Zero History Part 2

"No, really. It was very good." He tidied the trench coat, which he'd draped across the arm of his chair. "Working on something else now?"

She sipped her coffee.

"You want to follow that up," he said.

"I hadn't noticed."

"Barring scandal," he said, "society is reluctant to let someone who's become famous for one thing become famous for another."

"I'm not trying to become famous."

"You already are."

"Was. Briefly. And in quite a small way."

"A degree of undeniable celebrity," he said, like a doctor offering a particularly obvious diagnosis.

They sat silently, then, Hollis pretending to glance over the first few pages of the Times Times, until the Italian girl and an equally pretty and dark-haired boy arrived, bearing breakfast on dark wooden trays with bra.s.s handles. They arranged these on the low coffee table and retreated, Bigend studying the sway of the girl's hips. "I adore the full English," he said. "The offal. Blood pudding. The beans. The bacon. Were you here before they invented food?" he asked. "You must have been."

"I was," she admitted. "I was very young."

"Even then," he said, "the full English was a thing of genius." He was slicing a sausage that looked like haggis, but boiled in the stomach of a small animal, something on the order of a koala. "There's something you could help us out with," he said, and put a slice of sausage in his mouth.

"Us."

He chewed, nodded, swallowed. "We aren't just an advertising agency. I'm sure you know that. We do brand vision transmission, trend forecasting, vendor management, youth market recon, strategic planning in general."

"Why didn't that commercial ever come out, the one they paid us all the money to use 'Hard to Be One' in?"

He dabbed a torn toast-finger into the runny yellow eye of a fried egg, bit off half of it, chewed, swallowed, wiped his lips with his napkin. "Do you care?"

"That was a lot of money."

"That was China," he said. "The vehicle the ad was for hasn't made it to roll-out. Won't."

"Why not?"

"There were problems with the design. Fundamental ones. Their government decided that that wasn't the vehicle with which China should enter the world market. Particularly not in the light of the various tainted food product scandals. And whatnot."

"Was it that bad?"

"Fully." He forked baked beans adroitly onto toast. "They didn't need your song, in the end," he said, "and, as far we know, the executives in charge of the project are all still very much alive. Quite an optimal outcome for all concerned." He started on his bacon. She ate her oatmeal and fruit, watching him. He ate quickly, methodically topping up whatever metabolism kept him firing on those extra cylinders. She'd never seen him tired, or jet-lagged. He seemed to exist in his own personal time zone.

He finished before she did, wiping the white plate clean with a final half-triangle of golden Cabinet toast.

"Brand vision transmission," he said.

"Yes?" She raised an eyebrow.

"Narrative. Consumers don't buy products, so much as narratives."

"That's old," she said. "It must be, because I've heard it before." She took a sip of cooled coffee.

"To some extent, an idea like that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Designers are taught to invent characters, with narratives, who they then design products for, or around. Standard procedure. There are similar procedures in branding generally, in the invention of new products, new companies, of all kinds."

"So it works?"

"Oh, it works," he said, "but because it does, it's become de facto. Once you have a way in which things are done, the edge migrates. Goes elsewhere."

"Where?"

"That's where you come in," he said.

"I do not."

He smiled. He had, as ever, a great many very white teeth.

"You have bacon in your teeth," she said, though he didn't.

Covering his mouth with the white linen napkin, he tried to find the nonexistent bacon shard. Lowering it, he grimaced widely.

She pretended to peer. "I think think you got it," she said, doubtfully. "And I'm not interested in your proposition." you got it," she said, doubtfully. "And I'm not interested in your proposition."

"You're a bohemian," he said, folding the napkin and putting it on the tray, beside his plate.

"What does that mean?"

"You've scarcely ever held a salaried position. You're freelance. Have always been freelance. You've acc.u.mulated no real property."

"Not entirely through want of trying."

"No," he said, "but when you do try, your heart's scarcely in it. I'm a bohemian myself."

"Hubertus, you're easily the richest person I've ever met." This was, she knew as she said it, not literally true, but anyone she'd met who might have been wealthier than Bigend had tended to be comparatively dull. He was easily the most problematic rich person she'd yet encountered.

"It's a by-product," he said, carefully. "And one of the things it's a by-product of of is my fundamental disinterest in wealth." is my fundamental disinterest in wealth."

And, really, she knew that she believed him, at least about that. It was true, and it did things to his capacity for risk-taking. It was what made him, she knew from experience, so peculiarly dangerous to be around.

"My mother was a bohemian," he said.

"Phaedra," she remembered, somehow.

"I made her old age as comfortable as possible. That isn't always the case, with bohemians."

"That was good of you."

"Reg is quite the model of the successful bohemian, isn't he?"

"I suppose he is."

"He's always working on something, Reg. Always. Always something new." He looked at her, across the heavy silver pots. "Are you?"

And he had her, then, she knew. Looking somehow straight into her. "No," she said, there being nothing else really to say.

"You should be," he said. "The secret, of course, is that it doesn't really matter what it is. Whatever you do, because you are an artist, will bring you to the next thing of your own. That's what happened the last time, isn't it? You wrote your book."

"But you were lying to me," she said. "You pretended you had a magazine, and that I was writing for it."

"I did, potentially, have a magazine. I had staff."

"One person!"

"Two," he said, "counting you."

"I can't work that way," she told him. "I won't."

"It won't be that way. This is entirely less ... speculative."

"Wasn't the NSA or someone tapping your phone, reading your e-mail?"

"But now we know that they were doing that to everyone." He loosened his pale golden tie. "We didn't, then."

"You did," she said. "You'd guessed. Or found out."

"Someone," he said, "is developing what may prove to be a somewhat new way to transmit brand vision."

"You sound guarded in your appreciation."

"A certain genuinely provocative use of negative s.p.a.ce," he said, sounding still less pleased.

"Who?"

"I don't know," he said. "I haven't been able to find out. I feel that someone has read and understood my playbook. And may possibly be extending it."

"Then send Pamela," she said. "She understands all that. Or someone else. You have a small army of people who understand all that. You must."

"But that's exactly it. Because they 'understand all that,' they won't find the edge. They won't find the new. And worse, they'll trample on it, inadvertently crush it, beneath a certain mediocrity inherent in professional competence." He dabbed his lips with the folded napkin, though they didn't seem to need it. "I need a wild card. I need you."

He sat back, then, and regarded her in exactly the way he'd regarded the tidy and receding a.s.s of the Italian girl, though in this case, she knew, it had nothing at all to do with s.e.x.

"Dear G.o.d," she said, entirely without expecting to, and simultaneously wis.h.i.+ng she were very small. Small enough to curl up in the s.l.u.t's wool that crowned the steampunk lift, between those few cork-colored filter tips.

"Does 'The Gabriel Hounds' mean anything to you?" he asked.

"No," she said.

He smiled, obviously pleased.

4. PARADOXICAL ANTAGONIST

With the red cardboard tube tucked carefully in beside him, under the thin British Midlands blanket, Milgrim lay awake in the darkened cabin of his flight to Heathrow.

He'd taken his pills about fifteen minutes earlier, after some calculations on the back cover of the in-flight magazine. Time-zone transitions could be tricky, in terms of dosing schedules, particularly when you weren't allowed to know exactly what it was you were taking. Whatever the doctors in Basel provided, he never saw it in its original factory form, so had no way of figuring out what it might be. This was intentional, they had explained to him, and necessary to his treatment. Everything was repackaged, in variously sized featureless white gelatin capsules, which he was forbidden to open.

He'd pushed the empty white bubble-pack, with its tiny, precisely handwritten notations of date and hour, in purple ink, far down into the seatback pocket. It would remain on the plane, at Heathrow. Nothing to be carried through customs.

His pa.s.sport lay against his chest, beneath his s.h.i.+rt, in a Faraday pouch protecting the information on its resident RFID tag. RFID snooping was an obsession of Sleight's. Radio-frequency identification tags. They were in lots of things, evidently, and definitely in every recent U.S. pa.s.sport. Sleight himself was quite fond of RFID snooping, which Milgrim supposed was one reason he worried about it. You could sit in a hotel lobby and remotely collect information from the pa.s.sports of American businessmen. The Faraday pouch, which blocked all radio signals, made this impossible.

Milgrim's Neo phone was another example of Sleight's obsession with security or, as Milgrim supposed, control. It had an almost unimaginably tiny on-screen keyboard, one that could only be operated with a stylus. Milgrim's hand-eye coordination was quite good, according to the clinic, but he still had to concentrate like a jeweler when he needed to send a message. More annoyingly, Sleight had set it to lock its screen after thirty seconds of idle, requiring Milgrim to enter his pa.s.sword if he stopped to think for longer than twenty-nine seconds. When he'd complained about this, Sleight explained that it gave potential attackers only a thirty-second window to get in and read the phone, and that admin privileges were in any case out of the question.

The Neo, Milgrim gathered, was less a phone than a sort of tabula rasa, one which Sleight could field-update, without Milgrim's knowledge or consent, installing or deleting applications as he saw fit. It was also p.r.o.ne to something Sleight called "kernel panic," which caused it to freeze and need to be restarted, a condition Milgrim himself had been instantly inclined to identify with.

Lately, though, Milgrim didn't panic quite as easily. When he did, he seemed to restart of his own accord. It was, his cognitive therapist at the clinic had explained, a by-product of doing other things, rather than something one could train oneself to do in and of itself. Milgrim preferred to regard that by-product obliquely, in brief sidelong glances, else it somehow stop being produced. The biggest thing he was doing, in terms of the by-product of reduced anxiety, the therapist had explained, was to no longer take benzos on as constant a basis as possible.

He no longer took them at all, apparently, having undergone a very gradual withdrawal at the clinic. He wasn't sure when he'd actually stopped having any, as the unmarked capsules had made it impossible to know. And he'd taken lots of capsules, many of them containing food supplements of various kinds, the clinic having some obscure naturopathic basis which he'd put down to basic Swissness. Though in other ways the treatment had been quite aggressive, involving everything from repeated ma.s.sive blood transfusions to the use of a substance they called a "paradoxical antagonist." This latter produced exceptionally peculiar dreams, in which Milgrim was stalked by an actual Paradoxical Antagonist, a shadowy figure he somehow a.s.sociated with the colors in 1950s American advertising ill.u.s.trations. Perky.

He missed his cognitive therapist. He'd been delighted to be able to speak Russian with such a beautifully educated woman. Somehow he couldn't imagine having transacted all of that in English.

He'd stayed eight months, in the clinic, longer than any of the other clients. All of whom, when opportunity had afforded, had quietly asked the name of his firm. Milgrim had replied variously, at first, though always naming some iconic brand from his youth: Coca-Cola, General Motors, Kodak. Their eyes had widened, hearing this. Toward the end of this stay, he'd switched to Enron. Their eyes had narrowed. This had partly been the result of his therapist's having ordered him to use the internet to familiarize himself with the events of the previous decade. He had, as she'd quite rightly pointed out, missed all of that.

He dreams this in the tall white room, its floor of limed oak. Tall windows. Beyond them, snow is falling. The world outside is utterly quiet, depthless. The light is without direction.

"Where did you learn your Russian, Mr. Milgrim?"

"Columbia. The university."

Her white face. Black hair matte, center-parted, drawn back tight.

"You described your previous situation as one of literal captivity. This was after Columbia?"

"Yes."

"How do you see your current situation as differing from that?"

"Do I see it as captivity?"

"Yes."