Zero History

painfully with the orange leather upholstery. He’d proceeded, with no preface whatever,
as was his way, to tell Milgrim a great deal about the history of the rifle Gracie had left on
Little Wormwood Scrubs. It had, Milgrim had already known, been found, just after
dawn, by a dog walker, who’d promptly phoned the police. Stranger things, Milgrim now
knew, had been found on the Scrubs, including unexploded munitions, and not that long
ago.
He’d learned then that the police who’d responded to the dog walker had been ordinary
police, so that the rifle’s serial numbers had been, however briefly, in ordinary police
computers. Shortly to evaporate, under the attention of spookier entities, but long enough
for Bigend, however he might have done it, to acquire them. He now knew, somehow,
that the rifle, Chinese-made, had been captured in Afghanistan two years before, and
dutifully logged. After that, a blank, until Gracie had turned up with it, folded, in a
cardboard carton. It bothered Bigend, the rifle. It was his theory (or “narrative,” Milgrim’s
therapist in Basel might have said) that Gracie had gotten the gun from some opposite
number in the British military, after it had been secretly deleted from stores and smuggled
back to England. But Bigend’s concern now was just how opposite a number this
theoretical person might have been. Might Gracie have had a British partner, someone
with similar inclinations? Someone who hadn’t been rolled up by whatever supercops
Garreth had called down?
Milgrim hadn’t thought so. “I think it was about the gun,” he’d said.
“How do you mean, ‘about the gun’?”
“Things happen around guns. This happened because a gun was there. You’ve told me
that you can’t understand why Gracie brought the gun. That it doesn’t fit with your sense
of who he is. That it was stupid. Over-the-top. Gratuitous. Bad business.”
“Exactly.”
“He did it because someone he knew here had the gun. The gun was captured by British
troops. Someone smuggled it back here. That’s not arms dealing. That’s an illegal
souvenir. But Gracie saw the gun. And then he had the gun. And then things happened,
because the gun was there. But whoever he got the gun from wants nothing at all to do
with any of this. Ever.”
Bigend had stared at him. “Remarkable,” he’d said, finally, “how you do that.”
“It’s thinking like a criminal,” Milgrim said.
“Once again, I’m in your debt.”
In Winnie’s, Milgrim thought then, though Bigend didn’t know it. When he’d tweeted
her, after learning more from Hollis, he’d asked, “How did you do that?” Her tweet in
reply, the last he’d gotten from her, though he still checked for them, periodically, had
simply said, “Doilies.”
“It’s the order flow, isn’t it?” Milgrim had had no intent to ask this at all. Hadn’t been
thinking of it. Yet it had emerged. His therapist had told him that ideas, in human
relations, had lives of their own. Were in a sense autonomous.