Zero History (18 page)

The Neo rang in his hand.

“Yes?”

“Where are you?” Hollis. “I saw you walk past.”

“Can you meet me? By the entrance, downstairs.”

“Are you up here?”

“Downstairs.”

“On my way,” she said.

“Good,” he said, and clicked off. Resisting the impulse to whistle for Sleight’s benefit, he put his phone in his jacket pocket, then removed his jacket, wrapped it several times around the phone, tucked the resulting bundle under his arm, and headed for the stairs.

H
ollis found Milgrim giving his jacket to the Japanese girl at the bag check. “I’m finished,” she said. “We can go now, if you’re ready.”

Milgrim turned, took her hand, and led her away from the bag check.

“Is something wrong?”

“My phone,” said Milgrim, releasing her hand on the far side of the entranceway. “They’re listening through it.”

Tinfoil hats, people whose fillings broadcast thought-control messages. “ ‘They’ who?”

“Sleight. Bigend doesn’t trust him.”

“Neither do I.” She never had. And now that she thought of Sleight, Milgrim didn’t sound quite as automatically crazy. That was the trouble with Bigendland. People did things like that. The ones like Sleight did, anyway. Then again, Milgrim might just be crazy.

Or on drugs. What if he’d slipped? Gone back on whatever it was they’d gotten him off of in Switzerland? Where was the semi-absent character she’d met over tapas? He looked worked up, a little sweaty, maybe angry about something. He looked more like someone in particular, anyway, she realized, and that was what had been missing before. The lack of that was what had made him simultaneously so peculiar and so forgettable. She was looking into the eyes of someone experiencing the anxiety of sudden arrival. But Milgrim’s arrival, she somehow knew, was from within. But all because he thought he’d seen someone? Though someone, she reminded herself, she’d thought she’d seen too, in the basement. “I saw him,” she said. “Maybe.”

“Where?” Milgrim stepped back, allowing a pair of spryly geriatric American men to pass, headed for the stairs.

They looked to Hollis like aged hair-metal rockers in expensive mufti, and seemed to be talking golf. Did they collect vintage Chanel? “Downstairs,” she said. “I pushed the wrong button in the elevator. Then he came down the stairs. I think.”

“What did you do?”

“Got back in the elevator. Up. Didn’t see him again, but I was busy.”

“He’s here,” Milgrim said.

“You saw him?”

“I took his picture. Pamela wants it. I could show you, but the card’s not in my camera.”

“He’s here now?” She looked around.

“I saw him go out,” glancing toward the entrance. “Doesn’t mean he hasn’t come back.”

“I asked Bigend. He said they didn’t have anyone watching us.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Depends how much it matters to him. But we’ve got bad history, that way, between us. If he bullshits me again, and I find out about it, I’m gone. He understands that.” She looked Milgrim in the eye. “You aren’t high on anything, are you?”

“No.”

“You seem different. I’m worried about you.”

“I’m in recovery,” said Milgrim. “I’m
supposed
to be different. If I were high, I wouldn’t
be
different.”

“You seem angry.”

“Not with you.”

“But you weren’t angry, before.”

“It wasn’t allowed,” he said, and she heard his amazement, as if in saying this he’d discovered something about himself he’d never known before. He swallowed. “I want to find out if Sleight’s telling him where I am. I think I know how to do that.”

“What did Bigend say about Sleight?”

“He warned me to be careful of the Neo.”

“What’s that?”

“My phone. The brand. They’re bankrupt now.”

“Who is?”

“The company who made it. Sleight always knows where I am. The phone tells him. But I’ve known that.”

“You have?”

“I thought Bigend wanted him to. Did want him to, probably. It wasn’t a secret.”

“You think he listens through it?”

“He made me leave it in the hotel, yesterday. Charging. He does that when he wants to reprogram it, add or subtract applications.”

“I thought he was in New York.”

“He programs it from wherever he is.”

“Is he listening now?”

“It’s in my jacket. Over there.” He pointed at the bag check. “I shouldn’t leave it there for long.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Did Blue Ant make the hotel reservations?”

“I did.”

“By phone?”

“Through the hotel’s website. I didn’t tell anyone where we’d be. What do you want to do?”

“We’ll get a cab. You get in first, tell the driver Galeries Lafayette. Sleight won’t hear. Then I’ll get in. Don’t say anything about Galeries Lafayette, or about the hotel. Then I’ll block the GPS.”

“How?”

“I have a way. I’ve already tried it. He thought I was in an elevator.”

“Then what?”

“I’ll get out at Galeries Lafayette, you’ll go on, I’ll unblock my phone. And see if Foley comes to find me.”

“Who’s Foley?”

“Foliage green pants.”

“But what if someone’s here, and they just follow the cab?”

“That’s a lot of people. If they have a lot of people, there’s nothing we can do. They’ll follow you too.” He shrugged. “Where are we staying?”

“It’s called the Odéon. So is the street. And it’s by Odéon Métro. Easy to remember. Your room is on my credit card, and I’ve paid for one night. We have an eight o’clock dinner reservation, near the hotel. In my name.”

“We do?”

“With Meredith and George. I learned something, upstairs, but I think we might learn more, tonight.”

Milgrim blinked. “You want me there?”

“We’re working together, aren’t we?”

He nodded.

“Place called Les Éditeurs. George says you can see it from the hotel.”

“Eight,” said Milgrim. “When I get my jacket, don’t forget the phone’s in it. Sleight. Listening. When we get a cab, you get in first, tell the driver Galeries Lafayette.”

“Why there?”

“It’s big. Department stores are good.”

“They are?”

“For losing people.” He was at the counter now, giving the girl his ticket. She passed him his jacket and his black bag. Hollis presented hers and the girl wheeled her roll-aboard out.

“Merci,” said Hollis.

Milgrim had put his jacket on and was already headed out the door.

K
leenex?” Milgrim asked as the cab turned right, into what he recognized as the Rue du Temple. “My sinuses are bothering me,” he added, for Sleight’s benefit.

Hollis, seated to his left, behind the driver, produced a pack from her purse.

“Thanks.” He removed three tissues, handed the pack back, unfolded one, spread it across his knees, and took the Neo from his pocket. He showed it to her, presenting it from different angles, which made him feel something like a conjurer, though he was none too certain about what his trick might be.

The cab turned left, into another street, one that doubled back at a sharp angle. He imagined Sleight watching a cursor represent this on a screen. It seemed unlikely, though he couldn’t understand why that should be. He knew that Sleight did things like that, constantly. Sleight could be watching on the screen of his own Neo.

Milgrim lay the Neo on the Kleenex, resting it in the valley between his knees, opened the other two sheets, and began to carefully polish it. When he was finished, he remembered having idly removed the back, on the flight to Atlanta. Now he opened it again, rubbing down the inside of the battery cover and the exposed face of the battery, then replacing it. When he’d finished rubbing down the outside, he carefully folded the first tissue around it and slipped it into his pocket. He crumpled the other two and wiped his palms with them.

“Have you been in Paris before?” Hollis asked.

She seemed relaxed, her purse on her lap, the dark collar of the denim jacket turned up. “Once,” he said, “when I was just out of Columbia. For a month, with another graduate. We sublet an apartment.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“It was nice, to be here with someone.”

She looked out the window, as if remembering something, then looked back at him. “Were you in love?”

“No.”

“A couple?”

“Yes,” he said, though it seemed strange to say it.

“It didn’t work, for you?”

“I wasn’t available,” he said. “I didn’t know that, but I wasn’t, really. I learned that in Basel.” He remembered Sleight, their hypothetical listener. He pointed at the pocket that held his tissue-wrapped Neo.

“Sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay.”

They took a right, then left again, at an intersection where he glimpsed a sign for the Strasbourg-Saint-Denis Métro, and into heavier traffic.

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.