Zero history

5. THIN ON THE GROUND

And when she’d watched him, from her chair, the collar of his coat popped like a vampire’s cape, finally descend the stairs to Cabinet’s foyer, dropping further out of sight with each step, she put her head back against slippery brocade and gazed at the spiraled lances of the narwhale tusks, in their ornate rack.

Then she sat up and asked for a white coffee, a cup rather than a pot. The breakfast crowd had mostly gone, leaving only Hollis and a pair of darkly suited Russian men who looked like extras from that Cronenberg film.

She got out her iPhone and Googled “Gabriel Hounds.”

By the time her coffee arrived, she’d determined that The Gabriel Hounds was the title of a novel by Mary Stewart, had been the title of at least one CD, and had been or was the name of at least one band.

Everything, she knew, had already been the title of a CD, just as everything had already been the name of a band. This was why bands, for the past twenty years or so, had mostly had such unmemorable names, almost as though they’d come to pride themselves on it.

But the original Gabriel Hounds, it appeared, were folklore, legend. Dogs heard coursing, however faintly, high up in the windy night. Cousins it seemed to the Wild Hunt. This was Inchmale territory, definitely, and there were even weirder variants. Some involving hounds with human heads, or hounds with the heads of human infants. This had to do with the belief that the Gabriel Hounds were hunting the souls of children who’d died unbaptized. Christian tacked over pagan, she guessed. And the hounds seemed to have originally been “ratchets,” an old word for dogs that hunt by scent. Gabriel Ratchets. Sometimes “gabble ratchets.” Inchmaleian totally. He’d name the right band the Gabble Ratchets instantly.

“Left for you, Miss Henry.” The Italian girl, holding out a glossy paper carrier bag, yellow, unmarked.

“Thank you.” Hollis put the iPhone down and accepted the bag. It had been stapled shut, she saw, and she envisioned the oversized brass stapler atop the pornographic desk, its business end the head of a turbaned Turk. A pair of identical business cards, multiply stapled, held the two handles together. PAMELA M AINWARING, B LUE A NT.

She pulled off the cards and tugged the bag open, staples tearing through the glossy paper.

A very heavy denim shirt. She took it out and spread it across her lap. No, a jacket. The denim darker than the thighs of her Japanese jeans, bordering on black. And it smelled of that indigo, strongly, an earthy jungle scent familiar from the shop where she’d found her jeans. The metal buttons, the rivet kind, were dead black, nonreflective, oddly powdery-looking.

No exterior signage. The label, inside, below the back of the collar, was undyed leather, thick as most belts. On it had been branded not a name but the vague and vaguely disturbing outline of what she took to be a baby-headed dog. The branding iron appeared to have been twisted from a single length of fine wire, then heated, pressed down unevenly into the leather, which was singed in places. Centered directly beneath this, sewn under the bottom edge of the leather patch, was a small folded tab of white woven ribbon, machine-embroidered with three crisp, round black dots, arranged in a triangle. Indicating size?