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.”

“Bloody Clammy,” said Meredith, but not uncheerfully. “You’re after Hounds, aren’t you?”

“Not so much the product as its maker,” Hollis said, watching Meredith’s expression.

“You wouldn’t be the first.” Meredith smiled. “But there isn’t much I can tell you.”

“Would you like a coffee?” Offering Meredith her own cup. “I haven’t touched it.”

“No, thank you.”

“Hollis has been extremely helpful,” George said, “about Inchmale.”

“Horrid man,” said Meredith, to Hollis.

“He is that,” Hollis agreed. “Prides himself.”

“I’m less anxious, now,” said George, though Hollis found it difficult to imagine him anxious at all. “Hollis understands Reg’s process from experience. She puts things into perspective.”

Meredith took Hollis’s cup now, and sipped gingerly from the slot in the plastic lid. Wrinkled her nose. “Black,” she said.

“Sugar if you want it.”

“You’re really leaning on me now, aren’t you,” Meredith said to George.

“I am,” said George. “And I’ve waited until you’re in a very good mood.

“If that little shit hadn’t met my price,” Meredith said, “I wouldn’t be.”

“True,” said George, “but he did.”

“I think he wears them himself,” said Meredith. “Not that I think he’s gay. That would make it okay, actually. He insisted on all the documentation, everything we’d collected on their original owner. Something about that’s left me wanting a shower.” She took another sip of hot black coffee and handed the cup back to Hollis. “You want to know who designs the Gabriel Hounds.”

“I do,” said Hollis.

“Nice jacket.”

“A gift,” Hollis said, which was at least technically true.

“You’d have a hard time finding one now. They haven’t done them for a few seasons. Not that they have seasons in the ordinary sense.”

“No?” Studiously avoiding the matter of who “they” were.

“When they remake the jackets, if they ever do, they’ll be exactly the same, cut from exactly the same pattern. The fabric might be different, but only an otaku could tell.” She began to collect the slender security cables that had secured the Chanel suits to their dress forms, until she held them in one hand like a strange bouquet, or a steel flail.

“I don’t think I understand,” Hollis said.

“It’s about atemporality. About opting out of the industrialization of novelty. It’s about deeper code.”

Reminding Hollis of something Milgrim might have said, but she’d forgotten exactly what. She looked around, wondering if he was still in sight. He wasn’t.

“Lose something?”

“I’m here with someone. But never mind. Please.”

“I’m not sure I should help you with this. Probably I shouldn’t. And actually, I can’t.”

“You can’t?”

“Because I’m no longer in the loop. Because they’ve gotten that much harder to find, since I took Clammy to buy his jeans in Melbourne.”

“But you could tell me what you do know.” Hollis saw that George had busied himself collapsing the chrome stands of the dress forms, closing up shop.

“Were you ever a model?”

“No,” said Hollis.

“I was,” said Meredith, “for two years. I had a booker who loved using me. That’s the key, really, your booker. New York, L.A., all over western Europe, home to Australia for more work, back to New York, back here. Intensely nomadic. George says more so than being in a band. You can cope, when you’re seventeen, even when you’ve no money. Almost literally no money. I lived here, one winter, in a monthly-rent hotel room with three other girls. Hot plate, tiny fridge. Eighty euros a week ‘pocket money.’ That was what they called it. That was to live on. I couldn’t afford an Orange Card for the Metro. I walked everywhere. I was in Vogue, but I couldn’t afford to buy a copy. Fees were almost entirely eaten up before the checks found me, and the checks were always late. That’s the way it works, if you’re just another foot soldier, which is what I was. I slept on couches in New York, the floor of an apartment with no electricity in Milan. It became apparent to me that the industry was grossly, baroquely dysfunctional.”

“Modeling?”

“Fashion. The people I met who I most got on with, aside from some of the other girls, were stylists, people who finessed little bits of trim for the shoots, adjusted things, sourced antiques, props. Some of them had been to very good art schools, and it had put them off, profoundly. They didn’t want to be what they’d been groomed to be, and really it’s the nature of that system that not that many people can, ever. But they came out with brilliant skill sets for being stylists. And art school had made them masters of a kind of systems analysis. Extremely good at figuring out how an industry really runs, what the real products are. Which they did constantly, without really being that aware of doing it. And I listened to them. And all of them were pickers.”

Hollis nodded, remembering Pamela explaining the term.

“Constantly finding things. Value in rubbish. That ability to distinguish one thing from another. The eye for detail. And knowing where to sell it on, of course. I began to acquire that, watching, listening. Loved that, really. Meanwhile, I wore out runners, walking.”

“Here?”

“All over. Lot of Milan. Listening to stylists absently lecture on the fundamental dysfunction of the fashion industry. What my friends and I were going through as models was just a reflection of something bigger, broader. Everyone was waiting for their check. The whole industry wobbles along, really, like a shopping cart with a missing wheel. You can only keep it moving if you lean on it a certain way and keep pushing, but if you stop, it tips over. Season to season, show to show, you keep it moving.”