“Heidi!”

“Did the bat-suit thing. Took it really far out, really low, probably pissed that he’d jumped from below the record point. Trying for points on style.”

Hollis was crying now.

“Had to come down on a freeway. Four in the morning, there was a vintage Lotus Elan-”

Hollis started sobbing. She was sitting on the bed now, but didn’t know how she’d gotten there.

“He’s okay! Well, he’s alive, okay? My boy says he must’ve been super well connected, because the ambulance that picked him up put him straight on an air ambulance, a jet, into a high-end trauma center in Singapore. Where you go, there, if you need shit-hot medical attention.”

“He’s alive? Alive?”

“Fuck yes. I told you already. Leg’s messed up. I know he was in Singapore, six weeks, then it gets fuzzy. Some people say he went to the States from there, to get stuff done they couldn’t do in Singapore. Military doctors. You said he wasn’t military.”

“Connected. The old man…”

“Story is, that air ambulance had some kind of local royal crest.”

“Where is he?”

“These boys at my gym, they’re ex-military. Maybe ex-. Fuzzy. Doesn’t matter how much they drink, the story just trails off, at a certain point. Runs up against some prime directive. They know who he is, but from the jumping. They’re big fans of that. Also because he’s English. Tribal thing. That secret-life shit you told me about, I don’t think they’d get that. Or maybe they would. They’re all batshit in their own way.”

Hollis was wiping her face, mechanically, with a towel smeared with makeup. “He’s alive. Say he’s alive.”

“They think he went into some funny arrangement, Stateside, where they work on messed-up Delta Force guys, like that. That impresses them deeply. Then they order another round, talk football, and I fall asleep.”

“That’s all you’ve been able to find out?”

“All? I’ve done everything short of trying to fuck it out of them, and I wouldn’t say they’d made it exceptionally easy not to do that either. You were the one told me to leave the civilians alone, weren’t you?”

“Sorry, Heidi.”

“It’s okay. They never ran into anybody thought they were civilians before. Kind of worth it. You know how to get in touch with him?”

“Maybe.”

“Now you’ve got an excuse. Gotta go. They want me to throw darts. They bet. Take care of yourself. You back tomorrow? We’ll have dinner.”

“You’re sure he’s alive?”

“I think these guys would know, if he wasn’t. He’s like a football player to them. They’d hear. Where are you?”

“At the hotel.”

“Get some sleep. Tomorrow.”

“Bye, Heidi.”

The pale gold bullshit ideograms still swimming in tears.

34. THE ORDER FLOW

Milgrim woke as some large vehicle groaned past in the street, or perhaps in dream, chains rattling. He’d slept with the windows open.

He sat up and looked at the blank screen of Hollis’s laptop, on the cushioned ledge beneath the windows. The battery needed a charge, but she hadn’t given him the charger. He guessed he had enough power left to check for Winnie’s reply to his message of the night before. He’d intended to send Pamela the photos of Foley as well, and had bought the cable he’d need to do that, but after his conversation with Bigend he wasn’t sure about Blue Ant’s e-mail system. He imagined Sleight had been in charge of all of that. How complicated could that ultimately become, for Bigend?

With no Neo, and the laptop off, he had no way of knowing the time. The television suspended from the ceiling could tell him, he supposed, but he decided to shower instead. If it was time to go, Hollis would call him.

The shower was one of those telephone-handle arrangements, the stall largely conceptual. He brushed his teeth with one hand while rinsing his torso with the other, his battery-powered toothbrush loud in the small space. Toweling off, he thought of how Bigend seemed to regard what was going on in Blue Ant as a sort of expected burn-off, like some brushfire on the Nature Channel, brought on by an otherwise essential excess of intelligence and ambition.

He put on his new socks and underwear from Galeries Lafayette, and an unworn but creased shirt from Hackett. He remembered the Russians in the elevator. Foley. Winced. He tucked the memory card, with his pictures of Foley on it, down into the top of his left sock.

He edged around the bed, stood looking down at Parisians passing on the sidewalk opposite. A graying, leonine man in a long dark coat. Then a tall girl in very nice boots. He looked for Fiona, half expecting to see her astride her motorcycle, keeping watch. He looked up then, but didn’t see the penguin either.

A tiny garret window popped open, on a building opposite, and a girl with short dark hair thrust her head and shoulders through, into the morning, a cigarette between her lips. Milgrim nodded. Addictions were being serviced. He sat down on the padded bench and checked his Twitter. No Winnie. It was five after seven, he saw, earlier than he’d thought.

He packed his bag, putting the laptop in last. What would he do, once he’d returned it? How would he keep in touch with Winnie? The fact of Winnie made his knowledge of Blue Ant’s internal brushfire feel awkward. Otherwise, he imagined, without her, it would mainly have been interesting, as Bigend didn’t seem particularly worried. Though he’d never seen Bigend worried about anything. Where most people got worried, Bigend seemed to become interested, and Milgrim knew that that could be strangely contagious. Imagining explaining that to Winnie made him uneasy.

He made a last pass for misplaced property, discovering one of his socks under the edge of the bed. He put it in his bag, put the strap over his shoulder, and left the room, leaving the door unlocked. Maids were afoot but he didn’t see them, only their metal carts stacked with towels and tiny plastic bottles of shampoo. He saw the building’s original stairway, winding down, beyond big twisted brown-stained timbers that couldn’t possibly have been as old, in America, as they no doubt were, here.

He descended, passing windows, on each floor, overlooking a courtyard the morning hadn’t reached yet. Scooters and bicycles were parked there, at the bottom of a well of shadow.

On the ground floor he found his brief way around to the lobby, where china was rattling. No Hollis. He took a seat at a table for two, beside the windows, and asked for coffee and a croissant. The Tunisian waitress went away. Someone else brought the coffee immediately, with a small pitcher of hot milk. He was stirring his coffee when Hollis arrived, looking red-eyed and exhausted, the Hounds jacket draped across her shoulders like a short cape.

She sat down, a crumpled tissue in one hand.

“Is something wrong?” asked Milgrim, seized by some substrate of his own childhood fear, sorrow, the cup halfway to his mouth.

“I haven’t slept,” she said. “Found out a friend’s been in an accident. Not in very good shape. Sorry.”

“Your friend? Not in good shape?” He’d set the cup in its saucer. The waitress arrived with his croissant, butter, a miniature jar of jam.

“Coffee, please,” she said to the waitress. “Not a recent accident. I only heard last night.”

“How is she?” Milgrim was having one of those experiences of feeling, as he’d explained to his therapist, that he was emulating a kind of social being that he fundamentally wasn’t. Not that he was unconcerned with the pain he saw in Hollis’s eyes, or with the fate of her friend, but that there was some language required here that he’d never learned.

“He,” corrected Hollis as her coffee arrived.

“What happened?”

“He jumped off the tallest building in the world.” Her eyes widened, as if at the absurdity of what she’d just said, then closed, tightly.