Zero History (25 page)

She was asleep before they reached the tunnel.

M
ilgrim 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.

She sounded her horn again as they rolled forward, Milgrim unsure where to put his feet. He shifted, trying to look down. Heard her yell something. Found muddy pegs for passenger feet. Saw a rapidly strolling pigeon framed for an instant in the narrow, smudged field the jiggling helmet allowed his vision.

Fiona felt like a very determined child, encased in layers of ballistic nylon and an indeterminate number of armored plates. Milgrim locked his fingers together, instinctively, and leaned into her back. Hard automotive protrusions, some chromed, were zipping past his knees, either side.

He had no idea where they’d emerged from the station, what street they were on, or which direction they might be going. The hairspray smell was giving him a headache. When she stopped for a light, he kept his feet on the pegs, dubious about finding them again.

Pentonville Road, on a sign, though he didn’t know whether they were on it or near it. Midmorning traffic, though he’d never seen it from a motorcycle. His jacket, unbuttoned, flapped energetically in the wind, making him glad of the Faraday pouch. His money, what was left of it, was in his right front pocket, the memory card with the photographs of Foley tucked down into his right sock.

More signs, blurry through the plastic: King’s Cross Road, Farringdon Road. He thought the hairspray fumes were making his eyes sting now, but no way to rub them. He blinked repeatedly.

Eventually, a bridge, low railings, red and white paint. Blackfriars, he guessed, remembering the colors. Yes, there were the tops of the very formal iron columns that had once supported another bridge, beside it, their red paint slightly faded. He’d come this way once with Sleight, to meet Bigend in an archaic diner, for one of those big greasy breakfasts. He’d asked Sleight about the columns. Sleight hadn’t been interested, but Bigend had told him about the railway bridge that had stood beside Blackfriars. When Bigend talked about London, it felt to Milgrim that he was describing some intricate antique toy he’d bought at auction.

Leaving the bridge, she turned, deftly negotiating smaller streets. Then she slowed, turned again, and they rode up on oil-stained concrete, into a workyard full of motorcycles, big ugly ones, their fairings patched with tape. Almost stopping, she dropped her booted feet to the ground and supported the motorcycle with her legs, walking with it as she crept it forward, between the others, past a man in a filthy one-piece orange suit and a backward baseball cap, a gleaming socket wrench in his hand. Through a wide opening and into an interior littered with tools, disassembled cycles and their engines, white foam cups, crumpled food wrappers.

She cut the engine, put down the kickstand, and swatted at Milgrim’s hands, which he quickly withdrew. The sudden silence was disorienting. He struggled off, knees stiff, and removed the helmet. “Where are we?” He looked up at the high, soot-blackened ceiling, hung with shattered fiberglass fairings.

Now she dismounted, swinging one multibuckled boot over the seat. “Suthuk,” she said, after removing the scarred yellow helmet.

“What?”

“South-wark. South of the river. Suth-uk.” She set the helmet on a cluttered tool cart, and began to undo the elastic net that held Milgrim’s bag atop her gas tank.

“What is this place?”

“A roll-in. Vinegar and brown paper. Quick and dirty repairs. No appointment necessary. For couriers.”

Milgrim raised the helmet, sniffed at its interior, put it on the motorcycle where he’d sat. She handed him his bag.

After various rippings of Velcro, the zipper down the front of her jacket made its own loud noise. “You hadn’t ridden a motorcycle before?”

“A scooter, once.”

“There’s a center-of-gravity concept you’re missing. You need passenger lessons.”

“Sorry,” said Milgrim, and he was.

“Not a problem.” Her hair was a pale brown. He hadn’t been able to tell in Paris, in the darkened hotel lobby. The helmet had made it stick up in back. He wanted to smooth it down.

The man in the once-orange boiler suit came to the entrance. “Himself is on the bridge,” he said to Fiona. He sounded Irish, but looked to Milgrim to be of some other, darker ethnicity, his face battered and immobile. He took a cigarette from behind his ear and lit it, using a small transparent lighter. Put the lighter in a side pocket and absently wiped his hands on the stained orange fabric. “You could wait in the room,” he said, and smiled at Fiona, “for all that’s good in it.” His two front teeth were framed in gold, and protruded at an unusual angle, like the roof of a tiny porch. He drew on his cigarette.

“Is there tea, Benny?”

“I’ll send the boy,” the man said.

“Carburetors aren’t right,” she said, looking at her bike.

“I told you not to go with the Kawasaki, didn’t I?” said Benny, pinching the cigarette for a final fierce drag, then letting it drop, to crush it with a battered, grease-soaked toe, through which dull steel showed. “Carbs wear out. Dear to replace. Carbs on the GT550’ve been very good to me.”

“Have a look at it for me?”

Benny smirked. “Not like I’ve real couriers needing repairs. Family men, working for a guarantee.”

“Or home in bed, radio on, skiving,” said Fiona, taking off her jacket. She looked suddenly smaller, in a gray turtleneck jersey. “More your usual description.”

“I’ll have Saad look into it,” Benny said, turning and walking out.

“Is Benny Irish?”

“Dublin,” she said, “father’s Tunisian.”

“And you work for Hubertus?”

“As do you,” she said, slinging the heavy jacket over her shoulder. “This way.”

He followed her, avoiding oil-soaked rags and white foam cups, some half filled with what he assumed had once been tea, past a sort of giant red toolbox on wheels, to a battered door. She fished a small ring of keys from her trousers, which looked as heavy, and nearly as well armored, as her jacket.

“Did you want to?” he asked as she unlocked the door.

“Want to what?”

“Work for Hubertus. I didn’t. Didn’t plan to, I mean. It was his idea.”

“Now that you mention it,” she said, over her shoulder, “it was his idea.”

Milgrim stepped through after her, into a tidy white space perhaps fifteen feet on a side. The walls were recently painted brick, the concrete floor a glossier white, nearly as clean. A small square table and four chairs, matte steel tubing and bent, unpainted plywood, expensively simple. An enormous light glowed softly, something on a clinical-looking metallic pedestal, a sort of white parabolic umbrella, angled up. It looked to Milgrim like a very small art gallery between shows. “What’s this?” he asked, looking from one blank wall to another.

“One of his Vegas cubes,” she said. “Haven’t you seen one before?” She went to the light and did something, dialing the illumination up.

“No.”

“He doesn’t understand gambling,” she said, “the ordinary kind, but he loves Las Vegas casinos. The sort of thought that goes into them. How they enforce a temporal isolation. No clocks, no windows, artificial light. He likes to think in environments like that. Like this. No interruptions. And he likes them to be secret.”

“He likes secrets,” Milgrim agreed, putting his bag on the table.

A boy with an almost-shaven head came in, a tall white foam cup in either grimy hand, and placed them on the table. “Thanks,” said Fiona. He left without a word. Fiona picked up one of the cups, sipped through the hole in the white plastic lid. “Builder’s tea,” she said.

Milgrim tried his. Shuddered. Sweet, stewed.

“I’m not his daughter,” Fiona said.

Milgrim blinked. “Whose?”

“Bigend’s. In spite of rumors to the contrary. Not the case.” She sipped her tea.

“I wouldn’t have thought that.”

“My mother was his girlfriend. That’s where the story started. I was already around, so it actually doesn’t make any sense. Though I did wind up here, working for him.” She gave Milgrim a look he couldn’t read. “Just to get that straight.”

Milgrim sucked down some tea, mainly to cover his inability to think of anything to say. It was very hot. “Did he train you,” he asked, “to ride motorcycles?”

“No,” she said, “I was already a courier. That’s where I know Benny from. I could walk out on Bigend today, have a job in an hour. It’s like that, being a courier. If you want the day off, you quit. But it was driving my mother crazy. Worried about the danger.”