Zero History

30. SIGHTING
Milgrim left the white tea shop, walking in what he imagined as the direction of the
Seine, favoring streets that ran approximately perpendicular to the one where he’d had his
tea. Wondering exactly how he’d been followed here from the Salon du Vintage. Directly,
quite likely, on a motorcycle.
If the yellow helmet was really the one he’d seen in London, his motorcyclist was the
dispatch rider who’d delivered the printout of Winnie, the photo he’d assumed Sleight
had taken in Myrtle Beach. Pamela had sent it, after he’d seen Bigend, on the way back to
the hotel. Did they know who Winnie was, he wondered, or what she was? They all took
pictures of one another, and now they had him doing it as well.
Now he seemed to have found a street of expensive-looking African folk art. Big dark
wooden statues, in small galleries, beautifully lit. Nail-studded fetishes, suggesting terrible
emotional states.
But here was a small camera shop as well. He went in, bought a Chinese card-reader
from a pleasant Persian man in gold-rimmed glasses and a natty gray cardigan. Put it in
his bag with Hollis’s laptop and her book. Continued on.
He began to feel less anxious, somehow, though the elation he’d felt after giving the
Neo the slip wasn’t likely to return.
The question now, he decided, was whether the motorcyclist, if he hadn’t been
mistaken about the helmet, worked for Sleight or Bigend, or both. Had Bigend sent him
here, or Sleight? For that matter, how to be certain that Bigend really mistrusted Sleight?
Bigend, as far as he knew, had never lied to him, and Sleight had always seemed
fundamentally untrustworthy. Built from the ground up for betrayal.
He thought of his therapist. If she were here, he told himself, she’d remind him that this
situation, however complexly threatening or dangerous, was external, hence entirely
preferable to the one he’d been in when he’d arrived in Basel, a situation both internal
and seemingly inescapable. “Do not internalize the threat. When you do, the system floods
with adrenaline, cortisol. Crippling you.”
He reached for the Neo to check the time. It was no longer there.
He walked on, shortly finding himself in what an enameled wall-sign informed him was
the Rue Git-le-Coeur. Narrower, possibly more medieval. A few drops of rain began to
fall, the sky having clouded over while he’d been having his tea. He checked reflections
for a yellow helmet, though of course a professional might park the bike, leave the helmet
behind. Or, more likely, be part of a team. He saw a magical-looking bookshop, stock
piled like a mad professor’s study in a film, and swerved, craving the escape into text. But
these seemed not only comics, unable to provide his needed hit of words-in-row, but in
French as well. Some of the them, he saw, were the French kind, very literary-looking,