Zero History

by William Gibson

  “She was a singer. In a band. The Curfew.”

  Milgrim remembered a large silvery black-and-white photograph. A poster. A younger Hollis Henry with her knee up, her foot on something. A tweed miniskirt, that seemed mostly to have unraveled, drawn taut. Where had he seen that?

  “You’ll be working with her,” said Bigend. “A different project.”

  “Translating?”

  “I doubt it. This one is apparel-based as well.”

  “Back in Vancouver,” Milgrim began, then stopped.

  “Yes?”

  “I found a woman’s purse. There was quite a lot of money in it. A phone. A wallet with cards. Keys. I put the purse and the wallet and the cards and the keys in a mailbox. I kept the money and the phone. You started phoning. I didn’t know you. We started talking.”

  “Yes,” said Bigend.

  “That’s why I’m here today, isn’t it?

  “It is,” said Bigend.

  “Whose phone was that?”

  “Do you remember that there was something else in that purse? A black plastic unit, roughly twice the size of the phone?”

  Milgrim did now. He nodded.

  “That was a scrambler. It belonged to me. The person whose purse you found was an employee of mine. I wanted to know who had her phone. That was why I tried the number.”

  “Why did you keep phoning back?”

  “Because I became curious about you. And because you kept answering. Because we began to have a conversation that led eventually to our meeting, and, as you say, to your being here today.”

  “Did it cost more to have me here today than …” Milgrim thought about it. “More than the Toyota Hilux?” He felt as though his therapist were watching him.

  Bigend’s head tilted slightly. “I’m not certain, but it probably did. Why?”

  “That’s my question,” said Milgrim. “Why?”

  “Because I knew about the clinic in Basel. It’s highly controversial, very expensive. I was curious as to whether or not it would work, with you.”

  “Why?” asked Milgrim.

  “Because,” Bigend said, “I’m a curious person, and can afford to satisfy my curiosity. The doctors who examined you in Vancouver were not optimistic, to put it mildly. I like a challenge. And even in the condition I found you in, in Vancouver, you were an exceptional translator. Later”—and Bigend smiled—“it became evident that you have an interesting eye for a number of things.”

  “I’d be dead now, wouldn’t I?”

  “My understanding is that you probably would be, if you’d been withdrawn from the drug too quickly,” Bigend said.

  “Then what do I owe you?”

  Bigend reached for the shotgun, as though he were about to tap it with his finger, then caught himself. “Not your life,” he said. “That’s a by-product. Of my curiosity.”

  “All that money?”

  “The cost of my curiosity.”

  Milgrim’s eyes stung.

  “This is not a situation in which you’re required to thank me,” Bigend said. “I hope you understand that.”

  Milgrim swallowed. “Yes,” he said.

  “I do want you to work with Hollis on this other project,” Bigend said. “Then we’ll see.”

  “See what?”

  “What we see,” said Bigend, reaching across the shotgun for the gray folder. “Go back to the hotel. We’ll phone you.”

  Milgrim stood, lowering the Hackett bag, which had been covering the startled-looking digital portrait of himself he wore around his neck, on its lanyard of chartreuse nylon.

  “Why are you wearing that?”

  “It’s required,” said Milgrim. “I don’t work here.”

  “Remind me to fix that,” said Bigend, opening the gray folder, which contained a thick sheaf of what appeared to be clippings from Japanese magazines.

  Milgrim, who was already closing the door behind him, said nothing.

  13. MUSKRAT

  They ate muskrat,” Heidi said as they walked in gritty sunlight to Selfridges, for her appointment with Hollis’s stylist, “but only on Fridays.”

  “Who?”

  “Belgians. Got the church to say it was okay, because muskrats live in the water. Like fish.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s in the Larousse Gastronomique,” said Heidi. “Look it up. Or just look at your boy. You can see he’s had some.”

  Hollis’s iPhone rang as they were nearing Oxford Street. She looked at the screen. Blue Ant.

  “Hello?”

  “Hubertus.”

  “You eat muskrat, Fridays?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m defending you from a racial slur.”

  “Where are you?”

  “On my way to Selfridges with a friend. She’s getting her hair cut.” Getting Heidi the last-minute appointment had required epic stylist-suckery, but Hollis was a firm believer in the therapeutic power of the right haircut. And Heidi, for her part, now seemed neither hungover nor jet-lagged.

  “What are you doing while she does that?” asked Bigend.

  Hollis debated telling Bigend she was getting a cut herself, but it didn’t seem worth it. “What do you have in mind?”

  “The friend we had tapas with,” he said. “I want you two to talk.”

  The translator, the one who liked dogs. “Why?”

  “That will emerge. Talk while your friend has her hair cut. I’ll have Aldous run him over now. Where shall he meet you?”

  “The food hall, I suppose,” said Hollis. “Patisserie.”

  He hung up.

  “Shit,” said Hollis.

  “Muskrat,” said Heidi, pulling Hollis in beside her and taking on the remorseless afternoon pedestrian-flow of Oxford Street like a broad-shouldered icebreaker, homing on Selfridges. “You really are working for him.”

  “I am that,” said Hollis.

  >>>

  “Hollis?”

  She looked up. “Milgrim,” she said, remembering his name, which Bigend had been unwilling to use over the phone. He’d shaved, and looked rested. “I’m having a salad. Would you like something?”

  “Do they have croissants?”

  “I’m sure they do.” There was something she found deeply peculiar about his affect, even in this brief an exchange. He seemed genuinely mild, amiable, but also singularly alert, in some skewed way, as if there were something else looking out, around corners, swift and peripheral.

  “I think I’ll have one,” he said, quite seriously, and she watched him walk to the nearby counter. He wore darker trousers today, the same thin cotton sportscoat.

  He returned with his white tray. A croissant, a small rectangular slice of some compacted meat product in a pastry shell, and a cup of black coffee.

  “You’re a Russian translator, Mr. Milgrim?” she asked as he put down the tray and took a seat.

  “Just Milgrim,” he said. “I’m not Russian.”

  “But a translator of Russian?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Do you do that for Hubertus? For Blue Ant?”

  “I’m not a Blue Ant employee. I suppose I’m freelance. I’ve done some translation for Hubertus. Mostly literary.” He looked hungrily at his tray.

  “Please,” she said, picking up her salad fork. “Go ahead. We can talk afterward.”

  “I missed lunch,” he said. “I have to eat, with my medication.”

  “Hubertus mentioned you were recovering from something.”

  “Drugs,” he said. “I’m an addict. Recovering.” And the peripheral thing was right there, peering around some inner angle, taking her measure.

  “Which ones?”

  “Prescription tranquillizers. That sounds respectable, doesn’t it?”

  “I suppose it does,” she said, “although I don’t imagine it makes it any easier.”

  “It doesn’t,” he said, “but I hadn’t had a prescription for anything for quite a long time. I was a street a
ddict.” He cut a neat slice from one end of his cold meat tart.

  “I had a friend who was a heroin addict,” she said. “He died.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He began to eat.

  “It was years ago.” She picked at her salad.

  “What do you do for Hubertus?” he asked

  “I’m freelance as well,” she said. “But I’m not sure what I do. Not yet.”

  “He’s like that,” he said. Something caught his attention, across the hall. “Foliage green, those pants.”

  “Whose?”

  “He’s gone. Do you know coyote brown?”

  “Who?”

  “It was the fashionable shade in U.S. military equipment. Foliage green is newer, trending. Alpha green was up briefly, but foliage green is on top now.”

  “U.S. military equipment comes in fashion shades?”

  “It certainly does,” said Milgrim. “Hubertus doesn’t talk with you about that?”

  “No.”

  He was still trying to find the pants he’d glimpsed, in the distance. “It’s not a shade you’ll see much of this year, commercially. Next year, probably. I don’t even know the Pantone number.” He brought his attention back to his meat tart. Quickly finished it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not very good with new people. At first.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. You get right down to things, it seems to me.”

  “That’s what he says,” said Milgrim, blinking, and she guessed he meant Bigend. “I saw your picture,” he said. “A poster of you. I think on St. Mark’s Place. A used record store.”

  “That’s a very old picture.”

  Milgrim nodded, tore his croissant in half, began to butter it.

  “Does he talk to you about denim?”

  Milgrim looked up, mouth full of croissant, shook his head.

  “Gabriel Hounds?”

  Milgrim swallowed. “Who?”

  “It’s a very secretive jeans line. That seems to be what I do, for Hubertus.”

  “But what do you do?”

  “I investigate it. I try to find out where it comes from. Who makes it. Why people like it.”

  “Why do people like it?”

  “Possibly because it’s almost impossible to find.”

  “Is that it?” asked Milgrim, looking at her jacket.

  “Yes.”

  “Well made. But it’s not military.”

  “Not that I know of. Why is he interested in fashion, now?”

  “He isn’t. In any ordinary sense. That I know of.” And the obliquely-looking-out thing was there again, around that interior corner, and she felt its intelligence. “Do you know there’s a trade show specifically for manufacturers who hope to produce equipment for the Marine Corps?”

  “I didn’t. Have you been?”

  “No,” said Milgrim, “I missed it. It’s in South Carolina. I was just there. In South Carolina.”

  “What is it, exactly, that you do, for Hubertus, around clothing? Are you a designer? A marketer?”

  “No,” said Milgrim. “I notice things. I’m good with detail. I didn’t know that. It was something he pointed out to me, in Vancouver.”

  “Did you stay with him? In that penthouse?”

  Milgrim nodded.

  “In the room with the maglev bed?”

  “No,” Milgrim said, “I had a small room. I needed … focus.” He finished the last of his croissant, took a sip of coffee. “I was, I think the word is ‘institutionalized’? I wasn’t comfortable with too much space. Too many options. Then he sent me to Basel.”

  “Switzerland?”

  “To begin my recovery. If you don’t mind me asking, why are you working for him now?”

  “I ask myself that,” she said. “It’s not the first time, and after the first time, I certainly didn’t want there to be a second time. But it proved weirdly lucrative, that first time, in a very roundabout way, a way that had nothing to do with what I was supposedly doing for him. Then I lost a lot of that money in the crash, hadn’t found anything else I wanted to do, and suddenly he was insisting I do this. I’m not entirely comfortable with it.”

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “I can tell,” said Milgrim.

  “Why are you working for him?”

  “I need a job,” said Milgrim. “And because … he paid for the clinic, in Basel. My recovery.”

  “He sent you to detox?”

  “It was very expensive,” he said. “More than an armored truck. Cartel grade.” He straightened his knife and fork on the white plate, amid crumbs. “It’s confusing,” he said. “Now he wants me to work with you.” He looked up from the plate, both elements of his oddly fragmented self seeming for the first time to see her simultaneously. “Why don’t you sing?”

  “Because I don’t sing,” she said.

  “But you were famous. You must have been. There was a poster.”

  “That’s not really what it’s about,” she said.

  “It just seems it might be easier. For you, I mean.”

  “It wouldn’t,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  14. YELLOW HELMET

  In Shaftsbury Avenue, on the way back to Milgrim’s hotel, through light rain, a dispatch rider on a dirty gray motorcycle caught up with the Hilux at a pedestrian crossing. Aldous powered down the window on the passenger side, squeegeeing raindrops from the bulletproof glass, as the helmeted rider took an envelope from his jacket and passed it to Milgrim, his glove like a Kevlar-armored robot hand. The window slid back up as the bike pulled away between the lanes of traffic ahead of them, the rider’s yellow helmet dwindling steadily. The back of it was marred, as if mauled by the swipe of some great paw, revealing a white substrate.

  He looked down at the envelope. MILGRIM, centered, in a cartoonist’s loose caps, pm lower right. Pamela. It felt empty, or almost so, as he opened it. A limp transparent ring-binder sleeve, containing the inkjet image of his cop from Caffè Nero. Though not in Caffè Nero, here. Behind her, nicely in focus, Gay Dolphin Gift Cove’s dog-headed angels. And there the sweatshirt had been red, though he could make out the same white moon-and-palm logo. A different colorway. Had Sleight taken this? It appeared to be a candid shot. He imagined her sleeping, back in the coach compartment of his British Midlands flight.

  The cab filled with the opening chords of Toots and the Maytals’ “Draw Your Brakes.” “Aldous,” said Aldous, to his iPhone. “Certainly.” He passed it to Milgrim.

  “You see,” said Bigend.

  “That’s her,” said Milgrim. “When I was there?”

  Remembering Bigend’s advice about telephones, he didn’t ask where the image had been found, or how. “More or less,” said Bigend, and hung up, Milgrim returning the iPhone to Aldous’s large, waiting, beautifully manicured hand.

  15. THE DROP

  Fitzroy,” Clammy said, on her iPhone. She was staring up at the round bottom of Number Four’s birdcage, having left a freshly coiffed Heidi in Selfridges, preparing to test for residual viability in several of fuckstick’s credit cards.

  “Fitzroy?”

  “This neighborhood,” Clammy said, “Melbourne. ’Round Brunswick Street. Rose Street, off Brunswick. Rose Street’s got this artists’ market. Mere took me. Meredith. Ol’ George knew her.”

  That would be “Olduvai” George, the Bollards’ brilliant, virtually forehead-free keyboardist, whom Inchmale said had more brains in his little finger than the rest of them put together. An even No. 2 crop that looked like a very tight fur hat. Like one of Clammy’s black cashmere beanies, except he couldn’t take it off. Massive jaw and cheekbones, permanent glossy black stubble, huge deep-set intelligent eyes.

  “First thing I saw was her Hounds, girls’ Hounds,” Clammy continued.

  “Looked good?”

  “Hit it in a minute.”

  Meaning, she thought, that he hadn’t, but would’ve. In theory at least. “And you had Hounds in common?”


  “Wanted to,” Clammy said, “worst way. I’d seen that pillock Burton in a pair. Fat ass.” The transition from “arse” not yet quite bridged. Burton, whose fat ass she thought she’d heard cited before, did something in a band Clammy detested. The intensity of loathing one professional musician could manifest for another had been one of her least favorite things about the business. She’d bypassed it, she supposed, by generally avoiding the company of professional musicians. They weren’t all like that, by any means, she knew, but better safe than sorry.

  “So you admired her jeans?”

  “Made it known,” Clammy said, “that I knew what they were.”

  “And?”

  “She asked me if I’d like a pair. Told me she knew of a drop.”

  “Drop?”

  “A shipment.”

  “Where from?”

  “Didn’t want to ask,” he said, gravely. “Wanted me Hounds. Next day, she said. Said she’d take me.”

  It was growing dark outside, taking Number Four with it. The bottom of the birdcage hung above her, the shadow of a mothership, discoidal, like solidified dusk. Waiting to radiate some energy, carve her with crop circles perhaps. She became momentarily aware of a susurrus, the sea of London traffic. The fingers of her free hand on the scrimshawed walrus-ivory of the Piblokto Madness bed. “And?”

  “The others, they figured we were hooking up. ’Cept George. He knew her.”

  “Where from?”

  “Cordwainers. London College of Fashion. She’d studied shoe design. Had two seasons of her own line. Went back to Melbourne after that, making belts and purses. Serious girl, George said.”

  “He was at Cordwainers?”

  “Fucking Oxford, George. Seeing another Cordwainers girl, friend of hers.”

  Hollis realized that she was framing all of this, visualizing it, in a Melbourne that had almost nothing to do with any actual city. They’d played Melbourne and Sydney twice each, touring, and each time she’d been so jet-lagged, and so embroiled with band politics, that she’d scarcely registered either place. Her Melbourne was a collage, a mash-up, like a Canadianized Los Angeles, Anglo-Colonial Victorian amid a terraformed sprawl of suburbs. All of the larger trees in Los Angeles, Inchmale had told her, were Australian. She supposed the ones in Melbourne were as well. The city in which she was imagining Clammy now wasn’t real. A stand-in, something patched together from what little she had available. She felt a sudden, intense urge to go there. Not to whatever the real Melbourne might be, but to this sunny and approximate sham. “And she got them for you?” she asked Clammy.