“That reminds me,” said Milgrim.

“Of what?”

“I’m starving.”

“Sandwiches,” said Bigend, indicating a brown paper bag on the desk. “Chicken and bacon. Seedy bread. I’ll be in touch tomorrow, when the travel’s been arranged. You’ll be locked in here. The alarm system will be activated. Please don’t try to leave. Jun will be in at ten thirty or so. Good night.”

When Bigend had gone, Milgrim ate the two sandwiches, carefully wiped his fingers, then removed his new shoes, examined the Tanky amp; Tojo logo stamped into the orange leather insoles, smelled them, and put them on the white desk. The gray vinyl floor was cold through his socks. The door to the front of the shop, which Bigend had closed behind him, looked cheap, hollow-core. He’d once watched a dealer called Fish chisel the thin wooden skin from one side of a door like that. It had been filled with plastic bags of counterfeit Mexican Valium. Now he pressed his ear against this one, held his breath. Nothing.

Was the urine-sample man still sitting out there with his umbrella? He doubted it, but he wanted to be sure. He found the light switch, pressed it. Stood for a moment in darkness, then opened the door.

The shop was lit, but dimly, by wonky columnar lanterns of white paper, floor lamps. The display window, from here, looked like one of those big Cibachromes in an art gallery: photograph of a blank brick wall across the street, faint ghost of graffiti. Suddenly someone passed, in a black hoodie. Milgrim swallowed. Closed the door. Turned the lights back on.

He went to the rear, no longer bothering to be quiet, opened a similar but smaller door, finding a clean little room with a very new toilet and corner sink. No other doors. No rear entrance. The neighborhood, like much of London, he guessed, not having alleys in the American sense.

He found a virginal white slab of foam, five inches thick, double-wide, rolled into a thick upright cylinder. It was secured with three bands of transparent packing tape, the Blue Ant logo repeated along them at regular intervals. Beside it was a fat, surprisingly small sausage of what appeared to be a darkly iridescent silk, and a plastic liter bottle of still spring water, from Scotland.

The desk’s top drawer contained its Ikea assembly instructions and a pair of scissors with colorless transparent handles. The other two drawers were empty. He used the scissors to cut the tape, releasing the foam, which remained slightly bent, in the direction in which it had been rolled. He put the concave side down, on the cold vinyl, and picked up the silken sausage. mont-bell was embroidered on one side. He fumbled with the plastic lock on the draw cord, loosened it, and worked the densely compacted contents out. The sleeping bag, when he unfurled it, was very light, very thin, stretchy, and of that same iridescence, purplish-black. He unzipped it and spread it on the bed. He picked up the bottle of water and carried it to the desk, where he retrieved his bag from the floor, putting it beside the bottle. Taking Bigend’s chair, he sat down, opened the bag, and pulled out his crumpled cotton jacket. He looked down at the tweed lapels of his new one, surprised to see them. The shirt cuffs were too strange, but then, you couldn’t see them under a jacket. Laying his old jacket aside, he brought out the Mac Air, its power cord and U.K. adaptor plug, and Hollis’s red dongle.

British electricity was some brutal other breed, their plugs three-pronged, massive, wall sockets often equipped with their own little switches, a particularly ominous belt-and-suspenders touch. “Faggot above a load,” he said, plugging the power unit into the socket nearest the desk and flipping the socket switch.

He Googled “Tanky amp; Tojo,” shortly discovering that Jun, Junya Marukawa, had his own shop in Tokyo, that Tanky amp; Tojo were getting lots of web coverage, and that a SoHo branch would be opening next year on Lafayette. There was no mention of Hubertus Bigend at all. Jun’s style, evidently, was one Japanese take on something at least one writer called “transgressive trad.”

Then he went to Twitter, logged in, saw that there was nothing new from Winnie, and started composing his message to her in his head while he got rid of the three strange girls with numbers instead of surnames, the ones who wanted to follow him.

53. CRICKET

The phone’s cricket-noise woke her, though instantly she was uncertain whether she’d actually been asleep. She’d lain curled all night beside him, for the most part awake, out of some need to process the fact that he was there. He’d smelled of hospitals. Something he’d used to dress the wounds. He hadn’t let her see that, describing his injured leg as “a work in progress.”

He’d sat in the armchair to change the dressings, on a black garbage bag taken from the backpack slung behind the scooter-chair, undoing the safety pins down one inside leg of his trousers. She’d had to wait in the bathroom, leaning against the towel-warming pipes that caged the shower, listening to him whistling, deliberately tunelessly, to tease her. “There,” he’d called, finally. “I’m decent now.”

She’d emerged to find him safety-pinning the hem of his trouser leg. The black bag he’d spread across the chair was on the carpet now, something knotted into one of its corners. “Does it hurt, to do that?” she’d asked

“Not really,” he’d said. “The rest of it, the reconstruction, physiotherapy, that’s less fun. Do you know I’ve a rattan thighbone?” He grinned at her, evilly, sitting more upright.

“What’s that?”

“Rattan. The stuff they weave baskets and furniture out of. They’ve found a way to turn it into a perfect analog of human bone.”

“You’re making that up.”

“They’re just starting to test it on humans. On me, in fact. Works a charm, on sheep.”

“They can’t. Turn that into bone.”

“They put it in ovens. With calcium, other things. Under pressure. For a long time. Turns to bone, near enough.”

“No way.”

“If I’d thought of it, I’d have had them make you a basket. Brilliant thing about it, you can build exactly the bone you need, out of rattan. Work it as rattan. Then ossify it. Perfect replacement. Actually a bit stronger than the original. Microscopic structure allows the blood vessels to grow through it.”

“Don’t mess with me.”

“Tell me more about what this Milgrim said, to Mr. Big End,” he’d said. He always pronounced it that way, as though it were two words.

She found the receiver, feeling more absurdly massive in the dark than ever, lifted it. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” said Bigend. “Be in the sitting room.”

“What time is it?”

“Eight-fifteen.”

“I’m asleep. Was.”

“I need to see you.”

“Where’s Milgrim? And Heidi-”

“We’ll be discussing him shortly. Heidi’s no part of it.” He hung up.

She squinted at the glow around the edges of the curtains. Returned the receiver as quietly as she could to its cradle. Garreth’s breathing continued, unchanged.

She sat up, carefully. Made out the dark horizontals of his legs. He’d insisted on sleeping in his trousers and stocking feet. On his bare chest, she now knew, were new scars, healed but still livid, next to older ones she could have sketched from memory. She stood, padded into the bathroom, closed the door behind her, and turned on the light.