Zero history

47. IN THE CUISINART ATRIUM

Heidi, for some reason, knew a great deal about custom vehicular armor. Perhaps it was a Beverly Hills thing, Hollis thought, as Aldous wound them deeper into the City, or a Ponzi scheme thing, or both. Heidi and Aldous, with whom Hollis could see Heidi was flirting, though still at a level of solid deniability, were deep in a discussion of whether or not Bigend had been wise to insist on power windows for the front set of doors, which had meant forgoing a bulletproof documentation slot on the driver’s side, through which papers might be presented without opening either the door or the window. The power windows, Heidi maintained, meant that the doors were necessarily armored to a lower standard, with Aldous firmly insisting that this was not the case.

“I wish I didn’t have to see him now,” said Milgrim, beside Hollis in the back seat. “I have to tell him something.”

“So do I,” said Hollis, not caring whether Aldous heard, though she doubted that he did. “I’m quitting.”

“You are?” Milgrim looked suddenly bereft.

“Meredith’s changed her mind about telling me who the Hounds designer is. Her reason for doing that left me thinking I should let the whole thing go.”

“What will you do?”

“I’ll tell him I can’t do it. That should be that.” She wished she were as confident as she’d just sounded. “What do you have to tell him?”

“About Preston Gracie,” said Milgrim, “the man Foley’s working for.”

“How do you know that?”

“Someone told me,” said Milgrim, and actually squirmed. “Someone I met.”

“Who’s Preston Gracie?”

“Mike,” Milgrim said. “She says they’re all named Mike.”

“All who?”

“Special soldiers.”

“He’s a soldier?”

“Not anymore. An arms dealer.”

“She who?”

“Winnie,” said Milgrim, his voice catching. “She’s a… cop.” This last emerging, Hollis thought, as though he were having to confess, in utmost seriousness, to having had a conversation, or perhaps some more intimate exchange, with some other species entirely. “Well, sort of a cop. Worse, probably. A DCIS agent.” He pronounced this “deesis,” and she had no idea what it meant.

“That’s British?”

“No,” said Milgrim, “she followed me from Myrtle Beach. What she does is about military contracts, at least it is this time. She took my picture, in Seven Dials. Then came to the hotel. Do you want your computer back?”

“Of course not,” said Hollis. “Why did she follow you?”

“She thought we might be involved with Gracie. That Bigend might be. Then she talked to me, and saw that Bigend’s just after the same contracts.” She could barely hear him now.

“Bigend’s an arms dealer?” She looked at the back of Aldous’s head.

“No,” said Milgrim, “but Gracie’s trying to be involved in the same sort of contracting. Legitimization.”

“And she told you this because…?”

“She wants Bigend to know,” Milgrim said, miserably.

“Then tell him.”

“I shouldn’t have been talking with her,” Milgrim said. He’d locked his hands together, like a child desperately miming prayer. “I’m afraid.”

“Of what?”

His shoulders drew further together. “I just am,” he said. “I’m like that. But I… forgot.”

“It’ll be fine,” said Hollis, immediately deciding it was a ridiculous thing to have said.

“I wish you weren’t quitting,” he said.

Narrow City streets, their names often basic common nouns. They had to be really old, then, she supposed. She didn’t know this part of London at all. Had no idea now where they were. “How much further?” she asked Aldous.

“Almost there,” said Aldous. There was little traffic. Quite a few very new buildings, recalling the boom prior to the bust. They passed one with a logo she remembered from an ad on the cab she’d taken, the night Inchmale had advised her to call Bigend.

She reached over and gave Milgrim’s balled double fist a squeeze. His hands were very cold. “Relax. I’ll help you. We’ll do it together.” She saw that his eyes were closed.

“Draw Your Brakes” briefly filled the truck. “Aldous,” Aldous said into his iPhone. “Yes sir. Miss Henry, Mr. Milgrim, and Miss…?” He glanced back at Hollis.

“Give me the phone.”

He passed it back to her.

“Heidi’s with us,” she said.

“I wasn’t expecting her,” said Bigend, “but she can play with the balloons. We do need to talk.”

“She’ll understand.” She handed the phone back to Aldous. He held it to his ear. “Yes sir,” he said, and slipped it into his black suitcoat.

“Milgrim and I have to have a talk with Hubertus,” Hollis said to Heidi.

Heidi turned. “I thought you wanted some help with that.”

“I did,” said Hollis, “but it’s gotten more complicated.” She rolled her eyes in Milgrim’s direction.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing,” said Hollis.

“Don’t let him fuck with you,” said Heidi, reaching back to prod Milgrim in the knee, causing his eyes to snap wide with terror. “He’s full of shit,” she insisted, “they all are.” Leaving Hollis to wonder, as Aldous pulled the truck over, who they all were. Male authority figures, she guessed, from having known Heidi. Whatever had once made her serial liaisons with professional boxers so relentlessly lively, and had required her separation, as much as had been possible, from label executives.

Aldous pressed various switches on the truck’s dash, with resulting clunks and clanks. He opened his own door, climbed down, closed it, opened the one beside Hollis, and helped her down, his hand large and warm. Milgrim scrambled down behind her, flinching when Aldous heaved the door shut. Heidi, meanwhile, had opened her own door and jumped down. She was wearing gray-green leather plus-fours and knee-high black boots whose brogue-style uppers were soled with sections of tank tread, more loot from the ongoing punitive demolition of fuckstick’s remaining credit cards.

Hollis looked up at the building they were parked in front of. It resembled a European countertop appliance from the Nineties, something by Cuisinart or Krups, metallic gray plastic, its corners blandly rounded. Aldous pressed something on a black key-fob, causing the truck to clunk multiply and give an almost visible shiver of heightened awareness.

They followed him to the building’s entrance, where his equally tall but less-charming colleague, whose name Hollis had never gotten, waited inside.

“I hope he doesn’t want a urine sample,” Milgrim seemed to say, inexplicably, though she opted to pretend she hadn’t heard him.

They were passed through the door, then, from one Jamaican to another, the door locked behind them, and led out into the center of the Cuisinart Building’s determined but rather miniature atrium. Hollis, having some vague idea of what City real estate was worth, supposed they must have agonized over this empty, purely American volume of space, every square centimeter of which, otherwise, might have been filled with usable, windowless office-hive. As it was, it rose a mere five floors, wrapped at each level with a walk-around interior balcony of the same metallic-looking plastic, or plastic-looking metal, that sheathed the exterior. Like a model, to only partial scale, of some hotel in the Atlanta core.

Bigend, in his trench coat, stood at its center, holding an iPhone with both hands, arms extended, squinting, thumbs moving slightly.

“I need to speak with Hollis and Milgrim,” Bigend said to Heidi, offering her the iPhone, “but you’ll enjoy this. The controls are highly intuitive. The video-feed, of course, is from its nose-camera. Start with the manta, then try the penguin.” He pointed, up. They all looked up. Near the atrium’s uniformly glowing, paneled ceiling hung a penguin and a manta ray. The penguin, silvery, looked only approximately like a penguin, but the manta, merely a black, devilishly dynamic-looking blot, seemed considerably more realistic. “Try them,” Bigend said. “Delightful, really. Relaxing. The only other people in the building, at the moment, are employees of mine.”

Heidi craned up at the balloons, if that was what they were, then looked at the iPhone, which she now held in much the way Bigend had been holding it. Her thumbs began to move. “Damn,” she said appreciatively.

“This way,” said Bigend. “I’ve leased two floors of offices here, but they’re very busy now. We can sit here…” He led them to an L-shaped bench of dull aluminum mesh, in the shadow of a hanging stairway, the sort of place that would have been a smoking-nest, when people smoked in office buildings. “You recall the Amsterdam dealer we bought your jacket from? His mysterious picker?”

“Vaguely.”

“We’ve gone back to that. Or, rather, a strategic business intelligence unit I’ve hired in the Hague has. An example of Sleight pushing me out of my comfort zone. I’ve never trusted private security firms, private investigators, private intelligence firms, at all. In this case, though, they have no idea who they’re working for.”

“And?” Hollis, seated now, Milgrim beside her, was watching Bigend closely.

“I’m sending you both to Chicago. We think the Hounds designer is there.”

“Why?”

“Our dealer has had subsequent dealings with the picker who brought him the jacket. Both picker and jacket came from Chicago.”

“Are you certain?”

He shrugged.

“Who is the designer?”

“I’m sending you to find that out,” said Bigend.

“Milgrim,” said Hollis, “has something he needs to tell you.” It was the only thing she could think of that might change the subject, give her time to think.

“Do you, Milgrim?” Bigend asked.

Milgrim made a brief, strange, high-pitched sound, like something burning out. Closed his eyes. Opened them. “The cop,” he said, “in Seven Dials. The one who took my picture. The one from Myrtle Beach.”

Bigend nodded.

“She’s an agent. From,” and he closed his eyes again, “the Defense Criminal Investigative Service.” Milgrim opened his eyes, tentatively discovering himself not dead.

“Who are, I confess,” said Bigend, after a pause, “entirely new to me. American, I take it?”

“It was the pants,” said Milgrim. “She was watching the pants. Then we showed up, and she thought we might be involved with Foley, and Gracie.”

“Which we are, of course, courtesy of Oliver.”

Hollis hadn’t heard Bigend use Sleight’s first name for a while.

“She wants me to tell you about Gracie,” said Milgrim.

“I’d like you to do that,” said Bigend, “but perhaps things would be simplified by my speaking with her myself. I’m not entirely unaccustomed to dealing with Americans.”

“She has to go back,” said Milgrim. “She isn’t going to learn what she needs to learn here. You aren’t what she thought you were. You’re just competition for Foley and Gracie. But she wants you to know about Gracie. That Gracie won’t like it that you’re competing.”

“He already didn’t,” said Bigend. “He turned Sleight, probably at that Marine Corps trade fair in Carolina. Unless Sleight volunteered, which I regard as a possibility. And did she give you a reason for her wanting me to know all this, your unnamed, perhaps nameless federal agent?”

“Winnie Tung Whitaker,” said Milgrim.

Bigend stared at him. “Hyphenated?”

“No,” said Milgrim.

“Did she? Suggest why she might want me to know about this person?”

“She said that you’re rich and have lawyers. That if she can roll you in front of him, she might as well. I don’t think she’s been getting any closer to popping him. Sounded frustrated.”

“One does,” agreed Bigend, leaning forward in his trench coat. “And when did you discuss all this with her?”

“She was at the hotel,” Milgrim said, “after I met with you. And I had dinner with her, tonight. Vietnamese.”

“And who is employing ‘Foley,’ then?”

“Michael Preston Gracie.” Hollis saw Milgrim check to see that he’d gotten the name right. “Major, retired, U.S. Army, Special Forces. He trains police for foreign countries, arranges for them to buy equipment from friends of his. Sometimes it isn’t equipment they should be able to buy. But he’s moving into contracting the way you want to. Designing things, manufacturing. She said it was the legitimization stage.”

“Ah,” said Bigend, with a nod. “He’s gotten big enough to acquire real lawyers.”

“That’s what she said.”

“That’s often problematic. A watershed. Not everyone makes it. By the time you’re big enough to have lawyers willing to sufficiently make the case for legitimization, you’re quite big, and highly illegitimate.”

“I knew a drug dealer who bought a Saab dealership,” offered Milgrim.

“Exactly,” said Bigend, with a look for Hollis.

“I think she wanted you to understand that Gracie’s dangerous,” Milgrim said, “and that he regards competitors as enemies.”

“ ‘Listen to your enemies,’ ” Bigend said, “ ‘for God is speaking.’ ”

“What does that mean?” Milgrim asked.

“A Yiddish proverb,” Bigend said. “It rewards contemplation.”

Something moved, three feet above Bigend’s head. The manta, a sinuous matte-black blot, as wide, from wingtip to wingtip, as a small boy’s outstretched arms.

“Fuck, this is cool,” called Heidi, from across the floor of the atrium, “I heard everything you said!”

“Be a dear,” Bigend called to her, not bothering to look up. “Swim it away. Try the penguin now.”

The thing’s wingtips silently flexed, catching the air, for all the world like a real ray, as it swam slowly up, wheeling gracefully, barely missing the hanging stairway. “Utterly addictive,” Bigend said to Hollis. “Your locative art will morph again, with cheap aerial video drones.”

“That doesn’t look cheap to me.”

“No,” said Bigend, “not at all, but cheaper platforms will be in the High Street by Christmas. But the Festos are genius. We opted for their sheer strangeness, the organic movement, modeled from nature. They aren’t very fast, but if people see them, their first thought is that they’re hallucinating.”

Milgrim nodded. “He’s coming,” he said. “Gracie.”

“To London?”

“She said he’ll be here soon.”

“He has Sleight,” Bigend said, “so he knows that having a look at his pants was simply basic strategic business intelligence. It isn’t as though we’ve done anything to harm him. Or ‘Foley’ either, for that matter.”

Milgrim looked from Bigend to Hollis, eyes wide.

“A friend of mine has been in a traffic accident,” Hollis said. “I have to stay in town until I know how he is.”

Bigend frowned. “Anyone I know?”

“No,” said Hollis.

“That’s not a problem. I wasn’t planning on sending you immediately. Say four more days. Will you know by then whether or not your friend is out of the woods?”

“I hope so,” said Hollis.