Zero history

24. HUNCH

Milgrim sat at a table in the courtyard’s busy cafe, camera in his lap, cycling through his four shots of Foley.

The two from behind might be useful if you wanted to send someone to follow him. The quarter profile, against a glare of Eighties color, was actually less useful. Could be anyone. Had women’s clothing actually been that bright, in the Eighties?

But this one, which he’d shot blind, by reaching around, behind a hennaed German girl, was excellent. The girl had given him a dirty look, for getting too close. He’d smelled her perfume; something pointedly inorganic. The scent of coolly focused concentration, perhaps. “Sorry,” he’d said, and stepped back, palming the little camera, wondering if he’d captured Foley, who now had vanished again.

He’d looked down, summoned the image. And had found Foley, zoomed, in tight focus, crookedly off-center in the frame. He’d seen how Foley’s sunglasses had left slight tan lines, recalling the porn rectangle he’d worn on the link Winnie had sent. The cap’s short bill effectively concealed his forehead, cutting out a good deal of emotional information. His features were smooth, as if untouched by experience, and confident, a confidence that Milgrim suspected he might not entirely be feeling. Something he’d try to project, regardless of the situation.

With the camera semiconcealed in his right hand, Milgrim had moved on, scanning the busy Salon for Foley. He’d soon found him, but simultaneously had found Hollis, who was listening intently to a younger woman in jeans and a white shirt. Hollis had seen him, he was certain. Milgrim, focused on Foley’s receding back, had ignored her, avoiding eye-connect. When Foley had descended the stairs, Milgrim had followed, then had watched as Foley left the building.

He’d gone into the courtyard, ordered an espresso, and settled down to study his photographs.

Now he turned the camera off, opened the little hatch on the bottom and removed the blue card, the size of a postage stamp. When had he last used an actual postage stamp? He couldn’t remember. It gave him a strange feeling to even think of one. He reached down, hiked the cuff of his new pants, and slipped the card quite far down into his sock, which he then pulled up, allowing his cuff to fall back into place.

He was not a methodical man by nature, his therapist had said, but the constant ongoing state of emergency imposed by his active addiction had shown him the practical advantages of method, which had then become habit.

He took an unused card from the inside pocket of his jacket and extracted it, with the usual difficulty, from its cardboard backing. He inserted it, closed the hatch, and slipped the camera into the side pocket of his jacket.

The Neo rang, from a different pocket. He brought it out. It looked even uglier than usual.

“Yes?”

“Just checking your phone,” Sleight said, unconvincingly. “We’re having trouble with the whole system.” Sleight had always spoken of the Neos as a system, but Milgrim had met no one else, other than Sleight, who had one.

“Seems to be working,” Milgrim said.

“How are things?”

Sleight had never made it a secret that he was able to track Milgrim with the Neo, but only referred to it obliquely, if at all. The subtext, now, being that he knew Milgrim was in Paris. Knew that Milgrim was in this courtyard of this building, perhaps, given that extra overlay of Russian GPS.

When their relationship had begun, Milgrim had been unwilling to question anything. Sleight had set the terms, in every way, and so it had been.

“It’s raining,” said Milgrim, looking up at blue sky, bright clouds.

A silence lengthened.

He was trying to force Sleight to admit to knowing his location, but he didn’t know why. It was something to do with the anger he’d felt, was probably still feeling. Was that a good thing?

“How’s New York?” Milgrim asked, losing his nerve.

“Toronto,” said Sleight, “getting hot. See you.” He was gone.

Milgrim looked at the Neo. Something was unfolding within him. Like a brochure, he thought, rather than the butterfly he imagined to be the more common image. An unpleasant brochure, the sort that lays out symptoms all too clearly.

Why had Sleight actually called? Had he really needed to check Milgrim’s phone? Did a brief moment of live voice provide Sleight with the opportunity to manipulate the Neo in some way that he couldn’t, otherwise?

If Milgrim spoke now, he wondered for the very first time, would Sleight hear him?

It suddenly seemed entirely likely to him that Sleight could.

He sat back in his white-enameled aluminum chair, aware again of that emotion he supposed was anger. He could feel the Faraday pouch, containing his passport, slung on its cord, under his shirt. Blocking radio waves. Preventing the RFID in his U.S. passport from being read.

He looked at the Neo.

Without consciously making any decision, he undid the top button of his shirt, fished the pouch out, opened it, and slid the Neo in with his passport. He tucked it back into his shirt and buttoned up.

The pouch was bulkier now, visible under his shirt.

He finished his espresso, which had cooled, and was bitter, and left some coins on the small square receipt. He stood up, buttoned his jacket over the slight bulge of the pouch, and reentered the Salon du Vintage. Still scanning for Foley, who for all he knew had returned.

He took his time, making his way up the stairs, and then stood for a while, looking up at the blowup of Hollis’s poster. Then he undid his top button again, drew out the pouch, opened it, and removed the Neo, which rang immediately.

“Hello?” As he tucked the pouch back in with his free hand.

“Were you on an elevator?”

“It was filled with Japanese girls,” Milgrim said, watching one pass. “Only three floors, here, but I couldn’t get off.”

“Just checking,” said Sleight, neutrally, and hung up.

Milgrim looked at the Neo, Sleight’s extension, wondering for the first time if it was really off when he turned it off. Perhaps it needed its batteries removed for that. Though, come to think it, Sleight forbade that. Or its two cards, which Milgrim was also forbidden to remove.

Sleight had noticed it going into the Faraday pouch. Milgrim had been briefly invisible, as he’d sometimes gathered he was in elevators, for similar reasons.

Given everything else Sleight had said he could do with the Neo, having it function as a bug actually seemed like a very modest capacity. And it would help explain why they’d bothered with the thing at all, cranky as it was. He’d been carrying around a wire. Would Bigend have known about that? Milgrim wondered.

Sleight had given him the Neo on their flight from Basel to London, at the end of Milgrim’s treatment. He’d had it with him constantly, since then. Except, he remembered, yesterday, when Sleight had ordered him to leave it in his room. When Winnie had taken his picture. When he’d gone to Blue Ant to tell Bigend about that, and Bigend had suggested he no longer trusted Sleight. When he’d gone to the department store to have lunch with Hollis, then back to his hotel, where Winnie had been waiting. So Sleight had missed all of that, missed it because, if he was telling the truth, the company that made the Neo had gone bankrupt. “Lucky,” said Milgrim, then winced, imagining Sleight, Bluetoothed, somewhere, hearing him. But if Foley was Sleight’s, which was only one possibility, how had Foley known to find them at the department store? Perhaps he was following Hollis instead? But then, he reminded himself, Foley was someone else who had his picture on Winnie’s wall.

The Neo rang in his hand.

“Yes?”

“Where are you?” Hollis. “I saw you walk past.”

“Can you meet me? By the entrance, downstairs.”

“Are you up here?”

“Downstairs.”

“On my way,” she said.

“Good,” he said, and clicked off. Resisting the impulse to whistle for Sleight’s benefit, he put his phone in his jacket pocket, then removed his jacket, wrapped it several times around the phone, tucked the resulting bundle under his arm, and headed for the stairs.