Zero History (14 page)

“Is the car here?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I won’t need an umbrella, thanks.”

He carried the roll-aboard out for her and put it in the popped trunk of a black BMW, piloted by the bearded young man who’d admitted her to Blue Ant.

“Jacob,” this one said, smiling. He wore a waxed cotton motorcycle jacket. It lent him a sort of post-apocalyptic élan, she thought, this rainy morning. Props should’ve given him a Sten gun, or some other weapon looking equally like plumbing.

“Of course,” she said. “Thank you for picking me up.”

“Traffic’s not terrible,” opening her door for her.

“We’re meeting Mr. Milgrim?” As he slid in behind the wheel, she noted his wireless earpiece.

“All sorted. Been picked up. Ready for Paris?”

“I hope so,” she said as he pulled away from the curb.

Then Gloucester Place. Had she been walking, she’d have taken Baker Street instead, which she’d dreamed of as a child, and which retained, even at this stage of supposed adulthood, a certain small sharp sense of disappointment. Though perhaps game was afoot in Paris, she thought, and now merely a rather long subway ride from here.

In the traffic of Marylebone Road, stopping and starting, she kept noticing a dispatch rider, armored in samurai plastics, the back of his yellow helmet scarred as if something feline and huge had swatted him and almost missed, his clumsy-looking fiberglass fairing mended with peeling silver tape. He seemed to keep passing them, somehow, rolling forward between lanes. She’d never understood how that worked here.

“I hope I can find Milgrim at the station.”

“No fear,” said Jacob. “They’ll bring him to you.”

Sky-blue steel-girdered vastness. Towering volume of sound. Pigeons looking unconfused, about their pigeon business. Nobody did train stations like the Europeans, and the British, she thought, best of all. Faith in infrastructure, coupled with a necessity-driven gift for retrofitting.

One of Bigend’s lanky, elegant drivers, hand to earpiece, hove toward her steadily through the crowd, Milgrim in tow like a Sunday rowboat. Gazing around like a child, Milgrim, his face lit with a boy’s delight in the blue-girdered drama, the Dinky Toy grandeur of the great station.

One of the wheels of her roll-aboard began to click as she headed in their direction.

M
ilgrim glanced up from the square, glossy pages of
Presences: Locative Art in America
, and saw that Hollis was reading too. Something clothbound, black, no jacket.

They were somewhere under the Channel now, seated in Business Premier, which had wifi and a croissant breakfast. Or not wifi, but something cellular, requiring what she’d called a “dongle,” and had plugged into the edge of her MacBook for him. He’d borrowed it earlier, a weirdly thin one called an Air, and gone to Twitter, to see if Winnie had said anything, but she hadn’t. “Going through Kent now,” he’d written, then erased it. Then he’d tried “Hollis Henry” on Google and found her Wikipedia entry. Which had made for an odd read, as she was seated just opposite him, across the table, though she couldn’t see what he was looking at. Though now they were in the tunnel, there was no phone either.

She’d been described, in a retrospective piece written in 2004, as having looked, when she performed, like “a weaponized version of Françoise Hardy.” He wasn’t sure he could see it, exactly, and he’d also Googled Françoise Hardy to make the direct comparison. Françoise Hardy was more conventionally pretty, he thought, and he wasn’t sure what “weaponized” was supposed to mean, in that context. He supposed the writer had been trying to capture something of whatever she’d projected in live performance.

Hollis didn’t look like Milgrim’s idea of a rock singer, to the extent that he had one. She looked like someone who had a job that allowed you to wear what you wanted to the office. Which she did have, he supposed, with Bigend.

When he was finished with her computer, she’d offered him this copy of the book she’d written. “I’m afraid it’s mostly pictures,” she’d said, unzipping a side pocket on her black suitcase and pulling out a glossy, shrink-wrapped slab. The cover was a color photograph of tall nude statues of several very slender, small-breasted women, with identical helmet-like haircuts and matching bracelets, rising out of what seemed to be a rather small flower bed. They were made of something like solidified mercury, perfectly mirroring everything around them. The back cover was the same image, but minus the heroically erotic liqui-chrome statuary, which made it possible to read a sign they had concealed: Château Marmont.

“That’s a memorial to Helmut Newton,” she’d said. “He lived there, part of the time.”

“The back is ‘before’?” Milgrim had asked.

“No,” she’d said, “that’s what you see, there, unaugmented. The front’s what you see augmented. Construct’s tied to the GPS grid. To see it, you have to go there, use augmented reality.”

“I’ve never heard of that,” Milgrim had said, looking at the back, then the front.

“When I wrote the book, there was no commercial hardware. People were building their own. Now it’s all iPhone apps. Lots of work, back then, trying to render the pieces effectively. We had to take high-rez photographs of the site, from as many angles as you can, then marry them to whatever that exact angle on the construct would look like, then choose from those.”

“Did you do that yourself?’

“I chose, but Alberto did the photography and the imaging. That Newton memorial is one of his own pieces, but he rendered all of the others.” She pushed a strand of hair back from her eye. “Locative art probably started in London, and there’s a lot of it, but I haven’t seen much of it there. I decided to stick to American artists. Less to bite off, but also because it all has some peculiarly literal sense of place. I thought I had a marginally better chance of understanding it there.”

“You must know a lot about art.”

“I don’t. I stumbled on this stuff. Well, that’s not true. Bigend suggested I look at it. Though at the time I had no idea it was him doing the suggesting.”

He’d worked the corner of his thumbnail under the shrink-wrap. “Thank you,” he’d said, “it looks very interesting.”

Now she closed the black book, saw him looking at her. Smiled.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

“
Rogue Male
. Geoffrey Household. It’s about a man who tried to assassinate Hitler, or someone who’s exactly like Hitler.”

“Is it good?”

“Very good, though it really seems to be about wriggling down into the heart of the British countryside. Third act all seems to take place inside a hedgerow, down a badger hole.”

“I like your book. Like people were able to freeze their dreams, leave them places, and you could go there and see them, if you knew how.”

“Thank you,” she said, putting
Rogue Male
down on the table, without bothering to mark her place.

“Have you seen them all, yourself?”

“Yes, I have.”

“What’s your favorite?”

“River Phoenix, on the sidewalk. It was the first I saw. I never went back. Never saw it again. It made such a powerful impression. I suppose it was really why I decided to try to do a book, that impression.”

Milgrim closed
Presences
. He put it on the table, opposite
Rogue Male
. “Who are we going to see in Paris?”

“Meredith Overton. Studied at Cordwainers, shoe design, leather. She lives in Melbourne. Or did. She’s in Paris for the Salon du Vintage, selling something. She’s with a keyboard player named George, who’s in a band called the Bollards. Do you know them?”

“No,” said Milgrim.

“I know another Bollard, plus the man who’s currently producing their music.”

“She knows about Gabriel Hounds?”

“My other Bollard says she knew someone in London, when she was at Cordwainers, who knew someone involved in Hounds getting started.”

“It started in London?”

“I don’t know. Clammy met her in Melbourne. She was wearing Hounds, he wanted Hounds. She knew of Hounds locally. Some would be sold at a sort of art fair. He went with her and bought jeans. Says there was an American man there, selling them.”

“Why do you think she’ll talk to us?”

“I don’t,” she said. “But we can try.”

“Why do people care? Why do you think Bigend does?”

“He thinks someone’s copying some of his weirder marketing strategies,” she said, “improving on them.”

“And you think people want this brand because they can’t have it?”

“In part.”

“Drugs are valuable because you can’t get them without breaking the law,” Milgrim said.

“I thought they were valuable because they worked.”

“They have to work,” said Milgrim, “but the market value is about prohibition. Often they cost next to nothing to make. That’s what it all runs on. They work, you need them, they’re prohibited.”

“How did you get out of that, Milgrim?”

“They changed my blood. Replaced it. And while they were doing that, they were reducing the dose. And there was a paradoxical antagonist.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not sure,” said Milgrim. “Another drug. And cognitive therapy.”

“That sounds terrible,” she said.

“I liked the therapy,” Milgrim said. He could feel his passport against his chest, tucked safely into its Faraday pouch.

Rainy French countryside leapt on the carriage’s windows, hurtling, as if a switch had been thrown.

F
oliage green,” she heard Milgrim say, flatly, as she paid the driver with euros she’d gotten from an ATM in the Gare du Nord.

She turned. “What?”

He was half out of the cab, clutching his bag. “That department store, Oxford Street,” he said. “Foliage green pants. Same man, just walked in. Where we’re going.” That sharp, nervy thing fully present now, the mildly confused semiconvalescent gone entirely. He looked as though he were sniffing the air.

“Keep the change,” she said to the driver, shooing Milgrim out of the way and pulling her roll-aboard after her. She closed the door and the cab pulled away, leaving them on the sidewalk. “Are you sure?”

“Someone’s watching us.”

“Bigend?”

“Don’t know. You go in.”

“What will you do?”

“I’ll see.”

“Are you sure?”

“Let me borrow me your computer.”

Hollis bent, unzipped the side of her bag, and pulled out her Mac. He tucked it under his arm, like a clipboard. She saw that vagueness returning, the blinking mildness. He’s cloaking himself, she thought, then wondered what that meant.

“You go in now,” he said, “please.”

“Euros,” she said, passing him some bills.

She turned and wheeled her bag across the pavement, into the crowd around the venue’s entrance. Was Milgrim imagining things? Possibly, though there was Bigend’s penchant for attracting the most unwanted forms of attention, then following whatever followers turned up. Exactly what Milgrim claimed to be about to do. She looked back, expecting to see him, but he was gone.

She paid an entrance fee of five euros to a Japanese girl and was asked to check her bag.

A cobbled courtyard was visible through arches. Young women there were smoking cigarettes, making it look at once natural and profoundly attractive.

The Salon du Vintage itself was being held within the retrofitted seventeenth-century building to which the courtyard belonged, a previous decade’s idea of sleek modernity smoothly folded into its fabric.

Every second or third person in her field of vision was Japanese, and many were moving in approximately one direction. She went with them, up a minimalist stairway of pale Scandinavian wood, emerging into the first of two very large bright rooms, chandeliers glittering above carefully arranged racks of clothing, glass-topped display tables and pieces of period furniture.

This year’s iteration of the Salon du Vintage was devoted to the Eighties, she knew from having Googled it. She always found it peculiar to encounter a time she had actually lived through rendered as a period. It made her wonder whether she was living through another one, and if so, what it would be called. The first decades of the current century hadn’t yet acquired any very solid nomenclature, it seemed to her. Seeing relatively recent period clothing, particularly, gave her an odd feeling. She guessed that she unconsciously revised the fashion of her own past, turning it into something more contemporary. It was never quite as she remembered it. Shoulders tended to be peculiar, hems and waistlines not where she expected them to be.

Not that her own Eighties had been anything like Gaultier, Mugler, Alaïa and Montana, which she was now gathering was the version mainly being presented here.

She checked the handwritten price tag on a mulberry wool Mugler jacket. If Heidi were here, she decided, and were into this sort of thing, which she wasn’t, fuckstick’s remaining credit cards could probably be flatlined in an hour, with the resulting swag still fitting easily in a single cab.