Zero History Part 18

27. j.a.pANESE BASEBALL

How's Paris?" The image that came up for Heidi's call, on the iPhone, was a decade old, black-and-white, gritty. Jimmy's white Fender ba.s.s, out of focus in the foreground.

"I don't know," Hollis said. She was in Sevres-Babylone, walking between platforms, her bag's trick wheel ticking steadily, like a personal metronome. She had decided to give Milgrim's worries the benefit of the doubt, taking a random course through the Metro, short hops, line changes, abrupt reversals. If anyone was following her, she hadn't noticed them. But it was crowded now, tiring, and she'd just decided to head for Odeon, and the hotel, when Heidi called. "I think I've found something, but someone may have found me."

"Meaning?"

"Milgrim thought he saw someone, here, who he'd seen in London. At Selfridges, when you were getting your hair cut."

"You said he was bugf.u.c.k."

"I said he seemed unfocused. Anyway, he seems more focused now. Though maybe bugf.u.c.k too." At least her bag wasn't too heavy, minus the copy of her book that she'd given Milgrim. And her Air, she remembered: He still had that.

"Does Bigend have people there for you?"

"I didn't want that. I didn't tell them where I was staying."

"Where are you staying?"

"Latin Quarter." She hesitated. "A hotel where I stayed with Garreth."

Heidi pounced. "Really. And was that Garreth's choice, then, or yours?"

"His." As she reached her platform, and the waiting crowd.

"And which hand are you carrying this torch in?"

"I'm not."

"My hairy a.s.s you're not."

"You don't. Have one."

"Don't be so sure," Heidi said. "Marriage."

"What about it?"

"Does things to you."

"And how's f.u.c.kstick?

"Out on bond now. Not that much media. Ponzi's under a half a billion total. Current climate, they're embarra.s.sed to offer the story to the public. Petty sums. Like foreign serial killers."

"What about them?" The train was pulling in.

"America's the capital of serial murder. Foreign serial murder's like j.a.panese baseball."

"How are you, Heidi?"

"Found a gym. Hacky."

"Hackney."

The doors opened and the crowd moved forward, taking Hollis with it.

"Thought it was where they invented the sack." Disappointed. "Kind of like Silverlake. Fixed-up. Creatives. But the gym's old-school. MMA."

The doors closed behind her, the embrace of the crowd, mildly personal smells, the roll-aboard against her leg. "What's that?"

"Mixed martial arts," said Heidi, as if pleased with a dessert menu.

"Don't," advised Hollis. "Remember the boxers." The train began to move. "Gotta go."

"Fine," said Heidi, and was gone.

Six minutes on Line 10 and she was on another platform, Odeon, wheel ticking. Then telescoping the bag's handle to carry it up the stairs, into slanting sunlight and the sound and smell of the traffic on St. Germain, all of this entirely too familiar, as though she'd never left, and now the fear surfacing, acknowledgement that Heidi was right, that she'd tricked herself into revisiting the scene of a perfect crime. Dreamlike reactivation of pa.s.sion. The smell of his neck. His library of scars, hieroglyphic, waiting to be traced.

"Oh, please," she said. Snapping out the bag's handle, trundling it across wheel-eating cobbles, toward the hotel. Past the candyseller's wagon. Then the window offering fancy dress. Satin capes, plague-doctor masks with penile noses. The smart little drugstore at the angle of two streets, offering hydraulic breast-ma.s.sage devices and Swiss skin serums packaged like the latest in vaccines.

Into the hotel, where the man at the desk recognized but didn't greet her. Discretion rather than a lack of friendliness. She gave her name, signed in, confirmed that Milgrim's room was on her card, received her key on a heavy bra.s.s medallion cast with the head of a lion. Then into the elevator, smaller even than the one at Cabinet but more modern, like a pale bronze telephone booth. The feeling of being in a telephone booth almost forgotten now. How things went away.

In the third-floor hallway, ma.s.sive crooked timbers stood exposed. A maid's cart with towels and miniature soaps. Unlocking the door to her room.

Which to her considerable relief was neither of the two she'd stayed in with Garreth, though the view was virtually identical. A room the size of the bathroom at Cabinet, smaller perhaps. All dark reds and black and Chinese gold; some weird chinoiserie that Cabinet's decorators would have supercharged with busts of Mao and heroic proletarian posters.

It seemed odd, to not be in Cabinet, and that struck her as a bad sign.

I should find a flat, she said to herself, realizing she had no idea what country she should find it in, let alone which city. Putting her bag on the bed. Scarcely room to walk, here, except for a narrow circuit around the bed. Reflexively ducking the determinedly nondigital television slung in its white-painted bracket from the ceiling. Garreth had cut his head on one.

She sighed.

Looking across at the buildings opposite, remembering.

Don't. She turned back to the bed and her bag, unzipping it. She'd packed as lightly as possible. Toiletries, makeup, a dress, hose, dressier shoes, underwear. Taking out the dress, to hang it up, she discovered the Blue Ant figurine, which she was certain she hadn't packed, grinning perkily up at her. She remembered missing it, on the counter, beside the sink, in Cabinet.

"h.e.l.lo," she said, the tension in her voice startling her, as she picked it up.

Its grin becoming the Mona Lisa's smile, as she'd stood with Garreth, hand in his.

Looking up at him, she'd seen that he wasn't looking at the Mona Lisa at all, but rather at its plexi-shield, its mountings, and whatever of the Louvre's invisible security devices were somehow evident to him.

"You're imagining stealing it, aren't you?"

"Only academically. That laminated ledge, just beneath it? That's interesting. You'd want to know exactly what's inside. Quite thick, isn't it? Good foot thick. Something's in there. A surprise."

"You're terrible."

"Absolutely," he'd said, releasing her hand, caressing the back of her neck. "I am."

She put the figurine on the built-in bedside table, much smaller than the Mona Lisa's defensive ledge, and forced herself to unpack the rest of her things.

28. WHITE PEAR TEA

The cost of wifi was white pear tea.

Milgrim looked at the two-cup gla.s.s tea press on the round white table, beyond the matte aluminum rectangle of Hollis's laptop. He wasn't sure why he'd chosen white pear. Probably because he wasn't very fond of tea, and because almost everything else here was white. He decided to let it steep awhile longer.

He was alone, in this narrow white shop, with a great deal of tea and a girl in a nicely fitting, crisply starched cotton dress, faintly pinstriped in gray, not unlike a tennis dress. He hadn't thought of Parisians as tea drinkers, but if this place was any indication, they preferred it in ultrafragile gla.s.s pots. Walls lined with shallow white shelves, modernist apothecary jars filled with dried vegetable matter, plus a glittering, halogen-spotted a.s.sortment of these pots and presses. Equally minimalist cozies, in thick gray felt. A few green plants. Three small tables, each with two chairs.

From outside, the occasional whine and sputter of pa.s.sing scooters. The street was almost too narrow for cars. Somewhere in the Latin Quarter, if the cabdriver had understood him.

Now the girl began to give the apothecary jars the once-over with a feather duster. Like performance art, or some highly conceptual species of p.o.r.nography. The sort of thing that turned out to mainly be about the pinstripes. Or the tea.

He opened the pencil-thin laptop and turned it on.

Hollis's desktop was a digital representation of interstellar s.p.a.ce. Mauve galactic clouds. Was she interested in astronomy, he wondered, or was this something from Apple? He imagined the laptop displaying an image of itself instead, and of the tea press, on the white laminate. And in that imagined screen, another, identical image. Tunneling down, Escher-style, to a few pixels. He thought of the art in Hollis's book, and of the Neo, which he now a.s.sumed was on its way to some forbiddingly upscale suburb, or there already, his own small effort in GPS art.

He noted that he felt remarkably calm about that, about what he'd done. The main thing, it seemed, was that he'd done it. It was done. But noting this caused him to start to remember Sleight.

After his cab ride from Galeries Lafayette, to a randomly chosen intersection near here, he'd felt relatively certain that he was off Sleight's map. Now he considered Hollis's laptop, wondering if Sleight might not have been at that as well. Though Hollis said she was new in Bigend's employ, this time at least.

He opened the browser, then his webmail. Could Sleight see him do that? he wondered. His address, the first and only e-mail address he'd had, was a Blue Ant address. He opened Twitter. If he understood this correctly, Sleight might be able to know what he had opened, but would be unable to see what he was doing there. He entered his user name and pa.s.sword.

And Winnie was there. Or had been. "Whr R U?" An hour ago.

"Still Paris. Need to talk."

He refreshed the browser. No reply.

The girl in the cotton dress, having finished dusting, was looking at him. Reminding him, as he found certain young people did, of one of those otherwise fairly realistic j.a.panese cartoon characters, the ones with oversized Disney eyes. What was that about? It seemed to be international, whatever it was, though not yet universal. This was the sort of thing he'd gotten used to being able to ask Bigend about. Bigend actively encouraged this, because, he said, he valued Milgrim's questions. Milgrim had arrived from a decadelong low-grade brownout, and was, according to Bigend, like someone stepping from a lost s.p.a.ce capsule. Smooth clay, awaiting the telltale imprint of a new century.

"It is the Mac Air?" the girl asked.

Milgrim had to check the branding, at the bottom of the screen. "Yes," he said.

"It is very nice."

"Thank you," said Milgrim. Self-consciously, he carefully plunged the rod-and-ball atop the tea press, forcing clear fluid through a surgical grade of white nylon mesh. He poured some out, into the even more fragile-looking gla.s.s cup. Took a sip. Complexly metallic. Not much like tea. Though perhaps in a good way. "Do you have croissants?"

"Non," said the girl, said the girl, "pet.i.tes madeleines." "pet.i.tes madeleines."

"Please," said Milgrim, gesturing to his white table.

Proust cookies. It was literally all he knew of Proust, though he'd once had to listen to someone's lengthy argument that Proust had either described madeleines incorrectly or been describing something else entirely.

It was time for his medication. While the girl fetched his madeleines, from the rear of the shop, he took the bubble-pack from his bag and popped the day's ration of white capsules through the foil at the back of their individual bubbles. Out of long habit, he held them concealed in his palm. He'd replaced the bubble-pack by the time she returned, his three cookies on a square white plate. One plain, one lightly drizzled with something white, another with dark chocolate.

"Thank you," he said. He dunked the plain one briefly in his tea, perhaps out of some vague, Proust-related superst.i.tion, then quickly ate them all, as is. They were very good, and the white-drizzled one was almond. Finished, he washed the capsules from Basel down with white pear tea.

Then he remembered to refresh the browser again.

"R U there?" Two minutes ago.

"Yes. Sorry."

Refresh.

"Ur phons nt secure"

"Borrowed laptop. Lost phone." He hesitated. "I think Sleight was tracking me with it."

Refresh.

"U lost?"

"Got rid of it."

Refresh.

"Why??"

He had to think about that. "S was telling follower where I was."

Refresh.

"So??"

"Tired of it."

Refresh.

"No jack moves OK? B cool"

"Didn't want him to know where we're staying."

Refresh.