Zero History

by William Gibson

  They rode in silence for a few minutes. Then he undid the top button of his shirt and drew out the Faraday pouch.

  “What’s that?”

  “Métro station,” he said, for Sleight, then touched his index finger to his lips.

  She nodded.

  He opened the pouch, inserted the Neo, then closed it. “It blocks radio signals. Like when you’re in an elevator. If he was listening, he can’t hear us now. And he just lost track of where we are.”

  “Why do you have it?”

  “He gave it to me,” he said. “It’s for my passport. He’s worried someone will read the microchip.”

  “Do they do that?”

  “People like Sleight do.”

  “How does it work?”

  “It has metallic fibers. When I tested it, before, he lost me. Thought I was in an elevator.”

  “But if it’s that easy,” she said, “why did he give it to you?”

  “He insisted on it,” said Milgrim. “I think he really does worry about the chip-reading thing. It’s something he’s done himself.”

  “But he gave you your means of avoiding surveillance, right there.”

  “When I put it in the pouch, before, that was the first time I did something that I knew he wouldn’t want me to do. I wasn’t well, when I met him. He worked for Bigend and I did what I was told.”

  She looked at him. Then nodded. “I understand.”

  “But Sleight,” he said, “really liked it, having someone who’d do exactly what he said.”

  “He would, yes.”

  “I don’t think he imagined I’d ever get to the point where I’d use the pouch on the Neo. He would’ve enjoyed being able to count on that.”

  “What will you do at Galeries Lafayette?”

  “Wait till you’re gone, then take it out of the pouch. Then see who turns up.”

  “But what if someone’s following us now, the old-fashioned way?”

  “Have the driver take you to a Métro station. Do you know the Métro?”

  “More or less.”

  “If you’re clever, you can probably lose anyone who might try to follow you.”

  “We’re here.”

  He saw that they were in Boulevard Haussmann, the driver signaling to pull over.

  “Take care of yourself,” she said. “If that was him I saw in the basement, I didn’t like the look of him.”

  “I didn’t get the feeling that he was that good, at the Salon,” he said, checking that the strap of his bag was securely over his shoulder.

  “Good?”

  “Scary.”

  He opened the door before the cab had fully come to a halt. The driver said something in irritated French. “Sorry,” he said as they stopped, and slipped out, closing the door behind him.

  From the curb he looked back, saw Hollis smiling, telling the driver something. The cab pulled back into traffic.

  He quickly entered Galeries Lafayette and walked on, until he was beneath the center of the soaring mercantile mosque-dome of stained glass. He stood there, looking up, briefly experiencing the reflexive country-mouse awe the architect had intended to induce. A cross between Grand Central and the atrium of the Brown Palace, Denver, structures aimed heroically into futures that had never really happened. Wide balconies ringed every level, rising toward the dome. Beyond them he could see the tops of racks of clothing, rather than any audience, but if there had been an audience, he, Milgrim, would have been standing in exactly the spot where the fat lady would ultimately sing.

  He drew the Faraday pouch out, on its cord, and removed the Neo, exposing it to whatever intricate soup of signals existed here. Within its childish-looking shroud of Kleenex, it began to ring.

  Sleight had arranged things so that it was impossible to turn the ring off, but Milgrim thumbed the volume down, all the way, and put it into his side jacket pocket. It vibrated a few times, then quit. He took it out again, opened the Kleenex to check the time, careful not to touch it, then put it back.

  He had whatever remained of his three hundred pounds, unchanged, the euros Hollis had given, plus another thin fold of euros remaining from his Basel pocket money. He decided to invest in his own future, one much more immediate than the one the founders of Galeries Lafayette had imagined.

  He found his way into the men’s store, a separate building next door, and selected a pair of black French briefs, then a pair of black cotton-blend crew socks, paying for them with almost all of his Basel money. The euro bills reminded him, obscurely, of Disneyland’s original Tomorrowland, where his mother had taken him as a child.

  The Neo began to vibrate again, in his pocket. He let it, trying to imagine the look on Sleight’s face. But Sleight knew where he was, and quite possibly had heard the cashier’s side of the socks-and-underwear transaction, which Milgrim for his part had conducted nonverbally, with soft apologetic grunts. The Kleenex, he hoped, was muffling things a bit, though he supposed it didn’t really matter.

  He went back into the main store and rode escalators, into realms of lingerie, sportswear, little black dresses. If he were sure how much time he had, he thought, he’d look for the furniture department. The furniture departments of large department stores were oases of calm, usually. He’d often found them soothing. They were also very good places in which to determine whether or not you were being followed. But he really didn’t think that he was being followed, that way.

  He walked through a grove of Ralph Lauren, then a thinner one of Hilfiger, to a balustrade overlooking the central atrium. Looking down, he saw Foley crossing from the direction of Boulevard Haussmann. Take off the cap, he thought. A professional would have done that, at least, and removed the black jacket as well.

  When Foley reached almost the exact spot where Milgrim himself had paused to look up, he paused as well, just as Milgrim had, taking in the dome. Milgrim stepped back, knowing Foley would scan the balustrades next, which indeed he did.

  You know I’m here, Milgrim thought, but you don’t know exactly where. He saw Foley speak. To Sleight, he imagined, via a headset.

  A moment later, Milgrim was alone in an elevator, pressing the button for the top floor, his improv module kicking in. Open to opportunity.

  The elevator stopped at the next floor. The door slid open, and was quickly held by a thick arm in charcoal gray, the arm of a large man.

  “It’s a shame you no longer live here in the city,” said a tall blonde, in Russian, to another young woman beside her, equally tall, equally blond. The second blonde rolled a massive pram or stroller into the elevator, some sort of luxury baby-transporter on three bulbous wheels, a thing made apparently of carbon-fiber and sharkskin, everything a gray like the bodyguard’s suit.

  “It’s shit in the suburbs,” replied the pram-driver, in Russian, setting the thing’s hand brake with a flick of her finger. “A villa. Two hours. Dogs. Guards. Shit.”

  The bodyguard stepped in, eyeing Milgrim darkly. Milgrim backed up, as far as possible, a handrail digging painfully into his spine, and looked down at the floor. The door closed and the elevator began to rise. Milgrim stole a look at the two women, instantly regretting it for the attention it cost him from their looming guardian. He looked back down. The mega-stroller looked like something from the cabin of a very expensive airplane, perhaps the drinks trolley. Whatever infant it held was entirely concealed by a sharkskin cowl or fairing, probably bulletproof. “Surely he can’t have lost that much,” said the first blonde.

  “It was all heavily leveraged,” said the pram-driver.

  “What does that mean?”

  “That we have no Paris apartment, and shop in Galeries Lafayette,” said the pram-driver, bitterly.

  Milgrim, who hadn’t heard Russian since leaving Basel, felt a peculiar enchantment, in spite of the sullen presence of their guard, and the handrail in his back. The elevator stopped, the door opened, and a tall Parisian teenager stepped in. As the door closed, Milgrim noted the guard’s focus on the girl, no
less sullen but absolute. Slender, brunette, she looked from Milgrim to the two Russian women with a sort of benign disdain, ignoring the guard.

  When the elevator stopped again, and the door opened, Milgrim took the Neo from his jacket pocket and tucked it into a sharkskin pocket on the front of the super-pram, feeling it fall into the company of what he guessed were toys, tins of balm or perhaps caviar, or whatever else one needed for an infant oligarch. Doing it, as a pickpocket had once advised him, as if it were not only the expected but the only thing to do. He looked up at the guard, whose eyes were still locked on the brunette. Who turned, then, gazelle-like and justifiably bored, and stepped out, past the guard, as the pram-driver flicked the brake switch off and dragged the thing back out of the elevator like a parts cart in a tank factory.

  The guard noticed Milgrim again, but stepped quickly out of the elevator, unwilling to lose sight of his charges.

  Milgrim remained where he was as the door closed and the elevator rose again.

  “Dogs,” he said, to Sleight, who could no longer hear him. “Guards.”

  27. JAPANESE BASEBALL

  How’s Paris?” The image that came up for Heidi’s call, on the iPhone, was a decade old, black-and-white, gritty. Jimmy’s white Fender bass, out of focus in the foreground.

  “I don’t know,” Hollis said. She was in Sèvres-Babylone, walking between platforms, her bag’s trick wheel ticking steadily, like a personal metronome. She had decided to give Milgrim’s worries the benefit of the doubt, taking a random course through the Métro, short hops, line changes, abrupt reversals. If anyone was following her, she hadn’t noticed them. But it was crowded now, tiring, and she’d just decided to head for Odéon, and the hotel, when Heidi called. “I think I’ve found something, but someone may have found me.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Milgrim thought he saw someone, here, who he’d seen in London. At Selfridges, when you were getting your hair cut.”

  “You said he was bugfuck.”

  “I said he seemed unfocused. Anyway, he seems more focused now. Though maybe bugfuck too.” At least her bag wasn’t too heavy, minus the copy of her book that she’d given Milgrim. And her Air, she remembered: He still had that.

  “Does Bigend have people there for you?”

  “I didn’t want that. I didn’t tell them where I was staying.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “Latin Quarter.” She hesitated. “A hotel where I stayed with Garreth.”

  Heidi pounced. “Really. And was that Garreth’s choice, then, or yours?”

  “His.” As she reached her platform, and the waiting crowd.

  “And which hand are you carrying this torch in?”

  “I’m not.”

  “My hairy ass you’re not.”

  “You don’t. Have one.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Heidi said. “Marriage.”

  “What about it?”

  “Does things to you.”

  “And how’s fuckstick?

  “Out on bond now. Not that much media. Ponzi’s under a half a billion total. Current climate, they’re embarrassed to offer the story to the public. Petty sums. Like foreign serial killers.”

  “What about them?” The train was pulling in.

  “America’s the capital of serial murder. Foreign serial murder’s like Japanese baseball.”

  “How are you, Heidi?”

  “Found a gym. Hacky.”

  “Hackney.”

  The doors opened and the crowd moved forward, taking Hollis with it.

  “Thought it was where they invented the sack.” Disappointed. “Kind of like Silverlake. Fixed-up. Creatives. But the gym’s old-school. MMA.”

  The doors closed behind her, the embrace of the crowd, mildly personal smells, the roll-aboard against her leg. “What’s that?”

  “Mixed martial arts,” said Heidi, as if pleased with a dessert menu.

  “Don’t,” advised Hollis. “Remember the boxers.” The train began to move. “Gotta go.”

  “Fine,” said Heidi, and was gone.

  Six minutes on Line 10 and she was on another platform, Odéon, wheel ticking. Then telescoping the bag’s handle to carry it up the stairs, into slanting sunlight and the sound and smell of the traffic on St. Germain, all of this entirely too familiar, as though she’d never left, and now the fear surfacing, acknowledgement that Heidi was right, that she’d tricked herself into revisiting the scene of a perfect crime. Dreamlike reactivation of passion. The smell of his neck. His library of scars, hieroglyphic, waiting to be traced.

  “Oh, please,” she said. Snapping out the bag’s handle, trundling it across wheel-eating cobbles, toward the hotel. Past the candyseller’s wagon. Then the window offering fancy dress. Satin capes, plague-doctor masks with penile noses. The smart little drugstore at the angle of two streets, offering hydraulic breast-massage devices and Swiss skin serums packaged like the latest in vaccines.

  Into the hotel, where the man at the desk recognized but didn’t greet her. Discretion rather than a lack of friendliness. She gave her name, signed in, confirmed that Milgrim’s room was on her card, received her key on a heavy brass medallion cast with the head of a lion. Then into the elevator, smaller even than the one at Cabinet but more modern, like a pale bronze telephone booth. The feeling of being in a telephone booth almost forgotten now. How things went away.

  In the third-floor hallway, massive crooked timbers stood exposed. A maid’s cart with towels and miniature soaps. Unlocking the door to her room.

  Which to her considerable relief was neither of the two she’d stayed in with Garreth, though the view was virtually identical. A room the size of the bathroom at Cabinet, smaller perhaps. All dark reds and black and Chinese gold; some weird chinoiserie that Cabinet’s decorators would have supercharged with busts of Mao and heroic proletarian posters.

  It seemed odd, to not be in Cabinet, and that struck her as a bad sign.

  I should find a flat, she said to herself, realizing she had no idea what country she should find it in, let alone which city. Putting her bag on the bed. Scarcely room to walk, here, except for a narrow circuit around the bed. Reflexively ducking the determinedly nondigital television slung in its white-painted bracket from the ceiling. Garreth had cut his head on one.

  She sighed.

  Looking across at the buildings opposite, remembering.

  Don’t. She turned back to the bed and her bag, unzipping it. She’d packed as lightly as possible. Toiletries, makeup, a dress, hose, dressier shoes, underwear. Taking out the dress, to hang it up, she discovered the Blue Ant figurine, which she was certain she hadn’t packed, grinning perkily up at her. She remembered missing it, on the counter, beside the sink, in Cabinet.

  “Hello,” she said, the tension in her voice startling her, as she picked it up.

  Its grin becoming the Mona Lisa’s smile, as she’d stood with Garreth, hand in his.

  Looking up at him, she’d seen that he wasn’t looking at the Mona Lisa at all, but rather at its plexi-shield, its mountings, and whatever of the Louvre’s invisible security devices were somehow evident to him.

  “You’re imagining stealing it, aren’t you?”

  “Only academically. That laminated ledge, just beneath it? That’s interesting. You’d want to know exactly what’s inside. Quite thick, isn’t it? Good foot thick. Something’s in there. A surprise.”

  “You’re terrible.”

  “Absolutely,” he’d said, releasing her hand, caressing the back of her neck. “I am.”

  She put the figurine on the built-in bedside table, much smaller than the Mona Lisa’s defensive ledge, and forced herself to unpack the rest of her things.

  28. WHITE PEAR TEA

  The cost of wifi was white pear tea.

  Milgrim looked at the two-cup glass tea press on the round white table, beyond the matte aluminum rectangle of Hollis’s laptop. He wasn’t sure why he’d chosen white pear. Probably because he wasn’t ver
y fond of tea, and because almost everything else here was white. He decided to let it steep awhile longer.

  He was alone, in this narrow white shop, with a great deal of tea and a girl in a nicely fitting, crisply starched cotton dress, faintly pinstriped in gray, not unlike a tennis dress. He hadn’t thought of Parisians as tea drinkers, but if this place was any indication, they preferred it in ultrafragile glass pots. Walls lined with shallow white shelves, modernist apothecary jars filled with dried vegetable matter, plus a glittering, halogen-spotted assortment of these pots and presses. Equally minimalist cozies, in thick gray felt. A few green plants. Three small tables, each with two chairs.

  From outside, the occasional whine and sputter of passing scooters. The street was almost too narrow for cars. Somewhere in the Latin Quarter, if the cabdriver had understood him.

  Now the girl began to give the apothecary jars the once-over with a feather duster. Like performance art, or some highly conceptual species of pornography. The sort of thing that turned out to mainly be about the pinstripes. Or the tea.

  He opened the pencil-thin laptop and turned it on.

  Hollis’s desktop was a digital representation of interstellar space. Mauve galactic clouds. Was she interested in astronomy, he wondered, or was this something from Apple? He imagined the laptop displaying an image of itself instead, and of the tea press, on the white laminate. And in that imagined screen, another, identical image. Tunneling down, Escher-style, to a few pixels. He thought of the art in Hollis’s book, and of the Neo, which he now assumed was on its way to some forbiddingly upscale suburb, or there already, his own small effort in GPS art.

  He noted that he felt remarkably calm about that, about what he’d done. The main thing, it seemed, was that he’d done it. It was done. But noting this caused him to start to remember Sleight.

  After his cab ride from Galeries Lafayette, to a randomly chosen intersection near here, he’d felt relatively certain that he was off Sleight’s map. Now he considered Hollis’s laptop, wondering if Sleight might not have been at that as well. Though Hollis said she was new in Bigend’s employ, this time at least.