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“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.