Zero History

55. MR. WILSON
There were few guests for breakfast.
The Italian boy and another waiter were arranging screens, to the west of the narwhale
rack. She’d seen these deployed here before, for the heightened privacy of business
breakfasts. The screens were made of what she’d assumed to be extremely old tapestries,
faded to no particular color, a sort of variegated khaki, but now she noticed that they
depicted scenes from Disney’s Snow White. At least they didn’t appear to be
pornographic. She was about to take her accustomed seat, beneath the spiral tusks, when
the Italian boy noticed her. “You’ll be here, Miss Henry,” indicating the newly screened
table.
Then Bigend appeared at the head of the stairs, moving quickly, trench coat over his
arm, the aura of his blue suit almost painful.
“It’s Milgrim,” he said, when he reached her. “Bring coffee,” he ordered the Italian boy.
“Certainly, sir.” He was gone.
“Has something happened to Milgrim?”
“Nothing’s happened to Milgrim. Milgrim has happened to me.” He tossed his trench
coat over the back of his chair.
“What do you mean?”
“He tried to blind Foley, so-called, outside Bank Station. Last night.”
“Milgrim?”
“Not that he told me about it,” said Bigend, sitting down.
“Tell me what’s happened.” She sat opposite him.
“They came to Voytek’s flat this morning. They took Bobby.”
“Bobby?”
“Chombo.”
The name, once heard, recalling the man. Encountered first in Los Angeles, and then,
under very different circumstances, in Vancouver. “He’s here, in London? Who came?”
“Primrose Hill. Or was, until this morning.” Bigend glared at the Italian girl, arriving
with the coffee. She poured for Hollis, then for him.
“Coffee will be fine for now, thanks,” Hollis told her, hoping to give her a chance to
escape.
“Of course,” said the girl, and ducked smoothly behind the apparently four-hundredyear-old
Disney screen.
“He was a mathematician,” Hollis said. “Programmer? I’d forgotten him.” Perhaps
partly because Bobby, a markedly unpleasant personality in his own right, had been so
deeply embedded in that first experience of Bigend being, in many ways, so bad to know.
“I remember that I thought you seemed to be courting him, in Vancouver. As I was