Hollis was holding her coffee with both hands, leaning forward in her chair, across the low table.

“Which I now know I can’t tell you,” Meredith said. “And if you go there, the couple aren’t there, and neither is she.”

“She liked your shoes.”

“She really got them. I’m not sure anyone else ever did, to the same extent. She got what I was trying to get away from. The seasons, the bullshit, the stuff that wore out, fell apart, wasn’t real. I’d been that girl, walking across Paris, to the next shoot, no money for a Metro card, and I’d imagined those shoes. And when you imagine something like that, you imagine a world. You imagine the world those shoes come from, and you wonder if they could happen here, in this world, the one with all the bullshit. And sometimes they can. For a season or two.”

Hollis put her cup down. “I want you to know,” she said, “that it’s okay not to tell me any more. I’ll understand.”

Meredith shook her head. “We wound up having dinner, drinking sake, in this little place down the street. All the sake cups were different, used, old, like someone had chosen them from a charity shop. That was after she’d helped me choose my canvas. That was the Hounds designer. She doesn’t need anyone like your Mr. Bigend.”

“He’s not my Mr. Bigend.”

“Of all the people in the world, she doesn’t need that.”

“Okay.”

“And that’s why I can’t trade her name for my shoes. As much as I want my shoes.”

“If I tell him you won’t tell me, he’ll try to find those shoes himself. And when he has them, he’ll send someone else, to negotiate. Or come himself.”

“I’ve thought of that. It’s my own fault, really. For having considered betraying a friend.” She looked at Hollis. “I haven’t seen her since. Or been in touch, really. Just those e-mails announcing drops. I sent her a pair of the shoes she helped choose the canvas for. To the place in Ichinomiya. So I just can’t do it.”

“I wouldn’t either,” Hollis said. “Look, this is just a job for me, one I wish I didn’t have. Not even a job. Just Bigend bribing me to do something for him. The best thing, for you, would be for me not to tell him we’ve had this conversation. You’ve stopped returning my calls. Have George tell Reg to tell Bigend to leave you alone.”

“Would that work?”

“It might,” said Hollis. “Bigend values Reg’s take on certain things. Reg advises him on music. I think Reg actually likes him. If he thinks Bigend’s unsettling you, which in turn unsettles George, jeopardizing the next Bollards album, he’ll do everything he can to get Bigend to back off. But that’s not only my best plan, it’s my only one.”

“What will you do?”

“I’ll tell him I’ve been unable to contact you.”

“That’s not what I mean,” said Meredith. “Will you still be looking for her?”

“That’s a good question,” said Hollis.

Milgrim stood at the window of his room, watching someone on the canal path being given what Aldous would call the verbals. Which was to say harsh criticism, pointed verbal violence, probably with added threat of the physical. The recipient, whom Milgrim instinctively identified with, was an insubstantial figure in a pale grubby thigh-length raincoat, his verbalizer a slablike individual in a bright green exercise suit, one of those silky two-piece outfits sometimes still worn here, Milgrim guessed, out of nostalgia for an extinct American style of triumphal ghetto criminality. The verbals, Milgrim now saw, were being punctuated with fisted thumb-jabs to the smaller man’s ribs and sternum. Milgrim forced himself to turn away, absently rubbing a hand across his own ribs.

He’d walked with Winnie down the street called Parkway (wasn’t that in Monopoly?) to the High Street and the station, quizzed by her along the way on Michael Preston Gracie, and then she’d said goodbye, handshake firm, and ridden off down a very long escalator.

He’d continued back along the High Street, looking still more like a fair midway in some state in which youth-market footwear and alcohol were the main products, through buzzing young throngs outside several pubs, and home to the Holiday Inn.

He didn’t want to call Bigend, but Winnie had specifically ordered him to do that, and he’d said he would. He opened the envelope the driver had given him earlier, looked at the variously sized white capsules in their foil-backed transparent bubbles, the tiny, maniacally precise hand-labeling in purple Rapidograph ink, an hour and date and day of the week for each bubble. He had no more idea who had prepared this than he had of what the capsules contained. He felt as though he were between two worlds, vast and grinding spheres of influence, Bigend’s and Winnie’s, a wobbly little moon, trying to do as he’d been told by both. Trying, he supposed, to avoid the verbals.

He should call Bigend now. But no longer had the Neo, he remembered, and that meant he no longer had a number for him. He could look up Blue Ant and try to go through the switchboard, but under current circumstances that didn’t seem a good idea. A reprieve, of sorts. He went into the bathroom instead, and prepared to clean his teeth, the full four-stage operation, noting that he was still without the special mouthwash. He’d just inserted a fresh conical brush tip between his rearmost upper right molars when the room’s phone rang. Unwilling to remove the brush, he left the bathroom with it still in place, and answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Why do you sound that way?” asked Bigend.

“Sorry,” Milgrim said, extracting the brush, “something in my mouth.”

“Go down to the lobby. Aldous will be there shortly. You’ll pick up Hollis on your way to me. We need to talk.”

“Good,” said Milgrim, before Bigend could hang up, but then began to worry about whether he could deliver Winnie’s message about Gracie in front of Hollis.

He went back into the bathroom, to finish cleaning his teeth.

Heidi, legs strong and white in black cyclist’s shorts, shoulders square in her more complexly black majorette jacket, once again crouched gargoyle-fashion on the edge of the Piblokto Madness bed, black-nailed toes prehensile. Two pale silvery darts were tucked like bullets in a bandolier, into the thick cording of the jacket’s frogged front, their blood-red, paper-thin plastic flights pointing toward Number Four’s ceiling.

She rolled a third between thumb and forefinger, as if she might decide to smoke it. “Tungsten,” she said, “and rhenium. Alloyed, they’re superheavy.” She sighted along the dart’s black tip, almost invisible in this light. The heavy, multilayered drapes were drawn against the night, and only the tiny, focused, supernally brilliant Swiss bulbs, in the birdcage library, lit the room and its artifacts. “Place Ajay knows. Cost a hundred pounds apiece. You want to make supersonic shrapnel, you make it with this stuff.”

“Why would you?” asked Hollis, barefoot as well, from the striped armchair nearest the foot of the bed.

“Penetration,” said Heidi, flicking the dart past Hollis and into the eye, ten feet away, of a glossy black Congolese fetish.

“Don’t,” said Hollis. “I wouldn’t want to have to pay for that. I think it’s ebony.”

“Dense,” said Heidi, “but no match for wolfram. Old name for tungsten. Should’ve been a metal band: Wolfram. They wind the strings of some instruments with it. Need the density. Jimmy told me.”

The name of their dead friend and bandmate hung momentarily in the air.

“I don’t think this job with Bigend is working out,” Hollis said.

“No?” Heidi drew a second dart, which she held up like a fairy sword, between her eye and the birdcage lights, admiring the point.

“Don’t throw that,” Hollis warned. “I’m supposed to find someone for him. The woman who designed this jacket. Though he may not know she’s a woman.”