Zero History

21. MINUS ONE
Foliage green,” she heard Milgrim say, flatly, as she paid the driver with euros she’d
gotten from an ATM in the Gare du Nord.
She turned. “What?”
He was half out of the cab, clutching his bag. “That department store, Oxford Street,”
he said. “Foliage green pants. Same man, just walked in. Where we’re going.” That sharp,
nervy thing fully present now, the mildly confused semiconvalescent gone entirely. He
looked as though he were sniffing the air.
“Keep the change,” she said to the driver, shooing Milgrim out of the way and pulling
her roll-aboard after her. She closed the door and the cab pulled away, leaving them on
the sidewalk. “Are you sure?”
“Someone’s watching us.”
“Bigend?”
“Don’t know. You go in.”
“What will you do?”
“I’ll see.”
“Are you sure?”
“Let me borrow me your computer.”
Hollis bent, unzipped the side of her bag, and pulled out her Mac. He tucked it under
his arm, like a clipboard. She saw that vagueness returning, the blinking mildness. He’s
cloaking himself, she thought, then wondered what that meant.
“You go in now,” he said, “please.”
“Euros,” she said, passing him some bills.
She turned and wheeled her bag across the pavement, into the crowd around the
venue’s entrance. Was Milgrim imagining things? Possibly, though there was Bigend’s
penchant for attracting the most unwanted forms of attention, then following whatever
followers turned up. Exactly what Milgrim claimed to be about to do. She looked back,
expecting to see him, but he was gone.
She paid an entrance fee of five euros to a Japanese girl and was asked to check her
bag.
A cobbled courtyard was visible through arches. Young women there were smoking
cigarettes, making it look at once natural and profoundly attractive.
The Salon du Vintage itself was being held within the retrofitted seventeenth-century
building to which the courtyard belonged, a previous decade’s idea of sleek modernity
smoothly folded into its fabric.
Every second or third person in her field of vision was Japanese, and many were
moving in approximately one direction. She went with them, up a minimalist stairway of