Zero History (51 page)

The car drove out of frame.

“I’m going to have to ask you all to step outside for a moment,” Garreth said.

“Why?” asked Heidi’s disembodied head.

“Because I need to do something very dirty,” he said, producing a phone like the one he’d used to take the American agent’s call, “and because I don’t want him”—with a nod in Chombo’s direction—“weeping in the background. Gives the wrong impression.”

Hollis knelt beside Chombo. “Bobby? Hollis Henry. We met in Los Angeles. Do you remember?”

Chombo flinched, his eyes screwed shut.

She sang the opening line of “Hard to Be One,” probably for the first time in a decade. Then sang it again, getting it right, or in any case closer.

He fell silent, shuddered, opened his eyes. “Do you happen to have anything like a fucking cigarette?” he asked Hollis.

“I’m sorry,” she said “I—”

“I do,” said Heidi. “Outside.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Hollis.

“You can have the pack,” said Heidi, spreading the black fly with her white, black-nailed hands.

Chombo was already on his feet, tugging his thin knit coat around him. He glared at Hollis, then stepped gingerly through the zip-toothed vertical gap.

She followed him.

F
iona’s drone’s batteries had died, and it dropped like a stone, almost as soon as Foley and the others had left in the black car. Milgrim had helped her fold the tarp, which was now stuffed into one of the side pockets of his riding jacket, and then had been the one to find the drone, though he’d done so by stepping on it, cracking a rotor housing. She hadn’t seemed to care, tucking it under her arm like an empty drinks tray and quickly leading him to where she’d left her Kawasaki. “We’ll FedEx it back to Iowa and they’ll rebuild it,” she’d said, he’d guessed to stop him apologizing.

Now Milgrim held it as she dug in the eyeball-carrier Benny had mounted over the pillion seat. He shook it gingerly. Heard something rattle.

“Here,” she said, producing a very shiny black helmet, sealed in plastic. She ripped the plastic, pulled it off, took the drone, and handed him the helmet. She put the drone in the carrier, snapped it shut. “You were getting tired of Mrs. Benny’s.”

Milgrim was unable to resist turning it over, raising it, sniffing the interior. It smelled of new plastic, nothing else. “Thanks,” he said. He looked at the Kawasaki. “Where can I sit?”

“I’ll be on your lap, basically.” She reached out, took the strap of his bag, lifted it over his head so that it was on the other shoulder, diagonal across his chest, then kissed him, hard but briefly, on the mouth. “Get on the bike,” she said. “He wants us away from here.”

“Okay,” said Milgrim, breathily, out of hyperventilation and joy, as he put on his new helmet.

C
ornwall’s okay,” said Heidi, on Hollis’s iPhone. “Haven’t found a place to spread Mom ’n’ Jimmy yet, but it’s a good excuse for driving.”

“How’s Ajay’s ankle?” Hollis was watching Garreth, on his back on the bed, exercising Frank with a bright yellow rubber bungee. They had the windows open, admitting occasional breezes and the sound of afternoon traffic. It was a larger room than the one she’d had the week before, a double, but it had the same blood-red walls and faux Chinese nonideograms.

“Fine,” said Heidi, “but he’s still using that trick cane your boyfriend gave him. It’s a miracle he’s washed his hands.”

“Has he gotten over the rest of it?”

Ajay had been embarrassed over losing Chombo, and frustrated that he hadn’t gotten a chance to go up against the man with the mullet. Hollis herself, he’d said, could have taken Foley, who’d looked like he belonged in hospital to begin with. And Milgrim, to cap things for Ajay, had taken down Gracie, who’d turned up with not just a gun but an assault rifle. On the upside, Ajay seemed to have bonded with Charlie, and on his return from Cornwall intended to try to learn to make skilled opponents repeatedly fall down, seemingly without touching them. Garreth, Hollis gathered, doubted much would come of this, but didn’t tell Ajay.

“It isn’t like he’s got that long an attention span,” said Heidi. “Where’s Milgrim?”

“Iceland,” Hollis said, “or on his way. With Hubertus, and the Dottirs. He phoned this morning. I couldn’t understand whether he was on a plane or a boat. He said it was a plane, but that it had hardly any wings, and barely flew.”

“You happy?”

“Apparently,” said Hollis, watching Frank, now free of dressings, flex repeatedly against mild Parisian sunlight. “Weirdly. Today.”

“Take care of yourself,” said Heidi. “Gotta go. Ajay’s back.”

“You too. Bye.”

Milgrim and Heidi, Garreth said, had each saved his bacon on the Scrubs. Milgrim by zapping Gracie, who’d brought the gun that Garreth had hoped he wouldn’t; and Heidi, as she treated herself to a claustrophobia-reducing jog, by spotting Chombo, headed in the direction of Islington, and bringing him back, against his will, to the van.

Hollis remembered standing outside the van, with Bobby demanding time for a second cigarette, the pretty Norwegian driver demanding they be quiet now and get back inside. Pep had come scooting up then, on his eerily silent bike, running without lights, to hand Hollis a tattered Waitrose bag, leer at her, then whip away. When she’d renegotiated the black canvas flies, she’d found Garreth slumped in his chair, his screens blank. “Are you okay?” she’d asked, giving his shoulders a squeeze.

“Always a bit of a letdown,” he’d said, but then had perked up a few minutes later, the van under way. Someone on his headphone. “How many?” he’d asked. Then smiled. “Eleven unmarked vehicles,” he’d said to her, a moment later, quietly. “Body armor, Austrian automatic weapons, a few in hazmat suits. Heavy mob.”

She’d been about to ask what he meant, but he’d silenced her with a look and another smile. She’d handed him the Waitrose bag then. When he opened it, she’d glimpsed one huge horrid eye of the world’s ugliest T-shirt.

“What was that about a plane without wings?” he asked now, lowering Frank, the sequence completed.

“Milgrim’s on board something Bigend’s built, or restored. He said it was Russian.”

“Ekranoplan,” said Garreth. “A ground-effect vehicle. He’s mad.”

“He’s had Hermès do the interior, Milgrim says.”

“Dead posh, too.”

“What kind of police came, for Foley and the others?”

“A very heavy mob. Aren’t on the books. Old man knows a bit about them, says less than he knows.”

“You called them when you sent us outside?”

“Dropped the dime, yes. Milgrim’s American agent called me again when I was waiting for you in the van, behind Cabinet. Gave me a number and a code word. She hadn’t had them when she’d called before. Offered me numbers I already had. I asked her for something massive. She came through too. Massively. I used them, gave the make, color, and registration number. Bang.”

“Why did she do that?”

“Because she’s a bad-ass, according to Milgrim.” He smiled. “And, I’d guess, because it couldn’t be traced back to her, her agency, her government.”

“Where would she have gotten it?”

“No idea. Phoned a friend in Washington? But then, I never cease to be amazed at how the oddest things float about.”

“And they arrested Gracie and the others?”

He sat up, doubled the yellow bungee in front of his chest, and slowly pulled his fists apart. “A special kind of detention.”

“Nothing in the news.”

“Nothing,” he agreed, still stretching.

“Pep put something in their car. Then locked it up again.”

“Yes.” The bungee at full extension now, quivering.

“The other party favor.”

He relaxed, the yellow elastic drawing his fists together. “Yes.”

“What was in it?”

“Molecules. The sort you don’t want a bomb-sniffer to find. They were sampled from a particular batch of Semtex that the IRA were heavily invested in. Plastic explosive. Distinctive chemical signature. Still a few tons of it out there, as far as anyone knows. And the card from a digital camera. Photographs of mosques, all over Britain. The dates on the images were a few months old, but not over sell-by, as suggestive evidence goes.”

“And when you said you were using something ‘off the shelf,’ that was it?”

“Yes.”

“Who was it originally for?”

“Not important now. No need to know. When I jumped off the Burj, silly tit, I blew the window of opportunity on that one. But then I had a girlfriend in trouble. Vinegar and brown paper.”

“Vinegar?”

“Improvised fix. Whatever’s handiest.”

“I’m not complaining. But what about Gracie? Won’t he tell them about us?”

“The beauty of that,” he said, putting his hand on her hip, “is that he doesn’t know about us. Well, you a bit, possibly, through Sleight, but Sleight’s without a governor now, with Gracie a secret guest of Her Majesty. Sleight’s busy getting himself well away from all of it, I’d imagine. And it’s looking better than that, actually, according to the old man.”

“How better?”

“American government seems not to like Gracie. They’re turning up all sorts of things on their end. He’s getting major interagency attention, so the old boy hears. I imagine ours will eventually decide he’s been the victim of a practical joke, but then he’ll have genuine problems back home. Huge ones, I hope. I’m more worried about your Big End in the long run, myself.”

“Why?”

“Something’s happening there. Too big to get a handle on. But the old man says that that’s it exactly: Big End, somehow, is now too big to get a handle on. Which may be what they mean when they say something’s too big to fail.”

“He’s found Meredith’s last season of shoes. Tacoma. Bought them, given them to her. Via some weird new entity of his that targets and assists creatives.”

“I’d watch the ‘targets,’ myself.”

“And he’s paid me. My accountant phoned this morning. I’m worried about that.”

“Why?”

“Hubertus paid me exactly the amount I received for my share of licensing a Curfew song to a Chinese car company. That’s a lot of money.”

“Not a problem.”

“Easy for you to say. I don’t want to be in his debt.”

“You aren’t. If it hadn’t been for you, he might not have gotten Chombo back, because I wouldn’t have turned up. And if he had gotten him back, swapping Milgrim, he’d have eventually had to deal with Sleight and Gracie, down the road. I wasn’t just putting the wind up him with that. He knows that. You’re being rewarded for your crucial role in getting him wherever he’s now gotten.”

“On his way to Iceland, that would be.”

“Let him go. How are you at kitchens?”

“Cooking? Minimal skills.”

“Designing them. I have a flat in Berlin. East side, new building, old was entirely asbestos so they knocked it down. One very big room and a bathroom. No kitchen, just the stumps of pipes and ganglia sticking up from the floor, more or less in the middle. We’d need to fill that in, if we were going to live there.”

“You want to live in Berlin?”

“Provisionally, yes. But only if you do.”

She looked at him. “When I was leaving Cabinet,” she said, “following you out to the Slow Foods van, Robert congratulated me. I didn’t ask him what for, just said thanks. He’d been odd since you turned up. Do you know what that was about?”

“Ah. Yes. When I first struck up a conversation with him, when I was waiting for you, I told him that I was there to ask you to marry me.”

She stared at him. “And you were lying.”

“Not at all. Moment never presented itself. I assume he thinks we’re engaged.”

“Do you?”

“Your call, traditionally,” he said, putting down the bungee.

F
iona was getting her hair cut.

Milgrim stayed in the cabin, finishing Hollis’s book, then digging deeper into the archival subbasement of Cabinet’s website, where he might learn, for instance, that the watercolors in the hallways leading to Hollis’s room were early twentieth-century, by the expatriate American eccentric Doran Lumley. Cabinet owned thirty of these, and rotated them regularly.

He looked up at the decor of the cabin, remembering Hollis’s room at Cabinet, how much he’d liked it. Designers from Hermès had based these cabins on ones in transatlantic prewar German airships, though nobody was making much of a point of that. Frosted aluminum, laminated bamboo, moss-green suede, and ostrich in one very peculiar shade of orange. The three windows were round, portholes really, and through them, if he looked, an empty sea, gone bronze with the setting sun.

The ekranoplan reminded Milgrim of the
Spruce Goose
, which he’d toured in Long Beach as a high school student, but with its wings largely amputated. Weird Soviet hybrids, the ekranoplans; they flew, at tremendous speeds, about fifteen feet above the water, incapable of greater altitude. They had been designed to haul a hundred tons of troops or cargo, very quickly, over the Black or Baltic Sea. This one, an A-90 Orlyonok, had, like all the others, been built in the Volga Shipyard, at Nizhni Novgorod. Milgrim already knew more about them than he cared to, as he was supposed to be translating a four-inch stack of technical and historical documents for Bigend. With Fiona here, he hadn’t made much progress.