Zero History (45 page)

T
he penguin smelled of Krylon, an aerosol enamel Fiona had used to camouflage it, so to speak. Milgrim knew more about camouflage, now, than he would ever have expected to, via Bigend’s interest in military clothing. Prior to that, he had only been familiar with two kinds, the one with the Lava Lamp blobs in nature shades, that the U.S. Army had featured when he was a boy, and the creepy photorealist turkey-hunter stuff that a certain kind of extra-scary New Jersey drug dealer sometimes affected. What Fiona called “dazzle,” though, was new to him. Fiona said it had been invented by a painter, a Vorticist. He’d Google it, when he had time. It had been Garreth’s suggestion, and Fiona had told Milgrim that it didn’t actually make a lot of sense, in their situation, though anything was better than silver Mylar. She liked Garreth having suggested it, though, because it seemed to her to be part of some performance-art aspect of what he was doing. She said she’d never seen anything quite like it, what Garreth was doing, and particularly the speed with which it was being put together.

Out in the bike yard, she’d sprayed the penguin’s silver Mylar with black, random, wonky geometrics, their edges fuzzy, like graffiti. Real dazzle had sharp edges, she said, but there was no way to mask the inflated balloon. She used a piece of brown cardboard, cut in a concave curve, to mask approximately, then went back with a dull gray, to fill in the remaining silver. When that had dried a little, she’d further confused it with an equally dull beige, ghosting lines in with the cardboard mask. The result wouldn’t conceal the penguin against any background at all, particularly the sky, but broke it up visually, made it difficult to read as an object. Still a penguin, though, a swimming one, and now with the Taser and the extra electronics that Voytek had taped to its tummy.

There was an arming sequence, on the iPhone now, that required a thumb and forefinger, with the other forefinger needed to fire the thing. Milgrim hadn’t been entirely sure what a Taser was before, but he was getting an idea. If he accidentally fired it, here in the Vegas cube, a pair of barbed electrodes would shoot out, on two thin fifteen-foot cables, propelled by compressed gas. That was strictly once-only, the barb-shooting. If the barbs went into Bigend’s spotless plasterboard wall, the penguin was anchored there, he supposed, and there was a lot of fine cable around. But if you tapped the iPhone again, in the firing circle on the screen, the wall got shocked. Which wouldn’t bother the wall, but if those barbs happened to get into anybody, which was what they were actually for, that person got a shock, a big one. Not the kind that would kill you, but one that could knock you down, stun you. And there was more than one shock stored in the toy airship cabin Voytek had taped under there.

Fiona said that he wouldn’t have to worry about any of that when he flew the penguin. She said it was just extra bells and whistles, something Garreth had tossed in because he’d happened to run across the Taser. That was what Voytek had indicated, grumpily, on his way out, when they’d gotten back here on the Yamaha.

But that wasn’t what Garreth had told him, in Hollis’s hotel room. Garreth had said that he needed Fiona to operate the other drone, the one with the little helicopters, so he needed Milgrim to operate the penguin. To keep an eye on the general area, he said. When Milgrim asked which area that was, Garreth had said that he didn’t know yet, but that he was sure Milgrim would do very well. Milgrim, remembering the pleasure he’d taken in rolling the black ray, decided that simply nodding was the best course. Though the idea of anyone wanting him to operate anything was new. Other people operated things, and Milgrim observed them doing it. But, he supposed, he was really only being asked to observe something, whatever it was, through the cameras in the penguin, and it was best, as Fiona suggested, to regard the Taser as a random add-on.

It was harder to get the penguin to do anything, in the constrained space of the Vegas cube, than it had been to get the ray to do those rhythmic somersaults, but he was starting, now, to manage a repeated stationary roll. If he bumped the wall, Fiona noticed, and didn’t like it, so he tried to be as careful as he could. She said that the robotics in the wings were fragile, and the penguin was helpless without them. It didn’t really fly, because penguins don’t, and it was a balloon; rather, it swam, through air instead of water, and once you had it going where you wanted it to, it knew how to swim by itself. He was careful to keep that overridden now. He wished they could take the thing out and really fly it, the way he’d seen her fly the other one in Paris, but she said that they couldn’t, because people might see it and get excited, and because Garreth had ordered her to keep him inside.

Being kept inside with Fiona was an excellent thing, as far as Milgrim was concerned, but he was starting to recall Hollis’s scary-looking shower with something other than fear. “I wish there was a shower here,” he said, slowing the penguin’s roll, bringing the Taser around until it was on the bottom, stopping it. There was something wonderfully satisfying about this thing, something silky about the way it worked.

“There is,” said Fiona, looking up from his Air, where she sat at the table.

“There is?” Milgrim, on his back on the white foam, glanced around the blank white walls, thinking he’d missed a door.

“Benny has one rigged up. Drivers use it, sometimes. It has a geyser so old that it has a box that used to take coins. I could do with one myself.”

Milgrim was simultaneously aware of the stickiness of his armpits and what even the briefest image of Fiona in a shower did to him. “You go first, then.”

“You can’t trust Benny’s geyser,” said Fiona. “Get it working, it’ll go once, then stop. We should shower together.”

“Together,” said Milgrim, and heard the voice he only had in police custody. He coughed.

“We’ll leave the light out,” said Fiona, who was looking at him with an expression he couldn’t identify at all. “I’m not supposed to let you out of my sight. Literally. That was what he said.”

“Who?” asked Milgrim, in his own voice.

“Garreth.” She was wearing her armored pants, low on her hips as she sat on one of Bigend’s elegant chairs, and a tight T-shirt, white, that said
RUDGE
at the top of a round black emblem, the size of a dinner plate, and
COVENTRY
at the bottom. Between these names was a red heraldic hand, open and upright, its palm presented as if to warn anyone off the small but prominent breasts behind it.

“If it’s all right with you,” said Milgrim.

“I suggested it, didn’t I?”

W
here are you? Robert said you left with a woman.”

She was leaving the denim shop with Meredith and Clammy. “Soho. I did. Meredith. On my way back now.”

“Should have given you the sort of safe-word I gave your employer.”

“No. It’s okay.”

“Better if you’re not out.”

“Necessary, though.”

“But you’re coming back now?”

“Yes. See you soon.”

She looked from the phone in her hand to the faintly candlelit window. Shadows of people. Two more arriving now, to be admitted by Bo. Meredith thought she’d seen an associate editor from French
Vogue
. Clammy had ignored several other musicians, slightly older than he was, whom Hollis vaguely recognized. Otherwise, not what she thought of as a fashion crowd. Something else, though she didn’t know what. But she could tell that the secret Bigend had been chasing had already been starting to emerge when he’d given her the assignment. Already Hounds wasn’t a secret in the same way. He was too late. What did that mean? Was he losing his touch? Had he been too focused on his project with Chombo? Had Sleight somehow been skewing the flow of information?

Clammy’s little gray wagon arrived, driven by a very Clammy-looking boy Clammy didn’t bother to introduce. He popped out, handed Clammy the keys, nodded, and walked away.

“Who was that?” Hollis asked.

“Assistant,” said Clammy absently, opening the door on the passenger side. He had an unmarked manila shopping bag the size of a small suitcase. “You’ll have to hold this for me.”

“What did you get?”

“Two of the black, two of the chino, two shirts, and the black of your jacket.”

“And something for you,” said Meredith, to Hollis.

“It’s on top,” said Clammy impatiently. “Get in.”

Hollis folded herself, sideways, onto the rear bench, and accepted Clammy’s bag as best she could. A potent waft of indigo.

Clammy and Meredith got in, doors closing. “It was the first thing she ever did,” said Meredith, looking back. “Before she started Hounds.”

Hollis found something wrapped in unbleached tissue, atop Clammy’s thick, heavy pad of denim. Fumbled it out, pulling the tissue aside. Dark, smooth, heavy jersey. “What is it?”

“That’s for you to work out. A seamless tube. I’ve seen her wear it as a stole, an evening dress of any length, several different ways as skirts. Fabric’s amazing. Some ancient factory in France, this latest batch.”

“Thank her, please. And thank you. Both of you.”

“I’m sorted,” said Clammy, turning into Oxford Street, “just don’t crush my gear.”

When the lift descended, answering her call, she found it occupied by a short, older, oddly broad man of indeterminately Asian aspect, his thinning gray hair brushed neatly back. He stood very upright in the middle of the cage, a bobble-topped tartan tam in his hands, and thanked her, accent crisply British, when she hauled open the cage’s gate. “Good evening,” he said with a nod, stepping past her, turning on his heel, and marching for Cabinet’s door as he settled his tam.

Robert opened and held the door for him.

The ferret was in its vitrine.

When she reached Number Four’s door, she remembered she hadn’t taken her key. She rapped with her knuckles, softly. “It’s me.”

“Moment,” she heard him say.

She heard the chain rattle. Then he opened the door, leaning on his four-legged cane, something she took to be a glossy black LP sleeve tucked under his arm.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“The ugliest T-shirt in the world,” he said, and kissed her cheek.

“The Bollards will be disappointed,” she said, coming in and closing the door. “I thought they’d had me sleeping in that.”

“So ugly that digital cameras forget they’ve seen it.”

“Shall we have a look at it, then?”

“Not yet.” He showed her the black square, which she now saw was a sort of plastic envelope, its edges welded shut. “We might contaminate it with our DNA.”

“No, thank you. We might
not
.”

“A single stray hair would be enough. Material like this has to be handled very carefully, given what forensics are, these days. It’s nothing you want to be associated with at all, ever. In fact, there really isn’t much material like this. Something of a one-off, in the field.”

“Pep’s going to wear it?”

“And contaminate it, no doubt, with Catalan DNA.” He grinned. “But then we’ll put it in a bag, seal it, and incinerate the bag. No photographs of the ugliness, though. We don’t want that.”

“If cameras can’t see it, how could we photograph it?”

“Cameras can see it. The surveillance cameras can all see it, but then they forget they’ve seen it.”

“Why?”

“Because their architecture tells them to forget it, and anyone who’s wearing it as well. They forget the figure wearing the ugly T-shirt. Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure. That which the camera sees, bearing the sigil, it deletes from the recalled image. Though only if you ask it to show you the image. So there’s no suspicious busy-ness to be noticed. If you ask for June 7, camera 53, it retrieves what it saw. In the act of retrieval, the sigil, and the human form bearing it, cease to be represented. By virtue of deep architecture. Gentlemen’s agreement.”

“Are they doing that now? Really?”

“Answering that would require a very woolly discussion of what ‘they’ can mean. I imagine it’s literally impossible to say who’s doing it. It’s enough to say it’s being done. In a sort of larval way, though it works quite well. We’re quite far ahead, here, with this camera culture. Though we aren’t a patch on Dubai. I’m still getting bits and pieces of my freeway performance, mailed in. Downside of having obsessive friends who like computers. But none of those friends, I’d gladly wager, know about the ugly T-shirt. The ugly T-shirt is
deep
. As deep as I’ve ever gotten, really. Deep and bad to know. After this is over, regardless of outcome, you know nothing of the ugly T-shirt.”

“You’re really making me want to see it.”

“You will. I’m keen myself. Where did you go?”

“Back to the store that was the first place I asked anyone about Hounds.” She put the designer’s gift on an armchair, took her jacket off, and went to sit close beside him, her arm across his shoulders. “I met her. The designer.”

“She’s here?”

“Just leaving.”

“Big End’s been looking for something right under his nose?”

“I think there may have been some hiding in plain sight going on, but I’m sure she’s enjoyed that. She’s the only person I’ve met who’s had the same job I have, so he’s something of an issue for her.”