“It is the Mac Air?” the girl asked.

Milgrim had to check the branding, at the bottom of the screen. “Yes,” he said.

“It is very nice.”

“Thank you,” said Milgrim. Self-consciously, he carefully plunged the rod-and-ball atop the tea press, forcing clear fluid through a surgical grade of white nylon mesh. He poured some out, into the even more fragile-looking glass cup. Took a sip. Complexly metallic. Not much like tea. Though perhaps in a good way. “Do you have croissants?”

“Non,” said the girl, “petites madeleines.”

“Please,” said Milgrim, gesturing to his white table.

Proust cookies. It was literally all he knew of Proust, though he’d once had to listen to someone’s lengthy argument that Proust had either described madeleines incorrectly or been describing something else entirely.

It was time for his medication. While the girl fetched his madeleines, from the rear of the shop, he took the bubble-pack from his bag and popped the day’s ration of white capsules through the foil at the back of their individual bubbles. Out of long habit, he held them concealed in his palm. He’d replaced the bubble-pack by the time she returned, his three cookies on a square white plate. One plain, one lightly drizzled with something white, another with dark chocolate.

“Thank you,” he said. He dunked the plain one briefly in his tea, perhaps out of some vague, Proust-related superstition, then quickly ate them all, as is. They were very good, and the white-drizzled one was almond. Finished, he washed the capsules from Basel down with white pear tea.

Then he remembered to refresh the browser again.

“R U there?” Two minutes ago.

“Yes. Sorry.”

Refresh.

“Ur phons nt secure”

“Borrowed laptop. Lost phone.” He hesitated. “I think Sleight was tracking me with it.”

Refresh.

“U lost?”

“Got rid of it.”

Refresh.

“Why??”

He had to think about that. “S was telling follower where I was.”

Refresh.

“So??”

“Tired of it.”

Refresh.

“No jack moves OK? B cool”

“Didn’t want him to know where we’re staying.”

Refresh.

“Where R U?”

“Staying,” he completed, aloud, then wrote: “Hotel Odeon, by Odeon Metro.”

Refresh.

“Bak nxt AM?”

“As far as I know.”

Refresh.

“Whts yr partner want??”

“Jeans.”

Refresh.

“LOL! B cool B N touch bye”

“Bye,” said Milgrim, less than impressed with his new federal agent handler. It felt like having a disinterested young mother.

He logged out of Twitter and went to the bookmarks, clicking for the page he’d marked earlier. Foley modeling a zip-front jacket and an old-fashioned porn rectangle. What was that about? He skipped through the site, things starting to come together. Remembering another of the French girl’s PowerPoint presentations, back in Soho. The market’s fetishization of elite special forces, “operators.” She’d cited the Vietnam War as the tipping point for this, and had illustrated her argument with collages of small ads from the back pages of long-extinct Fifties mens’ magazines, True and Argosy: hernia aids, mail-order monkeys huddled in tea cups, courses in lawn mower repair, X-Ray Specs… These ads, she’d said, constituted a core sample of the mass unconscious of the American male, shortly after WWII. Aside from the ubiquitous trusses and truss substitutes (and what, Milgrim had wondered, had accounted for that epidemic of herniation among postwar American men?), this record differed very little from the equivalent record to be found in the back pages of comic books of the same era. While pointing out that anyone, then, could order exactly the same Italian surplus rifle that had later been used to assassinate JFK (for under fifteen dollars, including postage), she’d said that the postwar American male’s valorization of things military could be assumed to have been balanced by recent actual memories of the reality of war, though one that been quite definitively won. Vietnam had changed that, she’d said, as she’d moved into a new set of collages. Vietnam had shifted something in the American male psyche. Milgrim couldn’t remember exactly what that was supposed to have been, but he knew she’d connected it with what he assumed to be the culture that produced websites like this one.

Foley was wearing his black porn rectangle to protect his identity, the assumption on the viewer’s part intended to be that Foley himself was a member of some military elite. She’d actually mentioned that as a marketing technique.

He went back to the image of Foley. Foley wasn’t particularly scary. Milgrim knew a number of kinds of scary, from his decade on the street. The man with the mullet, in the mothballed restaurant outside of Conway, had been quite a special kind of scary. That kind of scary, which he had no name for, was difficult to conceal, and impossible to fake. He’d first seen it in New York, in a young Albanian in the heroin business. Suggestions of a military background, other things. A similar calm, the same utter lack of wasted motion. Foley, he began to suspect, studying the mouth under the black rectangle, might be the kind of scary that was about meanness, rather than strength. Though he’d also seen the two coexist, more or less, in the same individual, and that hadn’t been good at all.

He clicked back through the site. Bigend would be interested in this, though probably his team had already shown it to him. It was exactly the sort of thing they were looking at. Noticing neither a brand name nor prices. The site’s URL a string of letters and numbers. Not a site so much as a dummy, a mockup? The “About Us” page blank, also the “Order” page.

A deeper throbbing of exhaust, outside. He looked up to see a black motorcycle pass, slowly, the rider’s yellow helmet turning a smooth sweep of dark plastic visor his way, then forward again, rolling on. Revealing, for an instant, on the helmet’s back, broad, white diagonal scratches in the yellow gel-coat.

Exactly the kind of detail that Bigend would congratulate him for noticing.

29. SHIVER

Sleight,” Bigend said, as though the name tired him, “is asking about Milgrim. Is he with you?”

“No,” Hollis said, stretched on the bed, post-shower, partially wrapped in several of the hotel’s not-so-large white towels. “Isn’t he in New York? Sleight, I mean.”

“Toronto,” said Bigend. “He keeps track of Milgrim.”

“He does?” She looked at the iPhone. She had no iconic image for Bigend. Maybe a blank rectangle of Klein Blue?

“Milgrim initially required quite a lot of keeping track of. That fell to Sleight, for the most part.”

“Does he keep track of me?” She looked over at the blue figurine.

“Would you like him to?”

“No. It would be, in fact, a deal-breaker. For you and me.”

“That was my understanding, of course. Where did you buy your phone?”

“The Apple Store. SoHo. New York SoHo. Why?”

“I’d like to give you another one.”

“Why do you care where I bought this one?”

“Making certain you bought it yourself.”

“The last phone you gave me let you keep track of where I was, Hubertus.”

“I won’t do that again.”

“Not with a phone, anyway.”

“I don’t understand.”

She gave the figurine a flick with her finger. It wobbled on its round base.

“You know my concerns with integrity of communication,” he said.

“I don’t know where Milgrim is,” she said. “Is that all you wanted?”

“Sleight’s suggesting he’s left Paris. Done a runner, perhaps. Do you think that likely?”

“He’s not that easy to read. Not for me.”

“He’s changing,” Bigend said. “That’s the interesting thing, about someone in his situation. There’s always more of him arriving, coming online.”

“Maybe something’s arrived that doesn’t want Sleight knowing where it is.”