Zero History

strap of his bag was securely over his shoulder.
“Good?”
“Scary.”
He opened the door before the cab had fully come to a halt. The driver said something
in irritated French. “Sorry,” he said as they stopped, and slipped out, closing the door
behind him.
From the curb he looked back, saw Hollis smiling, telling the driver something. The cab
pulled back into traffic.
He quickly entered Galeries Lafayette and walked on, until he was beneath the center of
the soaring mercantile mosque-dome of stained glass. He stood there, looking up, briefly
experiencing the reflexive country-mouse awe the architect had intended to induce. A
cross between Grand Central and the atrium of the Brown Palace, Denver, structures
aimed heroically into futures that had never really happened. Wide balconies ringed every
level, rising toward the dome. Beyond them he could see the tops of racks of clothing,
rather than any audience, but if there had been an audience, he, Milgrim, would have
been standing in exactly the spot where the fat lady would ultimately sing.
He drew the Faraday pouch out, on its cord, and removed the Neo, exposing it to
whatever intricate soup of signals existed here. Within its childish-looking shroud of
Kleenex, it began to ring.
Sleight had arranged things so that it was impossible to turn the ring off, but Milgrim
thumbed the volume down, all the way, and put it into his side jacket pocket. It vibrated a
few times, then quit. He took it out again, opened the Kleenex to check the time, careful
not to touch it, then put it back.
He had whatever remained of his three hundred pounds, unchanged, the euros Hollis
had given, plus another thin fold of euros remaining from his Basel pocket money. He
decided to invest in his own future, one much more immediate than the one the founders
of Galeries Lafayette had imagined.
He found his way into the men’s store, a separate building next door, and selected a
pair of black French briefs, then a pair of black cotton-blend crew socks, paying for them
with almost all of his Basel money. The euro bills reminded him, obscurely, of
Disneyland’s original Tomorrowland, where his mother had taken him as a child.
The Neo began to vibrate again, in his pocket. He let it, trying to imagine the look on
Sleight’s face. But Sleight knew where he was, and quite possibly had heard the cashier’s
side of the socks-and-underwear transaction, which Milgrim for his part had conducted
nonverbally, with soft apologetic grunts. The Kleenex, he hoped, was muffling things a
bit, though he supposed it didn’t really matter.
He went back into the main store and rode escalators, into realms of lingerie,
sportswear, little black dresses. If he were sure how much time he had, he thought, he’d
look for the furniture department. The furniture departments of large department stores
were oases of calm, usually. He’d often found them soothing. They were also very good