Zero History

by William Gibson

  “But why didn’t you tell me this at the time?” asked Bigend.

  “Remove trousers, please,” said Jun, “and shirt.”

  “I was too anxious,” said Milgrim. “I have an anxiety disorder.” He sat down on the horrible stool and began to remove his shoes. Taking them off, he stood and began removing his pants, grateful to have something to do. “I didn’t make her follow me. You sent me to Myrtle Beach.”

  “You may have an anxiety disorder,” Bigend said, “but you’re definitely changing.”

  “Remove shirt, please,” said Jun.

  Milgrim did. He stood there in black socks and underpants from Galeries Lafayette, with a peculiar awareness of something just having shifted, though he wasn’t clear what. Jun had been busy unbuttoning and unfolding a tattersall shirt, which he now helped Milgrim into. It had a spread collar, Milgrim saw, and as he was buttoning the front he discovered that the barrel cuffs extended nearly to his elbows, with a great many pearl buttons.

  “Have you been to Florence?” asked Bigend as Milgrim was fastening those very peculiar cuffs.

  “Florence?” Jun had just handed him a pair of whipcord trousers.

  “Tuscany,” said Bigend, “is lovely. Better this time of year. The rain. More subtle light.”

  “You’re sending me to Italy?”

  “Along with Hollis. I want you both out of here. Someone is angry with you. I’ll generate deep Blue Ant traffic, to the effect that you’re both in Los Angeles. Perhaps that will convince Oliver.”

  Milgrim heard that scream, outside of Bank Station, took a breath, but found that no words came. He zipped up his new pants. Which were oddly narrow in the ankles, and cuffed.

  “Sit, please,” said Jun, who was loosening the laces of the brown shoes. They were wing-tip brogues, but with a narrower toe than was traditional, and thick, cleated-looking soles. Milgrim sat. Jun knelt, helped Milgrim on with the shoes, then tightened the laces and tied them. Milgrim stood, shifting his weight. They fit, he decided, but were stiff, heavy. Jun handed him a narrow, heavy leather belt of a similar shade, with a polished brass buckle. He put it on. “Tie,” said Jun, offering one in paisley silk.

  “I don’t wear them, thanks,” said Milgrim.

  Jun put the tie down on the desk, helped Milgrim into the jacket, then picked up the tie again, folded it, and tucked it into the jacket’s inside breast pocket. He smiled, patted Milgrim on the shoulder, and left.

  “That’s better,” said Bigend. “For Florence. Bella figura.”

  “Am I going back to Camden?”

  “No,” said Bigend. “That was why I had you give Fiona your key. She’s gone ’round to pick up your things, check you out.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “You aren’t,” said Bigend. “You’re sleeping here.”

  “Here?”

  “A foam mattress and a sleeping bag. We’re just around the corner from Blue Ant, but they don’t know.”

  “Know what?”

  “That I’m Tanky.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Tanky and Tojo. Name of the shop. I’m Tanky, Jun’s Tojo. He’s amazing, really.”

  “He is?”

  “You look,” said Bigend, “like a foxhunting spiv. His grasp of contradiction is brilliantly subversive.”

  “Is there wifi?”

  “No,” said Bigend, “there isn’t.”

  “What she most particularly wanted to convey to you,” Milgrim said, “Winnie Tung Whitaker, is that Gracie believes you’re his competitor. Which means, to him, that you’re his enemy.”

  “I’m not his enemy,” said Bigend.

  “You had me steal the design of his pants.”

  “ ‘Business intelligence.’ If you hadn’t thrown Foley under some random Russians, this would all be much easier. And it wouldn’t be distracting me from more important things. I am, however, glad that we had this opportunity to discuss the matter in greater detail, privately.”

  “Bent cops are one thing,” said Milgrim. “A bent former major in the Special Forces, who does illegal arms deals? I think that might be something else.”

  “A businessman. I’m one myself.”

  “She said he believes he can do anything,” said Milgrim. “She said they sent him to schools.”

  “He wouldn’t be my first arms dealer, you know,” said Bigend, getting up. He straightened his suit, which Milgrim noted was in need of a pressing. “Meanwhile, you and Hollis can do the museums, enjoy the food. It’s extraordinary, really.”

  “The food?”

  “What they managed to do with you in Basel. I’m really very impressed. I see now that it’s all taken a while to gel.”

  “That reminds me,” said Milgrim.

  “Of what?”

  “I’m starving.”

  “Sandwiches,” said Bigend, indicating a brown paper bag on the desk. “Chicken and bacon. Seedy bread. I’ll be in touch tomorrow, when the travel’s been arranged. You’ll be locked in here. The alarm system will be activated. Please don’t try to leave. Jun will be in at ten thirty or so. Good night.”

  When Bigend had gone, Milgrim ate the two sandwiches, carefully wiped his fingers, then removed his new shoes, examined the Tanky & Tojo logo stamped into the orange leather insoles, smelled them, and put them on the white desk. The gray vinyl floor was cold through his socks. The door to the front of the shop, which Bigend had closed behind him, looked cheap, hollow-core. He’d once watched a dealer called Fish chisel the thin wooden skin from one side of a door like that. It had been filled with plastic bags of counterfeit Mexican Valium. Now he pressed his ear against this one, held his breath. Nothing.

  Was the urine-sample man still sitting out there with his umbrella? He doubted it, but he wanted to be sure. He found the light switch, pressed it. Stood for a moment in darkness, then opened the door.

  The shop was lit, but dimly, by wonky columnar lanterns of white paper, floor lamps. The display window, from here, looked like one of those big Cibachromes in an art gallery: photograph of a blank brick wall across the street, faint ghost of graffiti. Suddenly someone passed, in a black hoodie. Milgrim swallowed. Closed the door. Turned the lights back on.

  He went to the rear, no longer bothering to be quiet, opened a similar but smaller door, finding a clean little room with a very new toilet and corner sink. No other doors. No rear entrance. The neighborhood, like much of London, he guessed, not having alleys in the American sense.

  He found a virginal white slab of foam, five inches thick, double-wide, rolled into a thick upright cylinder. It was secured with three bands of transparent packing tape, the Blue Ant logo repeated along them at regular intervals. Beside it was a fat, surprisingly small sausage of what appeared to be a darkly iridescent silk, and a plastic liter bottle of still spring water, from Scotland.

  The desk’s top drawer contained its Ikea assembly instructions and a pair of scissors with colorless transparent handles. The other two drawers were empty. He used the scissors to cut the tape, releasing the foam, which remained slightly bent, in the direction in which it had been rolled. He put the concave side down, on the cold vinyl, and picked up the silken sausage. mont-bell was embroidered on one side. He fumbled with the plastic lock on the draw cord, loosened it, and worked the densely compacted contents out. The sleeping bag, when he unfurled it, was very light, very thin, stretchy, and of that same iridescence, purplish-black. He unzipped it and spread it on the bed. He picked up the bottle of water and carried it to the desk, where he retrieved his bag from the floor, putting it beside the bottle. Taking Bigend’s chair, he sat down, opened the bag, and pulled out his crumpled cotton jacket. He looked down at the tweed lapels of his new one, surprised to see them. The shirt cuffs were too strange, but then, you couldn’t see them under a jacket. Laying his old jacket aside, he brought out the Mac Air, its power cord and U.K. adaptor plug, and Hollis’s red dongle.

  British electricity was some brutal other breed, their plugs
three-pronged, massive, wall sockets often equipped with their own little switches, a particularly ominous belt-and-suspenders touch. “Faggot above a load,” he said, plugging the power unit into the socket nearest the desk and flipping the socket switch.

  He Googled “Tanky & Tojo,” shortly discovering that Jun, Junya Marukawa, had his own shop in Tokyo, that Tanky & Tojo were getting lots of web coverage, and that a SoHo branch would be opening next year on Lafayette. There was no mention of Hubertus Bigend at all. Jun’s style, evidently, was one Japanese take on something at least one writer called “transgressive trad.”

  Then he went to Twitter, logged in, saw that there was nothing new from Winnie, and started composing his message to her in his head while he got rid of the three strange girls with numbers instead of surnames, the ones who wanted to follow him.

  53. CRICKET

  The phone’s cricket-noise woke her, though instantly she was uncertain whether she’d actually been asleep. She’d lain curled all night beside him, for the most part awake, out of some need to process the fact that he was there. He’d smelled of hospitals. Something he’d used to dress the wounds. He hadn’t let her see that, describing his injured leg as “a work in progress.”

  He’d sat in the armchair to change the dressings, on a black garbage bag taken from the backpack slung behind the scooter-chair, undoing the safety pins down one inside leg of his trousers. She’d had to wait in the bathroom, leaning against the towel-warming pipes that caged the shower, listening to him whistling, deliberately tunelessly, to tease her. “There,” he’d called, finally. “I’m decent now.”

  She’d emerged to find him safety-pinning the hem of his trouser leg. The black bag he’d spread across the chair was on the carpet now, something knotted into one of its corners. “Does it hurt, to do that?” she’d asked

  “Not really,” he’d said. “The rest of it, the reconstruction, physiotherapy, that’s less fun. Do you know I’ve a rattan thighbone?” He grinned at her, evilly, sitting more upright.

  “What’s that?”

  “Rattan. The stuff they weave baskets and furniture out of. They’ve found a way to turn it into a perfect analog of human bone.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “They’re just starting to test it on humans. On me, in fact. Works a charm, on sheep.”

  “They can’t. Turn that into bone.”

  “They put it in ovens. With calcium, other things. Under pressure. For a long time. Turns to bone, near enough.”

  “No way.”

  “If I’d thought of it, I’d have had them make you a basket. Brilliant thing about it, you can build exactly the bone you need, out of rattan. Work it as rattan. Then ossify it. Perfect replacement. Actually a bit stronger than the original. Microscopic structure allows the blood vessels to grow through it.”

  “Don’t mess with me.”

  “Tell me more about what this Milgrim said, to Mr. Big End,” he’d said. He always pronounced it that way, as though it were two words.

  She found the receiver, feeling more absurdly massive in the dark than ever, lifted it. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” said Bigend. “Be in the sitting room.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Eight-fifteen.”

  “I’m asleep. Was.”

  “I need to see you.”

  “Where’s Milgrim? And Heidi—”

  “We’ll be discussing him shortly. Heidi’s no part of it.” He hung up.

  She squinted at the glow around the edges of the curtains. Returned the receiver as quietly as she could to its cradle. Garreth’s breathing continued, unchanged.

  She sat up, carefully. Made out the dark horizontals of his legs. He’d insisted on sleeping in his trousers and stocking feet. On his bare chest, she now knew, were new scars, healed but still livid, next to older ones she could have sketched from memory. She stood, padded into the bathroom, closed the door behind her, and turned on the light.

  54. AIR GLOW

  Ferguson,” said Winnie Tung Whitaker, “the one with the mullet. He was on Gracie’s Heathrow flight, from Geneva.”

  In the glow of the Air’s screen and backlit keyboard, Milgrim was huddled at the desk, cowled in the MontBell sleeping bag. He’d tried sleeping, but had kept getting up to check Twitter. On the sixth or seventh try, her response had been this number in the United States. On checking her card, he’d seen that it was her cell number. Some research in the paper telephone directory under the swatch books had provided the necessary dialing prefixes. “The one with the pants?” he asked, hoping he was wrong.

  “Mike Ferguson. See? I told you.”

  “When are you going back?”

  “Actually, this story of yours might call for leave en route.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The one scam still permitted federal employees, we like to call it. I’m TDY now. Temporary duty, business travel. If I can get permission, I can take two days’ vacation. Sixteen hours of annual leave. When I saw your tweet, I e-mailed my boss. It’ll be on my own nickel, though.” She didn’t sound happy about that. “On the other hand, this is getting really interesting. Not that my boss would find it interesting enough to keep me here on per diem. That trick you played in Paris, though, I wouldn’t have expected that from you. What’s up?”

  “I don’t know.” It was true.

  “That was the Parsons grad, the designer, the wannabe SpecOps boy. And that dumbfuck attempt on your boss’s truck would be him too.”

  “It was,” said Milgrim. “I saw him.”

  “I mean it wasn’t Gracie or Ferguson. They were still going through immigration at Heathrow. Once they got through, though, they’d be apprised of what he’d done, and what had happened. The interesting thing, then, becomes how Gracie might react to that. If he were smart, he’d let it go, fire the designer. Who’s clearly worse than clueless. And it isn’t that Gracie’s not intelligent. He’s highly intelligent. Just not smart. Did you tell Bigend?”

  “Yes,” said Milgrim. “I think I told him everything you wanted me to.”

  “Did you tell him about me?”

  “I showed him your card,” Milgrim said. It was on the desk now, in front of him.

  “Describe his reaction.”

  “He didn’t seem worried. But he never does. He said that he’d had some experience with U.S. federal agents.”

  “He might have just a little under five hundred pounds of very highly trained Mike on his hands soon, between the two of them. You’ll need to keep me informed. Got a phone?”

  “No,” said Milgrim, “I left it in Paris.”

  “Tweet me. Or call this number.”

  “I’m glad about your leave.”

  “Not a done deal yet. Let’s hope it works out. Watch out for yourself.” She hung up.

  Milgrim replaced the weightless plastic handset in its recess on top of the phone, causing a backlit white panel to go out.

  He looked at the clock in the upper right corner of the screen. Jun was supposed to arrive in a few hours. It wouldn’t yet be light out now. Wrapped in the MontBell, he went back to the foam.

  55. MR. WILSON

  There were few guests for breakfast.

  The Italian boy and another waiter were arranging screens, to the west of the narwhale rack. She’d seen these deployed here before, for the heightened privacy of business breakfasts. The screens were made of what she’d assumed to be extremely old tapestries, faded to no particular color, a sort of variegated khaki, but now she noticed that they depicted scenes from Disney’s Snow White. At least they didn’t appear to be pornographic. She was about to take her accustomed seat, beneath the spiral tusks, when the Italian boy noticed her. “You’ll be here, Miss Henry,” indicating the newly screened table.

  Then Bigend appeared at the head of the stairs, moving quickly, trench coat over his arm, the aura of his blue suit almost painful.

  “It’s Milgrim,” he said, when he reached her. “Bring coffee,” h
e ordered the Italian boy.

  “Certainly, sir.” He was gone.

  “Has something happened to Milgrim?”

  “Nothing’s happened to Milgrim. Milgrim has happened to me.” He tossed his trench coat over the back of his chair.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He tried to blind Foley, so-called, outside Bank Station. Last night.”

  “Milgrim?”

  “Not that he told me about it,” said Bigend, sitting down.

  “Tell me what’s happened.” She sat opposite him.

  “They came to Voytek’s flat this morning. They took Bobby.”

  “Bobby?”

  “Chombo.”

  The name, once heard, recalling the man. Encountered first in Los Angeles, and then, under very different circumstances, in Vancouver. “He’s here, in London? Who came?”

  “Primrose Hill. Or was, until this morning.” Bigend glared at the Italian girl, arriving with the coffee. She poured for Hollis, then for him.

  “Coffee will be fine for now, thanks,” Hollis told her, hoping to give her a chance to escape.

  “Of course,” said the girl, and ducked smoothly behind the apparently four-hundred-year-old Disney screen.

  “He was a mathematician,” Hollis said. “Programmer? I’d forgotten him.” Perhaps partly because Bobby, a markedly unpleasant personality in his own right, had been so deeply embedded in that first experience of Bigend being, in many ways, so bad to know. “I remember that I thought you seemed to be courting him, in Vancouver. As I was leaving.”

  “Extraordinary talent. Terrifically narrow,” he said, with evident relish. “Focused, utterly.”

  “Asshole,” suggested Hollis.

  “Not an issue. I sorted his affairs, brought him here, and set him a task. A challenge truly worthy of his abilities. The first he’d had. I would have provided any sort of lifestyle, really.”