Zero History

with a fresh card, Blue Ant having kept the one he’d used in Myrtle Beach. They always
did. He checked the batteries, then put the camera in his jacket pocket. He put Hollis’s
laptop in his bag and zipped it shut. Leaving a few small coins on the zinc counter, he left
the shop and headed back to the Salon du Vintage, walking quickly again.
Was he still angry? he wondered. He was calmer now, he decided. He knew he
wouldn’t be telling Bigend about Winnie. Not if he could help it, anyway.
It was warmer, the cloud burning away. Paris seemed slightly unreal, the way London
always did when he first arrived. How peculiar, that these places had always existed backto-back,
as close together and as separate as the two sides of a coin, yet wormholed now
by a fast train and twenty-some miles of tunnel.
At the Salon du Vintage, after paying five euros admission, he checked his bag,
something he never liked doing. He’d stolen enough checked luggage himself to know
this arrangement as easy pickings. On the other hand, he’d be more mobile without it. He
smiled at the Japanese girl, pocketed his bag check, and entered.
He was more at home in the world of objects, his therapist said, than the world of
people. The Salon du Vintage, he assured himself, was about objects. Wishing to become
the person the Salon du Vintage would want him to be, hence somehow less visible, he
climbed a handsomely renovated stairway to the second floor.
The first thing he saw there was that poster of a younger Hollis, looking at once nervy
and naughty. This was not the actual poster, he judged, but an amateurish reproduction,
oversized and lacking in detail. He wondered what it would be like for her, seeing that.
He had left relatively few images himself over the past decade or so, and probably
Winnie had seen most of those. Had them ready, perhaps, to e-mail to someone she
wanted to be able to recognize him. Most of those had been taken by the police, and he
wondered whether he’d recognize them himself. He’d certainly recognize the one she’d
taken in the Caffè Nero in Seven Dials, and that would be the one she’d use.
The young man in the forage cap and foliage green pants, his black jacket still zipped,
emerged from a side aisle of racks, his attention captured by a darting shoal of young
Japanese girls. He’d removed his mirrored wraparound sunglasses. Milgrim stepped
sideways, behind a mannequin in a delirious photo-print dress, keeping his man in sight
over its massively padded shoulder, and wondered what he should do. If Foley didn’t
already know he was here, and saw him, he’d be recognized from Selfridges. If not, he
supposed, from South Carolina. Winnie had been there, watching him, and someone,
he’d assumed Sleight, had photographed her there. Should he tell her about that? He
flagged it for consideration. Foley was walking away now, toward the rear of the
building. Milgrim remembered the man with the mullet, in the mothballed restaurant.
Foley didn’t have that, Milgrim decided, whatever that had been, and it was a very good
thing. He stepped from behind the Gaultier and followed, ready to simply keep walking if
he was discovered. If Foley didn’t notice him, that would be a plus, but the main thing
was for Milgrim not to be thought to be following him. His hand in his jacket pocket, on