Zero History Part 13

"What are you reading?" he asked.

"Rogue Male. Geoffrey Household. It's about a man who tried to a.s.sa.s.sinate Hitler, or someone who's exactly like Hitler."

"Is it good?"

"Very good, though it really seems to be about wriggling down into the heart of the British countryside. Third act all seems to take place inside a hedgerow, down a badger hole."

"I like your book. Like people were able to freeze their dreams, leave them places, and you could go there and see them, if you knew how."

"Thank you," she said, putting Rogue Male Rogue Male down on the table, without bothering to mark her place. down on the table, without bothering to mark her place.

"Have you seen them all, yourself?"

"Yes, I have."

"What's your favorite?"

"River Phoenix, on the sidewalk. It was the first I saw. I never went back. Never saw it again. It made such a powerful impression. I suppose it was really why I decided to try to do a book, that impression."

Milgrim closed Presences Presences. He put it on the table, opposite Rogue Male Rogue Male. "Who are we going to see in Paris?"

"Meredith Overton. Studied at Cordwainers, shoe design, leather. She lives in Melbourne. Or did. She's in Paris for the Salon du Vintage, selling something. She's with a keyboard player named George, who's in a band called the Bollards. Do you know them?"

"No," said Milgrim.

"I know another Bollard, plus the man who's currently producing their music."

"She knows about Gabriel Hounds?"

"My other Bollard says she knew someone in London, when she was at Cordwainers, who knew someone involved in Hounds getting started."

"It started in London?"

"I don't know. Clammy met her in Melbourne. She was wearing Hounds, he wanted Hounds. She knew of Hounds locally. Some would be sold at a sort of art fair. He went with her and bought jeans. Says there was an American man there, selling them."

"Why do you think she'll talk to us?"

"I don't," she said. "But we can try."

"Why do people care? Why do you think Bigend does?"

"He thinks someone's copying some of his weirder marketing strategies," she said, "improving on them."

"And you think people want this brand because they can't have it?"

"In part."

"Drugs are valuable because you can't get them without breaking the law," Milgrim said.

"I thought they were valuable because they worked."

"They have to work," said Milgrim, "but the market value is about prohibition. Often they cost next to nothing to make. That's what it all runs on. They work, you need them, they're prohibited."

"How did you get out of that, Milgrim?"

"They changed my blood. Replaced it. And while they were doing that, they were reducing the dose. And there was a paradoxical antagonist."

"What's that?"

"I'm not sure," said Milgrim. "Another drug. And cognitive therapy."

"That sounds terrible," she said.

"I liked the therapy," Milgrim said. He could feel his pa.s.sport against his chest, tucked safely into its Faraday pouch.

Rainy French countryside leapt on the carriage's windows, hurtling, as if a switch had been thrown.

21. MINUS ONE

Foliage green," she heard Milgrim say, flatly, as she paid the driver with euros she'd gotten from an ATM in the Gare du Nord.

She turned. "What?"

He was half out of the cab, clutching his bag. "That department store, Oxford Street," he said. "Foliage green pants. Same man, just walked in. Where we're going." That sharp, nervy thing fully present now, the mildly confused semiconvalescent gone entirely. He looked as though he were sniffing the air.

"Keep the change," she said to the driver, shooing Milgrim out of the way and pulling her roll-aboard after her. She closed the door and the cab pulled away, leaving them on the sidewalk. "Are you sure?"

"Someone's watching us."

"Bigend?"

"Don't know. You go in."

"What will you do?"

"I'll see."

"Are you sure?"

"Let me borrow me your computer."

Hollis bent, unzipped the side of her bag, and pulled out her Mac. He tucked it under his arm, like a clipboard. She saw that vagueness returning, the blinking mildness. He's cloaking himself, she thought, then wondered what that meant.

"You go in now," he said, "please."

"Euros," she said, pa.s.sing him some bills.

She turned and wheeled her bag across the pavement, into the crowd around the venue's entrance. Was Milgrim imagining things? Possibly, though there was Bigend's penchant for attracting the most unwanted forms of attention, then following whatever followers turned up. Exactly what Milgrim claimed to be about to do. She looked back, expecting to see him, but he was gone.

She paid an entrance fee of five euros to a j.a.panese girl and was asked to check her bag.

A cobbled courtyard was visible through arches. Young women there were smoking cigarettes, making it look at once natural and profoundly attractive.

The Salon du Vintage itself was being held within the retrofitted seventeenth-century building to which the courtyard belonged, a previous decade's idea of sleek modernity smoothly folded into its fabric.

Every second or third person in her field of vision was j.a.panese, and many were moving in approximately one direction. She went with them, up a minimalist stairway of pale Scandinavian wood, emerging into the first of two very large bright rooms, chandeliers glittering above carefully arranged racks of clothing, gla.s.s-topped display tables and pieces of period furniture.

This year's iteration of the Salon du Vintage was devoted to the Eighties, she knew from having Googled it. She always found it peculiar to encounter a time she had actually lived through rendered as a period. It made her wonder whether she was living through another one, and if so, what it would be called. The first decades of the current century hadn't yet acquired any very solid nomenclature, it seemed to her. Seeing relatively recent period clothing, particularly, gave her an odd feeling. She guessed that she unconsciously revised the fashion of her own past, turning it into something more contemporary. It was never quite as she remembered it. Shoulders tended to be peculiar, hems and waistlines not where she expected them to be.

Not that her own Eighties had been anything like Gaultier, Mugler, Alaa and Montana, which she was now gathering was the version mainly being presented here.

She checked the handwritten price tag on a mulberry wool Mugler jacket. If Heidi were here, she decided, and were into this sort of thing, which she wasn't, f.u.c.kstick's remaining credit cards could probably be flatlined in an hour, with the resulting swag still fitting easily in a single cab.

She looked up, then, and winced at herself, in Anton Corbijn's 1996 portrait, enlarged and dry-mounted, suspended with transparent fishing line above the rack of Mugler. Anachronism, she thought. Not even her era.

Eager to escape the portrait, she declined an offer to try the Mugler on. Turning away, she brought out her iPhone. Bigend seemed to pick up before his phone had had a chance to ring.

"Do you have someone else here, Hubertus?"

"No," he said. "Should I?"

"You didn't have someone watching us, in Selfridges?"

"No."

"Milgrim thinks he's seen someone, someone he saw there."

"Always a possibility, I suppose. Paris office hasn't been told you're there. Would you like some company?"

"No. Just checking."

"Do you have anything for me?"

"Not yet. Just got here. Thanks." She hung up before he could say goodbye. Stood there with her arm c.o.c.ked, phone at ear-level, suddenly aware of the iconic nature of her unconscious pose. Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones. Human figures, a block down the street, in postures utterly familiar, were no longer smoking. The woman in Corbijn's portrait had never seen that.

The number Clammy had given her the night before rang several times before it was answered. "Yes?"

"George? It's Hollis Henry. We met at Cabinet, when Reg was still there."

"Yes," he said. "Clammy rang. You're needing to speak with Mere."

"I'd like to, yes."

"And you're here?"

"Yes."

"Afraid it's not possible." George sounded much more like a young barrister than the Bollards' keyboard player.

"She doesn't want to discuss it?"

"Not at all."

"I'm sorry," she said.

"No, really," he said, "not at all. She's closing a deal on the Chanel she brought from Melbourne. Tokyo dealers. Taken her out to lunch. Left me minding the shop."

Hollis held the iPhone away as she sighed with relief, then returned it to her ear. "She wouldn't mind talking with me, then?"

"Not at all. Loves your music. Mother's a great fan. Where are you?"

"Second floor. Not far from the stairs."

"Did you see they've a picture of you there?"

"Yes," she said, "I noticed."

"We're at the very back. I'll look out for you."

"Thanks." She walked on, pa.s.sing a display of denim work clothing she doubted was Eighties. All of it older than its dealer, she guessed, and she judged him to be in his forties. He watched her sharply as she pa.s.sed; the Hounds jacket, she thought.

She found Olduvai George beyond an archipelago of transparent inflatable orange furniture which didn't look Eighties to her either. He was smiling, natty and attractively simian, in jeans and a khaki raincoat.

"How are you?"

"Well, thanks," she said, shaking his hand. "How are you?"

"Haven't had a nibble since the Tokyo mob took Mere away. I don't think I have the retail gene."

Oxford, Inchmale had said of George, when she'd pressed him the night before. Balliol, graduated with a starred first PPE. Which she supposed she remembered perfectly now, because she had absolutely no idea what it might mean, other than that George was a.s.sumed to be monstrously overeducated for present employment. "And please don't tell anyone," Inchmale had added.

"Good thing you don't need it," she said, considering eight very pet.i.te, identically cut Chanel suits, displayed on austere charcoal-gray dress forms, that seemed to be the whole of Meredith Overton's stock. All cut from some thick fabric that resembled a highly magnified houndstooth check, in color combinations on the order of hot orange and mustard. She vaguely remembered oven mitts made of a similar material, similarly thick. She'd actually seen suits like this worn to very good effect once, but only once, and in Cannes. It had all depended, she'd thought at the time, on the way in which the two pieces resolutely refused to conform to the body. Now she saw that each garment had been threaded through with a slender steel cable, coated in transparent plastic. "Are they very valuable?"

"Hoping so. She found them in an estate sale in Sydney. They were made in the early Eighties, for the wife of a very successful property developer. Couture, exclusive fabrics. The sellers had no idea, but in order to do really well with them, it's either here, now, or Tokyo. And the significant j.a.panese buyers are all here, today, and Paris adds a certain symbolic leverage. They were made here."

"She was tiny," Hollis said, reaching out to touch a fabric-covered b.u.t.ton, but stopping.

"Would you like to see a photograph of her wearing one?"

"Really?"