Zero History

25. TINFOIL
Hollis found Milgrim giving his jacket to the Japanese girl at the bag check. “I’m
finished,” she said. “We can go now, if you’re ready.”
Milgrim turned, took her hand, and led her away from the bag check.
“Is something wrong?”
“My phone,” said Milgrim, releasing her hand on the far side of the entranceway.
“They’re listening through it.”
Tinfoil hats, people whose fillings broadcast thought-control messages. “ ‘They’ who?”
“Sleight. Bigend doesn’t trust him.”
“Neither do I.” She never had. And now that she thought of Sleight, Milgrim didn’t
sound quite as automatically crazy. That was the trouble with Bigendland. People did
things like that. The ones like Sleight did, anyway. Then again, Milgrim might just be
crazy.
Or on drugs. What if he’d slipped? Gone back on whatever it was they’d gotten him off
of in Switzerland? Where was the semi-absent character she’d met over tapas? He looked
worked up, a little sweaty, maybe angry about something. He looked more like someone
in particular, anyway, she realized, and that was what had been missing before. The lack
of that was what had made him simultaneously so peculiar and so forgettable. She was
looking into the eyes of someone experiencing the anxiety of sudden arrival. But
Milgrim’s arrival, she somehow knew, was from within. But all because he thought he’d
seen someone? Though someone, she reminded herself, she’d thought she’d seen too, in
the basement. “I saw him,” she said. “Maybe.”
“Where?” Milgrim stepped back, allowing a pair of spryly geriatric American men to
pass, headed for the stairs.
They looked to Hollis like aged hair-metal rockers in expensive mufti, and seemed to be
talking golf. Did they collect vintage Chanel? “Downstairs,” she said. “I pushed the wrong
button in the elevator. Then he came down the stairs. I think.”
“What did you do?”
“Got back in the elevator. Up. Didn’t see him again, but I was busy.”
“He’s here,” Milgrim said.
“You saw him?”
“I took his picture. Pamela wants it. I could show you, but the card’s not in my
camera.”
“He’s here now?” She looked around.
“I saw him go out,” glancing toward the entrance. “Doesn’t mean he hasn’t come back.”
“I asked Bigend. He said they didn’t have anyone watching us.”
“Do you believe him?”