Was he still angry? he wondered. He was calmer now, he decided. He knew he wouldn’t be telling Bigend about Winnie. Not if he could help it, anyway.
It was warmer, the cloud burning away. Paris seemed slightly unreal, the way London always did when he first arrived. How peculiar, that these places had always existed back-to-back, as close together and as separate as the two sides of a coin, yet wormholed now by a fast train and twenty-some miles of tunnel.
At the Salon du Vintage, after paying five euros admission, he checked his bag, something he never liked doing. He’d stolen enough checked luggage himself to know this arrangement as easy pickings. On the other hand, he’d be more mobile without it. He smiled at the Japanese girl, pocketed his bag check, and entered.
He was more at home in the world of objects, his therapist said, than the world of people. The Salon du Vintage, he assured himself, was about objects. Wishing to become the person the Salon du Vintage would want him to be, hence somehow less visible, he climbed a handsomely renovated stairway to the second floor.
The first thing he saw there was that poster of a younger Hollis, looking at once nervy and naughty. This was not the actual poster, he judged, but an amateurish reproduction, oversized and lacking in detail. He wondered what it would be like for her, seeing that.
He had left relatively few images himself over the past decade or so, and probably Winnie had seen most of those. Had them ready, perhaps, to e-mail to someone she wanted to be able to recognize him. Most of those had been taken by the police, and he wondered whether he’d recognize them himself. He’d certainly recognize the one she’d taken in the Caffe Nero in Seven Dials, and that would be the one she’d use.
The young man in the forage cap and foliage green pants, his black jacket still zipped, emerged from a side aisle of racks, his attention captured by a darting shoal of young Japanese girls. He’d removed his mirrored wraparound sunglasses. Milgrim stepped sideways, behind a mannequin in a delirious photo-print dress, keeping his man in sight over its massively padded shoulder, and wondered what he should do. If Foley didn’t already know he was here, and saw him, he’d be recognized from Selfridges. If not, he supposed, from South Carolina. Winnie had been there, watching him, and someone, he’d assumed Sleight, had photographed her there. Should he tell her about that? He flagged it for consideration. Foley was walking away now, toward the rear of the building. Milgrim remembered the man with the mullet, in the mothballed restaurant. Foley didn’t have that, Milgrim decided, whatever that had been, and it was a very good thing. He stepped from behind the Gaultier and followed, ready to simply keep walking if he was discovered. If Foley didn’t notice him, that would be a plus, but the main thing was for Milgrim not to be thought to be following him. His hand in his jacket pocket, on his camera.
Now it was Foley’s turn to step sideways, behind a neon-clad mannequin. Milgrim turned, toward a nearby display of costume jewelry, conveniently finding Foley reflected, distantly, in the seller’s mirror.
A red-haired girl offered to help him, in French.
“No,” said Milgrim, “thank you,” seeing Foley, in the mirror, step from behind his mannequin. He turned, pressing the button that extruded the camera’s optics, raised it, and snapped two pictures of Foley’s receding back. The red-haired girl was looking at him. He smiled and walked on, pocketing the camera.
23. MEREDITH
Maybe Milgrim was the one who was hallucinating here, she thought, as she climbed the Scandinavian stairway again, a tall paper cup of quadruple-shot Americain held gingerly in either hand. The coffee was steaming hot; if Milgrim’s possibly imaginary stalker suddenly manifested, she thought, she could hurl the contents of both cups.
Whatever that had been, down in the deserted blue-lit disco, if it had been anything at all, it now seemed like some random frame-splice from someone else’s movie: Milgrim’s, Bigend’s, anyone but hers. But she’d avoid that elevator, just in case, and she were still on the lookout for vaguely Nazi caps.
Milgrim had issues, clearly. Was in fact deeply peculiar. She scarcely knew him. He might well be seeing things. He looked, pretty much constantly, as though he were seeing things.
She carefully kept the blow-up of the Corbijn portrait out of her field of vision as she reached the second floor and the Salon du Vintage. Keeping her mind off the basement as well, she wondered exactly when coffee had gone walkabout in France. When she’d first been here, drinking coffee hadn’t been a pedestrian activity. One either sat to do it, in cafes or restaurants, or stood, at bars or on railway platforms, and drank from sturdy vessels, china or glass, themselves made in France. Had Starbucks brought the takeaway cup? she wondered. She doubted it. They hadn’t really had the time. More likely McDonald’s.
Her antique denim dealer, intense and ponytailed, was busy with a customer, laying out a pair of ancient dungarees that seemed to have more holes than fabric. He looked as though he should have supplemental lenses hinged to the edges of his rimless rectangular spectacles. He didn’t see her pass.
And here, past the inflatable orange furniture, came a funeral, and Olduvai George marching jauntily along beside it, smiling.
Four Japanese men in dark suits, unsmiling, a black coffin or body bag slung between them.
They passed her, but not George. Delighted, he took one of the coffees. “Thank you very much.”
“Sugar?”
“No, thank you.” He sipped hungrily.
“Who were they?” Looking over her shoulder as the four bore their somber burden out of sight, down the stairs.
He lowered the cup, wiped his mouth with the back of his startlingly furred hand. “Mere’s buyer’s minders. The Chanel’s in that bag, all of it, packed with archival tissue. And there’s Mere,” he added, “with the buyer.”
And two more black-suited minders. The buyer, she thought at first, was a twelve-year-old boy, costumed like a child in some archaic comic strip: tight, silky-looking yellow shorts to midthigh, a red-and-green-striped long-sleeved jersey, a yellow beanie, yellow boots like oversized baby shoes. He looked sour, petulant. And then she saw the hint of five-o’clock shadow, the jowls. He was talking with a slender young woman in jeans and a white shirt.
“Designer,” George said, after another eager swallow. “Harajuku. Fabulous collection.”
“Of Chanel?”
“Everything, apparently. I’m guessing it’s gone well for Mere.”
“How can you tell?”
“He’s still alive.”
The dress forms, she saw, were bare and gray.
Now the designer turned, flanked by the two remaining suits, and walked toward them.
They watched him pass.
“Are the people who buy Chanel all like that?” she asked.
“Never sold any before. Time you met Mere.”
He led her past the orange bubble-furniture.
Meredith Overton was stroking the horizontal screen of an iPhone, pinching up virtual bits of information. Ash-blond, wide gray eyes. She looked up at them. “It’s in the bank, in Melbourne. Direct transfer.”
“Did well, I take it?” George was smiling broadly.
“Very.”
“Congratulations,” said Hollis.
“Hollis Henry,” said George.
“Meredith Overton,” taking Hollis’s hand. “Mere. Pleased to meet you.” Hollis guessed that her jeans were Hounds, slender and too long, worn rucked rather than rolled, and a man’s rumpled white oxford shirt, though it fit too well to really be a man’s.
“They didn’t want the purses,” Meredith said. “Just the couture. But I’ve backup buyers for those, dealers here at the fair.” She pocketed her phone.
Hollis, out of the corner of her eyes, saw Milgrim pass them. He carried a small camera at his side, and seemed to be looking at nothing in particular. She ignored him. “Thank you for being willing to see me,” she said to Meredith. “I suppose you know what it’s about.”