Zero History (52 page)

He’d tried working in the smallest of the four lounges, on the top deck, directly behind the flight deck (if that was the term, in something that arguably voyaged, rather than flew). There was scarcely anyone there, usually, and he could take the papers and his laptop. But the wifi was excellent onboard, and he’d found himself Googling things there, eating croissants, drinking coffee. That was where he’d discovered Cabinet’s site.

“That’s Cabinet, isn’t it?” the Italian girl had asked, topping up his coffee. “Have you stayed there?”

“No,” Milgrim had said, “but I’ve been there.”

“I used to work there,” she’d said, smiling, and walked back toward the galley, looking very smart in her Jun Marukawa tunic and skirt. Fiona said that Bigend, with the Hermès ekranoplan, had gone totally Bond villain, and that the crew uniforms were the icing on the cake. Still, Milgrim had thought, no denying the girl looked good in her Marukawa.

But when he’d finally settled down to translate what was really quite dreadful prose, Bigend had emerged from the flight deck, the Klein Blue suit freshly pressed.

He’d taken a seat opposite Milgrim, at the small round table, the suit contrasting painfully with the orange leather upholstery. He’d proceeded, with no preface whatever, as was his way, to tell Milgrim a great deal about the history of the rifle Gracie had left on Little Wormwood Scrubs. It had, Milgrim had already known, been found, just after dawn, by a dog walker, who’d promptly phoned the police. Stranger things, Milgrim now knew, had been found on the Scrubs, including unexploded munitions, and not that long ago.

He’d learned then that the police who’d responded to the dog walker had been ordinary police, so that the rifle’s serial numbers had been, however briefly, in ordinary police computers. Shortly to evaporate, under the attention of spookier entities, but long enough for Bigend, however he might have done it, to acquire them. He now knew, somehow, that the rifle, Chinese-made, had been captured in Afghanistan two years before, and dutifully logged. After that, a blank, until Gracie had turned up with it, folded, in a cardboard carton. It bothered Bigend, the rifle. It was his theory (or “narrative,” Milgrim’s therapist in Basel might have said) that Gracie had gotten the gun from some opposite number in the British military, after it had been secretly deleted from stores and smuggled back to England. But Bigend’s concern now was just how opposite a number this theoretical person might have been. Might Gracie have had a British partner, someone with similar inclinations? Someone who hadn’t been rolled up by whatever supercops Garreth had called down?

Milgrim hadn’t thought so. “I think it was about the gun,” he’d said.

“How do you mean, ‘about the gun’?”

“Things happen around guns. This happened because a gun was there. You’ve told me that you can’t understand why Gracie brought the gun. That it doesn’t fit with your sense of who he is. That it was stupid. Over-the-top. Gratuitous. Bad business.”

“Exactly.”

“He did it because someone he knew here had the gun. The gun was captured by British troops. Someone smuggled it back here. That’s not arms dealing. That’s an illegal souvenir. But Gracie
saw
the gun. And then he
had
the gun. And then things happened, because the gun was there. But whoever he
got
the gun from wants
nothing
at all to do with any of this. Ever.”

Bigend had stared at him. “Remarkable,” he’d said, finally, “how you do that.”

“It’s thinking like a criminal,” Milgrim said.

“Once again, I’m in your debt.”

In Winnie’s, Milgrim thought then, though Bigend didn’t know it. When he’d tweeted her, after learning more from Hollis, he’d asked, “How did you do that?” Her tweet in reply, the last he’d gotten from her, though he still checked for them, periodically, had simply said, “Doilies.”

“It’s the order flow, isn’t it?” Milgrim had had no intent to ask this at all. Hadn’t been thinking of it. Yet it had emerged. His therapist had told him that ideas, in human relations, had lives of their own. Were in a sense autonomous.

“Of course.”

“That’s what Chombo was doing. Finding the order flow.”

“He found it a week before they kidnapped him, but his work, to that point, would have been useless. Without him, I mean.”

“And the market, the whole thing, it’s no longer real? Because you know the future?”

“It’s a very
tiny
slice of the future. The merest paring. Minutes.”

“How many?”

Bigend had glanced around the empty lounge. “Seventeen, presently.”

“Is that enough?”

“Seven would have been entirely adequate. Seven
seconds
, in most cases.”

Fiona’s dress was a seamless tube, lustrous black jersey. She was wearing it with the top rolled down, forming a sort of band across her breasts, her shoulders bare. A gift from her mother, she said, who’d gotten it from an associate editor at French
Vogue
. Milgrim knew almost nothing about her mother, other than that she’d once been involved with Bigend, but he’d always found the idea of girlfriends having parents intimidating.

He wore his freshly dry-cleaned tweed jacket and whipcord trousers, but with a Hackett shirt, no extraneous cuff-buttons.

Cocktails were being served in the ballroom, so-called, which ordinarily was the main dining room. The walls were decorated with quasi-Constructivist murals of ekranoplans, looking, as Milgrim thought they somewhat actually did, like the Pan American Airways Flying Clippers of the 1940s, but with truncated wings and that strange canard that supported the jet engines. As he and Fiona descended the spiral stairway, he saw Aldous and the other driver towering elegantly above the assembled passengers, many of whom Milgrim hadn’t seen before, as he and Fiona had been spending most of their time in the cabin. There was Rausch, too, his black suit rumpled, his matte hair reminding Milgrim of the stuff Chandra had used on Ajay, though with a different style of application.

As they reached the deck, Aldous arrived at the bottom of the stairs. “Hello,” said Milgrim, not having seen Aldous since that night in the City. “Thanks for getting us out of that. Hope it wasn’t too hard on you, after.”

“Bigend’s silk,” said Aldous, with an elegant shrug, which Milgrim knew meant lawyer. “And the courier,” he said to Fiona, winking.

“Hullo, Aldous.” She smiled, then turned away to greet someone Milgrim didn’t know.

“I’ve been wondering,” said Milgrim, lowering his voice, glancing across the ballroom at the polished head of the other driver, “about the testing. It’s been a while.”

“What testing?”

“Urinalysis,” said Milgrim.

“I think they discontinue that. Gone from the call sheets. But everything’s changing, now.”

“At Blue Ant?”

Aldous nodded. “New broom,” he said, gravely, then nodded to his own earpiece, and slipped silently away.

“We found your mouthwash,” said Rausch. “In New York. Sending it to your cabin.” He looked unhappy with Milgrim, but then he always did.

“Aldous says that things are changing at Blue Ant. ‘New broom,’ he said.”

Rausch’s shoulders rose. “Everyone who matters,” he said, “who’s made the cut, is on this plane.”

“It’s not a plane,” said Milgrim.

“Whatever it is,” said Rausch, irritably.

“Do you know when we reach Iceland?”

“Tomorrow morning. A lot of this has just been cruising, breaking the thing in.”

“I’m almost out of medication.”

“That’s all been placebos for the past three months. I suppose the vitamins and supplements were real.” Rausch watched him carefully, savoring his reaction.

“Why tell me now?”

“Bigend told everyone to afford you full human status. And I quote. Excuse me.” He scooted away into the crowd.

Milgrim slid his hand inside his jacket, to touch the almost-empty bubble-pack. No more tiny purple notations of date and time. “But I
like
a placebo,” he said to himself, and then there was a burst of applause.

The Dottirs and their unpleasant-looking father were descending the spiral, down the thick steps of frosted glass. Milgrim knew, via Fiona, that their album had just gone something. Ermine-haired and glittering, they stepped down, on either side of their glum Dottirs-father. Who Fiona said now owned, in partnership with Bigend, though in some arcane and largely undetectable way, a great deal of Iceland. Most of it, really. It had been Bigend, she said, who’d sold those young Icelandic fiscal cowboys on the idea of internet banking in the first place. “He put them up to it,” she’d said, in the cabin, in Milgrim’s arms. “He knew exactly what would happen. Out of their heads on E, most of them, which helped.”

A toast was being poured. He hurried to find Fiona and his glass of Perrier.

As he took her hand, Pamela Mainwaring walked quickly past, headed in Bigend’s direction.

“Hi, Mum,” said Fiona.

Pamela smiled, nodded, made the briefest possible eye contact with Milgrim, and continued on.

C
lockwise, this dream: eighteenth-century marble, winding, worn stone unevenly waxy, tones of smoker’s phlegm caught in its depths, profiles of each step set with careful segments of something lifeless as plaster, patching old accidents. Like the scribed, transected, stapled sections of a beloved limb, returned from voyaging: surgery, disaster, a climb up stairs taller still than these. Westernmost, the spiral. Above the lobby, the stripes of Robert’s shirt, the Turk’s head atop the stapler, above the subtly rude equine monkey-business in the desk’s carved thicket, she climbs.

To this floor unvisited, unknown, carpet flowered, faded, antediluvian, beneath incandescent bulbs, an archaic controlled combusion of filaments. Walls hung with madly varied landscapes, unpeopled, each haunted, however dimly, by the spectral finger of the Burj Khalifa.

And at the far end of a vast, perhaps endless room, in a pool of warm light, a figure, seated, in a suit of Klein Blue. As it turns, pale fur, muzzle rouged, the wooden painted teeth—

She wakes beside Garreth’s slow breathing, in their darkened room, the sheets against her skin.

My wife Deborah and daughter Claire were on-site first readers and sensitive critics, as ever.

Susan Allison, to whom this book is dedicated, and who has been my editor in one sense or another since the start of my career, of course was excellent with this one.

As indeed was Martha Millard, my literary agent since I first required one.

Jack Womack and Paul McAuley read pages almost daily, with Paul keeping very particular track of London. Louis Lapprend was enlisted as Milgrim arrived in Paris, to similar ends.

Cory Doctorow provided Sleight with Milgrim’s problematic Neo.

Johan Kugelberg very kindly put me up in the club on which Cabinet is loosely based, and which is very nearly as peculiar.

Sean Crawford kept Winnie honest.

Larry Lunn gave me the order flow, when asked for a macguffin of ultimate scale. I don’t know anyone else who could have.

Clive Wilson very kindly offered boots-on-the-ground Melbourne geography and vegan bacon.

Douglas Coupland introduced me to the concept of the Vegas cube by showing me, years ago, the one he’d built to write in.

Bruce Sterling, having been emailed exactly the wrong question about CCTV, graciously extruded the concept of the ugly T-shirt in one of his characteristic, demonically focused bursts of seemingly effortless imagination.

Michaela Sachenbacher and Errolson Hugh introduced me to the architecture of a “secret” brand, and the passion behind it.

Everything I know about being a fashion model in the 21st Century I learned from Jenna Sauers’ wonderful
Jezebel
memoir, “I Am The Anonymous Model.” Meredith’s modeling career is based on it. Available with a quick Google.

Likewise available is Mark Gardiner’s very informative “Artful Dodgers,” from the February 2009 issue of
Motorcyclist
, where I learned everything I know about London motorcycle couriers.

Meredith’s line of shoes was modeled after the brand Callous, launched by Thomas Fenning and Tomoaki Kobayashi in 2003, and which I gather met a somewhat similar fate.

Thank you all.

—Vancouver,
June 2010