“Echolalia,” she said, and stood, removing her sweater, which she folded and put in a chest-high drawer in the wardrobe, beside a small silk land mine of potpourri. If she didn’t touch it, she knew, she wouldn’t have to smell it. Putting on an off-white Cabinet robe, more velour than terry but somehow just missing whatever it was that made her so unfond of velour bathrobes. Men, particularly, looked fundamentally untrustworthy in them.
The room phone began to ring. It was a collage, its massive nautical-looking handset of rubber-coated bronze resting in a leather-padded cradle atop a cubical box of brass-cornered rosewood. Its ring was mechanical, tiny, as though you were hearing an old-fashioned bicycle bell far off down a quiet street. She stared hard, willing it to silence.
“Intense hysteria,” she said.
It continued to ring.
Three steps and her hand was on it.
It was as absurdly heavy as ever.
“Coprophagia.” Briskly, as if announcing a busy department in a large hospital.
“Hollis,” he said, “hello.”
She looked down at the handset, heavy as an old hammer and nearly as battered. Its thick cord, luxuriously cased in woven burgundy silk, resting against her bare forearm.
“Hollis?”
“Hello, Hubertus.”
She pictured herself driving the handset through brittle antique rosewood, crushing the aged electro-mechanical cricket within. Too late now. It had already fallen silent.
“I saw Reg,” he said.
“I know.”
“I told him to ask you to call.”
“I didn’t,” she said.
“Good to hear your voice,” he said.
“It’s late.”
“A good night’s sleep, then,” heartily. “I’ll be by in the morning, for breakfast. We’re driving back tonight. Pamela and I.”
“Where are you?”
“Manchester.”
She saw herself taking an early cab to Paddington, the street in front of Cabinet deserted. Catching the Heathrow Express. Flying somewhere. Another phone ringing, in another room. His voice.
“Manchester?”
“Norwegian black metal,” he said, flatly. She pictured Scandinavian folk jewelry, then self-corrected: the musical genre. “Reg said I might find it interesting.”
Good for him, she thought, Inchmale’s subclinical sadism sometimes finding a deserving target.
“I was planning on sleeping in,” she said, if only to be difficult. She knew now that it was going to be impossible to avoid him.
“Eleven, then,” he said. “Looking forward to it.”
“Good night. Hubertus.”
“Good night.” He hung up.
She put the handset down. Careful of the hidden cricket. Not its fault.
Nor hers.
Nor even his, probably. Whatever he was.
2. EDGE CITY
Milgrim considered the dog-headed angels in Gay Dolphin Gift Cove.
Their heads, rendered slightly less than three-quarter scale, appeared to have been cast from the sort of plaster once used to produce worryingly detailed wall-decorations: pirates, Mexicans, turbaned Arabs. There would almost certainly be examples of those here as well, he thought, in the most thoroughgoing trove of roadside American souvenir kitsch he’d ever seen.
Their bodies, apparently humanoid under white satin and sequins, were long, Modigliani-slender, perilously upright, paws crossed piously in the manner of medieval effigies. Their wings were the wings of Christmas ornaments, writ larger than would suit the average tree.
They were intended, he decided, with half a dozen of assorted breed facing him now, from behind glass, to sentimentally honor deceased pets.
Hands in trouser pockets, he quickly swung his gaze to a broader but generally no less peculiar visual complexity, noting as he did a great many items featuring Confederate-flag motifs. Mugs, magnets, ashtrays, statuettes. He considered a knee-high jockey boy, proffering a small round tray rather than the traditional ring. Its head and hands were a startling Martian green (so as not to give the traditional offense, he assumed). There were also energetically artificial orchids, coconuts carved to suggest the features of some generically indigenous race, and prepackaged collections of rocks and minerals. It was like being on the bottom of a Coney Island grab-it game, one in which the eclectically ungrabbed had been accumulating for decades. He looked up, imagining a giant, three-pronged claw, agent of stark removal, but there was only a large and heavily varnished shark, suspended overhead like the fuselage of a small plane.
How old did a place like this have to be, in America, to have “gay” in its name? Some percentage of the stock here, he judged, had been manufactured in Occupied Japan.
Half an hour earlier, across North Ocean Boulevard, he’d watched harshly tonsured child-soldiers, clad in skateboarding outfits still showing factory creases, ogling Chinese-made orc-killing blades, spiked and serrated like the jaws of extinct predators. The seller’s stand had been hung with Mardi Gras beads, Confederate-flag beach towels, unauthorized Harley-Davidson memorabilia. He’d wondered how many young men had enjoyed an afternoon in Myrtle Beach as a final treat, before heading ultimately for whatever theater of war, wind whipping sand along the Grand Strand and the boardwalk.
In the amusement arcades, he judged, some of the machines were older than he was. And some of his own angels, not the better ones, spoke of an ancient and deeply impacted drug culture, ground down into the carnival grime of the place, interstitial and immortal; sun-damaged skin, tattoos unreadable, eyes that peered from faces suggestive of gas-station taxidermy.
He was meeting someone here.
They were supposed to be alone. He himself wasn’t, really. Somewhere nearby, Oliver Sleight would be watching a Milgrim-cursor on a website, on the screen of his Neo phone, identical to Milgrim’s own. He’d given Milgrim the Neo on that first flight from Basel to Heathrow, stressing the necessity of keeping it with him at all times, and turned on, except when aboard commercial flights.
He moved, now, away from the dog-headed angels, the shadow of the shark. Past articles of an ostensibly more natural history: starfish, sand dollars, sea horses, conchs. He climbed a short flight of broad stairs, from the boardwalk level, toward North Ocean Boulevard. Until he found himself, eye-to-navel, with the stomach of a young, very pregnant woman, her elastic-paneled jeans chemically distressed in ways that suggested baroquely improbable patterns of wear. The taut pink T-shirt revealed her protruding navel in a way he found alarmingly suggestive of a single giant breast.
“You’d better be him,” she said, then bit her lower lip. Blond, a face he’d forget as soon as he looked away. Large dark eyes.
“I’m meeting someone,” he said, careful to maintain eye contact, uncomfortably aware that he was actually addressing the navel, or nipple, directly in front of his mouth.
Her eyes grew larger. “You aren’t foreign, are you?”
“New York,” Milgrim admitted, assuming that might all too easily qualify.
“I don’t want him getting in any trouble,” she said, at once softly and fiercely.
“None of us does,” he instantly assured her. “No need. At all.” His attempted smile felt like something forced from a flexible squeezetoy. “And you are … ?
“Seven or eight months,” she said, in awe at her own gravidity. “He’s not here. He didn’t like this, here.”
“None of us does,” he said, then wondered if that was the right thing to say.
“You got GPS?”
“Yes,” said Milgrim. Actually, according to Sleight, their Neos had two kinds, American and Russian, the American being notoriously political, and prone to unreliability in the vicinity of sensitive sites.
“He’ll be there in an hour,” she said, passing Milgrim a faintly damp slip of folded paper. “You better get started. And you better be alone.”
Milgrim took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but if it means driving, I won
’t be able to go alone. I don’t have a license. My friend will have to drive me. It’s a white Ford Taurus X.”
She stared at him. Blinked. “Didn’t they just fuck Ford up, when they went to giving them f-names?”
He swallowed.
“My mother had a Freestyle. Transmission’s a total piece of shit. Get that computer wet, car won’t move at all. Gotta disconnect it first. Brakes wore out about two weeks off the lot. They always made that squealing noise anyway.” But she seemed comforted, in this, as if by the recollection of something maternal, familiar.
“Right as rain,” he said, surprising himself with an expression he might never have used before. He pocketed the slip of paper without looking at it. “Could you do something for me, please?” he asked her belly. “Could you call him, now, and let him know my friend will be driving?”
Lower lip worked its way back under her front teeth.
“My friend has the money,” Milgrim said. “No trouble.”
>>>
“And she called him?” asked Sleight, behind the wheel of the Taurus X, from the center of a goatee he occasionally trimmed with the aid of a size-adjustable guide, held between his teeth.
“She indicated she would,” Milgrim said.
“Indicated.”
They were headed inland, toward the town of Conway, through a landscape that reminded Milgrim of driving somewhere near Los Angeles, to a destination you wouldn’t be particularly anxious to reach. This abundantly laned highway, lapped by the lots of outlet malls, a Home Depot the size of a cruise ship, theme restaurants. Though interstitial detritus still spoke stubbornly of maritime activity and the farming of tobacco. Fables from before the Anaheiming. Milgrim concentrated on these leftovers, finding them centering. A lot offering garden mulch. A four-store strip mall with two pawnshops. A fireworks emporium with its own batting cage. Loans on your auto title. Serried ranks of unpainted concrete garden statuary.
“Was that a twelve-step program you were in, in Basel?” asked Sleight.
“I don’t think so,” said Milgrim, assuming Sleight was referring to the number of times his blood had been changed.
>>>
“How close will those numbers put us to where he wants us?” Milgrim asked. Sleight, back in Myrtle Beach, had tapped coordinates from the pregnant girl’s note into his phone, which now rested on his lap.
“Close enough,” Sleight said. “Looks like that’s it now, off to the right.”
They were well through Conway, or in any case through the malled-over fringes of whatever Conway was. Buildings were thinning out, the landscape revealing more of the lineaments of an extinct agriculture.
Sleight slowed, swung right, onto spread gravel, a crushed limestone, pale gray. “Money’s under your seat,” he said. They were rolling, with a smooth, even crunch of tires in gravel, toward a long, one-story, white-painted clapboard structure, overhung with a roof that lacked a porch beneath it. Rural roadside architecture of some previous day, plain but sturdy. Four smallish rectangular front windows had been modernized with plate glass.
Milgrim had the cardboard tube for the tracing paper upright between his thighs, two sticks of graphite wrapped in a Kleenex in the right side pocket of his chinos. There was half of a fresh five-foot sheet of foam-core illustration board in the back seat, in case he needed a flat surface to work on. Holding the bright red tube with his knees, he bent forward, fishing under the seat, and found a metallic-blue vinyl envelope with a molded integral zipper and three binder-holes. It contained enough bundled hundreds to give it the heft of a good-sized paperback dictionary.
Gravel-crunch ceased as they halted, not quite in front of the building. Milgrim saw a primitive rectangular sign on two weather-grayed uprights, rain-stained and faded, unreadable except for FAMILY, in pale blue italic serif caps. There were no other vehicles in the irregularly shaped gravel lot.
He opened the door, got out, stood, the red tube in his left hand. He considered, then uncapped it, drawing out the furled tracing paper. He propped the red tube against the passenger seat, picked up the money, and closed the door. A scroll of semitranslucent white paper was less threatening.
Cars passed on the highway. He walked the fifteen feet to the sign, his shoes crunching loudly on the gravel. Above the blue italic FAMILY, he made out EDGE CITY in what little remained of a peeling red; below it, RESTAURANT. At the bottom, to the left, had once been painted, in black, the childlike silhouettes of three houses, though like the red, sun and rain had largely erased them. To the right, in a different blue than FAMILY, was painted what he took to be a semi-abstract representation of hills, possibly of lakes. He guessed that this place was on or near the town’s official outskirts, hence the name.
Someone, within the silent, apparently closed building, rapped sharply, once, on plate glass, perhaps with a ring.
Milgrim went obediently to the front door, the tracing paper upheld in one hand like a modest scepter, the vinyl envelope held against his side with the other.
The door opened inward, revealing a football player with an Eighties porn haircut. Or someone built like one. A tall, long-legged young man with exceptionally powerful-looking shoulders. He stepped back, gesturing for Milgrim to enter.
“Hello,” said Milgrim, stepping into warm unmoving air, mixed scents of industrial-strength disinfectant and years of cooking. “I have your money.” Indicating the plastic envelope. A place unused, though ready to be used. Mothballed, Edge City, like a B-52 in the desert. He saw the empty glass head of a gum machine, on its stand of wrinkle-finished brown pipe.
“Put it on the counter,” the young man said. He wore pale blue jeans and a black T-shirt, both of which looked as though they might contain a percentage of Spandex, and heavy-looking black athletic shoes. Milgrim noted a narrow, rectangular, unusually positioned pocket, quite far down on the right side-seam. A stainless steel clip held some large folding knife firmly there.
Milgrim did as he was told, noting the chrome and the turquoise leatherette of the row of floor-mounted stools in front of the counter, which was topped with worn turquoise Formica. He partially unfurled the paper. “I’ll need to make tracings,” he explained. “It’s the best way to capture the detail. I’ll take photographs first.”
“Who’s in the car?”
“My friend.”
“Why can’t you drive?”
“DUI,” said Milgrim, and it was true, at least in some philosophical sense.
Silently, the young man rounded an empty glass display-case that would once have contained cigarettes and candy. When he was opposite Milgrim, he reached beneath the counter and drew out something in a crumpled white plastic bag. He dropped this on the counter and swept the plastic envelope toward the far end, giving the impression that his body, highly trained, was doing these things of its own accord, while he himself continued to survey from some interior distance.
Milgrim opened the bag and took out a pair of folded, unpressed trousers. They were the coppery beige shade he knew as coyote brown. Unfolding them, he lay them out flat along the Formica, took the camera from his jacket pocket, and began to photograph them, using the flash. He took six shots of the front, then turned them over and took six of the back. He took one photograph each of the four cargo pockets. He put the camera down, turned the pants inside out, and photographed them again. Pocketing the camera, he arranged them, still inside out, more neatly on the counter, spread the first of the four sheets of paper over them, and began, with one of the graphite sticks, to make his rubbing.
He liked doing this. There was something inherently satisfying about it. He’d been sent to Hackney, to a tailor who did alterations, to spend an afternoon learning how to do it properly, and it pleased him, somehow, that this was a time-honored means of stealing information. It was like making a rubbing of a tombstone, or a bronze in a cathedral. The medium-hard graphite, if correctly applied, captured every detail of seam and stitching, all a sample-maker would need to reproduce the garment
, as well as providing for reconstruction of the pattern.
While he worked, the young man opened the envelope, unpacked the bundled hundreds, and silently counted them. “Needs a gusset,” he said as he finished.
“Pardon?” Milgrim paused, the fingers of his right hand covered with graphite dust.
“Gusset,” the young man said, reloading the blue envelope. “Inner thighs. They bind, if you’re rappelling.”
“Thanks,” Milgrim said, showing graphite-smudged fingers. “Would you mind turning them over for me? I don’t want to get this on them.”
>>>
“Delta to Atlanta,” Sleight said, handing Milgrim a ticket envelope. He was back in the very annoying suit he’d forgone for Myrtle Beach, the one with the freakishly short trousers.
“Business?”
“Coach,” said Sleight, his satisfaction entirely evident. He passed Milgrim a second envelope. “British Midland to Heathrow.”
“Coach?”
Sleight frowned. “Business.”
Milgrim smiled.
“He’ll want you in a meeting, straight off the plane.”
Milgrim nodded. “Bye,” he said. He tucked the red tube beneath his arm and headed for check-in, his bag in his other hand, walking directly beneath a very large South Carolina state flag, oddly Islamic with its palm tree and crescent moon.
3. SLUT’S WOOL
She woke to gray light around multiple layers of curtains and drapes. Lay staring up at a dim anamorphic view of the repeated insectoid cartouche, smaller and more distorted the closer to the ceiling. Shelves with objects, Wunderkammer stuff. Variously sized heads of marble, ivory, ormolu. The blank round bottom of the caged library.
Zero History Page 2