Zero History (40 page)

“Okay,” said Milgrim.

“You can’t sleep in Tanky & Tojo,” she said.

“Right,” Milgrim said, and began to remove his shirt, which had far too many buttons on each sleeve. When he’d gotten it off, he hung it on the back of the chair, over his new jacket, and took off his pants.

He could see her, dimly, pulling the MontBell out of its bag. He felt like screaming, or singing, something. He walked toward the foam, then realized he was wearing his black socks from Galeries Lafayette. That seemed wrong. He stopped and removed them, almost falling over.

“Get under,” Fiona said, having spread the open bag as wide as it would go. “Good thing I never use a pillow.”

“Me neither,” lied Milgrim, sitting down, tucking his socks quickly under the edge of the foam. He swung his legs under the Mont-Bell and lay down, very straight, beside her.

“You and that Heidi,” said Fiona, “you’re not a number, are you?”

“
Me
?” he said. “No!” Then lay there, eyes wide, awaiting her response, until he heard her softly snoring.

T
hey’d had a shower with H. G. Wells and Frank, Garreth’s bandaged leg, tucked through something that looked like an inhumanly capacious and open-ended condom. Toweling him off, she’d seen a bit more of Frank, “Frankenstein.” Much evidence of heroic surgery, so-called. As many stitches as a patchwork quilt, and indeed she suspected literally patchwork, the back of his other calf tidily scarred where they’d taken skin to graft. And within Frank, if Garreth wasn’t simply taking the piss, a good bit of newfangled rattan bone. Frank’s musculature was considerably reduced, though Garreth had hopes for that. Hopes generally, she’d been glad to see, and hard sensitive hands sliding all over her.

Now he lay on the Piblokto Madness bed, in Cabinet’s not-velour robe, Frank encased in a slippery-looking, black, Velcro-fastened wrapper through which a machine the size and nostalgic shape of a portable typewriter case pumped extremely cold water, very quickly. Heidi had used something similar, on their final tour, to help with the wrist and hand pain drumming had started to cause her. Garreth’s had arrived an hour before, by courier, a gift from the old man.

He was talking with the old man now; very much, she thought, as to a wife in a long marriage. They could convey a great deal in a very few words, and had their own slang, in-group jokes of seemingly infinite depth, a species of twin-talk. He wore a headset, cabled to his no-name black laptop, on the embroidered velour beside him, their conversation being conducted, she assumed, through one or another of the darknets they frequented. These were, she gathered, private internets, unlicensed and unpoliced, and Garreth had once remarked that, as with dark matter and the universe, the darknets were probably the bulk of the thing, were there any way to accurately measure them.

She didn’t listen. Stayed in the warm, steamy bathroom, drying her hair.

When she came out, he was staring up at the round bottom of the birdcage.

“Are you still talking?”

“No.” He removed the headset.

“Are you all right?”

“He’s done. Folded.”

“What do you mean?” She went to him.

“He had something he’d never told me about. Grailware. He’s giving it to me. For this. Means it’s over. Done.”

“What’s over?”

“The business. His mad career. If it weren’t, he’d not have given me this.”

“Can you tell me what it is?”

“Invisibility. A sigil.”

“A sigil?”

“The sigil of forgetting.”

“That thing’s chilling the blood in your brain.”

He smiled, though she could see the loss in him, the pain of it. “It’s a very great gift. Your man will be bricking it, if he knows we have it and he doesn’t.”

Which meant Bigend, she knew, and shit-scared. “Then he’ll want it for himself, whatever it is.”

“Exactly,” he said, “why he mustn’t know. I’ll convince him that Pep’s stayed off the cameras with tradecraft.”

“Pep?”

“Mad little Catalan. Perfect master car thief.” He looked at his watch, its black dial austere. The men who guard the Queen, he’d once told her, were not allowed to wear shoes with rubber soles, or watches with black faces. Why? she’d asked. Juju, he’d said. “He’ll be in from Frankfurt in twenty minutes.”

“How are you assembling all this so quickly, yet finding the time to soap my back and whatnot? Not to complain.”

“The old boy,” he said. “Can’t keep him from it. He’s doing it. It’s modular. We got that good at it. We have our bits of business, our set pieces, our people. We got really fast. Had to, as the best ones present themselves abruptly. Or did.”

“Can you really be invisible? Or is it more bullshit, like your rattan bones?”

“You’ll hurt Frank’s feelings. Think of it as a spell of forgetting. Or not remembering in the first place. The system sees you, but immediately forgets.”

“What system?”

“You’ve seen a few cameras in this town? Noticed them, have you?”

“You can make them forget you?”

He propped himself on his elbow, instinctively rubbed the slick, cold surface of the thing around his leg, then quickly wiped his palm on the embroidered coverlet. “The holy grail of the surveillance industry is facial recognition. Of course, they say it’s not. It’s already here, to a degree. Not operational. Larval. Can’t read you if you’re black, say, and might mistake you for me, but the hardware and software have potentials, awaiting later upgrade. Though what you need to understand, to understand forgetting, is that nobody’s actually eyeballing much of what a given camera sees. They’re digital, after all. Stored data sits there, stored. Not images, then, just ones and zeros. Something happens that requires official scrutiny, the ones and zeros are converted to images. But”—and he reached up to touch the edge of the bottom of the birdcage library—“say there’s been a gentlemen’s agreement.”

“What gentlemen?”

“Your usual suspects. The industry, the government, that lucrative sector the old boy’s so keen on, that might be either, or both.”

“And the agreement?”

“Say you needed the SBS to rendition a dozen possible jihadis out of the basement of a mosque. Or trade unionists, should they happen to be down there, promiscuous as they are. Just say.”

“Say,” said Hollis.

“And didn’t want it seen, ever. And shutting the cameras down wouldn’t be an option, of course, as you might well pay for that, later, on BBC. So say your Special Boats boys bear the sigil of forgetting—”

“Which is?”

“Facial recognition, after all, isn’t it?”

“I don’t get it.”

“You’ll see it, soon enough. It’s on its way over, courier. His last gift.”

“Did he say that?”

“No,” he said, sadly, “but we both knew.”

M
ilgrim woke with a leg over both of his, bent sharply at the knee, Fiona’s inner thigh and calf across the front of both his thighs. She’d turned on her side, facing him, and was no longer snoring, though he could feel, he discovered, her breath on his shoulder. She was still asleep.

How long, he wondered, if he remained perfectly still, might she remain in this extraordinary position? He only knew that he was prepared to find out.

A spidery, simultaneously sinuous and scratchy guitar chord filled the high-ceilinged twilight of Bigend’s Vegas cube, afloat on rainlike finger-drums. Milgrim winced. It died away. Came again.

Fiona moaned, threw her arm across his chest, snuggled closer. The chord returned, like surf, relentless. “Bugger,” said Fiona, but didn’t move until the scratching, writhing chord returned again. She rolled away from Milgrim, reaching for something. “Hullo?”

Milgrim imagined that the foam was a raft. Made the walls recede, horizon-deep. But it was a raft on which Fiona was taking calls.

“Wilson? Okay. Yes? Understood. Put him on.” She sat cross-legged now, at the very edge of the slab. “Hullo. Yes.” Silence. “I’d need to dress for it, the chartreuse vest, reflective stripes.” Silence. “Kawasaki. GT550. Bit tatty for the job, but if the box is new, should do. Benny can bolt anything on. Have the manufacturer’s URL? I could measure it for you, otherwise. I’ve already put it together. Haven’t tested it.” A longer silence. “Organ transplants, plasma? Autopsy bits?” Silence. “Send over enough of that precut foam from a camera shop, the throw-away-the-bits kind. I doubt vibration would do it much good at all, but Benny and I can sort that. Yes. I will. Thank you. Could you put Hubertus back on, please? Thanks.” She cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, “we do seem very busy, suddenly. Benny can bodge your box on, but I’ll need new dampers. This drone won’t travel as nicely, I don’t think. Different sort of moving parts. Yes. He did. He was very clear. Bye, then.”

“Hubertus?”

“And someone called Wilson. Something’s up.”

“What?”

“Wilson wants my bike outfitted like a medical courier, professional-looking box over the pillion, extra reflectors, safety gear. Our new drone goes in there.”

“Who’s Wilson?”

“No idea. Hubertus says do what he says, to the letter. When Hubertus delegates, he delegates.” He felt her shrug. “Good kip, though.” She yawned, stretched. “You?”

“Yes,” said Milgrim, keeping it at that.

She stood, went to where she’d left her armored pants. He heard her pull them on. The zip going up. He restrained a sigh. “Coffee,” she said. “I’ll have Benny get some in. White?”

“White,” said Milgrim, “sugar.” He groped under the foam for his socks. “What was that music, on your phone?”

“I’ve forgotten his name. Brilliant. Saharan.” She was pulling on her boots. “He heard Jimi and James Brown on the shortwave, when he was little. Carved extra frets into a guitar.” She went out without turning the Italian umbrella back up. Grayish sunlight. Then she closed the door behind her.

W
ith Garreth and Pep, the Catalan car thief, deep in electric hub motors for bicycles, she’d been glad of Inchmale’s call. She barely knew what hub motors were, but Pep wanted two, for extra speed, while Garreth insisted that two were too many. If one of them were to go out, Garreth argued, the extra weight, plus the generator drag, would negate the advantage of the first one. But if there was only one, and it failed, Pep could peddle as best he could, while not expending energy on the extra weight. The clarity with which she retained this, while having no knowledge of what any of it was really about, surprised her.

Pep looked as though someone had made an apple doll out of Gérard Depardieu, soaking the apple in salted lemon juice and baking it, then leaving it in a cool, dark place to harden, hoping it wouldn’t mold. He’d avoided molding, by the look of him, but had gotten much smaller. Impossible to judge his age. From certain angles, the world’s most weathered teenager; from others, shockingly old. There was a dragon tattooed on the back of his right hand, bat-winged and suggestively phallic, that looked less like a tattoo than a medieval woodcut. His fingernails, which were almost perfectly square, were freshly manicured, polished to a high sheen. Garreth seemed glad to see him, but he made her uncomfortable.

Inchmale had phoned from the sitting room, where she could hear, in the background, the early phases of the evening’s drinking. “Are you pregnant?” he’d asked.

“Are you mad?”

“The doorman referred to you as ‘they.’ I noted the sudden plurality.”

“I’ll be down. In the singular.”

She’d left Garreth chiding Pep for having ordered something, called a Hetchins frame, for a bike that might have to be tossed in the Thames after a few hours’ use. Pep’s position, as she was closing the door behind her, was that it might not have to be tossed at all, and that “curly stays” were in any case a lovely thing. She saw Pep look at his fingernails, that gesture she associated with manicured men.

She found Heidi and Inchmale established beneath the narwhale tusks. Inchmale was pouring tea from one of the vintage Bunnykins services that were a Cabinet trademark.

“Good evening,” he said. “We’re discussing the recent shit, a variety of possible fans, your place in same, plus the possibility of your having found a viable and ongoing relationship.”

“What would one of those constitute, for me, in your opinion?” she asked, taking a seat.

“Having someone to have one with, to begin with,” said Inchmale, putting down the teapot. “But you know I thought he was a good chap before.”

“That was what you said about Phil Spector.”

“Allowance for age,” said Inchmale, “misfortune. Genius. Lemon?” He proffered a wedge of cut lemon in an ornate silver squeezer.

“No lemon. What are ‘curly stays’?”

“Corsetry.”

“I just heard a Catalan car thief use the phrase.”

“Did he speak English? Perhaps he was trying to describe a permanent wave.”

“No. Part of a bicycle.”

“My money’s on corsetry. Do you know that Heidi’s stuck a man with a Rhenish dart?”