“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 M AINWARING, B LUE A NT.
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…”