Zero history

44. THE VERBALS

Milgrim stood at the window of his room, watching someone on the canal path being given what Aldous would call the verbals. Which was to say harsh criticism, pointed verbal violence, probably with added threat of the physical. The recipient, whom Milgrim instinctively identified with, was an insubstantial figure in a pale grubby thigh-length raincoat, his verbalizer a slablike individual in a bright green exercise suit, one of those silky two-piece outfits sometimes still worn here, Milgrim guessed, out of nostalgia for an extinct American style of triumphal ghetto criminality. The verbals, Milgrim now saw, were being punctuated with fisted thumb-jabs to the smaller man’s ribs and sternum. Milgrim forced himself to turn away, absently rubbing a hand across his own ribs.

He’d walked with Winnie down the street called Parkway (wasn’t that in Monopoly?) to the High Street and the station, quizzed by her along the way on Michael Preston Gracie, and then she’d said goodbye, handshake firm, and ridden off down a very long escalator.

He’d continued back along the High Street, looking still more like a fair midway in some state in which youth-market footwear and alcohol were the main products, through buzzing young throngs outside several pubs, and home to the Holiday Inn.

He didn’t want to call Bigend, but Winnie had specifically ordered him to do that, and he’d said he would. He opened the envelope the driver had given him earlier, looked at the variously sized white capsules in their foil-backed transparent bubbles, the tiny, maniacally precise hand-labeling in purple Rapidograph ink, an hour and date and day of the week for each bubble. He had no more idea who had prepared this than he had of what the capsules contained. He felt as though he were between two worlds, vast and grinding spheres of influence, Bigend’s and Winnie’s, a wobbly little moon, trying to do as he’d been told by both. Trying, he supposed, to avoid the verbals.

He should call Bigend now. But no longer had the Neo, he remembered, and that meant he no longer had a number for him. He could look up Blue Ant and try to go through the switchboard, but under current circumstances that didn’t seem a good idea. A reprieve, of sorts. He went into the bathroom instead, and prepared to clean his teeth, the full four-stage operation, noting that he was still without the special mouthwash. He’d just inserted a fresh conical brush tip between his rearmost upper right molars when the room’s phone rang. Unwilling to remove the brush, he left the bathroom with it still in place, and answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Why do you sound that way?” asked Bigend.

“Sorry,” Milgrim said, extracting the brush, “something in my mouth.”

“Go down to the lobby. Aldous will be there shortly. You’ll pick up Hollis on your way to me. We need to talk.”

“Good,” said Milgrim, before Bigend could hang up, but then began to worry about whether he could deliver Winnie’s message about Gracie in front of Hollis.

He went back into the bathroom, to finish cleaning his teeth.