zero_his_gibson.html

The moral right of the author has been asserted

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-14-196570-3

Contents

1. CABINET

2. EDGE CITY

3. SLUT’S WOOL

4. PARADOXICAL ANTAGONIST

5. THIN ON THE GROUND

6. AFTER THE GYRATORY

7. A HERF GUN IN FRITH STREET

8. CURETTAGE

9. FUCKSTICK

10. EIGENBLICH

11. UNPACKING

12. COMPLIANCE TOOL

13. MUSKRAT

14. YELLOW HELMET

15. THE DROP

16. HONOR BAR

17. HOMUNCULI

18. 140

19. PRESENCES

20. AUGMENTED

21. MINUS ONE

22. FOLEY

23. MEREDITH

24. HUNCH

25. TINFOIL

26. MOTHER RUSSIA

27. JAPANESE BASEBALL

28. WHITE PEAR TEA

29. SHIVER

30. SIGHTING

31. SECRET MACHINERIES

32. POST-ACUTE

33. BURJ

34. THE ORDER FLOW

35. DONGLE

36. VINEGAR AND BROWN PAPER

37. AJAY

38. GETTING HOTTER

39. THE NUMBER

40. ENIGMA ROTORS

41. GEAR-QUEER

42. ELVIS, GRACELAND

43. ICHINOMIYA

44. THE VERBALS

45. SHRAPNEL, SUPERSONIC

46. TORTOISESHELL AND PINSTRIPES

47. IN THE CUISINART ATRIUM

48. SHOTGUN

49. GREAT MARLBOROUGH

50. BANK-MONUMENT

51. SOMEONE

52. THE MATTER IN GREATER DETAIL

53. CRICKET

54. AIR GLOW

55. MR. WILSON

56. ALWAYS IS GENIUS

57. SOMETHING OFF THE SHELF

58. DOUCHE BAGGAGE

59. THE ART OF THE THING

60. RAY

61. FACIAL RECOGNITION

62. WAKING

63. CURLY STAYS, SLOW FOOD

64. THREAT MANAGEMENT

65. LEOPARD SKIN IN MINIATURE

66. ZIP

67. A CRUSHED MOUSE

68. HAND-EYE

69. THE GIFTING SUITE

70. DAZZLE

71. THE UGLY T-SHIRT

72. SMITHFIELD

73. THE PATCHWORK BOYFRIEND

74. MAP, TERRITORY

75. DOWN THE DARKNETS

76. GONE-AWAY GIRL

77. GREEN SCREEN

78. EL LISSITZKY

79. DUNGEON MASTER

80. FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE

81. ON SITE

82. LONDON EYE

83. PLEASE GO

84. NEW ONE

85. TO GET A HANDLE ON IT

86. DOILIES

87. THE OTHER SIDE

THANKS:

To Susan Allison,my editor

1. CABINET

Inchmale hailed a cab for her, the kind that had always been black, when she’d first known this city.

Pearlescent silver, this one. Glyphed in Prussian blue, advertising something German, banking services or business software; a smoother simulacrum of its black ancestors, its faux-leather upholstery a shade of orthopedic fawn.

“Their money’s heavy,” he said, dropping a loose warm mass of pound coins into her hand. “Buys many whores.” The coins still retained the body heat of the fruit machine from which he’d deftly wrung them, almost in passing, on their way out of the King’s Something.

“Whose money?”

“My countrymen’s. Freely given.”

“I don’t need this.” Trying to hand it back.

“For the cab.” Giving the driver the address in Portman Square.

“Oh Reg,” she said, “it wasn’t that bad. I had it in money markets, most of it.”

“Bad as anything else. Call him.”

“No.”

“Call him,” he repeated, wrapped in Japanese herringbone Gore-Tex, multiply flapped and counterintuitively buckled.

He closed the cab’s door.

She watched him through the rear window as the cab pulled away. Stout and bearded, he turned now in Greek Street, a few minutes past midnight, to rejoin his stubborn protégé, Clammy of the Bollards. Back to the studio, to take up their lucrative creative struggle.

She sat back, noticing nothing at all until they passed Selfridges, the driver taking a right.

The club, only a few years old, was on the north side of Portman Square. Getting out, she paid and generously tipped the driver, anxious to be rid of Inchmale’s winnings.

Cabinet, so called; of Curiosities, unspoken. Inchmale had become a member shortly after they, the three surviving members of the Curfew, had licensed the rights to “Hard to Be One” to a Chinese automobile manufacturer. Having already produced one Bollards album in Los Angeles, and with Clammy wanting to record the next in London, Inchmale had argued that joining Cabinet would ultimately prove cheaper than a hotel. And it had, she supposed, but only if you were talking about a very expensive hotel.

She was staying there now as a paying guest. Given the state of money markets, whatever those were, and the conversations she’d been having with her accountant in New York, she knew that she should be looking for more modestly priced accommodations.

A peculiarly narrow place, however expensive, Cabinet occupied half the vertical mass of an eighteenth-century townhouse, one whose façade reminded her of the face of someone starting to fall asleep on the subway. It shared a richly but soberly paneled foyer with whatever occupied the other, westernmost, half of the building, and she’d formed a vague conviction that this must be a foundation of some kind, perhaps philanthropic in nature, or dedicated to the advancement of peace in the Middle East, however eventual. Something hushed, in any case, as it appeared to have no visitors at all.

There was nothing, on façade or door, to indicate what that might be, no more than there was anything to indicate that Cabinet was Cabinet.

She’d seen those famously identical, silver-pelted Icelandic twins in the lounge, the first time she’d gone there, both of them drinking red wine from pint glasses, something Inchmale dubbed an Irish affectation. They weren’t members, he’d made a point of noting. Cabinet’s members, in the performing arts, were somewhat less than stellar, and she assumed that that suited Inchmale just about as well as it suited her.

It was the decor that had sold Inchmale, he said, and very likely it had been. Both he and it were arguably mad.

Pushing open the door, through which one might have ridden a horse without having to duck to clear the lintel, she was greeted by Robert, a large and comfortingly chalk-striped young man whose primary task was to mind the entrance without particularly seeming to.

“Good evening, Miss Henry.”

“Good evening, Robert.”

The decorators had kept it down, here, which was to say that they hadn’t really gone publicly, ragingly, batshit insane. There was a huge, ornately carved desk, with something vaguely pornographic going on amid mahogany vines and grape clusters, at which sat one or another of the club’s employees, young men for the most part, often wearing tortoiseshell spectacles of the sort she suspected of having been carved from actual turtles.

Beyond the desk’s agreeably archaic mulch of paperwork twined a symmetrically opposed pair of marble stairways, leading to the floor above; that floor being bisected, as was everything above this foyer, into twin realms of presumed philanthropic mystery and Cabinet. From the Cabinet side, now, down the stairs with the widdershins twist, cascaded the sound of earnest communal drinking, laughter and loud conversation bouncing sharply off unevenly translucent stone, marbled in shades of aged honey, petroleum jelly, and nicotine. The damaged edges of individual steps had been repaired with tidy rectangular inserts of less inspired stuff, pallid and mundane, which she was careful never to step on.

A tortoise-framed young man, seated at the desk, passed her the room key without being asked.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Miss Henry.”

Beyond the archway separating the stairways, the floor plan gave evidence of hesitation. Indicating, she guessed, some awkwardness inherent in the halving of the building’s original purpose. She pressed a worn but regularly polished brass button, to call down the oldest elevator she’d ever seen, even in London. The size of a small, shallow closet, wider than it was deep, it took its time, descending its elongated cage of black-enameled steel.

To her right, in shadow, illuminated from within by an Edwardian museum fixture, stood a vitrine displaying taxidermy. Game birds, mostly; a pheasant, several quail, others she couldn’t put a name to, all mounted as though caught in motion, crossing a sward of faded billiard-felt. All somewhat the worse for wear, though no more than might be expected for their probable age. Behind them, anthropomorphically upright, forelimbs outstretched in the manner of a cartoon somnambulist, came a moth-eaten ferret. Its teeth, which struck her as unrealistically large, she suspected of being wooden, and painted. Certainly its lips were painted, if not actually rouged, lending it a sinisterly festive air, like someone you’d dread running into at a Christmas party. Inchmale, on first pointing it out to her, had suggested she adopt it as a totem, her spirit beast. He claimed that he already had, subsequently discovering he could magically herniate the disks of unsuspecting music executives at will, causing them to suffer excruciating pain and a profound sense of helplessness.

The lift arrived. She’d been a guest here long enough to have mastered the intricacies of the articulated steel gate. Resisting an urge to nod to the ferret, she entered and ascended, slowly, to the third floor.

Here the narrow hallways, walls painted a very dark green, twisted confusingly. The route to her room involved opening several of what she assumed were fire doors, as they were very thick, heavy, and self-closing. The short sections of corridor, between, were hung with small watercolors, landscapes, unpeopled, each one featuring a distant folly. The very same distant folly, she’d noticed, regardless of the scene or region depicted. She refused to give Inchmale the satisfaction he’d derive from her asking about these, so hadn’t. Something too thoroughly liminal about them. Best not addressed. Life sufficiently complicated as it was.

The key, attached to a weighty brass ferrule sprouting thick soft tassels of braided maroon silk, turned smoothly in the lock’s brick-sized mass. Admitting her to Number Four, and the concentrated impact of Cabinet’s designers’ peculiarity, theatrically revealed when she prodded the mother-of-pearl dot set into an otherwise homely gutta-percha button.

Too tall, somehow, though she imagined that to be the result of a larger room having been divided, however cunningly. The bathroom, she suspected, might actually be larger than the bedroom, if that weren’t some illusion.

They’d run with that tallness, employing a white, custom-printed wallpaper, decorated with ornate cartouches in glossy black. These were comprised, if you looked more closely, of enlarged bits of anatomical drawings of bugs. Scimitar mandibles, spiky elongated limbs, the delicate wings (she imagined) of mayflies. The two largest pieces of furniture in the room were the bed, its massive frame covered entirely in slabs of scrimshawed walrus ivory, with the enormous, staunchly ecclesiastic-looking lower jawbone of a right whale, fastened to the wall at its head, and a birdcage, so large she might have crouched in it herself, suspended from the ceiling. The cage was stacked with books, and fitted, inside, with minimalist Swiss halogen fixtures, each tiny bulb focused on one or another of Number Four’s resident artifacts. And not just prop books, Inchmale had proudly pointed out. Fiction or non-, they all seemed to be about England, and so far she’d read parts of Dame Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics and most of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male.

She took off her coat, putting it on a stuffed, satin-covered hanger in the wardrobe, and sat on the edge of the bed to untie her shoes. The Piblokto Madness bed, Inchmale called it. “Intense hysteria,” she recited now, from memory, “depression, coprophagia, insensitivity to cold, echolalia.” She kicked her shoes in the direction of the wardrobe’s open door. “Hold the coprophagia,” she added. Cabin fever, this culture-bound, arctic condition. Possibly dietary in origin. Linked to vitamin A toxicity. Inchmale was full of this sort of information, never more so than when he was in the studio. Give Clammy a whole hod of vitamin A, she’d suggested, he looks like he could use it.

Her gaze fell on three unopened brown cartons, stacked to the left of the wardrobe. These contained shrink-wrapped copies of the British edition of a book she’d written in hotel rooms, though none as peculiarly memorable as this one. She’d begun just after the Chinese car commercial money had come in. She’d gone to Staples, West Hollywood, and bought three flimsy Chinese-made folding tables, to lay the manuscript and its many illustrations out on, in her corner suite at the Marmont. That seemed a long time ago, and she didn’t know what she’d do with these copies. The cartons of her copies of the American edition, she now remembered, were still in the luggage room of the Tribeca Grand.

“Echolalia,” she said, and stood, removing her sweater, which she folded and put in a chest-high drawer in the wardrobe, beside a small silk land mine of potpourri. If she didn’t touch it, she knew, she wouldn’t have to smell it. Putting on an off-white Cabinet robe, more velour than terry but somehow just missing whatever it was that made her so unfond of velour bathrobes. Men, particularly, looked fundamentally untrustworthy in them.

The room phone began to ring. It was a collage, its massive nautical-looking handset of rubber-coated bronze resting in a leather-padded cradle atop a cubical box of brass-cornered rosewood. Its ring was mechanical, tiny, as though you were hearing an old-fashioned bicycle bell far off down a quiet street. She stared hard, willing it to silence.

“Intense hysteria,” she said.

It continued to ring.

Three steps and her hand was on it.

It was as absurdly heavy as ever.

“Coprophagia.” Briskly, as if announcing a busy department in a large hospital.

“Hollis,” he said, “hello.”

She looked down at the handset, heavy as an old hammer and nearly as battered. Its thick cord, luxuriously cased in woven burgundy silk, resting against her bare forearm.

“Hollis?”

“Hello, Hubertus.”

She pictured herself driving the handset through brittle antique rosewood, crushing the aged electro-mechanical cricket within. Too late now. It had already fallen silent.

“I saw Reg,” he said.

“I know.”

“I told him to ask you to call.”

“I didn’t,” she said.

“Good to hear your voice,” he said.

“It’s late.”

“A good night’s sleep, then,” heartily. “I’ll be by in the morning, for breakfast. We’re driving back tonight. Pamela and I.”

“Where are you?”

“Manchester.”

She saw herself taking an early cab to Paddington, the street in front of Cabinet deserted. Catching the Heathrow Express. Flying somewhere. Another phone ringing, in another room. His voice.

“Manchester?”

“Norwegian black metal,” he said, flatly. She pictured Scandinavian folk jewelry, then self-corrected: the musical genre. “Reg said I might find it interesting.”

Good for him, she thought, Inchmale’s subclinical sadism sometimes finding a deserving target.

“I was planning on sleeping in,” she said, if only to be difficult. She knew now that it was going to be impossible to avoid him.

“Eleven, then,” he said. “Looking forward to it.”

“Good night. Hubertus.”

“Good night.” He hung up.

She put the handset down. Careful of the hidden cricket. Not its fault.

Nor hers.

Nor even his, probably. Whatever he was.

2. EDGE CITY

Milgrim considered the dog-headed angels in Gay Dolphin Gift Cove.

Their heads, rendered slightly less than three-quarter scale, appeared to have been cast from the sort of plaster once used to produce worryingly detailed wall-decorations: pirates, Mexicans, turbaned Arabs. There would almost certainly be examples of those here as well, he thought, in the most thoroughgoing trove of roadside American souvenir kitsch he’d ever seen.

Their bodies, apparently humanoid under white satin and sequins, were long, Modigliani-slender, perilously upright, paws crossed piously in the manner of medieval effigies. Their wings were the wings of Christmas ornaments, writ larger than would suit the average tree.

They were intended, he decided, with half a dozen of assorted breed facing him now, from behind glass, to sentimentally honor deceased pets.

Hands in trouser pockets, he quickly swung his gaze to a broader but generally no less peculiar visual complexity, noting as he did a great many items featuring Confederate-flag motifs. Mugs, magnets, ashtrays, statuettes. He considered a knee-high jockey boy, proffering a small round tray rather than the traditional ring. Its head and hands were a startling Martian green (so as not to give the traditional offense, he assumed). There were also energetically artificial orchids, coconuts carved to suggest the features of some generically indigenous race, and prepackaged collections of rocks and minerals. It was like being on the bottom of a Coney Island grab-it game, one in which the eclectically ungrabbed had been accumulating for decades. He looked up, imagining a giant, three-pronged claw, agent of stark removal, but there was only a large and heavily varnished shark, suspended overhead like the fuselage of a small plane.

How old did a place like this have to be, in America, to have “gay” in its name? Some percentage of the stock here, he judged, had been manufactured in Occupied Japan.

Half an hour earlier, across North Ocean Boulevard, he’d watched harshly tonsured child-soldiers, clad in skateboarding outfits still showing factory creases, ogling Chinese-made orc-killing blades, spiked and serrated like the jaws of extinct predators. The seller’s stand had been hung with Mardi Gras beads, Confederate-flag beach towels, unauthorized Harley-Davidson memorabilia. He’d wondered how many young men had enjoyed an afternoon in Myrtle Beach as a final treat, before heading ultimately for whatever theater of war, wind whipping sand along the Grand Strand and the boardwalk.

In the amusement arcades, he judged, some of the machines were older than he was. And some of his own angels, not the better ones, spoke of an ancient and deeply impacted drug culture, ground down into the carnival grime of the place, interstitial and immortal; sun-damaged skin, tattoos unreadable, eyes that peered from faces suggestive of gas-station taxidermy.

He was meeting someone here.

They were supposed to be alone. He himself wasn’t, really. Somewhere nearby, Oliver Sleight would be watching a Milgrim-cursor on a website, on the screen of his Neo phone, identical to Milgrim’s own. He’d given Milgrim the Neo on that first flight from Basel to Heathrow, stressing the necessity of keeping it with him at all times, and turned on, except when aboard commercial flights.

He moved, now, away from the dog-headed angels, the shadow of the shark. Past articles of an ostensibly more natural history: starfish, sand dollars, sea horses, conchs. He climbed a short flight of broad stairs, from the boardwalk level, toward North Ocean Boulevard. Until he found himself, eye-to-navel, with the stomach of a young, very pregnant woman, her elastic-paneled jeans chemically distressed in ways that suggested baroquely improbable patterns of wear. The taut pink T-shirt revealed her protruding navel in a way he found alarmingly suggestive of a single giant breast.

“You’d better be him,” she said, then bit her lower lip. Blond, a face he’d forget as soon as he looked away. Large dark eyes.

“I’m meeting someone,” he said, careful to maintain eye contact, uncomfortably aware that he was actually addressing the navel, or nipple, directly in front of his mouth.

Her eyes grew larger. “You aren’t foreign, are you?”

“New York,” Milgrim admitted, assuming that might all too easily qualify.

“I don’t want him getting in any trouble,” she said, at once softly and fiercely.

“None of us does,” he instantly assured her. “No need. At all.” His attempted smile felt like something forced from a flexible squeezetoy. “And you are … ?

“Seven or eight months,” she said, in awe at her own gravidity. “He’s not here. He didn’t like this, here.”

“None of us does,” he said, then wondered if that was the right thing to say.

“You got GPS?”

“Yes,” said Milgrim. Actually, according to Sleight, their Neos had two kinds, American and Russian, the American being notoriously political, and prone to unreliability in the vicinity of sensitive sites.

“He’ll be there in an hour,” she said, passing Milgrim a faintly damp slip of folded paper. “You better get started. And you better be alone.”

Milgrim took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but if it means driving, I won’t be able to go alone. I don’t have a license. My friend will have to drive me. It’s a white Ford Taurus X.”

She stared at him. Blinked. “Didn’t they just fuck Ford up, when they went to giving them f-names?”

He swallowed.

“My mother had a Freestyle. Transmission’s a total piece of shit. Get that computer wet, car won’t move at all. Gotta disconnect it first. Brakes wore out about two weeks off the lot. They always made that squealing noise anyway.” But she seemed comforted, in this, as if by the recollection of something maternal, familiar.

“Right as rain,” he said, surprising himself with an expression he might never have used before. He pocketed the slip of paper without looking at it. “Could you do something for me, please?” he asked her belly. “Could you call him, now, and let him know my friend will be driving?”

Lower lip worked its way back under her front teeth.

“My friend has the money,” Milgrim said. “No trouble.”

“And she called him?” asked Sleight, behind the wheel of the Taurus X, from the center of a goatee he occasionally trimmed with the aid of a size-adjustable guide, held between his teeth.

“She indicated she would,” Milgrim said.

“Indicated.”

They were headed inland, toward the town of Conway, through a landscape that reminded Milgrim of driving somewhere near Los Angeles, to a destination you wouldn’t be particularly anxious to reach. This abundantly laned highway, lapped by the lots of outlet malls, a Home Depot the size of a cruise ship, theme restaurants. Though interstitial detritus still spoke stubbornly of maritime activity and the farming of tobacco. Fables from before the Anaheiming. Milgrim concentrated on these leftovers, finding them centering. A lot offering garden mulch. A four-store strip mall with two pawnshops. A fireworks emporium with its own batting cage. Loans on your auto title. Serried ranks of unpainted concrete garden statuary.

“Was that a twelve-step program you were in, in Basel?” asked Sleight.

“I don’t think so,” said Milgrim, assuming Sleight was referring to the number of times his blood had been changed.

“How close will those numbers put us to where he wants us?” Milgrim asked. Sleight, back in Myrtle Beach, had tapped coordinates from the pregnant girl’s note into his phone, which now rested on his lap.

“Close enough,” Sleight said. “Looks like that’s it now, off to the right.”

They were well through Conway, or in any case through the malled-over fringes of whatever Conway was. Buildings were thinning out, the landscape revealing more of the lineaments of an extinct agriculture.

Sleight slowed, swung right, onto spread gravel, a crushed limestone, pale gray. “Money’s under your seat,” he said. They were rolling, with a smooth, even crunch of tires in gravel, toward a long, one-story, white-painted clapboard structure, overhung with a roof that lacked a porch beneath it. Rural roadside architecture of some previous day, plain but sturdy. Four smallish rectangular front windows had been modernized with plate glass.

Milgrim had the cardboard tube for the tracing paper upright between his thighs, two sticks of graphite wrapped in a Kleenex in the right side pocket of his chinos. There was half of a fresh five-foot sheet of foam-core illustration board in the back seat, in case he needed a flat surface to work on. Holding the bright red tube with his knees, he bent forward, fishing under the seat, and found a metallic-blue vinyl envelope with a molded integral zipper and three binder-holes. It contained enough bundled hundreds to give it the heft of a good-sized paperback dictionary.

Gravel-crunch ceased as they halted, not quite in front of the building. Milgrim saw a primitive rectangular sign on two weather-grayed uprights, rain-stained and faded, unreadable except for FAMILY, in pale blue italic serif caps. There were no other vehicles in the irregularly shaped gravel lot.

He opened the door, got out, stood, the red tube in his left hand. He considered, then uncapped it, drawing out the furled tracing paper. He propped the red tube against the passenger seat, picked up the money, and closed the door. A scroll of semitranslucent white paper was less threatening.

Cars passed on the highway. He walked the fifteen feet to the sign, his shoes crunching loudly on the gravel. Above the blue italic FAMILY, he made out EDGE CITY in what little remained of a peeling red; below it, RESTAURANT. At the bottom, to the left, had once been painted, in black, the childlike silhouettes of three houses, though like the red, sun and rain had largely erased them. To the right, in a different blue than FAMILY, was painted what he took to be a semi-abstract representation of hills, possibly of lakes. He guessed that this place was on or near the town’s official outskirts, hence the name.

Someone, within the silent, apparently closed building, rapped sharply, once, on plate glass, perhaps with a ring.

Milgrim went obediently to the front door, the tracing paper upheld in one hand like a modest scepter, the vinyl envelope held against his side with the other.

The door opened inward, revealing a football player with an Eighties porn haircut. Or someone built like one. A tall, long-legged young man with exceptionally powerful-looking shoulders. He stepped back, gesturing for Milgrim to enter.

“Hello,” said Milgrim, stepping into warm unmoving air, mixed scents of industrial-strength disinfectant and years of cooking. “I have your money.” Indicating the plastic envelope. A place unused, though ready to be used. Mothballed, Edge City, like a B-52 in the desert. He saw the empty glass head of a gum machine, on its stand of wrinkle-finished brown pipe.

“Put it on the counter,” the young man said. He wore pale blue jeans and a black T-shirt, both of which looked as though they might contain a percentage of Spandex, and heavy-looking black athletic shoes. Milgrim noted a narrow, rectangular, unusually positioned pocket, quite far down on the right side-seam. A stainless steel clip held some large folding knife firmly there.

Milgrim did as he was told, noting the chrome and the turquoise leatherette of the row of floor-mounted stools in front of the counter, which was topped with worn turquoise Formica. He partially unfurled the paper. “I’ll need to make tracings,” he explained. “It’s the best way to capture the detail. I’ll take photographs first.”

“Who’s in the car?”

“My friend.”

“Why can’t you drive?”

“DUI,” said Milgrim, and it was true, at least in some philosophical sense.

Silently, the young man rounded an empty glass display-case that would once have contained cigarettes and candy. When he was opposite Milgrim, he reached beneath the counter and drew out something in a crumpled white plastic bag. He dropped this on the counter and swept the plastic envelope toward the far end, giving the impression that his body, highly trained, was doing these things of its own accord, while he himself continued to survey from some interior distance.

Milgrim opened the bag and took out a pair of folded, unpressed trousers. They were the coppery beige shade he knew as coyote brown. Unfolding them, he lay them out flat along the Formica, took the camera from his jacket pocket, and began to photograph them, using the flash. He took six shots of the front, then turned them over and took six of the back. He took one photograph each of the four cargo pockets. He put the camera down, turned the pants inside out, and photographed them again. Pocketing the camera, he arranged them, still inside out, more neatly on the counter, spread the first of the four sheets of paper over them, and began, with one of the graphite sticks, to make his rubbing.

He liked doing this. There was something inherently satisfying about it. He’d been sent to Hackney, to a tailor who did alterations, to spend an afternoon learning how to do it properly, and it pleased him, somehow, that this was a time-honored means of stealing information. It was like making a rubbing of a tombstone, or a bronze in a cathedral. The medium-hard graphite, if correctly applied, captured every detail of seam and stitching, all a sample-maker would need to reproduce the garment, as well as providing for reconstruction of the pattern.

While he worked, the young man opened the envelope, unpacked the bundled hundreds, and silently counted them. “Needs a gusset,” he said as he finished.

“Pardon?” Milgrim paused, the fingers of his right hand covered with graphite dust.

“Gusset,” the young man said, reloading the blue envelope. “Inner thighs. They bind, if you’re rappelling.”

“Thanks,” Milgrim said, showing graphite-smudged fingers. “Would you mind turning them over for me? I don’t want to get this on them.”

“Delta to Atlanta,” Sleight said, handing Milgrim a ticket envelope. He was back in the very annoying suit he’d forgone for Myrtle Beach, the one with the freakishly short trousers.

“Business?”

“Coach,” said Sleight, his satisfaction entirely evident. He passed Milgrim a second envelope. “British Midland to Heathrow.”

“Coach?”

Sleight frowned. “Business.”

Milgrim smiled.

“He’ll want you in a meeting, straight off the plane.”

Milgrim nodded. “Bye,” he said. He tucked the red tube beneath his arm and headed for check-in, his bag in his other hand, walking directly beneath a very large South Carolina state flag, oddly Islamic with its palm tree and crescent moon.

3. SLUT’S WOOL

She woke to gray light around multiple layers of curtains and drapes. Lay staring up at a dim anamorphic view of the repeated insectoid cartouche, smaller and more distorted the closer to the ceiling. Shelves with objects, Wunderkammer stuff. Variously sized heads of marble, ivory, ormolu. The blank round bottom of the caged library.

She checked her watch. Shortly after nine.

She got out of bed, in her XXL Bollards T-shirt, put on the not-velour robe, and entered the bathroom, a tall deep cove of off-white tile. Turning on the enormous shower required as much effort as ever. A Victorian monster, its original taps were hulking knots of plated brass. Horizontal four-inch nickel-plate pipes caged you on three sides, handy for warming towels. Within these were slung sheets of inch-thick beveled glass, contemporary replacements. The original showerhead, mounted directly overhead, was thirty inches in diameter. Getting out of the robe and T-shirt, she put on a disposable cap, stepped in, and lathered up with Cabinet’s artisanal soap, smelling faintly of cucumber.

She kept a picture of this shower on her iPhone. It reminded her of H. G. Wells’s time machine. It had probably been in use when he began the serial that would become his first novel.

Toweling off, applying moisturizer, she listened to BBC through an ornate bronze grate. Nothing of catastrophic import since she’d last listened, though nothing particularly positive either. Early-twenty-first-century quotidian, death-spiral subtexts kept well down in the mix.

She took off the shower cap and shook her head, hair retaining residual stylist’s mojo from the salon in Selfridges. She liked to eat lunch in Selfridges’ food hall, escaping through its back door before the communal trance of shopping put her under. Though that was all it was likely to do, in a department store. She was more vulnerable to smaller places, and in London that could be very dangerous. The Japanese jeans she was pulling on now, for instance. Fruit of a place around the corner from Inchmale’s studio, the week before. Zen emptiness, bowls with shards of pure solidified indigo, like blue-black glass. The handsome, older, Japanese shopkeeper, in her Waiting for Godot outfit.

You’ll have to watch that now, she advised herself. Money.

Brushing her teeth, she noticed the vinyl Blue Ant figurine on the marble sinktop, amid her lotions and makeup. You let me down, she thought to the jaunty ant, its four arms akimbo. Aside from a few pieces of jewelry, it was one of the few things she owned that she’d had since she’d first known Hubertus Bigend. She’d tried abandoning it, at least once, but somehow it was still with her. She’d thought she’d left it in the penthouse he kept in Vancouver, but it had been in her bag when she’d arrived in New York. She’d come, however vaguely, to imagine it as a sort of inverse charm. A cartoon rendition of the trademark of his agency, she’d let it serve as a secret symbol of her unwillingness to have anything further to do with him.

She’d trusted it to keep him away.

She really hadn’t had that much other property to replace, she reminded herself, swishing mouthwash. The dot-com bubble and an ill-advised foray into retailing vinyl records had seen to that, well before he’d found her. She wasn’t quite that badly off now, but if she’d understood her accountant correctly she’d lost nearly fifty percent of her net worth when the market had gone down. And this time she hadn’t done anything to cause it. No start-up shares, no quixotic record store in Brooklyn.

Everything she owned, currently, was here in this room. Aside from devalued money market shares, and some boxes of American author’s copies, back in the Tribeca Grand. She spat mouthwash into the marble sink.

Inchmale didn’t mind Bigend, not the way she did, but Inchmale, as formidably bright as she knew him to be, was also gifted with a useful crudeness of mind, an inbuilt psychic callus. He found Bigend interesting. Possibly he found him creepy, too, though for Inchmale, interesting and creepy were broadly overlapping categories. He didn’t, she guessed, find Bigend that utter an anomaly. An overly wealthy, dangerously curious fiddler with the world’s hidden architectures.

There was no way, she knew, to tell an entity like Bigend that you wanted nothing to do with him. That would simply bring you more firmly to his attention. She’d had her time in Bigend’s employ; while brief, it had been entirely too eventful. She’d put it behind her, and gone on with her book project, which had grown quite naturally out of what she’d been doing (or had thought she’d been doing) for Bigend.

Although, she reminded herself, fastening her bra and pulling on a T-shirt, the money she’d seen reduced by almost half had come to her via Blue Ant. There was that. She pulled a sheer black mohair sweater over the T-shirt, smoothed it over her hips, and pushed up the sleeves. She sat on the edge of the bed, to put on her shoes. Then back into the bathroom for makeup.

Purse, iPhone, key with its tassel.

Out, then, and past the identical follies in their different landscapes. To press the button and wait for the lift. She put her face close to the iron cage, to see the lift rise toward her, atop it some complex electromechanical Tesla-node no designer had even had to fake up, the real deal, whatever function it might serve. And decked, she always noted with a certain satisfaction, with a bit of frank slut’s wool, the only actual dust she’d yet seen in Cabinet. Even a few errant cigarette butts, the English being beasts that way.

And down, to the floor above the paneled foyer, where the night’s boozing and networking had left no evidence, and the serving staff, reassuringly immune to the long room’s decor, were about their morning business. She made her way to the rear, taking a seat at a place for two, beneath what might originally have been a gun rack in parquetry, but which now held half a dozen narwhale tusks.

The Italian girl brought her a pot of coffee, unbidden, with a smaller one of steamed milk, and the Times.

She was starting her second cup, Times unread, when she saw Hubertus Bigend mount the stairhead, down the full length of the long room, wrapped in a wide, putty-colored trench coat.

He was the ultimate in velour-robe types, and might just as well have been wearing one now as he swept toward her through the drawing room, unknotting the coat’s belt as he came, pawing back its Crimean lapels, and revealing the only International Klein Blue suit she’d ever seen. He somehow managed always to give her the impression, seeing him again, that he’d grown visibly larger, though without gaining any particular weight. Simply bigger. Perhaps, she thought, as if he grew somehow closer.

As he did now, breakfasting Cabineteers cringing as he passed, less in fear of his vast trailing coat and its dangerously swinging belt than out of awareness that he didn’t see them.

“Hollis,” he said. “You look magnificent.” She rose, to be air-kissed. Up close, he always seemed too full of blood, by several extra quarts at least. Rosy as a pig. Warmer than a normal person. Scented with some ancient European barber-splash.

“Hardly,” she said. “Look at you. Look at your suit.”

“Mr. Fish,” he said, shrugging out of the trench coat with a rattle of grenade-loops and lanyard-anchors. His shirt was palest gold, the silk tie knit in an almost matching shade.

“He’s very good,” she said.

“He’s not dead,” said Bigend, smiling, settling himself in the armchair opposite.

“Dead?” She took her seat.

“Apparently not. Just impossible to find. I found his cutter,” he said. “In Savile Row.”

“That’s Klein Blue, isn’t it?”

“Of course.”

“It looks radioactive. In a suit.”

“It unsettles people,” he said.

“I hope you didn’t wear it for me.”

“Not at all.” He smiled. “I wore it because I enjoy it.”

“Coffee?”

“Black.”

She signaled to the Italian girl. “How was the black metal?”

“Tremolo picking,” he said, perhaps slightly fretfully. “Double-kick drumming. Reg thinks something’s there.” He tilted his head slightly. “Do you?”

“I don’t keep up.” Adding milk to her coffee.

The Italian girl returned for their breakfast order. Hollis asked for oatmeal with fruit, Bigend for the full English.

“I loved your book,” he said. “I thought the reception was quite gratifying. Particularly the piece in Vogue.”

“ ‘Old rock singer publishes book of pictures’?”

“No, really. It was very good.” He tidied the trench coat, which he’d draped across the arm of his chair. “Working on something else now?”

She sipped her coffee.

“You want to follow that up,” he said.

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Barring scandal,” he said, “society is reluctant to let someone who’s become famous for one thing become famous for another.”

“I’m not trying to become famous.”

“You already are.”

“Was. Briefly. And in quite a small way.”

“A degree of undeniable celebrity,” he said, like a doctor offering a particularly obvious diagnosis.

They sat silently, then, Hollis pretending to glance over the first few pages of the Times, until the Italian girl and an equally pretty and dark-haired boy arrived, bearing breakfast on dark wooden trays with brass handles. They arranged these on the low coffee table and retreated, Bigend studying the sway of the girl’s hips. “I adore the full English,” he said. “The offal. Blood pudding. The beans. The bacon. Were you here before they invented food?” he asked. “You must have been.”

“I was,” she admitted. “I was very young.”

“Even then,” he said, “the full English was a thing of genius.” He was slicing a sausage that looked like haggis, but boiled in the stomach of a small animal, something on the order of a koala. “There’s something you could help us out with,” he said, and put a slice of sausage in his mouth.

“Us.”

He chewed, nodded, swallowed. “We aren’t just an advertising agency. I’m sure you know that. We do brand vision transmission, trend forecasting, vendor management, youth market recon, strategic planning in general.”

“Why didn’t that commercial ever come out, the one they paid us all the money to use ‘Hard to Be One’ in?”

He dabbed a torn toast-finger into the runny yellow eye of a fried egg, bit off half of it, chewed, swallowed, wiped his lips with his napkin. “Do you care?”

“That was a lot of money.”

“That was China,” he said. “The vehicle the ad was for hasn’t made it to roll-out. Won’t.”

“Why not?”

“There were problems with the design. Fundamental ones. Their government decided that that wasn’t the vehicle with which China should enter the world market. Particularly not in the light of the various tainted food product scandals. And whatnot.”

“Was it that bad?”

“Fully.” He forked baked beans adroitly onto toast. “They didn’t need your song, in the end,” he said, “and, as far we know, the executives in charge of the project are all still very much alive. Quite an optimal outcome for all concerned.” He started on his bacon. She ate her oatmeal and fruit, watching him. He ate quickly, methodically topping up whatever metabolism kept him firing on those extra cylinders. She’d never seen him tired, or jet-lagged. He seemed to exist in his own personal time zone.

He finished before she did, wiping the white plate clean with a final half-triangle of golden Cabinet toast.

“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 annoyingly, Sleight had set it to lock its screen after thirty seconds of idle, requiring Milgrim to enter his password if he stopped to think for longer than twenty-nine seconds. When he’d complained about this, Sleight explained that it gave potential attackers only a thirty-second window to get in and read the phone, and that admin privileges were in any case out of the question.

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.

Lately, though, Milgrim didn’t panic quite as easily. When he did, he seemed to restart of his own accord. It was, his cognitive therapist at the clinic had explained, a by-product of doing other things, rather than something one could train oneself to do in and of itself. Milgrim preferred to regard that by-product obliquely, in brief sidelong glances, else it somehow stop being produced. The biggest thing he was doing, in terms of the by-product of reduced anxiety, the therapist had explained, was to no longer take benzos on as constant a basis as possible.

He no longer took them at all, apparently, having undergone a very gradual withdrawal at the clinic. He wasn’t sure when he’d actually stopped having any, as the unmarked capsules had made it impossible to know. And he’d taken lots of capsules, many of them containing food supplements of various kinds, the clinic having some obscure naturopathic basis which he’d put down to basic Swissness. Though in other ways the treatment had been quite aggressive, involving everything from repeated massive blood transfusions to the use of a substance they called a “paradoxical antagonist.” This latter produced exceptionally peculiar dreams, in which Milgrim was stalked by an actual Paradoxical Antagonist, a shadowy figure he somehow associated with the colors in 1950s American advertising illustrations. Perky.

He missed his cognitive therapist. He’d been delighted to be able to speak Russian with such a beautifully educated woman. Somehow he couldn’t imagine having transacted all of that in English.

He’d stayed eight months, in the clinic, longer than any of the other clients. All of whom, when opportunity had afforded, had quietly asked the name of his firm. Milgrim had replied variously, at first, though always naming some iconic brand from his youth: Coca-Cola, General Motors, Kodak. Their eyes had widened, hearing this. Toward the end of this stay, he’d switched to Enron. Their eyes had narrowed. This had partly been the result of his therapist’s having ordered him to use the internet to familiarize himself with the events of the previous decade. He had, as she’d quite rightly pointed out, missed all of that.

He dreams this in the tall white room, its floor of limed oak. Tall windows. Beyond them, snow is falling. The world outside is utterly quiet, depthless. The light is without direction.

“Where did you learn your Russian, Mr. Milgrim?”

“Columbia. The university.”

Her white face. Black hair matte, center-parted, drawn back tight.

“You described your previous situation as one of literal captivity. This was after Columbia?”

“Yes.”

“How do you see your current situation as differing from that?”

“Do I see it as captivity?”

“Yes.”

“Not in the same way.”

“Do you understand why they would be willing to pay the very considerable fees required to keep you here?”

“No. Do you?”

“Not at all. Do you understand the nature of doctor-patient confidentiality, in my profession?”

“You aren’t supposed to tell anyone what I tell you?”

“Exactly. Do you imagine I would?”

“I don’t know.”

“I would not. When I agreed to come here, to work with you, I made that absolutely clear. I am here for you, Mr. Milgrim. I am not here for them.”

“That’s good.”

“But because I am here for you, Mr. Milgrim, I am also concerned for you. It is as though you are being born. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“You were incomplete when they brought you here. You are somewhat less incomplete now, but your recovery is necessarily a complexly organic process. If you are very fortunate, it will continue for the rest of your life. ‘Recovery’ is perhaps a deceptive word for this. You are recovering some aspects of yourself, certainly, but the more important things are things you’ve never previously possessed. Primary aspects of development. You have been stunted, in certain ways. Now you have been given an opportunity to grow.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it?”

“Good, yes. Comfortable? Not always.”

At Heathrow there was a tall black man, head immaculately shaven, holding a clipboard against his chest. On it, in medium-nib red Sharpie, someone had written “mILgRIm.”

“Milgrim,” Milgrim said.

“Urine test,” the man said. “This way.”

Refusing to submit to random testing would have been a deal-breaker. They’d been very clear about that, from the start. He would have minded it less if they’d managed to collect the samples at less awkward times, but he supposed that was the point.

The man removed Milgrim’s red name from his clipboard as he led him into an obviously preselected public restroom, crumpling it and thrusting it into his black overcoat.

“This way,” walking briskly down a row of those seriously private British toilet-caves. Not cubicles, or stalls, but actual narrow little closets, with real doors. This was usually the first cultural difference Milgrim noticed here. Englishmen must experience American public toilets as remarkably semicommunal, he guessed. The man gestured him into a vacant toilet-room, glanced back the way they’d come, then quickly stepped in, closing the door behind him, locked it, and handed Milgrim a plastic sandwich bag containing a blue-topped sample bottle. Milgrim propped the red cardboard tube, carefully, in a corner.

They had to watch, Milgrim knew. Otherwise, you might switch containers, palm off someone else’s clean urine. Or even use, he’d read in New York tabloids, a special prosthetic penis.

Milgrim removed the bottle from the bag, tore off the paper seal, removed the blue lid, and filled it, the phrase “without further ceremony” coming to mind. He capped it, placed it in the bag, and passed it over, in such a way that the man wouldn’t have to experience the warmth of his fresh urine. He’d gotten quite good at this. The man dropped it into a small brown paper bag, which he folded and stuffed into his coat pocket. Milgrim turned and finished urinating, as the man unlocked the door and stepped out.

When Milgrim emerged, the man was washing his hands, fluorescent lights reflecting off the impressive dome of his skull.

“How’s the weather?” Milgrim asked, soaping his own hands from a touch-free dispenser, the cardboard tube resting on the water-flecked faux-granite counter.

“Raining,” said the man, drying his hands.

When Milgrim had washed and dried his own hands, he used the damp paper towels to wipe the bottom plastic cap of his tube.

“Where are we going?”

“Soho,” the man said.

Milgrim followed him out, his overnight bag slung over one shoulder, the tube tucked under the opposite arm.

Then he remembered the Neo.

When he turned it on, it began to ring.

5. THIN ON THE GROUND

And when she’d watched him, from her chair, the collar of his coat popped like a vampire’s cape, finally descend the stairs to Cabinet’s foyer, dropping further out of sight with each step, she put her head back against slippery brocade and gazed at the spiraled lances of the narwhale tusks, in their ornate rack.

Then she sat up and asked for a white coffee, a cup rather than a pot. The breakfast crowd had mostly gone, leaving only Hollis and a pair of darkly suited Russian men who looked like extras from that Cronenberg film.

She got out her iPhone and Googled “Gabriel Hounds.”

By the time her coffee arrived, she’d determined that The Gabriel Hounds was the title of a novel by Mary Stewart, had been the title of at least one CD, and had been or was the name of at least one band.

Everything, she knew, had already been the title of a CD, just as everything had already been the name of a band. This was why bands, for the past twenty years or so, had mostly had such unmemorable names, almost as though they’d come to pride themselves on it.

But the original Gabriel Hounds, it appeared, were folklore, legend. Dogs heard coursing, however faintly, high up in the windy night. Cousins it seemed to the Wild Hunt. This was Inchmale territory, definitely, and there were even weirder variants. Some involving hounds with human heads, or hounds with the heads of human infants. This had to do with the belief that the Gabriel Hounds were hunting the souls of children who’d died unbaptized. Christian tacked over pagan, she guessed. And the hounds seemed to have originally been “ratchets,” an old word for dogs that hunt by scent. Gabriel Ratchets. Sometimes “gabble ratchets.” Inchmaleian totally. He’d name the right band the Gabble Ratchets instantly.

“Left for you, Miss Henry.” The Italian girl, holding out a glossy paper carrier bag, yellow, unmarked.

“Thank you.” Hollis put the iPhone down and accepted the bag. It had been stapled shut, she saw, and she envisioned the oversized brass stapler atop the pornographic desk, its business end the head of a turbaned Turk. A pair of identical business cards, multiply stapled, held the two handles together. PAMELA MAINWARING, BLUE ANT.

She pulled off the cards and tugged the bag open, staples tearing through the glossy paper.

A very heavy denim shirt. She took it out and spread it across her lap. No, a jacket. The denim darker than the thighs of her Japanese jeans, bordering on black. And it smelled of that indigo, strongly, an earthy jungle scent familiar from the shop where she’d found her jeans. The metal buttons, the rivet kind, were dead black, nonreflective, oddly powdery-looking.

No exterior signage. The label, inside, below the back of the collar, was undyed leather, thick as most belts. On it had been branded not a name but the vague and vaguely disturbing outline of what she took to be a baby-headed dog. The branding iron appeared to have been twisted from a single length of fine wire, then heated, pressed down unevenly into the leather, which was singed in places. Centered directly beneath this, sewn under the bottom edge of the leather patch, was a small folded tab of white woven ribbon, machine-embroidered with three crisp, round black dots, arranged in a triangle. Indicating size?

Her gaze was drawn back to the brand of the hound, with its almost featureless kewpie head.

“Twenty-ounce,” the handsomely graying professor of denim pronounced, the Gabriel Hounds jacket spread before her on a foot-thick slab of polished hardwood, atop what Hollis guessed had been the cast-iron legs of a factory lathe. “Slubby.”

“Slubby?”

Running her hand lightly over the jacket’s sleeve. “This roughness. In the weave.”

“Is this Japanese denim?”

The woman raised her eyebrows. She was dressed, today, in a tweed that looked as if the brambles had been left in, khaki laundered so often as to be of no particular color, oxford cloth so coarse it seemed handloomed, and at least two tattered paisley cravats of peculiar but differing widths. “Americans forget how to make denim like this. Maybe loomed in Japan. Maybe not. Where did you find it?”

“It belongs to a friend.”

“You like it?”

“I haven’t tried it on.”

“No?” The woman moved behind Hollis, helping her remove her coat. She picked up the jacket and helped Hollis into it.

Hollis saw herself in the mirror. Straightened. Smiled. “That’s not bad,” she said. She turned up the collar. “I haven’t worn one of these for at least twenty years.”

“Fit is very good,” the woman said. She touched Hollis’s back with both hands, just below her shoulders. “By-swing shoulders. Inside, elastic ribbons, pull it into shape. This detail is from HD Lee mechanic jacket, early Fifties.”

“If the fabric is Japanese, would it have to have been made in Japan?”

“Possible. Build-quality, detailing, are best, but … Japan? Tunisia? Even California.”

“You don’t know where I could find another like it? Or more of this brand?” She didn’t, somehow, want to name it.

Their eyes met, in the mirror. “You know ‘secret brand’? You understand?”

“I think so,” she said, doubtfully.

“This is very secret brand,” the woman said. “I cannot help you.”

“But you have,” Hollis said, “thank you,” suddenly wanting to be out of the beautifully spare little shop, the musky pong of indigo, “thank you very much.” She pulled her coat on, over the Gabriel Hounds jacket. “Thank you. Goodbye.”

Outside, in Upper James Street, a boy was hurrying past, a hemisphere of thin black wool pulled down level with his eyes. All black, save for his white, blotchily unshaven face and the pavement-smudged white sole-edges of his black shoes.

“Clammy,” she said, reflexively, as he passed her.

“Fucking hell,” hissed Clammy, in his recently and somewhat oddly acquired West Hollywood American, and shuddered, as if from some sudden massive release of coiled tension. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for denim,” she said, then had to point back at the shop, having no idea what it was called, discovering simultaneously that it apparently had no sign. “Gabriel Hounds. They don’t have any.”

Clammy’s eyebrows might have gone up, beneath his black beanie.

“Like this,” she said, tugging at the unbuttoned denim jacket beneath her coat.

His eyes narrowed. “Where’d you get that?”

“A friend.”

“Next to fucking impossible to find,” pronounced Clammy, gravely. As if suddenly taking her, to her amazement and for the first time, seriously.

“Time for a coffee?”

Clammy shivered. “I’m fucking ill,” he said, and sniffled noisily. “Had to get out of the studio.”

“Herbal tea. And something I have for your immune system.”

“Were you Reg’s girl, in the band? My mate says you were.”

“Never,” she said, firmly. “Neither symbolically nor biblically.”

Blank.

“They always think the singer must be fucking the guitarist,” she clarified.

Clammy smirked, through his cold. “Tabloids said that about me ’n’ Arfur.”

“Exactly,” she said. “A Canadian-made, ginseng-based patent medicine. Herbal tea chaser. Can’t hurt.”

Clammy, snuffling, nodded his consent.

She hoped he really did have a virus. Otherwise, he was in the early onset of heroin withdrawal. But probably a cold, plus the very considerable stress inherent in working in the studio with Inchmale.

She’d gotten him to swallow five capsules of Cold-FX, taking three herself as a prophylactic measure. It usually didn’t seem to do anything, once symptoms were advanced, but the promise of it had gotten him around the corner and into the Starbucks on Golden Square, and she hoped he was prone to the placebo effect. She was herself, according to Inchmale, who was an adamant and outspoken Cold-FX denier. “You have to keep taking them,” she said to Clammy, placing the white plastic bottle beside his steaming paper cup of chamomile. “Ignore the instructions. Take three, three times a day.”

He shrugged. “Where’d you say you got the Hounds?”

“It belongs to someone I know.”

“Where’d they get it, then?”

“I don’t know. Someone told me it was a ‘secret brand.’ ”

“Not when you know,” he said. “Just very hard to find. Thin on the fucking ground, your Gabriel Hounds.”

“Is he starting to talk about rerecording the bed tracks?” She guessed that if she tried to change the subject, he might resist, and she could go along with that, not seem too interested.

Clammy shivered. Nodded.

“Has he talked about doing it in Tucson?”

Clammy frowned, forehead masked behind black cashmere. “Last night.” He peered out, through plate glass, at Golden Square, deserted in the rain.

“There’s a place there,” she said. “One of his secrets. Do it. If he wants to go back later for the overdubs, do it.”

“So why’s he breaking my balls now, remixing?”

“It’s his process,” she said.

Clammy rolled his eyes, to heaven or his black cap, then back to her. “You ask your friend where they got the Hounds?”

“Not yet,” she said.

He turned on his stool, swung his leg out from beneath the counter. “Hounds,” he said. The jeans he wore were black, very narrow. “Twenty-ounce,” he said. “Brutal heavy.”

“Slubby?”

“You blind?”

“Where did you find them?”

“Melbourne. Girl I met, knew where and when.”

“A store?”

“Never in shops,” he said. “Except secondhand, and that’s not likely.”

“I tried Google,” she said. “A Mary Stewart book, a band, CD by someone else …”

“Go further, on Google, and there’s eBay,” he said.

“Hounds on eBay?”

“All fake. Almost all. Chinese fakes.”

“The Chinese are faking it?”

“Chinese are faking everything,” Clammy said. “You get a real Hounds piece on eBay, someone makes an offer high enough to stop it. Never seen an auction for real Hounds run off.”

“It’s an Australian brand?”

He looked disgusted, which was how he’d looked in whatever few previous brief conversations they’d had. “Fuck no,” he said, “it’s Hounds.”

“Tell me about it, Clammy,” she said. “I need to know.”

6. AFTER THE GYRATORY

The Neo’s plastic case reminded Milgrim of one of those electronic stud-finders they sold in hardware stores, its shape simultaneously simple and clumsy, awkward against his ear.

“Gussets?” demanded Rausch, on the Neo.

“He said they needed them. One in each inner thigh.”

“What are they?”

“An extra piece of material, between two seams. Usually triangular.”

“How do you know that?”

Milgrim considered. “I like details,” he said.

“What did he look like?”

“Football player,” Milgrim said. “With a sort of mullet.”

“A what?”

“I have to go,” Milgrim said. “We’re at the Hanger Lane Gyratory System.”

“Wha—”

Milgrim clicked off.

Pocketing the Neo, he brought himself more upright, feeling the Jankel-armored, four-doored, short-bedded Toyota Hilux’s ferocious engine-transplant gather itself for their plunge into England’s most famously intimidating roundabout, seven lanes of fiercely determined traffic.

According to Aldous, the Hilux’s other driver, this route from Heathrow, decidedly nonoptimal, was part of his job requirement, meant to maintain certain skills one was otherwise unable to practice in London traffic.

Braced for the discomfort of rapid acceleration on run-flat tires, from a standing stop, Milgrim glanced down, to his right, glimpsing the pinstriped thigh of the driver in the adjacent lane, and missed seeing the light change.

Then they were in it, fully gyratory, the driver expertly and repeatedly inserting the Hilux’s secretly massive but oddly skittish bulk sideways, it seemed, into absurdly tiny lane-change gaps.

Milgrim had no idea why he’d come to enjoy this so much. Prior to his stay in Basel, he’d have kept his eyes shut for the whole thing; if he’d been expecting it, he’d have upped his medication. But now, grinning, he sat with the red cardboard tube upright between his legs, holding it with the fingertips of both hands, as though it were a joystick.

Then they were out of it. He sighed, deeply if mysteriously satisfied, and felt the driver’s glance.

This driver wasn’t as talkative as Aldous, but that might have something to do with the urine test. Aldous had never had to administer the urine test, or drive back to London with a vial cooling in his overcoat pocket.

Aldous had told Milgrim all about the Toyota Hilux, about the Jankel armor and the bulletproof glass and the run-flats. “Cartel grade,” Aldous had assured him, and unusual for London, at least as far as a silver-gray pickup truck went. Milgrim hadn’t asked why these particular features had been deemed necessary, but he suspected that that might be a sensitive area.

Eventually, now, after a much less entertaining stretch of the journey, it became Euston Road, and the beginnings of his idea of actual London.

Like entering a game, a layout, something flat and mazed, arbitrarily but fractally constructed from beautifully detailed but somehow unreal buildings, its order perhaps shuffled since the last time he’d been here. The pixels that comprised it were familiar, but it remained only provisionally mapped, a protean territory, a box of tricks, some possibly even benign.

The run-flats were nasty on mixed pavement, worse on cobbles. He sat back and held on to the red cardboard tube as the driver began taking an endless series of corners, keeping roughly parallel, Milgrim guessed, to Tottenham Court Road. Headed for the heart of town, and Soho.

Rausch, his translucently short black hair looking like something sprayed from a nozzle, was waiting for them in front of Blue Ant, the driver having phoned ahead as they’d crept along through the traffic on Beak Street. Rausch held a magazine above his head, to ward off the drizzle. He looked characteristically disheveled, but in his own peculiar way. Everything about his personal presentation was intended to convey an effortless concision, but nothing quite did. His tight black suit was wrinkled, bagged at the knees, and in extending his arm above his head to hold the magazine, he’d untucked one side of his white shirt. His glasses, whose frames came equipped with their own squint, would be in need of cleaning.

“Thanks,” Milgrim said when the driver pushed a button, unlocking the passenger-side door. The driver said nothing. They were behind a black cab, not quite there yet.

When Milgrim opened the door, it swung out with an alarming, weight-driven velocity, to be stopped by a short pair of heavy nylon straps that prevented it from tearing itself off its hinges. He climbed down, with the red tube and his bag, briefly glimpsing the red tank of fire-extinguishing foam beneath the passenger seat, and tried to bump the door shut with his shoulder. “Ouch,” he said. He put the bag down, tucked the tube under his arm, and used the other hand to heave the armored door shut.

Rausch was bending to pick up his bag.

“He’s got the pee,” Milgrim said, indicating the truck.

Rausch straightened, grimacing fastidiously. “Yes. He takes it to the lab.”

Milgrim nodded, looking around at the pedestrian traffic, which tended to interest him in Soho.

“They’re waiting,” said Rausch.

Milgrim followed him into Blue Ant, Rausch holding a security badge over a metal plate to unlock the door, a single sheet of greenish two-inch-thick glass.

The lobby here suggested some combination of extremely expensive private art school and government defense establishment, though when he thought about it, he’d never been in either. There was a massive central chandelier, constructed from thousands of pairs of discarded prescription eyeglasses, that contributed very handsomely to the art school part, but the Pentagon part (or would it be Whitehall?) was harder to pin down. Half a dozen large plasma screens constantly showed the latest house product, mostly European and Japanese automobile commercials with production budgets dwarfing those of many feature films, while beneath these moved people wearing badges like the one Rausch had used to open the door. These were worn around the neck, on lanyards in various shades, some bearing the repeated logos of various brands or projects. There was a smell of exceptionally good coffee.

Milgrim looked obediently at a large red plus sign, on the wall behind the security counter, while an automated camera moved lazily behind a small square window, like something in a very technical reptile house. He was shortly presented with a large square photograph of himself, very low in resolution, on a hideous chartreuse lanyard minus any branding. As always, he suspected that this was at least partially intended to serve as a high-visibility target, should the need arise. He put it on. “Coffee,” he said.

“No,” said Rausch, “they’re waiting,” but Milgrim was already on his way to the lobby’s cappuccino station, the source of that fine aroma.

“Piccolo, please,” said Milgrim to the blond barista, her hair only slightly longer than Rausch’s.

“He’s waiting,” said Rausch, beside him, tensely stressing the first syllable of “waiting.”

“He’ll expect me to be able to talk,” said Milgrim, watching the girl expertly draw the shot. She foamed milk, then poured an elaborate Valentine’s heart into the waiting shot in Milgrim’s white cup. “Thank you,” he said.

Rausch fumed silently in the elevator to the fourth floor, while Milgrim was mainly concerned with keeping his cup and saucer level and undisturbed.

The doors slid aside, revealing Pamela Mainwaring. Looking, Milgrim thought, like some very tasteful pornographer’s idea of “mature,” her blond hair magnificently banged.

“Welcome back,” she said, ignoring Rausch. “How was South Carolina?”

“Fine,” said Milgrim, who held the red cardboard tube in his right hand, the piccolo in his left. He raised the tube slightly. “Got it.”

“Very good,” she said. “Come in.”

Milgrim followed her into a longish room with a long central table. Bigend was seated at the table’s far end, a window behind him. He looked like something that had gone wrong on a computer screen, but then Milgrim realized that that was the suit he was wearing, in a weirdly electric cobalt blue.

“If you don’t mind,” Pamela said, taking the red cardboard tube and handing it on to Milgrim’s favorite in Bigend’s clothing design team, a French girl, today in a plaid kilt and cashmere pullover. “And the photographs?”

“In my bag,” Milgrim said.

While his bag was placed on the table and opened, motorized shades tracked silently shut across the window behind Bigend. Overhead, fixtures came on, illuminating the table, where Milgrim’s tracings were being carefully unfurled. He’d remembered to leave his camera atop his clothes, and now it was being passed from hand to hand, up the table.

“Your medication,” said Pamela, handing him a fresh bubble-pack.

“Now, then,” said Bigend, rising, “be seated.”

Milgrim took the chair to the right of Pamela’s. They were extremely fine workstation chairs, either Swiss or Italian, and he had to restrain himself from fiddling with the various knobs and levers projecting from beneath the seat.

“I see the Bundeswehr NATO pattern,” someone said. “The legs are pure 501.”

“But not the box,” said the girl in kilt and cashmere. The box, he had learned, was everything, in a pair of jeans, above the top of the leg. “The two small pleats are absent, the rise lower.”

“The photographs,” said Bigend, from behind her chair. A plasma screen, above the window he’d been sitting in front of, flared turquoise, around coppery coyote brown, the Formica counter in Edge City Family Restaurant making itself known in this darkened room in central London.

“Knee pads,” said a young man, American. “Absent. No pockets for them.”

“We hear they have a new pad-retention system,” said the French girl, with a surgeon’s seriousness. “But I don’t see that here.”

They watched, then, silently, while Milgrim’s photographs cycled.

“How tactical are they?” asked Bigend as the first photograph reappeared. “Are we looking at a prototype for a Department of Defense contract?”

A silence. Then: “Streetwear.” The French girl, much more confident than the others. “If these are for the military, it isn’t the American military.”

“He said they needed gussets,” said Milgrim.

“What?” asked Bigend, softly.

“He said they were too tight in the thighs. For rappelling.”

“Really,” said Bigend. “That’s good. That’s very good.”

Milgrim allowed himself a first careful sip of his coffee.

7. A HERF GUN IN FRITH STREET

Bigend was telling a story, over drinks in a crowded Frith Street tapas place Hollis suspected she’d been to before. A story about someone using something called a “herf” gun, high-energy radio frequency, in Moscow, to erase someone else’s stored data, in a drive in an adjacent building, on the opposite side of a party wall. So far the best thing about it was that Bigend kept using the British expression “party wall,” and she’d always found it mildly if inexplicably comical. The herf gun, he was explaining now, the electromagnetic radiation device, was the size of a backpack, putting out a sixteen-megawatt pulse, and she suddenly found herself afraid, boys being boys, of some punch-line involving accidentally baked internal organs. “Were any animals harmed, Hubertus,” she interrupted, “in the making of this anecdote?”

“I like animals,” said Milgrim, the American Bigend had introduced at Blue Ant, sounding as though he were more than mildly surprised to discover that he did. He seemed to have only the one name.

After Clammy had decided to go back to the studio, her white plastic bottle of Cold-FX wedged precariously into a back pocket of his Hounds, departing the Golden Square Starbucks during an unexpected burst of weak but thoroughly welcome sunlight, Hollis had gone out to stand for a few moments amid the puddles in Golden Square, before walking (aimlessly, she’d pretended to herself) back up Upper James to Beak Street. Turning right, crossing the first intersection on her side of Beak, she’d found Blue Ant exactly where she remembered it, while simultaneously realizing that she’d been hoping it somehow wouldn’t be there.

When she’d pressed the annunciator button, a square pattern of small round holes had said hello. “Hollis Henry, for Hubertus.” Was she expected? “Not at all, no.”

A handsome, bearded child, in a corduroy sports coat considerably older than he was, had opened the thick glass door almost immediately. “I’m Jacob,” he’d said. “We’re just trying to find him.” He’d offered his hand.

“Hollis,” she’d said.

“Come in, please. I’m a huge fan of The Curfew.”

“Thank you.”

“Would you like coffee, while you wait?” He’d indicated a sort of guardhouse, diagonally striped in artfully battered yellow and black paint, in which a girl with very short blond hair was polishing an espresso maker that looked set to win at Le Mans. “They sent three men from Turin, to install the machine.”

“Shouldn’t I be being photographed?” she’d asked him. Inchmale hadn’t liked Blue Ant’s new security measures at all when they’d last come here, to sign contracts. But then the phone in Jacob’s right hand had played the opening chords of “Box 1 of 1,” one of her least favorite Curfew songs. She’d pretended not to notice. “In the lobby,” he’d said to the phone.

“Have you been with Blue Ant long?” she’d asked.

“Two years now. I actually worked on your commercial. We were gutted when it fell through. Do you know Damien?” She didn’t. “The director. Gutted, absolutely.” But then Bigend had appeared, in his very blue suit, shoulder-draped in the bivouac-tent yardage of the trench coat, and accompanied by Pamela Mainwaring and a nondescript but unshaven man in a thin cotton sportscoat and wrinkled slacks, a black nylon bag slung over his shoulder. “This is Milgrim,” Bigend had said, then “Hollis Henry” to the man, who’d said “Hello,” but scarcely anything since.

“What kinds of animals?” she asked him now, in a still more naked bid to derail Bigend’s narrative.

Milgrim winced. “Dogs,” he said, quickly, as though surprised in some guilty pleasure.

“You like dogs?” She was sure that Bigend had been paying whatever lowlife had been wielding that herf gun, though he’d never come right out and tell you that, unless he had some specific reason to.

“I met a very nice dog in Basel,” Milgrim said, “at …” A micro-expression of anxiety. “At a friend’s.”

“Your friend’s dog?”

“Yes,” said Milgrim, nodding once, tightly, before taking a sip of his Coke. “You could have used a spark coil generator instead,” he said to Bigend, blinking, “made from a VCR tuner. They’re smaller.”

“Who told you that?” asked Bigend, suddenly differently focused.

“A … roommate?” Milgrim extended an index finger, to touch his stack of tiny, elongated white china tapas dishes, as if needing to assure himself that they were there. “He worried about things like that. Out loud. They made him angry.” He looked apologetically at Hollis.

“I see,” said Bigend, although Hollis certainly didn’t.

Now Milgrim took a pharmacist’s folded white bubble-pack from an inside jacket pocket, flattened it, and frowned with concentration. All of the pills, Hollis saw, were white as well, white capsules, though of differing sizes. He carefully pushed three of them through the foil backing, put them in his mouth, and washed them down with a swig of Coke.

“You must be exhausted, Milgrim,” said Pamela, seated beside Hollis. “You’re on east coast time.”

“Not too bad,” Milgrim said, putting the bubble-pack away. There was a curious lack of definition to his features, Hollis thought, something adolescent, though she guessed he was in his thirties. He struck her as unused to inhabiting his own face, somehow. As amazed to find himself who he was as to find himself here in Frith Street, eating oysters and calamari and dry shaved ham.

“Aldous will take you back to the hotel,” Pamela said. Aldous, Hollis guessed, was one of the two black men who’d walked over with them from Blue Ant, carrying long, furled umbrellas with beautifully lacquered cane handles. They were waiting outside now, a few feet apart, silently, keeping an eye on Bigend through the window.

“Where is it?” Milgrim asked.

“Covent Garden,” said Pamela.

“I like that one,” he said. He folded his napkin, put it beside the white china tower. He looked at Hollis. “Nice meeting you.” He nodded, first to Pamela, then to Bigend. “Thanks for dinner.” Then he pushed back his chair, bent to pick up his bag, stood up, shouldering the bag, and walked out of the restaurant.

“Where did you find him?” Hollis asked, watching Milgrim, through the window, speak to the one she supposed was Aldous.

“In Vancouver,” Bigend said, “a few weeks after you were there.”

“What does he do?”

“Translation,” Bigend said, “simultaneous and written. Russian. Brilliant with idioms.”

“Is he … well?” She didn’t know how else to put it.

“Convalescing,” said Bigend.

“Recovering,” said Pamela. “He translates for you?”

“Yes. Though we’re beginning to see that he may actually be more useful in other areas.”

“Other areas?”

“Good eye for detail,” said Bigend. “We have him looking at clothing.”

“Doesn’t look like a fashion plate.”

“That’s an advantage, actually,” said Bigend.

“Did he notice your suit?”

“He didn’t say,” said Bigend, glancing down at an International Klein Blue lapel of Early Carnaby proportions. He looked up, pointedly, at her Hounds jacket. “Have you learned anything?” He rolled a piece of the dry, translucent Spanish ham, waiting for her answer. His hand fed the ham to his mouth carefully, as if afraid of being bitten. He chewed.

“It’s what the Japanese call a secret brand,” Hollis said. “Only more so. This may or may not have been made in Japan. No regular retail outlets, no catalog, no web presence aside from a few cryptic mentions on fashion blogs. And eBay. Chinese pirates have started to fake it, but only badly, the minimal gesture. If a genuine piece turns up on eBay, someone will make an offer that induces the seller to stop the auction.” Turning to Pamela. “Where did you get this jacket?”

“We advertised. On fashion fora, mainly. Eventually we found a dealer, in Amsterdam, and met his price. He ordinarily deals in unworn examples of anonymously designed mid-twentieth-century workwear.”

“He does?”

“Not unlike rare stamps, apparently, except that you can wear them. A segment of his clientele appreciates Gabriel Hounds, though they’re a minority among what we take to be the brand’s demographic. We’re guessing active global brand-awareness, meaning people who’ll go to very considerable trouble to find it, tops out at no more than a few thousand.”

“Where did the dealer in Amsterdam get his?”

“He claimed to have bought it as part of a lot of vintage new old stock, from a picker, without having known what it was. Said he’d assumed they were otaku-grade Japanese reproductions of vintage, and that he could probably resell them easily enough.”

“A picker?”

“Someone who looks for things to sell to dealers. He said that the picker was German, and a stranger. A cash transaction. Claimed not to recall a name.”

“It can’t be that big a secret,” Hollis said. “I’ve found two people since breakfast who knew at least as much about it as I’ve told you.”

“And they are?” Bigend leaned forward.

“The Japanese woman at a very pricey specialist shop not far from Blue Ant.”

“Ah,” he said, his disappointment obvious. “And?”

“A young man, who bought a pair of jeans in Melbourne.”

“Really,” said Bigend, brightening. “And did he tell you who he bought them from?”

Hollis picked up a slice of the glassine ham, rolled it, dipped it in olive oil. “No. But I think he will.”

8. CURETTAGE

Milgrim, cleaning his teeth in the brightly but flatteringly lit bath room of his small but determinedly upscale hotel room, thought about Hollis Henry, the woman Bigend had brought along to the restaurant. She hadn’t seemed to be part of Blue Ant, and she’d also seemed somehow familiar. Milgrim’s memory of the past decade or so was porous, unreliable as to sequence, but he didn’t think they’d met before. But still, somehow familiar. He switched tips on the mini-brush he was using between his upper rear molars, opting for a conical configuration. He would let Hollis Henry settle down into the mix. In the morning he might find he knew who she was. If not, there was the lobby’s complimentary MacBook, in every way preferable to trying to Google on the Neo. Pleasant enough, Hollis Henry, at least if you weren’t Bigend. She wasn’t entirely pleased with Bigend. He’d gotten that much on the walk to Frith Street.

He switched to a different tool, one that held taut, half-inch lengths of floss between disposable U-shaped bits of plastic. They’d fixed his teeth, in Basel, and had sent him several times to a periodontal specialist. Curettage. Nasty, but now he felt like he had a new mouth, if a very high-maintenance one. The best thing about having had all that done, aside from getting a new mouth, was that he’d gotten to see a little bit of Basel, going out for the treatments. Otherwise, he’d stayed in the clinic, per his agreement.

Finishing with the floss, he brushed his teeth with the battery-powered brush, then rinsed with water from a bottle whose deep-blue glass reminded him of Bigend’s suit. Pantone 286, he’d told Milgrim, but not quite. The thing Bigend most seemed to enjoy about the shade, other than the fact that it annoyed people, was that it couldn’t quite be re-created on most computer monitors.

He was out of his mouthwash, which contained something they used in tap water on airplanes. You were only allowed to take a little bit of liquid with you on the plane, and he didn’t check luggage. He’d been rationing the last of that mouthwash, in Myrtle Beach. He’d ask someone at Blue Ant. They had people who seemed able to find anything, who had doing that as a job description.

He put out the bathroom lights, and stood beside the bed, undressing. The room had slightly too much furniture, including a dressmaker’s dummy that had been re-covered with the same brown and tan material as the armchair. He considered putting his pants in the trouser press, but decided against it. He’d shop tomorrow. A chain called Hackett. Like an upscale Banana Republic but with pretensions he knew he didn’t understand. He was turning down the bed when the Neo rang, emulating the mechanical bell on an old telephone. That would be Sleight.

“Leave the phone in your room tomorrow,” Sleight said. “Turned on, on the charger.” He sounded annoyed.

“How are you, Oliver?”

“The company that makes these things has gone out of business,” Sleight said. “So we need to do some reprogramming tomorrow.” He hung up.

“Good night,” Milgrim said, looking at the Neo in his hand. He put it on the bedside table, climbed into bed in his underwear, and pulled the covers to his chin. He turned out the light. Lay there running his tongue over the backs of his teeth. The room was slightly too warm, and he was aware, somehow, of the dressmaker’s dummy.

And listened to, or at any rate sensed, the background frequency that was London. A different white noise.

9. FUCKSTICK

When she opened Cabinet’s front door, pinstriped Robert was not there to help her with it.

Due, she saw immediately, to the jackbooted advent of Heidi Hyde, once the Curfew’s drummer, in whose assorted luggage Robert was now draped, clearly terrified, back in the lift-grotto, next to the vitrine housing Inchmale’s magic ferret. Heidi, beside him, was fully as tall and possibly as broad at the shoulders. Unmistakably hers, that direly magnificent raptorial profile, and just as unmistakably furious.

“Was she expected?” Hollis quietly asked whichever tortoise-framed boy was on the desk.

“No,” he said, just as quietly, passing her the key to her room. “Mr. Inchmale phoned, minutes ago, to alert us.” Eyes wide behind the brown frames. He had something of the affect, beneath his hotelman’s game-face, of a tornado survivor.

“It’ll be okay,” Hollis assured him.

“What’s wrong with this fucking thing?” Heidi demanded, loudly.

“It gets confused,” Hollis said, walking up to them, with a nod and reassuring smile for Robert.

“Miss Henry.” Robert looked pale.

“You mustn’t press it more than once,” Hollis said to Heidi. “Takes it longer to make up its mind.”

“Fuck,” said Heidi, from some bottomless pit of frustration, causing Robert to wince. Her hair was dyed goth black, signaling the warpath, and Hollis guessed she’d done it herself.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” Hollis said.

“Neither did I,” said Heidi, grimly. Then: “It’s fuckstick.”

At which Hollis understood that Heidi’s unlikely sub-Hollywood marriage was over. Heidi’s exes lost their names, at termination, to be known henceforth only by this blanket designation.

“Sorry to hear that,” Hollis said.

“Running a pyramid scheme,” Heidi said as the lift arrived. “What the fuck is this?”

“The elevator.” Hollis opened the articulated gate, gesturing Heidi in.

“Please, go ahead,” Robert said. “I’ll bring your bags.”

“Get in the fucking elevator,” commanded Heidi. “Get. In.” She backed him into the lift with sheer enraged presence. Hollis nipped in after him, raising the brass-hinged mahogany bench against the back wall for more room.

Heidi, up close, smelled of sweat, airport rage, and musty leather. She was wearing a jacket that Hollis remembered from their touring days. Once black, its seams were worn the color of dirty parchment.

Robert managed to push a button. They started up, the lift complaining audibly at the weight.

“Fucking thing’s going to kill us all,” said Heidi, as if finding the idea not entirely unattractive.

“What room is Heidi in?” Hollis asked him.

“Next to yours.”

“Good,” said Hollis, with more enthusiasm than she felt. That would be the one with the yellow silk chaise longue. She’d never understood the theme. Not that she understood the theme of her own, but she sensed it had one. The room with the yellow chaise longue seemed to be about spies, sad ones, in some very British sense, and seedy political scandal. And reflexology.

Hollis opened the gate, when the lift finally reached their floor, then held the various fire doors for Heidi and the heavily burdened Robert. Heidi seethed her way through the windowless green mini-hallways, body language conveying a universal dissatisfaction. Hollis saw that Robert had Heidi’s room key tucked for safekeeping between two fingers. She took it from him, its tassels moss green.

“You’re right next to me,” she said to Heidi, unlocking and opening the door. She shooed Heidi in, thinking of bulls, china shops. “Just put everything down,” she said to Robert, quietly. “I’ll take care of the rest.” She relieved him of two amazingly heavy cardboard cartons, each about the size required to contain a human head. He began immediately to unsling Heidi’s various luggage. She slipped him a five-pound note.

“Thank you, Miss Henry.”

“Thank you, Robert.” She closed the door in his relieved face.

“What,” demanded Heidi, “the fuck is this?”

“Your room,” said Hollis, who was arranging the luggage along a wall. “It’s a private club that Inchmale joined.”

“A club for what? What’s that?” Indicating a large framed silkscreen that Hollis herself found one of the least peculiar articles of decor.

“A Warhol. I think.” Had Warhol covered the Profumo scandal?

“I should have fucking known Inchmale would come up with something like this. Where is he?”

“Not here,” Hollis said. “He rented a house in Hampstead, when Angelina and the baby came from Argentina.”

Heidi hefted a wide-based crystal decanter, unstoppered it, sniffed. “Whiskey,” she said.

“The clear one’s gin,” Hollis advised, “not water.”

Heidi splashed three fingers of Cabinet Scotch into a highball glass, drank it off at a go, shuddered, set the decanter down and flicked the crystal stopper back into its neck with a dangerously sharp click. She had a spooky gift for aiming things; had never lost a game of darts in her life, but didn’t play darts, just threw them.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Hollis asked.

Heidi shrugged out of her leather jacket, tossed it aside, and pulled her black T-shirt off, revealing an olive-drab bra that looked as combat-ready as any bra Hollis had ever seen.

“Nice bra.”

“Israeli,” said Heidi. She looked around, taking in the contents of the room. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “The wallpaper’s like Hendrix’s pants.”

“I think it’s satin.” Vertically striped, in green, burgundy, ecru, and black.

“What I fucking said,” said Heidi, giving her Israeli army bra a tug, and sat down on the yellow silk chaise longue. “Why did we stop smoking?”

“Because it was bad for us.”

Heidi sighed, explosively. “He’s in jail,” she said, “fuckstick. No bond. He was doing something with other people’s money.”

“I thought that’s what producers do.”

“Not like that, it isn’t.”

“Are you in any trouble yourself?”

“Are you kidding? I’ve got a prenup thicker than fuckstick’s long. It’s his problem. I just needed to get the fuck out of Dodge.”

“I never understood why you married him.”

“It was an experiment. What about you? What are you doing here?”

“Working for Hubertus Bigend,” Hollis said, noting just how little she enjoyed saying it.

Heidi’s eyes widened. “Fuck me. That asshole? You couldn’t stand him. Creeped you totally out. Why?”

“I guess I need the money.”

“How bad did the crash do you?”

“About half.”

Heidi nodded. “Did everybody about half. Unless you had somebody like fuckstick doing your investing for you.”

“And you didn’t?”

“Are you kidding? Separation of church and fucking state. Always. I never thought he had any sense that way anyway. Other people did, though. Know what?”

“What?”

“The salt of the fucking earth never tells you it’s the salt of the fucking earth. People who get scammed, they’re all people who don’t know that.”

“I think I’ll have a whiskey.”

“Be my guest,” said Heidi. Then smiled. “Good to fucking see you.” And started to cry.

10. EIGENBLICH

Milgrim woke, took his medication, showered, shaved, brushed his teeth, dressed, and left the Neo charging but turned on. The U.K. plug-adaptor was larger than the phone’s charger. Keeping the dressmaker’s dummy out of his field of vision, he left the room.

In the silent Japanese elevator, descending three floors, he considered pausing to Google Hollis Henry on the lobby MacBook, but someone was using it when he got there.

He wasn’t always entirely comfortable with the lobby here, what there was of it. He felt like he might look as though he were here to steal something, though aside from his wrinkled post-flight clothing he was fairly certain he didn’t. And really, he thought, stepping out into Monmouth Street and tentative sunlight, he wouldn’t. Had no reason to. Three hundred pounds in a plain manila envelope in the inside pocket of his jacket, and nothing, today, telling him what he needed to do with it. Still a novel situation, to a man of his history.

Addictions, he thought, turning right, toward Seven Dials’ namesake obelisk, started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn’t seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were, his therapist in Basel had said, less intelligent than goldfish.

He went to Caffè Nero, a tastier alternate-reality Starbucks, crowded now. He ordered a latte and a croissant, the latter shipped frozen from France, baked here. He approved of that. Saw a small round table being vacated by a woman in a pinstriped suit and swiftly occupied it, looking out at the Vidal Sassoon, across the little roundabout, where young hairdressers were going in to work.

Eating his croissant, he wondered what Bigend might be up to with designer combat pants. He was a good listener, careful to not let people know it, but Bigend’s motives and modus eluded him. They could seem almost aggressively random.

Military contracting was essentially recession-proof, according to Bigend, and particularly so in America. That was a part of it, and perhaps even the core of it. Recession-proofing. And Bigend seemed centered on one area of military contracting, the one in which, Milgrim supposed, Blue Ant’s strategic skill set was most applicable. Blue Ant was learning everything it could, and very quickly, about the contracting, design, and manufacture of military clothing. Which seemed, from what Milgrim had seen so far, to be a very lively business.

And Milgrim, for whatever reason or lack of one, was along for the ride. That was what Myrtle Beach had been about.

Volunteer armies, the French girl had said, the one who’d worn the plaid kilt at yesterday’s meeting, in an earlier PowerPoint presentation that Milgrim had found quite interesting, required volunteers, the bulk of them young men. Who might otherwise be, for instance, skateboarding, or at least wearing clothing suggestive of skateboarding. And male streetwear generally, over the past fifty years or so, she said, had been more heavily influenced by the design of military clothing than by anything else. The bulk of the underlying design code of the twenty-first-century male street was the code of the previous midcentury’s military wear, most of it American. The rest of it was work wear, most of that American as well, whose manufacture had coevolved with the manufacture of military clothing, sharing elements of the same design code, and team sportswear.

But now, according to the French girl, that had reversed itself. The military needed clothing that would appeal to those it needed to recruit. Every American service branch, she said, illustrating each with a PowerPoint slide, had its own distinctive pattern of camouflage. The Marine Corps, she said, had made quite a point of patenting theirs (up close, Milgrim had found it too jazzy).

There was a law in America that prohibited the manufacture of American military clothing abroad.

And that was where Bigend, Milgrim knew, hoped to come in. Things that were manufactured in America didn’t necessarily have to be designed there. Outerwear and sporting-goods manufacturers, along with a few specialist uniform manufacturers, competed for contracts to manufacture clothing for the U.S. military, but that clothing had previously been designed by the U.S. military. Who now, the French girl had said, somewhat breathlessly, as though she were closing in on a small animal in some forest clearing, clearly lacked the newly requisite design skills to do that. Having invented so much of contemporary masculine cool in the midcentury, they found themselves competing with their own historical product, reiterated as streetwear. They needed help, the French girl had said, her mouse clicks summoning a closing flurry of images, and they knew it.

He sipped his latte, looking out, watching people pass, wondering if he could see the French girl’s thesis proven in the garments of this morning’s pedestrians. If you thought of it as a kind of pervasive subtext, he decided, you could.

“Excuse me. Would you mind if I shared the table?”

Milgrim looked up at this smiling American, ethnically Chinese, in her black sweatshirt, a small plain gold cross, gold-chained, worn atop it, one white plastic barrette visible, as some unsleeping module of addict street-alertness, hardwired to his very core, crisply announced: cop.

He blinked. “Of course. You’re welcome.” Feeling muscles in his thighs bunching, tight, readying themselves for the dash out the door. Malfunction, he told the module. Post-acute withdrawal syndrome. Flashback: His limbic brain was grooved for this, like the tracks of the wheels of Conestoga wagons, worn ankle-deep in sandstone.

She put her sacklike white pleather purse on the table, her plastic-lidded pale blue Caffè Nero cup beside it, pulled out the chair opposite him, and sat. Smiled.

Embroidered in white, on the black sweatshirt, were the crescent moon and palm tree of the South Carolina state flag, a bit larger than one of Ralph Lauren’s polo ponies. Milgrim’s buried module instantly extruded an entire DEW line of arcane cop-sensing apparatus.

Paranoia, his therapist had told him, was too much information. He had that now as the woman dipped into her purse, brought up a matte silver phone, opened it, and furrowed her brow. “Messages,” she said.

Milgrim looking straight into the infinitely deep black pupil that was the phone’s camera. “Uh-oh,” she said, “I see I have to run. Thanks anyway!” And up, purse under her arm, and out into Seven Dials.

Leaving her drink.

Milgrim picked it up. Empty. The white lid smudged with a dark lipstick she hadn’t been wearing.

Through the window he saw her pass an overflowing trash canister, from which she’d likely plucked this cup for her prop. Quickly crossing the intersection, toward Sassoon. Vanishing around a corner.

He stood, straightening his jacket, and walked out, not looking around. Back up Monmouth Street, toward his hotel. As he neared it, he crossed Monmouth diagonally, still moving at a calculatedly casual pace, and entered a sort of brick tunnel that led to Neal’s Yard, a courtyard gotten up as a kind of New Age mini-Disneyland. He bolted through this so quickly that people looked after him. Out into Shorts Garden, another street.

Purposeful pace now, but nothing to attract attention.

All the while aware of his addiction, awakened by the flood of stress chemicals, urgently advising him that something to take the edge off would be a very good idea indeed. It was, some newer part of him thought, amazed, like having a Nazi tank buried in your back yard. Grown over with grass and dandelions, but then you noticed its engine was still idling.

Not today, he told the Nazis in their buried tank, heading for Covent Garden tube station through an encyclopedic anthology of young people’s shoe stores, spring’s sneakers tinted like jelly beans.

Not good, another part of him was saying, not good.

As much as he wished to appear relaxed, the usual crew of beggars, floating in solution on the pavement in front of the station, faded at his approach. They saw something. He had again become as they were.

He saw Covent Garden as if from a great height, the crowd in Long Acre drawing back from him like magnetized iron filings.

Take the stairs, advised the autonomic pilot. He did, head down, never looking back, a unit in the spiral human chain.

Next he’d take the first train to Leicester Square, the shortest journey in the entire system. Then back, without exiting, having assured himself he wasn’t being followed. He knew how to do that, but then there were all these cameras, in their smoked acrylic spheres, like knockoff Courrèges light fixtures. There were cameras literally everywhere, in London. So far, he’d managed not to think about them. He remembered Bigend saying they were a symptom of autoimmune disease, the state’s protective mechanisms ’roiding up into something actively destructive, chronic; watchful eyes, eroding the healthy function of that which they ostensibly protected.

Did anyone protect him now?

He took himself through what one did in order to determine that one wasn’t being followed. While he did so, he anticipated his immediate return to this station. Imagined his ascent in the elevator’s dead air, where a dead voice would repeatedly advise him to have his ticket or pass ready.

He would be calmer, then.

Then restart the day, as planned. Go to Hackett in King Street, buy pants and a shirt.

Not good, said the other voice, causing his shoulders to narrow, bone and sinew tightening almost audibly.

Not good.

11. UNPACKING

Heidi’s room looked like the aftermath of a not-very-successful airplane bombing. Something that blew open every suitcase in the luggage compartment without bringing the plane down. Hollis had seen this many times before, touring with the Curfew, and took it to be a survival mechanism, a means of denying the soulless suction of sequential hotel rooms. She’d never actually seen Heidi distribute her things, nest-build. She guessed it was unconscious, accomplished in the course of an instinctive trance, like a dog walking tight circles in grass before it lay down to sleep. She was impressed now, to see how effectively Heidi had created her own space, pushing back whatever it was that Cabinet’s designers had intended the room to express.

“Fuck,” said Heidi, ponderously, apparently having slept, or passed out, in her Israeli army bra. Hollis, who had taken the key with her when she’d left, saw that there was barely a finger of whiskey left in the decanter. Heidi didn’t drink often, but when she did, she did. She lay now under a wrinkled pile of laundry, including, Hollis saw, several magenta linen table napkins and a cheap Mexican beach towel striped like a serape. Apparently Heidi had dumped the contents of the laundry hopper at Chez Fuckstick into one of her bags, departing, then pulled it out here. It was this she’d slept under, not Cabinet’s bedclothes.

“Breakfast?” Hollis began picking up and sorting the things on the bed. There was a large freezer-bag full of small, sharp-looking tools, fine-tipped brushes, tiny tins of paint, bits of white plastic. As if Heidi had adopted a twelve-year-old boy. “What’s this?”

“Therapy,” Heidi croaked, then made a sound like a vulture about to bring up something too putrid to digest, but Hollis had heard it before. She thought she remembered who Heidi had learned it from, a supernaturally pale German keyboardist with prematurely aged tattoos, their outlines blurred like felt pen on toilet paper. She put the bag and its mysterious contents on the dresser and picked up the phone, French, early twentieth century, but covered entirely in garishly reptilian Moroccan beading, like the business end of a hookah in the Grand Bazaar. “Pot of coffee, black, two cups,” she said to the room service voice, “rack of dry toast, large orange juice. Thanks.” She removed an ancient Ramones T-shirt from what was then revealed as a foot-tall white china reflexology model, an ear, complexly mapped in red. She put the T-shirt back, arranging it so that the band’s logo was optimally displayed.

“What about you?” asked Heidi, from beneath her laundry.

“What about me?”

“Men,” said Heidi.

“None,” said Hollis.

“What about the performance artist. Jumped off skyscrapers wearing that flying-squirrel suit. He was okay. Hot, too. Darrell?”

“Garreth,” said Hollis, probably for the first time in over a year, not wanting to.

“Is that why you’re here? He was English.”

“No,” said Hollis. “I mean yes, he was, but that’s not why I’m here.”

“You met him in Canada. Bigend introduce you? I didn’t meet him till later.”

“No,” Hollis said, dreading Heidi’s skill at this other, more painful unpacking. “They never met.”

“You don’t do jocks,” said Heidi.

“He was different,” said Hollis.

“They all are,” said Heidi.

“Was fuckstick?”

“No,” said Heidi. “Not that way. That was me, trying to be different. He was as undifferent as you can get, but he was somebody else’s undifferent. I just had this feeling that I could step into somebody else’s shoes. Put all the tour stuff in boxes. Shop at malls. Drive a car I’d never have thought of driving. Get a fucking break, you know? Time-out.”

“You didn’t seem very happy with it, when I saw you in L.A.”

“He turned out to be a closet creative. I married a tax lawyer. He started trying to produce. Indie stuff. He was starting to mention directing.”

“And he’s in jail now?”

“No bond. We had the FBI in the office. Wearing those jackets with ‘FBI’ on the back. They looked really good. Great look for a small production. But he couldn’t be on the set.”

“But you’re okay, legally?”

“I had Inchmale’s lawyer, in New York. I won’t even lose the share of his legitimate property I’m entitled to as the ex. Should they leave him any, which is unlikely. But seriously, fuck it.”

Breakfast arrived, Hollis taking the tray from the Italian girl at the door, with a wink. Tip her later.

Heidi batted her way out of the laundry pile. Sat on the edge of the bed, pulling on an enormous hockey jersey which Hollis, born without the gene for following team sports, recalled as having belonged to someone quite famous. Heidi definitely did jocks, though only if they were sufficiently crazy. Drumming for the Curfew, she’d had a spectacularly bad string of boxers, however good it might have been for publicity. She’d put one of them out cold with a single punch, at a pre-Oscars party. Very frequently now, Hollis was grateful for having had a pre-YouTube career.

“I never got what he did, Garret,” said Heidi, pouring herself half a cup of coffee, then topping it up with what remained in the whiskey decanter.

“Garreth. Do you think that’s a good idea?”

Heidi shrugged, her shoulders almost lost within the jersey. “You know me. Get this down and I’m good for six months of mineral water. Actually what I need now’s a gym. Serious one. What did he do?”

“I’m not sure I could explain that,” Hollis said, pouring her own coffee. “But I made a very firm agreement never to try.”

“Crook?”

“No,” said Hollis, “though some of what he did involved breaking laws. You know Banksy, the graffiti artist?”

“Yeah?”

“He liked Banksy. Identified with him. They’re both from Bristol.”

“But he wasn’t a graffiti artist.”

“I think he thought he was. Just not with paint.”

“With what?”

“History,” said Hollis.

Heidi looked unconvinced.

“He worked with an older man, someone with a lot of resources. The old man decided what should be done, what the gesture would be, then Garreth worked out the best way to do it. And not get caught. Dramaturge to the old man’s playwright, sort of, but sometimes actor as well.”

“So what was the problem?”

“Scary. Not that I didn’t approve of what they were doing. But it was scarier than Bigend’s stuff. I need the world to have a surface, the same surface everyone sees. I don’t like feeling like I’m always about to fall through, into something else. Look what happened to you.”

Heidi picked up a triangle of dry toast, considering it the way a potential suicide might consider a razor. “You said they weren’t crooks.”

“They broke laws, but they weren’t crooks. But by the very nature of what they did, they constantly made enemies. He came to L.A., we hung out. I was starting the book. He went back to Europe. Saw him again when I was over here to sign the car contract.”

“I got a proxy.” Biting off a corner of toast, chewing it dubiously.

“I wanted to be here.” Hollis smiled. “Then he came back with me, to New York. He wasn’t working. But then they were gearing up again. It was the run-up to Obama’s election. They were getting ready to do something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. If I did, and kept my promise, I couldn’t tell you anyway. I just got really busy with the book. He wasn’t around as much. Then he just wasn’t around.”

“Miss him?”

Hollis shrugged.

“You’re a difficult fit, you know that?”

Hollis nodded.

“Must make it harder.” Heidi got up, carried her whiskey and coffee into the bathroom, and splashed it into the sink. She came back and poured herself more coffee. “Feel like you’re on hold?”

“Definitely.”

“No good,” said Heidi. “Call him. See what’s up. Work through it.”

“No.”

“Got a number?”

“For emergencies. Only.”

“What kind?”

“Only if having known them ever got me into trouble.”

“Use it anyway.”

“No.”

“Pathetic,” said Heidi. “What the fuck is that?” She was staring into the bathroom.

“Your shower.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Wait’ll you see mine. What’s in those two boxes?” Pointing, where she’d put them down after taking them from Robert the night before. Hoping to change the topic. “A pair of concrete blocks?”

“Ashes,” Heidi said, “cremains.”

“Whose?”

“Jimmy’s.” The Curfew’s bass player. “There was nobody to claim them. He always said he wanted to be buried in Cornwall, remember?”

“No,” said Hollis. “Why Cornwall?”

“Fuck if I know. Maybe he’d decided it was the opposite of Kansas.”

“That’s a lot of ashes.”

“My mom’s too.”

“Your mother’s?”

“I never got around to doing anything with them. They were in the basement, with my tour stuff. I couldn’t leave ’em there with fuckstick, could I? I’ll take ’em both to Cornwall. Jimmy never had a mother anyway.”

“Okay,” said Hollis, unable to think of anything else to say.

“Where the fuck is Cornwall?”

“I can show you. On a map.”

“I need a fucking shower,” said Heidi.

12. COMPLIANCE TOOL

Bigend’s office, when Milgrim was finally ushered in, was windowless and surprisingly small. Perhaps it wasn’t that specifically his office, Milgrim thought. It didn’t look like an office anyone actually worked in.

The Swedish boy who’d brought Milgrim in put a gray folder on the teak desk and left silently. There was nothing else on the desk except a shotgun, one that appeared to have been made from solidified Pepto-Bismol.

“What’s that?” Milgrim asked.

“The maquette for one of the early takes on a collaboration between Taser and Mossberg, the shotgun manufacturer.” Bigend was wearing disposable plastic gloves, the kind that came on a roll, like cheap sandwich bags. “A compliance tool.”

“Compliance tool?”

“That’s what they call it,” said Bigend, picking the thing up with one hand and turning it, so that Milgrim could see it from various angles. It looked weightless. Hollow, some sort of resin. “I have it because I’m trying to decide whether a collaboration like this is the equivalent of Roberto Cavalli designing a trench coat for H&M.”

“I’ve been made,” said Milgrim.

“Made?” Bigend looked up.

“A cop took my picture this morning.”

“A cop? What kind?”

“A Chinese-American missionary-looking one. Her sweatshirt was embroidered with the South Carolina state flag.”

“Sit down,” said Bigend.

Milgrim sat, his Hackett shopping bag on his lap.

“How do you know she was a cop?” Bigend removed the glove-baggies, crumpled them.

“I just did. Do. Not necessarily in the sense of a law enforcement officer, but I wouldn’t put it past her.”

“You’ve been shopping,” said Bigend, looked at the Hackett bag. “What did you buy?”

“Pants,” said Milgrim, “a shirt.”

“Ralph Lauren shops at Hackett, I’m told,” said Bigend. “That’s an extremely complex piece of information, conceptually. Whether it’s true or not.” He smiled. “Do you like to shop there?”

“I don’t understand it,” Milgrim said, “but I like their pants. Some of their plainer shirts.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“The English football thing.”

“How so?”

“Are they serious about that, Hackett?”

“Exactly what I value in you. You go effortlessly to the core.”

“But are they?”

“Some would maintain that a double negative amounts to a positive. Where did this person take your picture?”

“Coffee place near the hotel. Seven Dials.”

“And you have informed—?”

“You.”

“Don’t mention this to anyone else. Except Pamela. I’ll inform her.”

“Not Oliver?”

“No,” said Bigend, “definitely not Oliver. Have you spoken with him today?”

“He had me leave my phone in the room, charging and turned on. He said that he needed to reprogram it. I haven’t gone back there yet.”

Bigend stared at the pink shotgun.

“Why is it that pink?” asked Milgrim.

“Output from a 3-D printer. I don’t know why they use pink. Seems to be the default shade. Those phones are an Oliver project. When you use one, you aren’t to consider it secure, whether for voice, text, or e-mail. But since this is England, really, you aren’t to consider any phone secure. Understood?”

“You don’t trust Oliver?”

“I don’t,” said Bigend. “What I want you to do, now, is to go about your business, as though you hadn’t noticed being photographed. Simply that.”

“What is my business?” asked Milgrim.

“Did you like Hollis Henry?”

“She seemed … familiar?”

“She was a singer. In a band. The Curfew.”

Milgrim remembered a large silvery black-and-white photograph. A poster. A younger Hollis Henry with her knee up, her foot on something. A tweed miniskirt, that seemed mostly to have unraveled, drawn taut. Where had he seen that?

“You’ll be working with her,” said Bigend. “A different project.”

“Translating?”

“I doubt it. This one is apparel-based as well.”

“Back in Vancouver,” Milgrim began, then stopped.

“Yes?”

“I found a woman’s purse. There was quite a lot of money in it. A phone. A wallet with cards. Keys. I put the purse and the wallet and the cards and the keys in a mailbox. I kept the money and the phone. You started phoning. I didn’t know you. We started talking.”

“Yes,” said Bigend.

“That’s why I’m here today, isn’t it?

“It is,” said Bigend.

“Whose phone was that?”

“Do you remember that there was something else in that purse? A black plastic unit, roughly twice the size of the phone?”

Milgrim did now. He nodded.

“That was a scrambler. It belonged to me. The person whose purse you found was an employee of mine. I wanted to know who had her phone. That was why I tried the number.”

“Why did you keep phoning back?”

“Because I became curious about you. And because you kept answering. Because we began to have a conversation that led eventually to our meeting, and, as you say, to your being here today.”

“Did it cost more to have me here today than …” Milgrim thought about it. “More than the Toyota Hilux?” He felt as though his therapist were watching him.

Bigend’s head tilted slightly. “I’m not certain, but it probably did. Why?”

“That’s my question,” said Milgrim. “Why?”

“Because I knew about the clinic in Basel. It’s highly controversial, very expensive. I was curious as to whether or not it would work, with you.”

“Why?” asked Milgrim.

“Because,” Bigend said, “I’m a curious person, and can afford to satisfy my curiosity. The doctors who examined you in Vancouver were not optimistic, to put it mildly. I like a challenge. And even in the condition I found you in, in Vancouver, you were an exceptional translator. Later”—and Bigend smiled—“it became evident that you have an interesting eye for a number of things.”

“I’d be dead now, wouldn’t I?”

“My understanding is that you probably would be, if you’d been withdrawn from the drug too quickly,” Bigend said.

“Then what do I owe you?”

Bigend reached for the shotgun, as though he were about to tap it with his finger, then caught himself. “Not your life,” he said. “That’s a by-product. Of my curiosity.”

“All that money?”

“The cost of my curiosity.”

Milgrim’s eyes stung.

“This is not a situation in which you’re required to thank me,” Bigend said. “I hope you understand that.”

Milgrim swallowed. “Yes,” he said.

“I do want you to work with Hollis on this other project,” Bigend said. “Then we’ll see.”

“See what?”

“What we see,” said Bigend, reaching across the shotgun for the gray folder. “Go back to the hotel. We’ll phone you.”

Milgrim stood, lowering the Hackett bag, which had been covering the startled-looking digital portrait of himself he wore around his neck, on its lanyard of chartreuse nylon.

“Why are you wearing that?”

“It’s required,” said Milgrim. “I don’t work here.”

“Remind me to fix that,” said Bigend, opening the gray folder, which contained a thick sheaf of what appeared to be clippings from Japanese magazines.

Milgrim, who was already closing the door behind him, said nothing.

13. MUSKRAT

They ate muskrat,” Heidi said as they walked in gritty sunlight to Selfridges, for her appointment with Hollis’s stylist, “but only on Fridays.”

“Who?”

“Belgians. Got the church to say it was okay, because muskrats live in the water. Like fish.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s in the Larousse Gastronomique,” said Heidi. “Look it up. Or just look at your boy. You can see he’s had some.”

Hollis’s iPhone rang as they were nearing Oxford Street. She looked at the screen. Blue Ant.

“Hello?”

“Hubertus.”

“You eat muskrat, Fridays?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I’m defending you from a racial slur.”

“Where are you?”

“On my way to Selfridges with a friend. She’s getting her hair cut.” Getting Heidi the last-minute appointment had required epic stylist-suckery, but Hollis was a firm believer in the therapeutic power of the right haircut. And Heidi, for her part, now seemed neither hungover nor jet-lagged.

“What are you doing while she does that?” asked Bigend.

Hollis debated telling Bigend she was getting a cut herself, but it didn’t seem worth it. “What do you have in mind?”

“The friend we had tapas with,” he said. “I want you two to talk.”

The translator, the one who liked dogs. “Why?”

“That will emerge. Talk while your friend has her hair cut. I’ll have Aldous run him over now. Where shall he meet you?”

“The food hall, I suppose,” said Hollis. “Patisserie.”

He hung up.

“Shit,” said Hollis.

“Muskrat,” said Heidi, pulling Hollis in beside her and taking on the remorseless afternoon pedestrian-flow of Oxford Street like a broad-shouldered icebreaker, homing on Selfridges. “You really are working for him.”

“I am that,” said Hollis.

“Hollis?”

She looked up. “Milgrim,” she said, remembering his name, which Bigend had been unwilling to use over the phone. He’d shaved, and looked rested. “I’m having a salad. Would you like something?”

“Do they have croissants?”

“I’m sure they do.” There was something she found deeply peculiar about his affect, even in this brief an exchange. He seemed genuinely mild, amiable, but also singularly alert, in some skewed way, as if there were something else looking out, around corners, swift and peripheral.

“I think I’ll have one,” he said, quite seriously, and she watched him walk to the nearby counter. He wore darker trousers today, the same thin cotton sportscoat.

He returned with his white tray. A croissant, a small rectangular slice of some compacted meat product in a pastry shell, and a cup of black coffee.

“You’re a Russian translator, Mr. Milgrim?” she asked as he put down the tray and took a seat.

“Just Milgrim,” he said. “I’m not Russian.”

“But a translator of Russian?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you do that for Hubertus? For Blue Ant?”

“I’m not a Blue Ant employee. I suppose I’m freelance. I’ve done some translation for Hubertus. Mostly literary.” He looked hungrily at his tray.

“Please,” she said, picking up her salad fork. “Go ahead. We can talk afterward.”

“I missed lunch,” he said. “I have to eat, with my medication.”

“Hubertus mentioned you were recovering from something.”

“Drugs,” he said. “I’m an addict. Recovering.” And the peripheral thing was right there, peering around some inner angle, taking her measure.

“Which ones?”

“Prescription tranquillizers. That sounds respectable, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose it does,” she said, “although I don’t imagine it makes it any easier.”

“It doesn’t,” he said, “but I hadn’t had a prescription for anything for quite a long time. I was a street addict.” He cut a neat slice from one end of his cold meat tart.

“I had a friend who was a heroin addict,” she said. “He died.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He began to eat.

“It was years ago.” She picked at her salad.

“What do you do for Hubertus?” he asked

“I’m freelance as well,” she said. “But I’m not sure what I do. Not yet.”

“He’s like that,” he said. Something caught his attention, across the hall. “Foliage green, those pants.”

“Whose?”

“He’s gone. Do you know coyote brown?”

“Who?”

“It was the fashionable shade in U.S. military equipment. Foliage green is newer, trending. Alpha green was up briefly, but foliage green is on top now.”

“U.S. military equipment comes in fashion shades?”

“It certainly does,” said Milgrim. “Hubertus doesn’t talk with you about that?”

“No.”

He was still trying to find the pants he’d glimpsed, in the distance. “It’s not a shade you’ll see much of this year, commercially. Next year, probably. I don’t even know the Pantone number.” He brought his attention back to his meat tart. Quickly finished it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not very good with new people. At first.”

“I wouldn’t say that. You get right down to things, it seems to me.”

“That’s what he says,” said Milgrim, blinking, and she guessed he meant Bigend. “I saw your picture,” he said. “A poster of you. I think on St. Mark’s Place. A used record store.”

“That’s a very old picture.”

Milgrim nodded, tore his croissant in half, began to butter it.

“Does he talk to you about denim?”

Milgrim looked up, mouth full of croissant, shook his head.

“Gabriel Hounds?”

Milgrim swallowed. “Who?”

“It’s a very secretive jeans line. That seems to be what I do, for Hubertus.”

“But what do you do?”

“I investigate it. I try to find out where it comes from. Who makes it. Why people like it.”

“Why do people like it?”

“Possibly because it’s almost impossible to find.”

“Is that it?” asked Milgrim, looking at her jacket.

“Yes.”

“Well made. But it’s not military.”

“Not that I know of. Why is he interested in fashion, now?”

“He isn’t. In any ordinary sense. That I know of.” And the obliquely-looking-out thing was there again, around that interior corner, and she felt its intelligence. “Do you know there’s a trade show specifically for manufacturers who hope to produce equipment for the Marine Corps?”

“I didn’t. Have you been?”

“No,” said Milgrim, “I missed it. It’s in South Carolina. I was just there. In South Carolina.”

“What is it, exactly, that you do, for Hubertus, around clothing? Are you a designer? A marketer?”

“No,” said Milgrim. “I notice things. I’m good with detail. I didn’t know that. It was something he pointed out to me, in Vancouver.”

“Did you stay with him? In that penthouse?”

Milgrim nodded.

“In the room with the maglev bed?”

“No,” Milgrim said, “I had a small room. I needed … focus.” He finished the last of his croissant, took a sip of coffee. “I was, I think the word is ‘institutionalized’? I wasn’t comfortable with too much space. Too many options. Then he sent me to Basel.”

“Switzerland?”

“To begin my recovery. If you don’t mind me asking, why are you working for him now?”

“I ask myself that,” she said. “It’s not the first time, and after the first time, I certainly didn’t want there to be a second time. But it proved weirdly lucrative, that first time, in a very roundabout way, a way that had nothing to do with what I was supposedly doing for him. Then I lost a lot of that money in the crash, hadn’t found anything else I wanted to do, and suddenly he was insisting I do this. I’m not entirely comfortable with it.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

“I can tell,” said Milgrim.

“Why are you working for him?”

“I need a job,” said Milgrim. “And because … he paid for the clinic, in Basel. My recovery.”

“He sent you to detox?”

“It was very expensive,” he said. “More than an armored truck. Cartel grade.” He straightened his knife and fork on the white plate, amid crumbs. “It’s confusing,” he said. “Now he wants me to work with you.” He looked up from the plate, both elements of his oddly fragmented self seeming for the first time to see her simultaneously. “Why don’t you sing?”

“Because I don’t sing,” she said.

“But you were famous. You must have been. There was a poster.”

“That’s not really what it’s about,” she said.

“It just seems it might be easier. For you, I mean.”

“It wouldn’t,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

14. YELLOW HELMET

In Shaftsbury Avenue, on the way back to Milgrim’s hotel, through light rain, a dispatch rider on a dirty gray motorcycle caught up with the Hilux at a pedestrian crossing. Aldous powered down the window on the passenger side, squeegeeing raindrops from the bulletproof glass, as the helmeted rider took an envelope from his jacket and passed it to Milgrim, his glove like a Kevlar-armored robot hand. The window slid back up as the bike pulled away between the lanes of traffic ahead of them, the rider’s yellow helmet dwindling steadily. The back of it was marred, as if mauled by the swipe of some great paw, revealing a white substrate.

He looked down at the envelope. MILGRIM, centered, in a cartoonist’s loose caps, pm lower right. Pamela. It felt empty, or almost so, as he opened it. A limp transparent ring-binder sleeve, containing the inkjet image of his cop from Caffè Nero. Though not in Caffè Nero, here. Behind her, nicely in focus, Gay Dolphin Gift Cove’s dog-headed angels. And there the sweatshirt had been red, though he could make out the same white moon-and-palm logo. A different colorway. Had Sleight taken this? It appeared to be a candid shot. He imagined her sleeping, back in the coach compartment of his British Midlands flight.

The cab filled with the opening chords of Toots and the Maytals’ “Draw Your Brakes.” “Aldous,” said Aldous, to his iPhone. “Certainly.” He passed it to Milgrim.

“You see,” said Bigend.

“That’s her,” said Milgrim. “When I was there?”

Remembering Bigend’s advice about telephones, he didn’t ask where the image had been found, or how. “More or less,” said Bigend, and hung up, Milgrim returning the iPhone to Aldous’s large, waiting, beautifully manicured hand.

15. THE DROP

Fitzroy,” Clammy said, on her iPhone. She was staring up at the round bottom of Number Four’s birdcage, having left a freshly coiffed Heidi in Selfridges, preparing to test for residual viability in several of fuckstick’s credit cards.

“Fitzroy?”

“This neighborhood,” Clammy said, “Melbourne. ’Round Brunswick Street. Rose Street, off Brunswick. Rose Street’s got this artists’ market. Mere took me. Meredith. Ol’ George knew her.”

That would be “Olduvai” George, the Bollards’ brilliant, virtually forehead-free keyboardist, whom Inchmale said had more brains in his little finger than the rest of them put together. An even No. 2 crop that looked like a very tight fur hat. Like one of Clammy’s black cashmere beanies, except he couldn’t take it off. Massive jaw and cheekbones, permanent glossy black stubble, huge deep-set intelligent eyes.

“First thing I saw was her Hounds, girls’ Hounds,” Clammy continued.

“Looked good?”

“Hit it in a minute.”

Meaning, she thought, that he hadn’t, but would’ve. In theory at least. “And you had Hounds in common?”

“Wanted to,” Clammy said, “worst way. I’d seen that pillock Burton in a pair. Fat ass.” The transition from “arse” not yet quite bridged. Burton, whose fat ass she thought she’d heard cited before, did something in a band Clammy detested. The intensity of loathing one professional musician could manifest for another had been one of her least favorite things about the business. She’d bypassed it, she supposed, by generally avoiding the company of professional musicians. They weren’t all like that, by any means, she knew, but better safe than sorry.

“So you admired her jeans?”

“Made it known,” Clammy said, “that I knew what they were.”

“And?”

“She asked me if I’d like a pair. Told me she knew of a drop.”

“Drop?”

“A shipment.”

“Where from?”

“Didn’t want to ask,” he said, gravely. “Wanted me Hounds. Next day, she said. Said she’d take me.”

It was growing dark outside, taking Number Four with it. The bottom of the birdcage hung above her, the shadow of a mothership, discoidal, like solidified dusk. Waiting to radiate some energy, carve her with crop circles perhaps. She became momentarily aware of a susurrus, the sea of London traffic. The fingers of her free hand on the scrimshawed walrus-ivory of the Piblokto Madness bed. “And?”

“The others, they figured we were hooking up. ’Cept George. He knew her.”

“Where from?”

“Cordwainers. London College of Fashion. She’d studied shoe design. Had two seasons of her own line. Went back to Melbourne after that, making belts and purses. Serious girl, George said.”

“He was at Cordwainers?”

“Fucking Oxford, George. Seeing another Cordwainers girl, friend of hers.”

Hollis realized that she was framing all of this, visualizing it, in a Melbourne that had almost nothing to do with any actual city. They’d played Melbourne and Sydney twice each, touring, and each time she’d been so jet-lagged, and so embroiled with band politics, that she’d scarcely registered either place. Her Melbourne was a collage, a mash-up, like a Canadianized Los Angeles, Anglo-Colonial Victorian amid a terraformed sprawl of suburbs. All of the larger trees in Los Angeles, Inchmale had told her, were Australian. She supposed the ones in Melbourne were as well. The city in which she was imagining Clammy now wasn’t real. A stand-in, something patched together from what little she had available. She felt a sudden, intense urge to go there. Not to whatever the real Melbourne might be, but to this sunny and approximate sham. “And she got them for you?” she asked Clammy.

“Came in the morning. Drove me to Brunswick Street. Eggs and bacon in a vegan lesbian café bar.”

“Vegan bacon?”

“Open-minded. We talked about Hounds. I got the idea she’d met someone here, London, when she’d been at Cordwainers, who was in on the start of Hounds.”

“It started here?”

“Didn’t say that. But someone here had known something about it, early stages.”

The bottom of the cage was perfectly dark now, the insectoid wallpaper dimly floral. “We have a deal,” she reminded him.

“We do,” he agreed, “but there may be less to it than you’re expecting, now I’ve had time to think about it.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

“So breakfast, and we talk, then we hit the market. I’d thought it would be more like the clothes end of Portobello, or Camden Lock. But it was more artists, craftsy stuff. Japanese prints, paintings, jewelry. Things the sellers had made.”

“When was this?”

“Last March. Still hot. People had been lining up, for Hounds, while we ate. Market’s not very big. Mere leads me straight to this queue, inside, I’d say twenty people, more after us. Out in a yard. I’m thinking, That’s not for us, but she says it is, we have to queue too.”

“What were the other people like, waiting?”

“Focused,” he said. “No chatting. And they all seemed to be alone. Trying to look casual, like.”

“Male? Female?”

“More male.”

“Age?”

“Mixed.”

She wondered what that meant, to Clammy.

“And they were waiting for … ?”

“There was a table, in under this old beach umbrella. We were in the sun, getting hotter. He’s sitting under there behind the table.”

“He?”

“White. Maybe thirty. American.”

She guessed Clammy might be unable to estimate age accurately, over about twenty or so. “How do you know?”

“Spoke with him, didn’t I, when I got up there.”

“What about?”

“Shrinkage,” Clammy said. “Sizing. Hounds are sized to shrink to the label size. Just under, in the waist, then that stretches a little. True sizes, no vanity sizing.”

“Anything else?”

“He’d only sell me the one pair. Had three in my size. Showed him the readies. Said he couldn’t. One to a customer. Kept things moving. ’Nother twenty, thirty people behind us.”

“What was he like?”

“Reddish hair, freckles. A white shirt I wondered about.”

“Why?”

“If it might be Hounds. Simple, like, but then not so simple. Like Hounds. He had his cash folded in one hand. No coins. Cash only.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred Australian.”

“Was he alone?”

“Two Aussie girls. Friends of Mere’s. It was actually their pitch he was using. Sell Mere’s belts, T’s they print, jewelry.”

“Names?”

“Nah. Mere’d know.”

“She’s in Melbourne?”

“Nah. Paris.”

She let the darkness of the mothership’s hull fill her field of vision. “Paris?”

“What I said.”

“Do you know how to reach her?”

“She’s at some vintage clothing fair. Two days. Starts tomorrow. Ol’ George is there with her. Inchmale’s pissed that he left while we’re in studio.”

“I need to meet her. Tomorrow or the next day. Can you arrange that?”

“Remember our agreement?”

“Absolutely. Get on it now. Call me back.”

“ ’Kay,” said Clammy, and was gone, the iPhone suddenly inert, empty.

16. HONOR BAR

She was waiting for Milgrim when he got back to his hotel. On the upholstered bench where they kept their complementary MacBook leashed, on the left side of the crossbar of the T-shaped lobby, opposite the desk.

He hadn’t seen her there as he asked the Canadian girl for his room key. “Someone’s waiting for you, Mr. Milgrim.”

“Mr. Milgrim?”

He turned. She was still seated there, just closing the MacBook, in the black sweatshirt. Flanked on the bench by her large white purse and a larger Waterstone’s bag. She stood, slinging the purse over her right shoulder and picking up the Waterstone’s bag. She must have had the card out, ready, because he saw it in her right hand as she approached him.

“Winnie Whitaker, Mr. Milgrim.” Handing him the card. Badge-like emblem in gold foil, upper left corner. WINNIE TUNG WHITAKER. He blinked. SPECIAL AGENT. Looking past that, desperately seeking escape, into the Waterstone’s shopping bag, where he saw at least two Paddington Bear fuzzy toys, with their iconic yellow hats. Then back to the card. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE. OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GENERAL. DEFENSE CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIVE SERVICE. “DCIS,” pronouncing the individual letters of the acronym, then pronouncing it again as “dee sis,” stress on the first.

“You took my picture,” Milgrim said, sadly.

“Yes, I did. I need to have a talk with you, Mr. Milgrim. Is there somewhere more private?”

“My room’s very small,” he said. Which was true, though as he said it he realized there was absolutely nothing in his room that he had to keep her from finding. “The honor bar,” he said, “just up the stairs here.”

“Thank you,” she said, and gestured with the Waterstone’s bag for him to lead the way.

“Have you been waiting long?” he asked as he started up the stairs, hearing his own voice as though it belonged to a robot.

“Over an hour, but I got to tweet my kids,” she said.

Milgrim didn’t know what that meant, and had never fully taken the measure of the honor bar, and wasn’t sure how many rooms it might actually consist of. The one they entered now was like one of those educational display corners in a Ralph Lauren flagship store, meant to suggest how some semimythical other half had lived, but cranked up, here, into something else entirely, metastasized, spookily hyper-real.

“Wow,” she said appreciatively as he looked down at the card, hoping it would have become something else entirely. “Like the Ritz-Carlton on steroids. But in miniature, sort of.” She put her bag of Paddingtons carefully down on a leather hassock.

“Can I offer you a drink?” asked Milgrim’s robotically level voice. He looked down at the horrible card again, then tucked it into the breast pocket of his jacket.

“Do they have a beer?”

“I’m sure they do.” With some difficulty he located a paneled-in refrigerator, its door covered in red mahogany. “What would you like?”

She peered into the cold matte-silver interior. “I don’t know any of those.”

“A Beck’s,” suggested his robot. “Not the one they have in America.”

“And yourself?”

“I don’t drink alcohol,” he said, passing her a bottle of Beck’s and choosing a canned soft drink at random. She opened it, using something sterling, with a thick haft of deer antler for a handle, and took a swig directly from the bottle.

“Why did you take my picture?” Milgrim asked, unexpectedly bypassing his robot voice and sounding like a completely different person, the one you automatically and immediately arrest.

“I’m obsessive,” she said.

Milgrim blinked, shuddered.

“Basically,” she said, “I collect things. In accordion files, mostly. Pieces of paper. Photographs. Sometimes I put them on the wall, in my office. I have a booking shot of you, from a narcotics arrest in New York, 1997.”

“I wasn’t charged,” Milgrim said.

“No,” she agreed, “you weren’t.” She took a sip of Beck’s. “And I have a copy of your passport photograph, which of course is much more recent. But this morning, following you, I decided I’d be talking to you this afternoon. So I wanted to get a picture of you before I did. In situ, sort of. Actually, though, I really am obsessive about pictures. I’m not sure now whether I decided I’d talk to you this afternoon, first, or whether I just decided to take your picture, which would mean I’d be talking to you this afternoon.” She smiled. “Don’t you want your drink?”

Milgrim looked down at the small can, popped the top, and poured something yellowish and carbonated into a highball glass.