Zero history

27. JAPANESE 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 bass, 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 bugfuck.”

“I said he seemed unfocused. Anyway, he seems more focused now. Though maybe bugfuck 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 ass 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 fuckstick?

“Out on bond now. Not that much media. Ponzi’s under a half a billion total. Current climate, they’re embarrassed 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 Japanese 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 passion. 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-massage 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 brass 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, massive 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.

“Hello,” 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.