Zero history

“Thanks,” Milgrim said, showing graphite-smudged fingers. “Would you mind turning them over for me? I don’t want to get this on them.”

›››

“Delta to Atlanta,” Sleight said, handing Milgrim a ticket envelope. He was back in the very annoying suit he’d forgone for Myrtle Beach, the one with the freakishly short trousers.

“Business?”

“Coach,” said Sleight, his satisfaction entirely evident. He passed Milgrim a second envelope. “British Midland to Heathrow.”

“Coach?”

Sleight frowned. “Business.”

Milgrim smiled.

“He’ll want you in a meeting, straight off the plane.”

Milgrim nodded. “Bye,” he said. He tucked the red tube beneath his arm and headed for check-in, his bag in his other hand, walking directly beneath a very large South Carolina state flag, oddly Islamic with its palm tree and crescent moon.

3. SLUT’S WOOL

She woke to gray light around multiple layers of curtains and drapes. Lay staring up at a dim anamorphic view of the repeated insectoid cartouche, smaller and more distorted the closer to the ceiling. Shelves with objects, Wunderkammer stuff. Variously sized heads of marble, ivory, ormolu. The blank round bottom of the caged library.

She checked her watch. Shortly after nine.

She got out of bed, in her XXL Bollards T-shirt, put on the not-velour robe, and entered the bathroom, a tall deep cove of off-white tile. Turning on the enormous shower required as much effort as ever. A Victorian monster, its original taps were hulking knots of plated brass. Horizontal four-inch nickel-plate pipes caged you on three sides, handy for warming towels. Within these were slung sheets of inch-thick beveled glass, contemporary replacements. The original showerhead, mounted directly overhead, was thirty inches in diameter. Getting out of the robe and T-shirt, she put on a disposable cap, stepped in, and lathered up with Cabinet’s artisanal soap, smelling faintly of cucumber.

She kept a picture of this shower on her iPhone. It reminded her of H. G. Wells’s time machine. It had probably been in use when he began the serial that would become his first novel.

Toweling off, applying moisturizer, she listened to BBC through an ornate bronze grate. Nothing of catastrophic import since she’d last listened, though nothing particularly positive either. Early-twenty-first-century quotidian, death-spiral subtexts kept well down in the mix.

She took off the shower cap and shook her head, hair retaining residual stylist’s mojo from the salon in Selfridges. She liked to eat lunch in Selfridges’ food hall, escaping through its back door before the communal trance of shopping put her under. Though that was all it was likely to do, in a department store. She was more vulnerable to smaller places, and in London that could be very dangerous. The Japanese jeans she was pulling on now, for instance. Fruit of a place around the corner from Inchmale’s studio, the week before. Zen emptiness, bowls with shards of pure solidified indigo, like blue-black glass. The handsome, older, Japanese shopkeeper, in her Waiting for Godot outfit.

You’ll have to watch that now, she advised herself. Money.

Brushing her teeth, she noticed the vinyl Blue Ant figurine on the marble sinktop, amid her lotions and makeup. You let me down, she thought to the jaunty ant, its four arms akimbo. Aside from a few pieces of jewelry, it was one of the few things she owned that she’d had since she’d first known Hubertus Bigend. She’d tried abandoning it, at least once, but somehow it was still with her. She’d thought she’d left it in the penthouse he kept in Vancouver, but it had been in her bag when she’d arrived in New York. She’d come, however vaguely, to imagine it as a sort of inverse charm. A cartoon rendition of the trademark of his agency, she’d let it serve as a secret symbol of her unwillingness to have anything further to do with him.

She’d trusted it to keep him away.

She really hadn’t had that much other property to replace, she reminded herself, swishing mouthwash. The dot-com bubble and an ill-advised foray into retailing vinyl records had seen to that, well before he’d found her. She wasn’t quite that badly off now, but if she’d understood her accountant correctly she’d lost nearly fifty percent of her net worth when the market had gone down. And this time she hadn’t done anything to cause it. No start-up shares, no quixotic record store in Brooklyn.

Everything she owned, currently, was here in this room. Aside from devalued money market shares, and some boxes of American author’s copies, back in the Tribeca Grand. She spat mouthwash into the marble sink.

Inchmale didn’t mind Bigend, not the way she did, but Inchmale, as formidably bright as she knew him to be, was also gifted with a useful crudeness of mind, an inbuilt psychic callus. He found Bigend interesting. Possibly he found him creepy, too, though for Inchmale, interesting and creepy were broadly overlapping categories. He didn’t, she guessed, find Bigend that utter an anomaly. An overly wealthy, dangerously curious fiddler with the world’s hidden architectures.

There was no way, she knew, to tell an entity like Bigend that you wanted nothing to do with him. That would simply bring you more firmly to his attention. She’d had her time in Bigend’s employ; while brief, it had been entirely too eventful. She’d put it behind her, and gone on with her book project, which had grown quite naturally out of what she’d been doing (or had thought she’d been doing) for Bigend.

Although, she reminded herself, fastening her bra and pulling on a T-shirt, the money she’d seen reduced by almost half had come to her via Blue Ant. There was that. She pulled a sheer black mohair sweater over the T-shirt, smoothed it over her hips, and pushed up the sleeves. She sat on the edge of the bed, to put on her shoes. Then back into the bathroom for makeup.

Purse, iPhone, key with its tassel.

Out, then, and past the identical follies in their different landscapes. To press the button and wait for the lift. She put her face close to the iron cage, to see the lift rise toward her, atop it some complex electromechanical Tesla-node no designer had even had to fake up, the real deal, whatever function it might serve. And decked, she always noted with a certain satisfaction, with a bit of frank slut’s wool, the only actual dust she’d yet seen in Cabinet. Even a few errant cigarette butts, the English being beasts that way.

And down, to the floor above the paneled foyer, where the night’s boozing and networking had left no evidence, and the serving staff, reassuringly immune to the long room’s decor, were about their morning business. She made her way to the rear, taking a seat at a place for two, beneath what might originally have been a gun rack in parquetry, but which now held half a dozen narwhale tusks.

The Italian girl brought her a pot of coffee, unbidden, with a smaller one of steamed milk, and the Times.

She was starting her second cup, Times unread, when she saw Hubertus Bigend mount the stairhead, down the full length of the long room, wrapped in a wide, putty-colored trench coat.

He was the ultimate in velour-robe types, and might just as well have been wearing one now as he swept toward her through the drawing room, unknotting the coat’s belt as he came, pawing back its Crimean lapels, and revealing the only International Klein Blue suit she’d ever seen. He somehow managed always to give her the impression, seeing him again, that he’d grown visibly larger, though without gaining any particular weight. Simply bigger. Perhaps, she thought, as if he grew somehow closer.

As he did now, breakfasting Cabineteers cringing as he passed, less in fear of his vast trailing coat and its dangerously swinging belt than out of awareness that he didn’t see them.

“Hollis,” he said. “You look magnificent.” She rose, to be air-kissed. Up close, he always seemed too full of blood, by several extra quarts at least. Rosy as a pig. Warmer than a normal person. Scented with some ancient European barber-splash.

“Hardly,” she said. “Look at you. Look at your suit.”

“Mr. Fish,” he said, shrugging out of the trench coat with a rattle of grenade-loops and lanyard-anchors. His shirt was palest gold, the silk tie knit in an almost matching shade.

“He’s very good,” she said.

“He’s not dead,” said Bigend, smiling, settling himself in the armchair opposite.

“Dead?” She took her seat.

“Apparently not. Just impossible to find. I found his cutter,” he said. “In Savile Row.”

“That’s Klein Blue, isn’t it?”

“Of course.”

“It looks radioactive. In a suit.”

“It unsettles people,” he said.

“I hope you didn’t wear it for me.”

“Not at all.” He smiled. “I wore it because I enjoy it.”

“Coffee?”

“Black.”

She signaled to the Italian girl. “How was the black metal?”

“Tremolo picking,” he said, perhaps slightly fretfully. “Double-kick drumming. Reg thinks something’s there.” He tilted his head slightly. “Do you?”

“I don’t keep up.” Adding milk to her coffee.

The Italian girl returned for their breakfast order. Hollis asked for oatmeal with fruit, Bigend for the full English.

“I loved your book,” he said. “I thought the reception was quite gratifying. Particularly the piece in Vogue.”

“ ‘Old rock singer publishes book of pictures’?”

“No, really. It was very good.” He tidied the trench coat, which he’d draped across the arm of his chair. “Working on something else now?”

She sipped her coffee.

“You want to follow that up,” he said.

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Barring scandal,” he said, “society is reluctant to let someone who’s become famous for one thing become famous for another.”

“I’m not trying to become famous.”

“You already are.”

“Was. Briefly. And in quite a small way.”

“A degree of undeniable celebrity,” he said, like a doctor offering a particularly obvious diagnosis.

They sat silently, then, Hollis pretending to glance over the first few pages of the Times, until the Italian girl and an equally pretty and dark-haired boy arrived, bearing breakfast on dark wooden trays with brass handles. They arranged these on the low coffee table and retreated, Bigend studying the sway of the girl’s hips. “I adore the full English,” he said. “The offal. Blood pudding. The beans. The bacon. Were you here before they invented food?” he asked. “You must have been.”

“I was,” she admitted. “I was very young.”

“Even then,” he said, “the full English was a thing of genius.” He was slicing a sausage that looked like haggis, but boiled in the stomach of a small animal, something on the order of a koala. “There’s something you could help us out with,” he said, and put a slice of sausage in his mouth.

“Us.”

He chewed, nodded, swallowed. “We aren’t just an advertising agency. I’m sure you know that. We do brand vision transmission, trend forecasting, vendor management, youth market recon, strategic planning in general.”

“Why didn’t that commercial ever come out, the one they paid us all the money to use ‘Hard to Be One’ in?”

He dabbed a torn toast-finger into the runny yellow eye of a fried egg, bit off half of it, chewed, swallowed, wiped his lips with his napkin. “Do you care?”

“That was a lot of money.”

“That was China,” he said. “The vehicle the ad was for hasn’t made it to roll-out. Won’t.”

“Why not?”

“There were problems with the design. Fundamental ones. Their government decided that that wasn’t the vehicle with which China should enter the world market. Particularly not in the light of the various tainted food product scandals. And whatnot.”

“Was it that bad?”

“Fully.” He forked baked beans adroitly onto toast. “They didn’t need your song, in the end,” he said, “and, as far we know, the executives in charge of the project are all still very much alive. Quite an optimal outcome for all concerned.” He started on his bacon. She ate her oatmeal and fruit, watching him. He ate quickly, methodically topping up whatever metabolism kept him firing on those extra cylinders. She’d never seen him tired, or jet-lagged. He seemed to exist in his own personal time zone.

He finished before she did, wiping the white plate clean with a final half-triangle of golden Cabinet toast.

“Brand vision transmission,” he said.

“Yes?” She raised an eyebrow.

“Narrative. Consumers don’t buy products, so much as narratives.”

“That’s old,” she said. “It must be, because I’ve heard it before.” She took a sip of cooled coffee.

“To some extent, an idea like that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Designers are taught to invent characters, with narratives, who they then design products for, or around. Standard procedure. There are similar procedures in branding generally, in the invention of new products, new companies, of all kinds.”

“So it works?”

“Oh, it works,” he said, “but because it does, it’s become de facto. Once you have a way in which things are done, the edge migrates. Goes elsewhere.”

“Where?”

“That’s where you come in,” he said.

“I do not.”

He smiled. He had, as ever, a great many very white teeth.

“You have bacon in your teeth,” she said, though he didn’t.

Covering his mouth with the white linen napkin, he tried to find the nonexistent bacon shard. Lowering it, he grimaced widely.

She pretended to peer. “I think you got it,” she said, doubtfully. “And I’m not interested in your proposition.”

“You’re a bohemian,” he said, folding the napkin and putting it on the tray, beside his plate.

“What does that mean?”

“You’ve scarcely ever held a salaried position. You’re freelance. Have always been freelance. You’ve accumulated no real property.”

“Not entirely through want of trying.”

“No,” he said, “but when you do try, your heart’s scarcely in it. I’m a bohemian myself.”

“Hubertus, you’re easily the richest person I’ve ever met.” This was, she knew as she said it, not literally true, but anyone she’d met who might have been wealthier than Bigend had tended to be comparatively dull. He was easily the most problematic rich person she’d yet encountered.

“It’s a by-product,” he said, carefully. “And one of the things it’s a by-product of is my fundamental disinterest in wealth.”

And, really, she knew that she believed him, at least about that. It was true, and it did things to his capacity for risk-taking. It was what made him, she knew from experience, so peculiarly dangerous to be around.

“My mother was a bohemian,” he said.

“Phaedra,” she remembered, somehow.

“I made her old age as comfortable as possible. That isn’t always the case, with bohemians.”

“That was good of you.”

“Reg is quite the model of the successful bohemian, isn’t he?”

“I suppose he is.”

“He’s always working on something, Reg. Always. Always something new.” He looked at her, across the heavy silver pots. “Are you?”

And he had her, then, she knew. Looking somehow straight into her. “No,” she said, there being nothing else really to say.

“You should be,” he said. “The secret, of course, is that it doesn’t really matter what it is. Whatever you do, because you are an artist, will bring you to the next thing of your own. That’s what happened the last time, isn’t it? You wrote your book.”

“But you were lying to me,” she said. “You pretended you had a magazine, and that I was writing for it.”

“I did, potentially, have a magazine. I had staff.”

“One person!”

“Two,” he said, “counting you.”

“I can’t work that way,” she told him. “I won’t.”

“It won’t be that way. This is entirely less… speculative.”

“Wasn’t the NSA or someone tapping your phone, reading your e-mail?”

“But now we know that they were doing that to everyone.” He loosened his pale golden tie. “We didn’t, then.”

“You did,” she said. “You’d guessed. Or found out.”

“Someone,” he said, “is developing what may prove to be a somewhat new way to transmit brand vision.”

“You sound guarded in your appreciation.”

“A certain genuinely provocative use of negative space,” he said, sounding still less pleased.

“Who?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t been able to find out. I feel that someone has read and understood my playbook. And may possibly be extending it.”

“Then send Pamela,” she said. “She understands all that. Or someone else. You have a small army of people who understand all that. You must.”

“But that’s exactly it. Because they ‘understand all that,’ they won’t find the edge. They won’t find the new. And worse, they’ll trample on it, inadvertently crush it, beneath a certain mediocrity inherent in professional competence.” He dabbed his lips with the folded napkin, though they didn’t seem to need it. “I need a wild card. I need you.”

He sat back, then, and regarded her in exactly the way he’d regarded the tidy and receding ass of the Italian girl, though in this case, she knew, it had nothing at all to do with sex.

“Dear God,” she said, entirely without expecting to, and simultaneously wishing she were very small. Small enough to curl up in the slut’s wool that crowned the steampunk lift, between those few cork-colored filter tips.

“Does ‘The Gabriel Hounds’ mean anything to you?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

He smiled, obviously pleased.