Zero History (16 page)

When he refreshed, her reply was thirty seconds old. “Never mind & try not 2 let hm no ur on hm,” she’d written.

Know, he thought, then typed “Bigend?”

“When U back”

“Hollis thinks we’re back tomorrow.”

“Ur lucky ur in paris out”

“Over,” he wrote, though he wasn’t sure that was right. Her telegraphese was infectious. He saved the URL of the elite operator’s page to bookmarks, then logged out of Twitter, out of his webmail, and closed the computer. His Neo began to ring, its archaic dial-phone tone filling the tobacco shop. The man behind the counter was frowning.

“Yes?”

“You’re lucky to be in Paris.” It was Pamela Mainwaring. “Not ours.”

His first thought was that she’d somehow been watching his Twitter exchange with Winnie. “Not?”

“She rang us. Definitely not. Be lovely to have a snap from Paris.”

Hollis. Pamela’s call constrained now by Bigend’s suspicion of Sleight and the Neo. “I’ll try,” Milgrim said.

“Enjoy,” she said, and hung up.

Milgrim hoisted his bag to the zinc counter, unzipped it, found his camera. He loaded it with a fresh card, Blue Ant having kept the one he’d used in Myrtle Beach. They always did. He checked the batteries, then put the camera in his jacket pocket. He put Hollis’s laptop in his bag and zipped it shut. Leaving a few small coins on the zinc counter, he left the shop and headed back to the Salon du Vintage, walking quickly again.

Was he still angry? he wondered. He was calmer now, he decided. He knew he wouldn’t be telling Bigend about Winnie. Not if he could help it, anyway.

It was warmer, the cloud burning away. Paris seemed slightly unreal, the way London always did when he first arrived. How peculiar, that these places had always existed back-to-back, as close together and as separate as the two sides of a coin, yet wormholed now by a fast train and twenty-some miles of tunnel.

At the Salon du Vintage, after paying five euros admission, he checked his bag, something he never liked doing. He’d stolen enough checked luggage himself to know this arrangement as easy pickings. On the other hand, he’d be more mobile without it. He smiled at the Japanese girl, pocketed his bag check, and entered.

He was more at home in the world of objects, his therapist said, than the world of people. The Salon du Vintage, he assured himself, was about objects. Wishing to become the person the Salon du Vintage would want him to be, hence somehow less visible, he climbed a handsomely renovated stairway to the second floor.

The first thing he saw there was that poster of a younger Hollis, looking at once nervy and naughty. This was not the actual poster, he judged, but an amateurish reproduction, oversized and lacking in detail. He wondered what it would be like for her, seeing that.

He had left relatively few images himself over the past decade or so, and probably Winnie had seen most of those. Had them ready, perhaps, to e-mail to someone she wanted to be able to recognize him. Most of those had been taken by the police, and he wondered whether he’d recognize them himself. He’d certainly recognize the one she’d taken in the Caffè Nero in Seven Dials, and that would be the one she’d use.

The young man in the forage cap and foliage green pants, his black jacket still zipped, emerged from a side aisle of racks, his attention captured by a darting shoal of young Japanese girls. He’d removed his mirrored wraparound sunglasses. Milgrim stepped sideways, behind a mannequin in a delirious photo-print dress, keeping his man in sight over its massively padded shoulder, and wondered what he should do. If Foley didn’t already know he was here, and saw him, he’d be recognized from Selfridges. If not, he supposed, from South Carolina. Winnie had been there, watching him, and someone, he’d assumed Sleight, had photographed her there. Should he tell her about that? He flagged it for consideration. Foley was walking away now, toward the rear of the building. Milgrim remembered the man with the mullet, in the mothballed restaurant. Foley didn’t have that, Milgrim decided, whatever that had been, and it was a very good thing. He stepped from behind the Gaultier and followed, ready to simply keep walking if he was discovered. If Foley didn’t notice him, that would be a plus, but the main thing was for Milgrim not to be thought to be following him. His hand in his jacket pocket, on his camera.

Now it was Foley’s turn to step sideways, behind a neon-clad mannequin. Milgrim turned, toward a nearby display of costume jewelry, conveniently finding Foley reflected, distantly, in the seller’s mirror.

A red-haired girl offered to help him, in French.

“No,” said Milgrim, “thank you,” seeing Foley, in the mirror, step from behind his mannequin. He turned, pressing the button that extruded the camera’s optics, raised it, and snapped two pictures of Foley’s receding back. The red-haired girl was looking at him. He smiled and walked on, pocketing the camera.

M
aybe Milgrim was the one who was hallucinating here, she thought, as she climbed the Scandinavian stairway again, a tall paper cup of quadruple-shot Americain held gingerly in either hand. The coffee was steaming hot; if Milgrim’s possibly imaginary stalker suddenly manifested, she thought, she could hurl the contents of both cups.

Whatever that had been, down in the deserted blue-lit disco, if it had been anything at all, it now seemed like some random frame-splice from someone else’s movie: Milgrim’s, Bigend’s, anyone but hers. But she’d avoid that elevator, just in case, and she were still on the lookout for vaguely Nazi caps.

Milgrim had issues, clearly. Was in fact deeply peculiar. She scarcely knew him. He might well be seeing things. He looked, pretty much constantly, as though he
were
seeing things.

She carefully kept the blow-up of the Corbijn portrait out of her field of vision as she reached the second floor and the Salon du Vintage. Keeping her mind off the basement as well, she wondered exactly when coffee had gone walkabout in France. When she’d first been here, drinking coffee hadn’t been a pedestrian activity. One either sat to do it, in cafés or restaurants, or stood, at bars or on railway platforms, and drank from sturdy vessels, china or glass, themselves made in France. Had Starbucks brought the takeaway cup? she wondered. She doubted it. They hadn’t really had the time. More likely McDonald’s.

Her antique denim dealer, intense and ponytailed, was busy with a customer, laying out a pair of ancient dungarees that seemed to have more holes than fabric. He looked as though he should have supplemental lenses hinged to the edges of his rimless rectangular spectacles. He didn’t see her pass.

And here, past the inflatable orange furniture, came a funeral, and Olduvai George marching jauntily along beside it, smiling.

Four Japanese men in dark suits, unsmiling, a black coffin or body bag slung between them.

They passed her, but not George. Delighted, he took one of the coffees. “Thank you very much.”

“Sugar?”

“No, thank you.” He sipped hungrily.

“Who were they?” Looking over her shoulder as the four bore their somber burden out of sight, down the stairs.

He lowered the cup, wiped his mouth with the back of his startlingly furred hand. “Mere’s buyer’s minders. The Chanel’s in that bag, all of it, packed with archival tissue. And there’s Mere,” he added, “with the buyer.”

And two more black-suited minders. The buyer, she thought at first, was a twelve-year-old boy, costumed like a child in some archaic comic strip: tight, silky-looking yellow shorts to midthigh, a red-and-green-striped long-sleeved jersey, a yellow beanie, yellow boots like oversized baby shoes. He looked sour, petulant. And then she saw the hint of five-o’clock shadow, the jowls. He was talking with a slender young woman in jeans and a white shirt.

“Designer,” George said, after another eager swallow. “Harajuku. Fabulous collection.”

“Of Chanel?”

“Everything, apparently. I’m guessing it’s gone well for Mere.”

“How can you tell?”

“He’s still alive.”

The dress forms, she saw, were bare and gray.

Now the designer turned, flanked by the two remaining suits, and walked toward them.

They watched him pass.

“Are the people who buy Chanel all like that?” she asked.

“Never sold any before. Time you met Mere.”

He led her past the orange bubble-furniture.

Meredith Overton was stroking the horizontal screen of an iPhone, pinching up virtual bits of information. Ash-blond, wide gray eyes. She looked up at them. “It’s in the bank, in Melbourne. Direct transfer.”

“Did well, I take it?” George was smiling broadly.

“Very.”

“Congratulations,” said Hollis.

“Hollis Henry,” said George.

“Meredith Overton,” taking Hollis’s hand. “Mere. Pleased to meet you.” Hollis guessed that her jeans were Hounds, slender and too long, worn rucked rather than rolled, and a man’s rumpled white oxford shirt, though it fit too well to really be a man’s.

“They didn’t want the purses,” Meredith said. “Just the couture. But I’ve backup buyers for those, dealers here at the fair.” She pocketed her phone.

Hollis, out of the corner of her eyes, saw Milgrim pass them. He carried a small camera at his side, and seemed to be looking at nothing in particular. She ignored him. “Thank you for being willing to see me,” she said to Meredith. “I suppose you know what it’s about.”

“Bloody Clammy,” said Meredith, but not uncheerfully. “You’re after Hounds, aren’t you?”

“Not so much the product as its maker,” Hollis said, watching Meredith’s expression.

“You wouldn’t be the first.” Meredith smiled. “But there isn’t much I can tell you.”

“Would you like a coffee?” Offering Meredith her own cup. “I haven’t touched it.”

“No, thank you.”

“Hollis has been extremely helpful,” George said, “about Inchmale.”

“Horrid man,” said Meredith, to Hollis.

“He is that,” Hollis agreed. “Prides himself.”

“I’m less anxious, now,” said George, though Hollis found it difficult to imagine him anxious at all. “Hollis understands Reg’s process from experience. She puts things into perspective.”

Meredith took Hollis’s cup now, and sipped gingerly from the slot in the plastic lid. Wrinkled her nose. “Black,” she said.

“Sugar if you want it.”

“You’re really leaning on me now, aren’t you,” Meredith said to George.

“I am,” said George. “And I’ve waited until you’re in a very good mood.

“If that little shit hadn’t met my price,” Meredith said, “I wouldn’t be.”

“True,” said George, “but he did.”

“I think he wears them himself,” said Meredith. “Not that I think he’s gay. That would make it okay, actually. He insisted on all the documentation, everything we’d collected on their original owner. Something about that’s left me wanting a shower.” She took another sip of hot black coffee and handed the cup back to Hollis. “You want to know who designs the Gabriel Hounds.”

“I do,” said Hollis.

“Nice jacket.”

“A gift,” Hollis said, which was at least technically true.

“You’d have a hard time finding one now. They haven’t done them for a few seasons. Not that they have seasons in the ordinary sense.”

“No?” Studiously avoiding the matter of who “they” were.

“When they remake the jackets, if they ever do, they’ll be exactly the same, cut from exactly the same pattern. The fabric might be different, but only an otaku could tell.” She began to collect the slender security cables that had secured the Chanel suits to their dress forms, until she held them in one hand like a strange bouquet, or a steel flail.

“I don’t think I understand,” Hollis said.

“It’s about atemporality. About opting out of the industrialization of novelty. It’s about deeper code.”

Reminding Hollis of something Milgrim might have said, but she’d forgotten exactly what. She looked around, wondering if he was still in sight. He wasn’t.

“Lose something?”

“I’m here with someone. But never mind. Please.”

“I’m not sure I should help you with this. Probably I shouldn’t. And actually, I can’t.”

“You can’t?”

“Because I’m no longer in the loop. Because they’ve gotten that much harder to find, since I took Clammy to buy his jeans in Melbourne.”

“But you could tell me what you do know.” Hollis saw that George had busied himself collapsing the chrome stands of the dress forms, closing up shop.

“Were you ever a model?”

“No,” said Hollis.

“I was,” said Meredith, “for two years. I had a booker who loved using me. That’s the key, really, your booker. New York, L.A., all over western Europe, home to Australia for more work, back to New York, back here. Intensely nomadic. George says more so than being in a band. You can cope, when you’re seventeen, even when you’ve no money. Almost literally no money. I lived here, one winter, in a monthly-rent hotel room with three other girls. Hot plate, tiny fridge. Eighty euros a week ‘pocket money.’ That was what they called it. That was to live on. I couldn’t afford an Orange Card for the Métro. I walked everywhere. I was in
Vogue,
but I couldn’t afford to buy a copy. Fees were almost entirely eaten up before the checks found me, and the checks were always late. That’s the way it works, if you’re just another foot soldier, which is what I was. I slept on couches in New York, the floor of an apartment with no electricity in Milan. It became apparent to me that the industry was grossly, baroquely dysfunctional.”