William Gibson - Zero history

He put on his new socks and underwear from Galeries Lafayette, and an unworn but creased shirt from Hackett. He remembered the Russians in the elevator. Foley. Winced. He tucked the memory card, with his pictures of Foley on it, down into the top of his left sock.

He edged around the bed, stood looking down at Parisians passing on the sidewalk opposite. A graying, leonine man in a long dark coat. Then a tall girl in very nice boots. He looked for Fiona, half expecting to see her astride her motorcycle, keeping watch. He looked up then, but didn’t see the penguin either.

A tiny garret window popped open, on a building opposite, and a girl with short dark hair thrust her head and shoulders through, into the morning, a cigarette between her lips. Milgrim nodded. Addictions were being serviced. He sat down on the padded bench and checked his Twitter. No Winnie. It was five after seven, he saw, earlier than he’d thought.

He packed his bag, putting the laptop in last. What would he do, once he’d returned it? How would he keep in touch with Winnie? The fact of Winnie made his knowledge of Blue Ant’s internal brushfire feel awkward. Otherwise, he imagined, without her, it would mainly have been interesting, as Bigend didn’t seem particularly worried. Though he’d never seen Bigend worried about anything. Where most people got worried, Bigend seemed to become interested, and Milgrim knew that that could be strangely contagious. Imagining explaining that to Winnie made him uneasy.

He made a last pass for misplaced property, discovering one of his socks under the edge of the bed. He put it in his bag, put the strap over his shoulder, and left the room, leaving the door unlocked. Maids were afoot but he didn’t see them, only their metal carts stacked with towels and tiny plastic bottles of shampoo. He saw the building’s original stairway, winding down, beyond big twisted brown-stained timbers that couldn’t possibly have been as old, in America, as they no doubt were, here.

He descended, passing windows, on each floor, overlooking a courtyard the morning hadn’t reached yet. Scooters and bicycles were parked there, at the bottom of a well of shadow.

On the ground floor he found his brief way around to the lobby, where china was rattling. No Hollis. He took a seat at a table for two, beside the windows, and asked for coffee and a croissant. The Tunisian waitress went away. Someone else brought the coffee immediately, with a small pitcher of hot milk. He was stirring his coffee when Hollis arrived, looking red-eyed and exhausted, the Hounds jacket draped across her shoulders like a short cape.

She sat down, a crumpled tissue in one hand.

“Is something wrong?” asked Milgrim, seized by some substrate of his own childhood fear, sorrow, the cup halfway to his mouth.

“I haven’t slept,” she said. “Found out a friend’s been in an accident. Not in very good shape. Sorry.”

“Your friend? Not in good shape?” He’d set the cup in its saucer. The waitress arrived with his croissant, butter, a miniature jar of jam.

“Coffee, please,” she said to the waitress. “Not a recent accident. I only heard last night.”

“How is she?” Milgrim was having one of those experiences of feeling, as he’d explained to his therapist, that he was emulating a kind of social being that he fundamentally wasn’t. Not that he was unconcerned with the pain he saw in Hollis’s eyes, or with the fate of her friend, but that there was some language required here that he’d never learned.

“He,” corrected Hollis as her coffee arrived.

“What happened?”

“He jumped off the tallest building in the world.” Her eyes widened, as if at the absurdity of what she’d just said, then closed, tightly.

“In Chicago?” asked Milgrim.

“It hasn’t been Chicago for years,” she said, opening her eyes, “has it? Dubai.” She poured milk into her coffee, her movements determinedly businesslike now, precise.

“How is he?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Flown to a hospital in Singapore. His leg. A car hit him. I don’t know where he is.”

“You said he jumped off a building,” said Milgrim, sounding accusing, though he hadn’t intended to.

“He glided down, then opened a chute. Came down in traffic.”

“Why?” Milgrim shifted uneasily in his seat, knowing he was somehow off-script now.

“He’d need somewhere clear, flat, no wires.”

“I mean, why did he jump?”

She frowned. Sipped some coffee. “He says it’s like walking through walls. Nobody can, but if you could, he says, it would feel like that. He says the wall is inside, though, and you do have to walk through it.”

“I’m afraid of heights.”

“So’s he. He says. Said. I haven’t seen him for a while.”

“Was he your boyfriend?” Milgrim had no idea where this came from, but his therapist had had a lot to say about his relative inability to trust certain kinds of instinct.

She looked at him. “Yes,” she said.

“Do you know where he is?”

“No.”

“Do you know how to get in touch with him?”

“I have a number,” she said, “but I’m only supposed to call it if I’m in trouble.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I’m unhappy now. Anxious. Sad. That’s not the same.”

“But do you want to stay that way?” Milgrim felt as though he’d become his therapist, in some weird role-flip, or rather Hollis’s. “How can you expect to feel better if you don’t find out how he is?”

“You should eat that,” Hollis said, sharply, indicating his croissant. “We have a cab coming.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, feeling suddenly miserable. “It’s none of my business.” He fumbled with the paper seal on the lid of the tiny jam jar.

“No, I’m sorry. You’re just trying to help. It’s complicated, for me. And I haven’t slept. And I’d been managing not to think about him, for quite a while.”

“You were good, last night, with Meredith,” Milgrim said, tearing his croissant in half and troweling butter and jam inside both pieces. He bit into one of the halves.

“Now I don’t know whether I can go on with that. I have to find him.”

“Call him. Not knowing is affecting your work. That’s trouble.”

“I’m afraid. Afraid that might not work. Afraid he might not want to hear from me.”

“Use Hubertus,” Milgrim said, around a mouthful of croissant, covering his mouth with his hand. “He can find anyone.”

Her eyebrows rose.

“Like Meredith’s sneakers,” he said. “The price of admission.”

“Meredith’s sneakers wouldn’t be unhappy to be found by Hubertus. My friend would be unhappy to be found by anyone.”

“Would he have to know?”

“Did you learn to think this way from Bigend?”

“I learned it being an addict. Constantly requiring something I wasn’t legally allowed to possess, and which I couldn’t afford. I learned leverage. What you did last night, with Meredith. You could do that with Hubertus, and find your friend.”

She frowned.

“There was someone here, last night,” he said. “From Hubertus. After you went up.”

“Who?”

“Fiona. A girl on a motorcycle. Not someone I’d seen at Blue Ant. Well, I’d seen her. On her motorcycle. Delivering something for Pamela. But I didn’t know she was a girl.”

“Why was she here?”

“So that I could speak with Hubertus, on her phone. He told me that Sleight is either working for or with someone else. He told me that I should regard everyone other than Pamela, and Fiona, as suspect. And you. He said you didn’t know about it. But you do now.”

“How did he seem to be taking that?”

“He seemed… interested? He wants you to take a cab to your hotel when we arrive. Fiona will take me to meet him then.”