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bonbons for their pretty daughters and sometimes—choosing at random a half-pound box of chocolate-covered bitter orange sticks, or chocolate-covered maraschino cherries—they said, “Give me one of those, as well.” And M. Loman smiled and added it to the order, knowing they didn’t intend to pay for it. They stood there, in their expensive suits that had been tailored to fit their big, greedy bodies, and they took a pound of chocolates without paying for them, because it was all M. Loman had to give, and because they could. Were they suggesting, by doing it, that they suspected M. Loman had not got here strictly legally? That, though he dutifully paid his taxes and his national insurance on behalf of Cyril Loman, they suspected Cyril Loman might be surprised to know it, having died prematurely around twenty years ago. M. Loman was a man whose shop stood, metaphorically speaking, on quicksand. He was not surprised when he felt his feet sink half an inch or so into the cold mud below him, and he knew it was best not to struggle or he would just go deeper in. But if it came to it, he would throw a rope around something or someone to pull himself out, and if they should fall in beside him, he couldn’t promise that he wouldn’t step on their shoulders to get himself out. Because wherever M. Loman came from—was it the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Was it Haiti? Was it Rwanda?—he had no intention of going back.
    The doorbell jangled, and M. Loman put the newspaper down and leaped lightly to his feet. The customer was one he recognized and was cautiously fond of. A slightly eccentric, elfin woman in a blue angora beret who stretched out both hands to him (rather awkward—a handshake was more businesslike, the two-hand grasp implied that one of them had just won a BAFTA, and that wasn’t ever going to happen).
    “Monsieur Loman,” she said, in her smoky Marianne Faithfull voice, “I have the most marvelous sponsorship opportunity for you. Are you busy now? Can we talk about it?”
    M. Loman knew what this meant. This lovely lady, who lived in material comfort in her tidy little million-pound townhouse in Highgate, was not going to stiff him for a box of handmade chocolates. No indeed. She was going to stiff him for forty boxes. And he was going to pretend to be happy about it. Business was business. Something might come of it.
    “Is it time for the conference already, Mizz Blakely?” he inquired. “How the days go by so fast.” He took her two hands in his, bowed, and kissed them. He was the perfect French gentleman. The creator of fantasies.
*
    Zena was lying in the bath in her flat in Muswell Hill in North London. Not lying in it: she was luxuriating in it. Her fingers, with their purple-painted nails, hung loosely over each side of the enamel rim at the top of the bathtub, ensuring the skin stayed wrinkle-free. Her hands and her mind were perhaps the two most important parts of Zena, because they helped her to earn her living. She needed her fingers for typing, and she protected them from potentially damaging household chores, like cleaning and cooking. She didn’t like to open so much as a can of tomatoes for fear of slicing her fingers and slowing her progress at the keyboards. Paper cuts were an unavoidable injury in her line of work, but she tried to avoid all other possible injuries to her hands, so far as she could. Her mind was to be treasured more than any physical part of her. She visualized it as a beautiful dove that nestled most of the time in a jeweled cathedral (the high domed ceiling of the cathedral was created by the bones of her skull; the jewels that decorated it were her brown tourmaline eyes and her pretty white teeth), but some days she sent the dove flying off beyond the physical limits of its existence by expanding her consciousness, then brought it home again bearing some magical gift for her in its beak. Zena was a person who was unembarrassed about thinking of herself as the