Zero history

26. MOTHER RUSSIA

Kleenex?” Milgrim asked as the cab turned right, into what he recognized as the Rue du Temple. “My sinuses are bothering me,” he added, for Sleight’s benefit.

Hollis, seated to his left, behind the driver, produced a pack from her purse.

“Thanks.” He removed three tissues, handed the pack back, unfolded one, spread it across his knees, and took the Neo from his pocket. He showed it to her, presenting it from different angles, which made him feel something like a conjurer, though he was none too certain about what his trick might be.

The cab turned left, into another street, one that doubled back at a sharp angle. He imagined Sleight watching a cursor represent this on a screen. It seemed unlikely, though he couldn’t understand why that should be. He knew that Sleight did things like that, constantly. Sleight could be watching on the screen of his own Neo.

Milgrim lay the Neo on the Kleenex, resting it in the valley between his knees, opened the other two sheets, and began to carefully polish it. When he was finished, he remembered having idly removed the back, on the flight to Atlanta. Now he opened it again, rubbing down the inside of the battery cover and the exposed face of the battery, then replacing it. When he’d finished rubbing down the outside, he carefully folded the first tissue around it and slipped it into his pocket. He crumpled the other two and wiped his palms with them.

“Have you been in Paris before?” Hollis asked.

She seemed relaxed, her purse on her lap, the dark collar of the denim jacket turned up. “Once,” he said, “when I was just out of Columbia. For a month, with another graduate. We sublet an apartment.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“It was nice, to be here with someone.”

She looked out the window, as if remembering something, then looked back at him. “Were you in love?”

“No.”

“A couple?”

“Yes,” he said, though it seemed strange to say it.

“It didn’t work, for you?”

“I wasn’t available,” he said. “I didn’t know that, but I wasn’t, really. I learned that in Basel.” He remembered Sleight, their hypothetical listener. He pointed at the pocket that held his tissue-wrapped Neo.

“Sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay.”

They took a right, then left again, at an intersection where he glimpsed a sign for the Strasbourg-Saint-Denis Metro, and into heavier traffic.

They rode in silence for a few minutes. Then he undid the top button of his shirt and drew out the Faraday pouch.

“What’s that?”

“Metro station,” he said, for Sleight, then touched his index finger to his lips.

She nodded.

He opened the pouch, inserted the Neo, then closed it. “It blocks radio signals. Like when you’re in an elevator. If he was listening, he can’t hear us now. And he just lost track of where we are.”

“Why do you have it?”

“He gave it to me,” he said. “It’s for my passport. He’s worried someone will read the microchip.”

“Do they do that?”

“People like Sleight do.”

“How does it work?”

“It has metallic fibers. When I tested it, before, he lost me. Thought I was in an elevator.”

“But if it’s that easy,” she said, “why did he give it to you?”

“He insisted on it,” said Milgrim. “I think he really does worry about the chip-reading thing. It’s something he’s done himself.”

“But he gave you your means of avoiding surveillance, right there.”

“When I put it in the pouch, before, that was the first time I did something that I knew he wouldn’t want me to do. I wasn’t well, when I met him. He worked for Bigend and I did what I was told.”

She looked at him. Then nodded. “I understand.”

“But Sleight,” he said, “really liked it, having someone who’d do exactly what he said.”

“He would, yes.”

“I don’t think he imagined I’d ever get to the point where I’d use the pouch on the Neo. He would’ve enjoyed being able to count on that.”

“What will you do at Galeries Lafayette?”

“Wait till you’re gone, then take it out of the pouch. Then see who turns up.”

“But what if someone’s following us now, the old-fashioned way?”

“Have the driver take you to a Metro station. Do you know the Metro?”

“More or less.”

“If you’re clever, you can probably lose anyone who might try to follow you.”

“We’re here.”

He saw that they were in Boulevard Haussmann, the driver signaling to pull over.

“Take care of yourself,” she said. “If that was him I saw in the basement, I didn’t like the look of him.”

“I didn’t get the feeling that he was that good, at the Salon,” he said, checking that the strap of his bag was securely over his shoulder.

“Good?”

“Scary.”

He opened the door before the cab had fully come to a halt. The driver said something in irritated French. “Sorry,” he said as they stopped, and slipped out, closing the door behind him.

From the curb he looked back, saw Hollis smiling, telling the driver something. The cab pulled back into traffic.

He quickly entered Galeries Lafayette and walked on, until he was beneath the center of the soaring mercantile mosque-dome of stained glass. He stood there, looking up, briefly experiencing the reflexive country-mouse awe the architect had intended to induce. A cross between Grand Central and the atrium of the Brown Palace, Denver, structures aimed heroically into futures that had never really happened. Wide balconies ringed every level, rising toward the dome. Beyond them he could see the tops of racks of clothing, rather than any audience, but if there had been an audience, he, Milgrim, would have been standing in exactly the spot where the fat lady would ultimately sing.

He drew the Faraday pouch out, on its cord, and removed the Neo, exposing it to whatever intricate soup of signals existed here. Within its childish-looking shroud of Kleenex, it began to ring.

Sleight had arranged things so that it was impossible to turn the ring off, but Milgrim thumbed the volume down, all the way, and put it into his side jacket pocket. It vibrated a few times, then quit. He took it out again, opened the Kleenex to check the time, careful not to touch it, then put it back.

He had whatever remained of his three hundred pounds, unchanged, the euros Hollis had given, plus another thin fold of euros remaining from his Basel pocket money. He decided to invest in his own future, one much more immediate than the one the founders of Galeries Lafayette had imagined.

He found his way into the men’s store, a separate building next door, and selected a pair of black French briefs, then a pair of black cotton-blend crew socks, paying for them with almost all of his Basel money. The euro bills reminded him, obscurely, of Disneyland’s original Tomorrowland, where his mother had taken him as a child.

The Neo began to vibrate again, in his pocket. He let it, trying to imagine the look on Sleight’s face. But Sleight knew where he was, and quite possibly had heard the cashier’s side of the socks-and-underwear transaction, which Milgrim for his part had conducted nonverbally, with soft apologetic grunts. The Kleenex, he hoped, was muffling things a bit, though he supposed it didn’t really matter.

He went back into the main store and rode escalators, into realms of lingerie, sportswear, little black dresses. If he were sure how much time he had, he thought, he’d look for the furniture department. The furniture departments of large department stores were oases of calm, usually. He’d often found them soothing. They were also very good places in which to determine whether or not you were being followed. But he really didn’t think that he was being followed, that way.

He walked through a grove of Ralph Lauren, then a thinner one of Hilfiger, to a balustrade overlooking the central atrium. Looking down, he saw Foley crossing from the direction of Boulevard Haussmann. Take off the cap, he thought. A professional would have done that, at least, and removed the black jacket as well.

When Foley reached almost the exact spot where Milgrim himself had paused to look up, he paused as well, just as Milgrim had, taking in the dome. Milgrim stepped back, knowing Foley would scan the balustrades next, which indeed he did.

You know I’m here, Milgrim thought, but you don’t know exactly where. He saw Foley speak. To Sleight, he imagined, via a headset.

A moment later, Milgrim was alone in an elevator, pressing the button for the top floor, his improv module kicking in. Open to opportunity.

The elevator stopped at the next floor. The door slid open, and was quickly held by a thick arm in charcoal gray, the arm of a large man.

“It’s a shame you no longer live here in the city,” said a tall blonde, in Russian, to another young woman beside her, equally tall, equally blond. The second blonde rolled a massive pram or stroller into the elevator, some sort of luxury baby-transporter on three bulbous wheels, a thing made apparently of carbon-fiber and sharkskin, everything a gray like the bodyguard’s suit.

“It’s shit in the suburbs,” replied the pram-driver, in Russian, setting the thing’s hand brake with a flick of her finger. “A villa. Two hours. Dogs. Guards. Shit.”

The bodyguard stepped in, eyeing Milgrim darkly. Milgrim backed up, as far as possible, a handrail digging painfully into his spine, and looked down at the floor. The door closed and the elevator began to rise. Milgrim stole a look at the two women, instantly regretting it for the attention it cost him from their looming guardian. He looked back down. The mega-stroller looked like something from the cabin of a very expensive airplane, perhaps the drinks trolley. Whatever infant it held was entirely concealed by a sharkskin cowl or fairing, probably bulletproof. “Surely he can’t have lost that much,” said the first blonde.

“It was all heavily leveraged,” said the pram-driver.

“What does that mean?”

“That we have no Paris apartment, and shop in Galeries Lafayette,” said the pram-driver, bitterly.

Milgrim, who hadn’t heard Russian since leaving Basel, felt a peculiar enchantment, in spite of the sullen presence of their guard, and the handrail in his back. The elevator stopped, the door opened, and a tall Parisian teenager stepped in. As the door closed, Milgrim noted the guard’s focus on the girl, no less sullen but absolute. Slender, brunette, she looked from Milgrim to the two Russian women with a sort of benign disdain, ignoring the guard.

When the elevator stopped again, and the door opened, Milgrim took the Neo from his jacket pocket and tucked it into a sharkskin pocket on the front of the super-pram, feeling it fall into the company of what he guessed were toys, tins of balm or perhaps caviar, or whatever else one needed for an infant oligarch. Doing it, as a pickpocket had once advised him, as if it were not only the expected but the only thing to do. He looked up at the guard, whose eyes were still locked on the brunette. Who turned, then, gazelle-like and justifiably bored, and stepped out, past the guard, as the pram-driver flicked the brake switch off and dragged the thing back out of the elevator like a parts cart in a tank factory.

The guard noticed Milgrim again, but stepped quickly out of the elevator, unwilling to lose sight of his charges.

Milgrim remained where he was as the door closed and the elevator rose again.

“Dogs,” he said, to Sleight, who could no longer hear him. “Guards.”