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between the sun and the crowd and the residual wonky affect of soul-delay, she feels suddenly dizzy.
    “No good now, for finding,” Voytek says, clutching his pouch protecttively under his arm. He downs the last of his coffee. “I must be going. Have work.”
    “What do you do?” she asks, mainly to cover her dizziness.
    But he only nods toward the pouch. “I must evaluate condition. Have pleasure in meeting you.” He takes something from one of the top front pockets of his jean jacket and hands it to her. It is a scrap of white cardboard with a rubber-stamped e-mail address.
    Cayce never has cards, and has always been reluctant to give out particulars. “I don’t have a card,” she says, but on impulse tells him her current hotmail address, sure he’ll forget it. He smiles, goofy and somehow winningly open under his ruler-straight Slavic cheekbones, and turns away into the crowd.
    Cayce burns her tongue on her still-scalding coffee. Gets rid of it in an already overflowing bin.
    She decides to walk back to that Starbucks near the Notting Hill tube, have a latte made with mirror-world milk, and take the train to Camden.
    She’s starting to feel like she’s really here.
    “He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots,” by way this time of an expression of gratitude, and starts back toward Notting Hill station.

5.

WHAT THEY DESERVE
    She finds the Children’s Crusade just as she remembers it.
    Damien’s expression for what descends on Camden Town on a Saturday, this shuffling lemming-jam of young people, clogging the High Street from below the station up to Camden Lock.
    As she comes up out of the rattling, sighing depths of the station, ascending vertiginous escalators with step grids cut from some pale and grimy heartwood that must be virtually indestructible, the pack starts to thicken and make itself known.
    On the sidewalk outside, she is abruptly in it, the crowd stretching away up the High Street like some Victorian engraving of a public hanging or race day.
    The facades of the modest retail buildings on either side are encrusted with distorted, oversized representations of vintage airplanes, cowboy boots, a vast six-eyelet Dr. Martens. These all have a slightly queasy handmade quality, as though they’ve been modeled from carloads of Fimo by the children of giants.
    Cayce has spent hours here, escorting the creative executives of the world’s leading athletic-shoe companies through the ambulatory forest of the feet that have made their fortunes, and hours more alone, looking for little jolts of pure street fashion to e-mail home.
    Nothing at all like the crowd in Portobello; this one is differently driven, flavored with pheromones and the smoke of clove cigarettes and hashish.
    Striking a course for the convenient landmark of the Virgin Mega-store, she wonders whether she shouldn’t go with the flow and try to putherself on another sort of professional footing today. There is cool to be hunted, here, and she still has clients in New York willing to pay for a Cayce Pollard report on what the early adaptors in this crush are doing, wearing, or listening to. She decides against it. She’s technically under contract to Blue Ant, and anyway she’s feeling less than motivated. Damien’s flat feels like a better idea, and she can reach it, with a minimum of jostling, via the fruit and vegetable stalls in Inverness Street, where she can lay in additional supplies.
    This she does, finding fresher produce than the local supermarket offers, and walking home with a transparent pink bag of oranges from either Spain or Morocco.
    Damien’s flat has no security system, and she’s glad of that, as setting off someone’s alarm, be it silent or otherwise, is something she’s done in the past and has no desire to do again. Damien’s keys are as big and solid and nearly as nicely finished as the chunky pound coins: one for the street door, two for the door into the flat.
    When she reenters the