Zero History (48 page)

“That was her, the photograph?”

“Probably.”

“What did she want?”

“She was offering something. Didn’t really have what I’d most like, but may be able to get it.”

“You won’t tell me?”

“Only because you’d be less safe knowing at this point.” He stroked her hair back from her face, on one side. “Do you know what you’d take with you, if you were going away forever? No more than you can carry at a brisk run.”

“Forever?”

“Probably not. But best to assume you wouldn’t come back here.”

“Not the author’s copies,” indicating the boxes.

“No. But seriously. Pack.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you.”

“That’s the plan. But pack now, please.”

“Is this too big?” indicating her roll-aboard.

“Perfect, but keep it light.”

“Is it about something she told you?”

“No,” he said, “it’s because I doubt we have much more time. Pack.”

She set the empty roll-aboard on the nearest armchair, unzipped it, and began to select things from the drawers in the wardrobe. She added the Hounds designer’s jersey tube. Went into the bathroom, gathering things from the counter.

“How’s Frank?” she asked, emerging.

“Complaining, but he has to get used to it.”

She noticed the Blue Ant figurine on the bedside table. Picked it up. You’re in, she thought, surprising herself, and carried it, with bottles and tubes of product, to the roll-aboard. “Won’t you need some sort of follow-up for neural surgery?”

“Woman in Harley Street,” he said, “as soon as I can.”

“How soon is that?”

“When this is over.” A phone began to ring. Yet another variant on Old Phone. Not hers. He took a phone from his pocket, looked at it. After the third ring he answered. “Yes? From now? Venue? No? Crucial.” He thumbed a key.

“Who?”

“Big End.”

“What?”

“We’re on. Ninety minutes.”

“What’s crucial?”

“We don’t know where. Venue matters. We need exterior, need privacy. But so do they. You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

“Get a pullover. Back of the van’s unheated.” He’d brought out a second phone. “Message all,” he said, tapping a few tiny keys. The phone beeped.

She glanced around Number Four. The insect-parts wallpaper, the shelves with their busts and heads. Would she see this again? “Are you taking the scooter?”

“No further than the door,” he said, rising from the bed with the aid of his cane. “It’s Frank’s turn.” He winced.

She’d just pulled a sweater on. “Are you all right?”

“Actually,” he said, “I am. Be a dear and get the ugly T-shirt from the bedside hutch. And the other package, the smaller one.”

“What’s that?”

“Almost nothing. And a world of woe, for someone. Quick. There’s a vegan van waiting for us.”

“What the fuck is up?” demanded Heidi, from the other side of Number Four’s door.

Hollis opened the door.

Heidi stood, glaring, majorette jacket open over Israeli army bra. “Ajay just got a text, hauled ass down the hall, said he had to see his cousin.” She saw Garreth. “Was that you?”

“Yes,” said Garreth, “but you’re coming with us.”

“Whatever the fuck this is,” Heidi said, “I’m coming with—”

“Us,” interrupted Garreth, “but
not
if you make us late. And put a shirt on. Trainers, not boots. In case there’s running.”

Heidi opened her mouth, closed it.

“Time to go,” said Hollis, zipping her bag shut.

“Not without the party favors,” said Garreth.

M
ilgrim stood, feeling lost, remembering the sound of Fiona’s Kawasaki fading to nothing at all.

She’d gotten a message from Garreth and was gone, leaving her chicken and bacon sandwich uneaten on the table in the Vegas cube, but not before she’d snapped a short length of transparent nylon line to tiny eyebolts, front and rear, on the paint-dazzled penguin. He’d helped her steer it through the door, and she’d anchored it, atop Benny’s huge red tool kit, by placing a hammer on the fishing line. Then she’d quickly returned to the cube, where she’d given him the penguin’s iPhone. “That little van I brought you here in,” she said, “will be here shortly. Wait in the yard, with the penguin. It’ll fit in the back.”

“Where are you going?”

“Don’t know.” Zipping up her jacket.

“Am I going to the same place?”

“Depends on Garreth,” she’d said, and for a moment he’d imagined she might be about to kiss him, maybe just on the cheek, but she hadn’t. “Take care of yourself,” she said.

“You too.”

Then she was out the door, and gone.

He’d carefully rewrapped her sandwich, tucking it into one of the huge side pockets of the nylon jacket, which he’d kept on. He’d give it to her if he saw her later. Then he noticed Mrs. Benny’s black helmet on the table, and took it to mean he wouldn’t be riding with Fiona tonight. He picked it up and sniffed the interior, hoping for hairspray, but couldn’t find it now.

He put his bag, with the Air, over his shoulder, dialed the Italian umbrella down, and went out, closing the door behind him. If there was a way to lock it, he didn’t know it.

He went to Benny’s toolbox, freed the penguin, and walked out into the yard, the line through his left fist, which he held upright, as though he were holding a subway strap.

“Going out?” asked Benny. He held one of the fiberglass cowlings.

Milgrim had had no idea that he was there. How late did Benny work? Or was he another cog, now, in Garreth’s plan? “They’re picking me up,” said Milgrim.

“Have a good one, then,” said Benny, seemingly paying no attention to the penguin. “I’ll lock up.”

Then the little Japanese minivan with the curtains and the moonroof pulled up, the driver’s-side window powering down. A Japanese mini-driver, looking about fifteen, in a crisp white shirt. “I’ll help you put that in the back,” he said, with a British accent. He cut the engine and got out.

“Where are we going?”

“Haven’t been told yet, but we’re in a bit of a hurry.”

T
he broken wheel on her roll-aboard woke, like some ominous precision measuring device, as she pulled it along the corridor to the rear lobby. She’d gone to say goodbye to the ferret, though she doubted she’d ever be able to explain that to anyone. Garreth might understand, who had his own odd ways with fear. She saw the empty scooter-chair, abandoned beside the glass slab door, where Robert now stood.

“Congratulations, Miss Henry,” he said, inexplicably and rather tenderly, as he opened and held the door for her. Unwilling, after more definitely having noted a multiplication of identical follies in the watercolors upstairs, plus her moment just now with the ferret, to risk further liminality, she thanked him, smiling, and clicked swiftly on, out beneath a porte cochere she supposed had been built for actual coaches, and on toward the back of the tall Slow Foods van, drawn up near it. Tall, the van, a big one, and newly painted a rich aubergine, lettered and trimmed in a dull bronze, as if the Queen herself were vegan, if vegan was what Slow Food was about, and fond of Aubrey Beardsley.

“Hello,” said the driver, brunette under her Foleyesque cap, and prettily Norwegian. Both a professional truck driver and an actress. Hollis knew all this because she’d overheard Garreth hiring her, via some third party, and hadn’t realized until now that this was what that had been about. “There are two zippered panels, inside these doors,” the driver said, indicating the back of the truck. “I’ll open the first for you, then close it, then you’ll open and close the second. It’s to make sure no light escapes. Clear?” The girl smiled, and Hollis found herself smiling back. Aside from driving, Hollis knew, she was there to engage the authorities, should there be any trouble with where they were parked later. Now the girl opened one of the van’s rear doors, revealing a taut wall of black canvas, like something in a conjuring trick, and climbed three very sturdy-looking folding aluminum steps, where she raised a tall vertical zip. “Give me your bag.” Hollis passed it up. The driver put it through the slit, climbed down. Hollis went up the steps, through the slit, the zip’s plastic teeth odd against her wrist, then turned and pulled the zipper most of the way down. The girl pulled it the rest of the way, leaving Hollis in absolute darkness.

Behind her, the other zip went up, admitting startlingly bright light. She turned and saw Garreth, and behind him Pep, wearing what she instantly knew must be the ugly T-shirt.

“I didn’t think it would literally be that ugly,” she said, stepping through the second zip.

It was. Pep, in black cyclist’s pants, wore the largest, ugliest T-shirt she’d ever seen, in a thin, cheap-looking cotton the color of ostomy devices, that same imaginary Caucasian flesh-tone. There were huge features screened across it in dull black halftone, asymmetrical eyes at breast height, a grim mouth at crotch-level. Later she’d be unable to say exactly what had been so ugly about it, except that it was somehow beyond punk, beyond art, and fundamentally, somehow, an affront. Diagonals at the edges continued around the sides, and across the short, loose sleeves. Pep leered at her, or perhaps only looked at her, and pulled the strap of a dark green messenger bag over his head, tucking what she recognized as Garreth’s other party favor into it.

“Don’t forget to take that bag off,” Garreth said. He was seated in a black workstation chair that appeared to have been taped to the shiny aubergine floor. “Queer the visuals, otherwise.”

Pep leered, or perhaps smiled, in reply, then stepped past her, through the open zip in the second scrim of black canvas. She saw the same hideous features repeated on the back of the shirt. He bent, picked up her bag, deposited it inside, then ran the zipper down, vanishing. She heard the other zipper being opened, then closed, then the sound of the door being closed.

She turned to Garreth, but saw that he was mounting his black laptop in a sort of clasp that extended from a framework of black plastic pipe. The pipe, like a geometric model of a rectangular solid, almost filled the interior of the van. Like Garreth’s chair, it was held in place with that nonreflective black tape that kept film sets together. There were things mounted on the framework: two plasma screens, one above the other, cables, boxes and bits the cables plugged into, and several very stylish-looking LED lamps.

“Where we going?” asked Heidi, sounding oddly subdued, seated on the floor at the front, her back against another centrally zippered sheet of black canvas.

“Should know shortly,” Garreth said as he finished locking his computer in place, so that it sat before him on an invisible desk.

“Where’s Ajay gone?”

“Wherever we’re going,” Garreth said, “but with Charlie.”

It all smelled of pipe cement, new electronics, lighting.

“Sit down beside Heidi,” Garreth said as Hollis heard the driver’s door slam shut. “There’s foam.”

Hollis did.

“Crazy,” said Heidi, eyes wide, looking from Hollis to the rig that surrounded them. “Claustrophobia.”

“What about it?” Hollis asked.

“I’ve got it,” said Heidi.

The driver started the engine. The van was moving away from Cabinet.

Deal, said Hollis, silently, to the ferret, though she hadn’t really been aware of making one.

“I’ve never heard you say anything about claustrophobia,” Hollis said.

“Fujiwara says it was being married to fuckstick. Why I went to him in the first place. I thought it was just wanting to beat the living fuck out of somebody, y’know?”

“You don’t think it was?”

“When he got me calmed down, building models, I could see that it was not wanting to feel trapped.”

“Did you finish your Breast Chaser?” Thinking it might help, to keep her talking.

“Not enough detail,” Heidi said, sadly.

“Have an ETA?” Garreth asked someone. He was conversing in clipped but genial near-code, with some unknown number of people, his headset plugged into a switchbox attached to an octopus galaxy of phones.

“How ’bout us?” said Heidi. “Do we?”

“Hush. He has to concentrate.”

“Understand what he’s doing?”

“No, but it’s complicated.”

“Ajay’s cousin got him up in whiteface. Filled the notch in his nose with putty. Dyed his hair shit-brown and sprayed stuff on the sides.”

“They want him to be mistaken for Milgrim.”

“I
got
that. Why?”

“Someone’s kidnapped Bigend’s star researcher. They’re demanding Milgrim in exchange for him.”

“Why would they?”

“Actually,” Hollis said, “it seems to be because you stuck the man who was following you with that dart, though Milgrim had already fucked him up himself.”

Heidi, her large white hands locked tightly across her knees, black nails chipped, regarded Hollis from just above them with utmost seriousness. “Are you shitting me?”