Rainy French countryside leapt on the carriage’s windows, hurtling, as if a switch had been thrown.

21. MINUS ONE

Foliage green,” she heard Milgrim say, flatly, as she paid the driver with euros she’d gotten from an ATM in the Gare du Nord.

She turned. “What?”

He was half out of the cab, clutching his bag. “That department store, Oxford Street,” he said. “Foliage green pants. Same man, just walked in. Where we’re going.” That sharp, nervy thing fully present now, the mildly confused semiconvalescent gone entirely. He looked as though he were sniffing the air.

“Keep the change,” she said to the driver, shooing Milgrim out of the way and pulling her roll-aboard after her. She closed the door and the cab pulled away, leaving them on the sidewalk. “Are you sure?”

“Someone’s watching us.”

“Bigend?”

“Don’t know. You go in.”

“What will you do?”

“I’ll see.”

“Are you sure?”

“Let me borrow me your computer.”

Hollis bent, unzipped the side of her bag, and pulled out her Mac. He tucked it under his arm, like a clipboard. She saw that vagueness returning, the blinking mildness. He’s cloaking himself, she thought, then wondered what that meant.

“You go in now,” he said, “please.”

“Euros,” she said, passing him some bills.

She turned and wheeled her bag across the pavement, into the crowd around the venue’s entrance. Was Milgrim imagining things? Possibly, though there was Bigend’s penchant for attracting the most unwanted forms of attention, then following whatever followers turned up. Exactly what Milgrim claimed to be about to do. She looked back, expecting to see him, but he was gone.

She paid an entrance fee of five euros to a Japanese girl and was asked to check her bag.

A cobbled courtyard was visible through arches. Young women there were smoking cigarettes, making it look at once natural and profoundly attractive.

The Salon du Vintage itself was being held within the retrofitted seventeenth-century building to which the courtyard belonged, a previous decade’s idea of sleek modernity smoothly folded into its fabric.

Every second or third person in her field of vision was Japanese, and many were moving in approximately one direction. She went with them, up a minimalist stairway of pale Scandinavian wood, emerging into the first of two very large bright rooms, chandeliers glittering above carefully arranged racks of clothing, glass-topped display tables and pieces of period furniture.

This year’s iteration of the Salon du Vintage was devoted to the Eighties, she knew from having Googled it. She always found it peculiar to encounter a time she had actually lived through rendered as a period. It made her wonder whether she was living through another one, and if so, what it would be called. The first decades of the current century hadn’t yet acquired any very solid nomenclature, it seemed to her. Seeing relatively recent period clothing, particularly, gave her an odd feeling. She guessed that she unconsciously revised the fashion of her own past, turning it into something more contemporary. It was never quite as she remembered it. Shoulders tended to be peculiar, hems and waistlines not where she expected them to be.

Not that her own Eighties had been anything like Gaultier, Mugler, Alaia and Montana, which she was now gathering was the version mainly being presented here.

She checked the handwritten price tag on a mulberry wool Mugler jacket. If Heidi were here, she decided, and were into this sort of thing, which she wasn’t, fuckstick’s remaining credit cards could probably be flatlined in an hour, with the resulting swag still fitting easily in a single cab.

She looked up, then, and winced at herself, in Anton Corbijn’s 1996 portrait, enlarged and dry-mounted, suspended with transparent fishing line above the rack of Mugler. Anachronism, she thought. Not even her era.

Eager to escape the portrait, she declined an offer to try the Mugler on. Turning away, she brought out her iPhone. Bigend seemed to pick up before his phone had had a chance to ring.

“Do you have someone else here, Hubertus?”

“No,” he said. “Should I?”

“You didn’t have someone watching us, in Selfridges?”

“No.”

“Milgrim thinks he’s seen someone, someone he saw there.”

“Always a possibility, I suppose. Paris office hasn’t been told you’re there. Would you like some company?”

“No. Just checking.”

“Do you have anything for me?”

“Not yet. Just got here. Thanks.” She hung up before he could say goodbye. Stood there with her arm cocked, phone at ear-level, suddenly aware of the iconic nature of her unconscious pose. Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones. Human figures, a block down the street, in postures utterly familiar, were no longer smoking. The woman in Corbijn’s portrait had never seen that.

The number Clammy had given her the night before rang several times before it was answered. “Yes?”

“George? It’s Hollis Henry. We met at Cabinet, when Reg was still there.”

“Yes,” he said. “Clammy rang. You’re needing to speak with Mere.”

“I’d like to, yes.”

“And you’re here?”

“Yes.”

“Afraid it’s not possible.” George sounded much more like a young barrister than the Bollards’ keyboard player.

“She doesn’t want to discuss it?”

“Not at all.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“No, really,” he said, “not at all. She’s closing a deal on the Chanel she brought from Melbourne. Tokyo dealers. Taken her out to lunch. Left me minding the shop.”

Hollis held the iPhone away as she sighed with relief, then returned it to her ear. “She wouldn’t mind talking with me, then?”

“Not at all. Loves your music. Mother’s a great fan. Where are you?”

“Second floor. Not far from the stairs.”

“Did you see they’ve a picture of you there?”

“Yes,” she said, “I noticed.”

“We’re at the very back. I’ll look out for you.”

“Thanks.” She walked on, passing a display of denim work clothing she doubted was Eighties. All of it older than its dealer, she guessed, and she judged him to be in his forties. He watched her sharply as she passed; the Hounds jacket, she thought.

She found Olduvai George beyond an archipelago of transparent inflatable orange furniture which didn’t look Eighties to her either. He was smiling, natty and attractively simian, in jeans and a khaki raincoat.

“How are you?”

“Well, thanks,” she said, shaking his hand. “How are you?”

“Haven’t had a nibble since the Tokyo mob took Mere away. I don’t think I have the retail gene.”

Oxford, Inchmale had said of George, when she’d pressed him the night before. Balliol, graduated with a starred first PPE. Which she supposed she remembered perfectly now, because she had absolutely no idea what it might mean, other than that George was assumed to be monstrously overeducated for present employment. “And please don’t tell anyone,” Inchmale had added.

“Good thing you don’t need it,” she said, considering eight very petite, identically cut Chanel suits, displayed on austere charcoal-gray dress forms, that seemed to be the whole of Meredith Overton’s stock. All cut from some thick fabric that resembled a highly magnified houndstooth check, in color combinations on the order of hot orange and mustard. She vaguely remembered oven mitts made of a similar material, similarly thick. She’d actually seen suits like this worn to very good effect once, but only once, and in Cannes. It had all depended, she’d thought at the time, on the way in which the two pieces resolutely refused to conform to the body. Now she saw that each garment had been threaded through with a slender steel cable, coated in transparent plastic. “Are they very valuable?”