Zero History (17 page)

“Modeling?”

“Fashion. The people I met who I most got on with, aside from some of the other girls, were stylists, people who finessed little bits of trim for the shoots, adjusted things, sourced antiques, props. Some of them had been to very good art schools, and it had put them off, profoundly. They didn’t want to be what they’d been groomed to be, and really it’s the nature of that system that not that many people can, ever. But they came out with brilliant skill sets for being stylists. And art school had made them masters of a kind of systems analysis. Extremely good at figuring out how an industry really runs, what the real products are. Which they did constantly, without really being that aware of doing it. And I listened to them. And all of them were pickers.”

Hollis nodded, remembering Pamela explaining the term.

“Constantly finding things. Value in rubbish. That ability to distinguish one thing from another. The eye for detail. And knowing where to sell it on, of course. I began to acquire that, watching, listening. Loved that, really. Meanwhile, I wore out runners, walking.”

“Here?”

“All over. Lot of Milan. Listening to stylists absently lecture on the fundamental dysfunction of the fashion industry. What my friends and I were going through as models was just a reflection of something bigger, broader.
Everyone
was waiting for their check. The whole industry wobbles along, really, like a shopping cart with a missing wheel. You can only keep it moving if you lean on it a certain way and keep pushing, but if you stop, it tips over. Season to season, show to show, you keep it moving.”

Which reminded Hollis of a Curfew tour, though she didn’t say so. She took a sip of the unsweetened Americain, which was cooling, and listened.

“My grandmother died, I’m the only grandchild, she left a bit of money. My booker was leaving the agency, getting out of the business. I applied to Cordwainers College, London College of Fashion, accessories and footwear. Done with modeling. It was the runners.”

“Sneakers?”

“The ones I wore out walking. The ugliest ones were best for walking, the best-looking fell apart. The stylists would talk about them, because I’d show up in them, at shoots. Talk about how the business worked. The factories in China, Vietnam. The big companies. And I’d started to imagine ones that weren’t ugly at all, that didn’t fall apart. But somehow,” and she smiled ruefully, “untainted by fashion. I’d started doing drawings. Very bad ones. But I’d already decided that I really wanted to understand shoes, their history, how they work, before I tried to do anything. Not that conscious a decision, but a decision. So I applied to Cordwainers, was accepted, moved to London. Or rather, simply stopped moving. In London. I may just have been enamored of the idea of waking up in the same town every day, but I had my mission, the mystery runners that I couldn’t quite imagine.”

“And you made them, in the end?”

“Two seasons. We couldn’t get away from that structure. But that was only after I’d graduated. I could still make you quite a smashing pair of shoes, with my own hands, though the finishing would never get past my tutor there. But they did teach us everything. Exhaustively.”

“Sneakers?”

“Not the sole-molding or the vulcanization, but I could still cut and sew your uppers. We used a lot of elk for our line. Very thick, supple. Lovely.” She looked down at the security cables in her hand. “My second year, there, I met someone, a boy, Danny. American. From Chicago. Not at Cordwainers but he knew all my friends there. Skater. Well, not that he skated much. An entrepreneur, that way, but nothing too repulsive. Made films for some of the American companies. We lived together. Hackney. He had Hounds,” Meredith said, looking up from the cables, “before there were Hounds.”

“Yes?”

“He had a jacket quite a lot like yours, but made of a sort of canvas, off-white, plain brass buttons. Always in need of a good wash. Perfectly simple, but it was one of those things that everyone immediately wanted or, failing that, wanted the name of a designer, a brand. He’d laugh at them. Tell them it was no-name. Tell them it was ‘fucking real, not fashion.’ That a friend of his in Chicago had made it.”

“Chicago?”

“Chicago. Where he was from.”

“His friend was a designer?”

“He never called her that.”

“Her?”

“That was no-name too. He wouldn’t tell me her name. He never did.” Looking Hollis firmly in the eye. “I don’t think she’d been a girlfriend. She was older, I guessed. And more a hobbyist than a designer, from what he said. He said she did things more out of a sense of what she didn’t like than what she did, if that makes any sense. And she was very good. Very. But what I got from it, really, was that I was on the right track, with what I was designing, my shoes. On a track, anyway.”

“What was your track?”

“Things that weren’t tied to the present moment. Not to any moment, really, so not retro either.”

“What happened to your line?” Hollis asked.

“Business happened. Business as usual. We weren’t able to invent a new business model. Our backing wasn’t sufficient to carry us through that routine dysfunction. We crashed and burned. There might be a warehouse full of our last season in Seattle. If I could find it, get my hands on it, the eBay sales would be worth more money than we ever saw from the line.”

George held open a battered Galeries Lafayette bag and Mere thrust the security cables into it.

“Can I offer you dinner?” Hollis asked.

“Where are you staying?” George asked her.

“St. Germain. By the Odéon Métro.”

“I know a place,” said George. “I’ll make reservations for eight.”

“Meredith?”

Meredith considered Hollis. Then nodded.

“For four, please,” Hollis said.

M
ilgrim sat at a table in the courtyard’s busy café, camera in his lap, cycling through his four shots of Foley.

The two from behind might be useful if you wanted to send someone to follow him. The quarter profile, against a glare of Eighties color, was actually less useful. Could be anyone. Had women’s clothing actually been that bright, in the Eighties?

But this one, which he’d shot blind, by reaching around, behind a hennaed German girl, was excellent. The girl had given him a dirty look, for getting too close. He’d smelled her perfume; something pointedly inorganic. The scent of coolly focused concentration, perhaps. “Sorry,” he’d said, and stepped back, palming the little camera, wondering if he’d captured Foley, who now had vanished again.

He’d looked down, summoned the image. And had found Foley, zoomed, in tight focus, crookedly off-center in the frame. He’d seen how Foley’s sunglasses had left slight tan lines, recalling the porn rectangle he’d worn on the link Winnie had sent. The cap’s short bill effectively concealed his forehead, cutting out a good deal of emotional information. His features were smooth, as if untouched by experience, and confident, a confidence that Milgrim suspected he might not entirely be feeling. Something he’d try to project, regardless of the situation.

With the camera semiconcealed in his right hand, Milgrim had moved on, scanning the busy Salon for Foley. He’d soon found him, but simultaneously had found Hollis, who was listening intently to a younger woman in jeans and a white shirt. Hollis had seen him, he was certain. Milgrim, focused on Foley’s receding back, had ignored her, avoiding eye-connect. When Foley had descended the stairs, Milgrim had followed, then had watched as Foley left the building.

He’d gone into the courtyard, ordered an espresso, and settled down to study his photographs.

Now he turned the camera off, opened the little hatch on the bottom and removed the blue card, the size of a postage stamp. When had he last used an actual postage stamp? He couldn’t remember. It gave him a strange feeling to even think of one. He reached down, hiked the cuff of his new pants, and slipped the card quite far down into his sock, which he then pulled up, allowing his cuff to fall back into place.

He was not a methodical man by nature, his therapist had said, but the constant ongoing state of emergency imposed by his active addiction had shown him the practical advantages of method, which had then become habit.

He took an unused card from the inside pocket of his jacket and extracted it, with the usual difficulty, from its cardboard backing. He inserted it, closed the hatch, and slipped the camera into the side pocket of his jacket.

The Neo rang, from a different pocket. He brought it out. It looked even uglier than usual.

“Yes?”

“Just checking your phone,” Sleight said, unconvincingly. “We’re having trouble with the whole system.” Sleight had always spoken of the Neos as a system, but Milgrim had met no one else, other than Sleight, who had one.

“Seems to be working,” Milgrim said.

“How are things?”

Sleight had never made it a secret that he was able to track Milgrim with the Neo, but only referred to it obliquely, if at all. The subtext, now, being that he knew Milgrim was in Paris. Knew that Milgrim was in this courtyard of this building, perhaps, given that extra overlay of Russian GPS.

When their relationship had begun, Milgrim had been unwilling to question anything. Sleight had set the terms, in every way, and so it had been.

“It’s raining,” said Milgrim, looking up at blue sky, bright clouds.

A silence lengthened.

He was trying to force Sleight to admit to knowing his location, but he didn’t know why. It was something to do with the anger he’d felt, was probably still feeling. Was that a good thing?

“How’s New York?” Milgrim asked, losing his nerve.

“Toronto,” said Sleight, “getting hot. See you.” He was gone.

Milgrim looked at the Neo. Something was unfolding within him. Like a brochure, he thought, rather than the butterfly he imagined to be the more common image. An unpleasant brochure, the sort that lays out symptoms all too clearly.

Why had Sleight actually called? Had he really needed to check Milgrim’s phone? Did a brief moment of live voice provide Sleight with the opportunity to manipulate the Neo in some way that he couldn’t, otherwise?

If Milgrim spoke now, he wondered for the very first time, would Sleight hear him?

It suddenly seemed entirely likely to him that Sleight could.

He sat back in his white-enameled aluminum chair, aware again of that emotion he supposed was anger. He could feel the Faraday pouch, containing his passport, slung on its cord, under his shirt. Blocking radio waves. Preventing the RFID in his U.S. passport from being read.

He looked at the Neo.

Without consciously making any decision, he undid the top button of his shirt, fished the pouch out, opened it, and slid the Neo in with his passport. He tucked it back into his shirt and buttoned up.

The pouch was bulkier now, visible under his shirt.

He finished his espresso, which had cooled, and was bitter, and left some coins on the small square receipt. He stood up, buttoned his jacket over the slight bulge of the pouch, and reentered the Salon du Vintage. Still scanning for Foley, who for all he knew had returned.

He took his time, making his way up the stairs, and then stood for a while, looking up at the blowup of Hollis’s poster. Then he undid his top button again, drew out the pouch, opened it, and removed the Neo, which rang immediately.

“Hello?” As he tucked the pouch back in with his free hand.

“Were you on an elevator?”

“It was filled with Japanese girls,” Milgrim said, watching one pass. “Only three floors, here, but I couldn’t get off.”

“Just checking,” said Sleight, neutrally, and hung up.

Milgrim looked at the Neo, Sleight’s extension, wondering for the first time if it was really off when he turned it off. Perhaps it needed its batteries removed for that. Though, come to think it, Sleight forbade that. Or its two cards, which Milgrim was also forbidden to remove.

Sleight had noticed it going into the Faraday pouch. Milgrim had been briefly invisible, as he’d sometimes gathered he was in elevators, for similar reasons.

Given everything else Sleight had said he could do with the Neo, having it function as a bug actually seemed like a very modest capacity. And it would help explain why they’d bothered with the thing at all, cranky as it was. He’d been carrying around a wire. Would Bigend have known about that? Milgrim wondered.

Sleight had given him the Neo on their flight from Basel to London, at the end of Milgrim’s treatment. He’d had it with him constantly, since then. Except, he remembered, yesterday, when Sleight had ordered him to leave it in his room. When Winnie had taken his picture. When he’d gone to Blue Ant to tell Bigend about that, and Bigend had suggested he no longer trusted Sleight. When he’d gone to the department store to have lunch with Hollis, then back to his hotel, where Winnie had been waiting. So Sleight had missed all of that, missed it because, if he was telling the truth, the company that made the Neo had gone bankrupt. “Lucky,” said Milgrim, then winced, imagining Sleight, Bluetoothed, somewhere, hearing him. But if Foley was Sleight’s, which was only one possibility, how had Foley known to find them at the department store? Perhaps he was following Hollis instead? But then, he reminded himself, Foley was someone else who had his picture on Winnie’s wall.