tan island of foam afloat in her half pint of Guinness, to see it move, then drank some. Always a mysterious beverage to her. Unsure why she’d asked for it. She liked the way it looked more than how it tasted. How would it taste, she wondered, if it tasted the way she thought it looked? No idea. “Though maybe not in such a bad way. Not his fault Bigend found him. We know how that is.”

“Robert’s found me a gym. Old school. East side.”

“End. Not side.”

“He’s cute.”

“Don’t you dare. ‘No civilians,’ remember? If you’d stuck with the rule, you wouldn’t have to be divorcing fuckstick.”

“Look at you. Motherfucker’s on YouTube, jumping off skyscrapers in a flying-squirrel suit.”

“But it was
your
rule, remember? Not mine. After the boxers, you stuck with musicians.”

“Homunculuses,” Heidi said, nodding, “douche bags.”

“I could’ve told you that,” Hollis said.

“You did.”

The bar’s level of early-evening drinking-crowd noise tilted, suddenly. Hollis looked up and saw the Icelandic twins, their identical frosty pelts aglitter. Behind them, somehow worryingly avuncular, loomed Bigend.

“Shit,” said Hollis.

“I’m out of here,” said Heidi, putting down her water and standing, giving her shoulders an irritated shrug within her new jacket.

Hollis rose too, half-pint in hand. “I’ll have to speak with him,” she said. “About Paris.”

“You’re the one with the job.”

“Hollis,” said Bigend. “And Heidi. Delighted.”

“Mr. Bellend,” said Heidi.

“Allow me to introduce Eydis and Fridrika Brandsdottir. Hollis Henry and Heidi Hyde.”

Eydis and Fridrika smiled identically, in eerie unison. “A pleasure,” said one. “Yes,” said the other.

“I’m leaving,” said Heidi, and did, men turning to follow her with their eyes as she strode off through the bar.

“She isn’t feeling well,” said Hollis. “The flight’s affected her throat.”

“She is a singer?” asked either Eydis or Fridrika.

“A drummer,” said the other.

“May I speak with you for a moment, Hubertus?” Hollis turned to the twins. “Please excuse me. Take these seats.”

As they settled in the armchairs that Hollis and Heidi had vacated, Hollis stepped closer to Bigend. He’d forgone the blue suit this evening, and wore one in some peculiarly light-absorbing black fabric that somehow looked as though it didn’t have a surface. More like an absence, an opening into something else, antimatter paired with mohair. “I hadn’t known Heidi was here,” he said.

“We’re all surprised. But I wanted to tell you that I’m going to Paris tomorrow, to try to speak with someone who may know something about Hounds. I thought I’d take Milgrim.”

“You got along?”

“Well enough, considering.”

“I’ll have Pamela e-mail you in a few minutes. She can handle any reservations.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll keep track of expenses. But I don’t want to give up my room here, so I’ll keep it and you can cover that.”

“I already am,” Bigend said, “plus incidentals. Can you tell me anything about Paris?”

“I may have found someone who was involved with whatever the beginning of Hounds was. ‘May.’ That’s all I know. And it may not be true. I’ll call you from there. Anyway, you’ve got company.” Smiling in the direction of Eydis and Fridrika, now coiled like slender silvery arctic mammals in their matching armchairs. “Good night.”

T
he Neo rang while he was still trying to grasp Twitter. He was registered, now, as GAYDOLPHIN2. No followers, following no one. Whatever that meant. And his updates, whatever those were, were protected.

The harsh faux-mechanical ring tone had attracted the attention of the girl at the desk. He smiled anxiously, apologetically, from his seat on the leather-padded laptop-tethering bench, and answered it, the Neo awkward against his ear. “Yes?”

“Milgrim?”

“Speaking.”

“Hollis. How are you?”

“Well,” said Milgrim, automatically. “How are you?”

“Wondering if you’re up for Paris tomorrow. We’d take an early Eurostar.”

“What’s that?”

“The train,” she said. “Chunnel. It’s quicker.”

“What for?” Sounding, he thought, like a suspicious child.

“I’ve found someone we need to try to speak with. She’s there tomorrow, and the day after. After that, I don’t know.”

“Will we be gone long?”

“Overnight, if we’re lucky. Seven-thirty out of St. Pancras. I’ll arrange for someone from Blue Ant to pick you up at the hotel.”

“Does Hubertus know?”

“Yes. I just ran into him.”

“All right,” he said. “Thank you.”

“I’ll have the car phone your room.”

“Thank you.”

Milgrim put the Neo away and went back to webmail and Twitter. He’d just heard from Twitter, asking whether he was willing to have GAYDOLPHIN1 follow him. He was. And now he’d have to tell her about Paris. In bursts of a hundred and forty character spaces, apparently.

As he was finishing this, someone called CyndiBrown32 asked whether he was willing to have her follow him.

Remembering Winnie’s instructions, he wasn’t. He closed Twitter and logged out of webmail. Closed the MacBook.

“Good night, Mr. Milgrim,” said the girl at the desk as he went to the elevator.

He felt as though something new and entirely too large was attempting to fit within him. He’d shifted allegiances, or acquired a new one. Or was he simply more afraid of Winnie than he was of Bigend? Or was it that he was afraid of the possibility of the absence of Bigend?

“Institutionalized,” he said to the brushed stainless interior of the Hitachi elevator as its door closed.

He’d gone from where he’d been before, somewhere he thought of as being extremely small, and very hard, to this wider space, to his not-quite-job running errands for Bigend, but suddenly that seemed not so wide. This succession of rooms, in hotels he never chose. Simple missions, involving travel. Urine tests. Always another bubble-pack.

Reminded of his medication, he calculated. He had enough for two nights away. Whatever it was.

The door opened on the third-floor hallway.

Take your medicine. Clean your teeth. Pack for Paris.

When had he last been in Paris? It felt as though he never had. Someone else had been, in his early twenties. That mysterious previous iteration his therapist in Basel had been so relentlessly interested in. A younger, hypothetical self. Before things had started to go not so well, then worse, then much worse, though by then he’d arranged to be absent much of the time. As much of the time as possible.

“Quit staring,” he said to the dressmaker’s dummy as he stepped into his room. “I wish I had a book.” It had been quite a while since he’d found anything to read for pleasure. Nothing since the start of his recovery, really. There were a few expensively bound and weirdly neutered bookazines here, rearranged daily by the housekeepers, but he knew from glancing through them that these were bland advertisements for being wealthy, wealthy and deeply, witheringly unimaginative.

He’d look for a book in Paris.

Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.

T
ossing makeup and toiletries into a bag, she noticed that the Blue Ant figurine wasn’t there on the counter, her failed employment-avoidance totem. Moved by the housecleaners in yesterday’s tidy, she supposed, but unlike them. She zipped the makeup bag. Checked her hair in the mirror. A voice with a BBC register was flowing smoothly, meaninglessly, from the ornate wall-grid.

Out past the steamy glass slabs and nickel-plate bumpers of the H. G. Wells shower, multiply towel-draped now.

Glancing around Number Four in hope of finding something she might have forgotten to pack, she saw the three unopened cartons of the British edition of her book. Remembering Milgrim, when she’d first met him, on their walk to the tapas place, expressing interest. Bigend, of course, had brought it up. Milgrim had seemed taken, for a few seconds, with the idea that she’d written a book.

She should take him one, she decided.

She wrestled a ridiculously heavy carton onto the unmade bed and used the foil-ripper on the room’s Victorian corkscrew to slit the transparent plastic tape. Releasing a bookstore smell as she opened the carton, but not a good one. Dry, chemical. And there they were, square and individually shrink-wrapped,
Presences
, by Hollis Henry. She took one off the top, slid it into the side pocket of her roll-aboard.

Then out, through liminal green hallways, lift, and down, to the coffee-smelling foyer, where a tortoise-spectacled young man presented her with a tall white coffee in a crisp white paper cup, lidded with white plastic, and offered her a Cabinet umbrella.