Zero history

“Brand vision transmission,” he said.

“Yes?” She raised an eyebrow.

“Narrative. Consumers don’t buy products, so much as narratives.”

“That’s old,” she said. “It must be, because I’ve heard it before.” She took a sip of cooled coffee.

“To some extent, an idea like that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Designers are taught to invent characters, with narratives, who they then design products for, or around. Standard procedure. There are similar procedures in branding generally, in the invention of new products, new companies, of all kinds.”

“So it works?”

“Oh, it works,” he said, “but because it does, it’s become de facto. Once you have a way in which things are done, the edge migrates. Goes elsewhere.”

“Where?”

“That’s where you come in,” he said.

“I do not.”

He smiled. He had, as ever, a great many very white teeth.

“You have bacon in your teeth,” she said, though he didn’t.

Covering his mouth with the white linen napkin, he tried to find the nonexistent bacon shard. Lowering it, he grimaced widely.

She pretended to peer. “I think you got it,” she said, doubtfully. “And I’m not interested in your proposition.”

“You’re a bohemian,” he said, folding the napkin and putting it on the tray, beside his plate.

“What does that mean?”

“You’ve scarcely ever held a salaried position. You’re freelance. Have always been freelance. You’ve accumulated no real property.”

“Not entirely through want of trying.”

“No,” he said, “but when you do try, your heart’s scarcely in it. I’m a bohemian myself.”

“Hubertus, you’re easily the richest person I’ve ever met.” This was, she knew as she said it, not literally true, but anyone she’d met who might have been wealthier than Bigend had tended to be comparatively dull. He was easily the most problematic rich person she’d yet encountered.

“It’s a by-product,” he said, carefully. “And one of the things it’s a by-product of is my fundamental disinterest in wealth.”

And, really, she knew that she believed him, at least about that. It was true, and it did things to his capacity for risk-taking. It was what made him, she knew from experience, so peculiarly dangerous to be around.

“My mother was a bohemian,” he said.

“Phaedra,” she remembered, somehow.

“I made her old age as comfortable as possible. That isn’t always the case, with bohemians.”

“That was good of you.”

“Reg is quite the model of the successful bohemian, isn’t he?”

“I suppose he is.”

“He’s always working on something, Reg. Always. Always something new.” He looked at her, across the heavy silver pots. “Are you?”

And he had her, then, she knew. Looking somehow straight into her. “No,” she said, there being nothing else really to say.

“You should be,” he said. “The secret, of course, is that it doesn’t really matter what it is. Whatever you do, because you are an artist, will bring you to the next thing of your own. That’s what happened the last time, isn’t it? You wrote your book.”

“But you were lying to me,” she said. “You pretended you had a magazine, and that I was writing for it.”

“I did, potentially, have a magazine. I had staff.”

“One person!”

“Two,” he said, “counting you.”

“I can’t work that way,” she told him. “I won’t.”

“It won’t be that way. This is entirely less… speculative.”

“Wasn’t the NSA or someone tapping your phone, reading your e-mail?”

“But now we know that they were doing that to everyone.” He loosened his pale golden tie. “We didn’t, then.”

“You did,” she said. “You’d guessed. Or found out.”

“Someone,” he said, “is developing what may prove to be a somewhat new way to transmit brand vision.”

“You sound guarded in your appreciation.”

“A certain genuinely provocative use of negative space,” he said, sounding still less pleased.

“Who?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t been able to find out. I feel that someone has read and understood my playbook. And may possibly be extending it.”

“Then send Pamela,” she said. “She understands all that. Or someone else. You have a small army of people who understand all that. You must.”

“But that’s exactly it. Because they ‘understand all that,’ they won’t find the edge. They won’t find the new. And worse, they’ll trample on it, inadvertently crush it, beneath a certain mediocrity inherent in professional competence.” He dabbed his lips with the folded napkin, though they didn’t seem to need it. “I need a wild card. I need you.”

He sat back, then, and regarded her in exactly the way he’d regarded the tidy and receding ass of the Italian girl, though in this case, she knew, it had nothing at all to do with sex.

“Dear God,” she said, entirely without expecting to, and simultaneously wishing she were very small. Small enough to curl up in the slut’s wool that crowned the steampunk lift, between those few cork-colored filter tips.

“Does ‘The Gabriel Hounds’ mean anything to you?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

He smiled, obviously pleased.

4. PARADOXICAL ANTAGONIST

With the red cardboard tube tucked carefully in beside him, under the thin British Midlands blanket, Milgrim lay awake in the darkened cabin of his flight to Heathrow.

He’d taken his pills about fifteen minutes earlier, after some calculations on the back cover of the in-flight magazine. Time-zone transitions could be tricky, in terms of dosing schedules, particularly when you weren’t allowed to know exactly what it was you were taking. Whatever the doctors in Basel provided, he never saw it in its original factory form, so had no way of figuring out what it might be. This was intentional, they had explained to him, and necessary to his treatment. Everything was repackaged, in variously sized featureless white gelatin capsules, which he was forbidden to open.

He’d pushed the empty white bubble-pack, with its tiny, precisely handwritten notations of date and hour, in purple ink, far down into the seatback pocket. It would remain on the plane, at Heathrow. Nothing to be carried through customs.

His passport lay against his chest, beneath his shirt, in a Faraday pouch protecting the information on its resident RFID tag. RFID snooping was an obsession of Sleight’s. Radio-frequency identification tags. They were in lots of things, evidently, and definitely in every recent U.S. passport. Sleight himself was quite fond of RFID snooping, which Milgrim supposed was one reason he worried about it. You could sit in a hotel lobby and remotely collect information from the passports of American businessmen. The Faraday pouch, which blocked all radio signals, made this impossible.

Milgrim’s Neo phone was another example of Sleight’s obsession with security or, as Milgrim supposed, control. It had an almost unimaginably tiny on-screen keyboard, one that could only be operated with a stylus. Milgrim’s hand-eye coordination was quite good, according to the clinic, but he still had to concentrate like a jeweler when he needed to send a message. More a

The Neo, Milgrim gathered, was less a phone than a sort of tabula rasa, one which Sleight could field-update, without Milgrim’s knowledge or consent, installing or deleting applications as he saw fit. It was also prone to something Sleight called “kernel panic,” which caused it to freeze and need to be restarted, a condition Milgrim himself had been instantly inclined to identify with.