I paid cash and went upstairs. The room was small and dank and, despite the NO SMOKING sign propped on the rickety side table, reeked of cigarettes and roach spray. I was so beat, I wouldn’t have cared if I’d caught a roach puffing away on a Marlboro. I dropped my bag, pulled off my cowboy boots and tossed them into a corner, lifted my head, and saw my face reflected in a mottled mirror above the nightstand.

Along with my camera, my straw-blond hair was gone—I’d hacked it off, then dyed it black. I was a person of interest in several countries, but the passports I carried—my own and one nicked from a Swedish junkie named Dagney, who bore a passing resemblance to me—showed a six-foot blonde.

At the moment, I needed to distance myself from both of those women. I couldn’t do anything about my height, but the rest could be dealt with, given enough makeup and a decent hairstylist. I combed my fingers through my ragged hair and shrugged out of my leather jacket.

For a few minutes I sat, trying to ignore the black sparks that spun across my vision, like specks on damaged film stock. They’d started after I first arrived in London a week before. I finally popped two Xanax from the stash of stolen pharmaceuticals in my bag, and collapsed into bed.

I woke to the sound of sirens and the brass-knuckled thump of bass from a car blasting grime in the street below. Ashen light filtered through the window. I clutched the coverlet around me as I sat up, still groggy from the Xanax. The digital clock beside the bed read 1:32 p.m. I had to keep moving. I took a shower, changed into a moth-eaten black cashmere sweater and black jeans, unpacked my bag, and took stock of its contents on the rumpled bed.

A dozen pill bottles stolen from the medicine cabinet of a small-time gangster in Crouch End, one of the three dead mentioned in the Metro. A couple of striped boatneck shirts. Socks and underwear, another worn cashmere sweater, some T-shirts, all black. Two passports, my own and Dagney Ahlstrand’s. A UK mobile phone that wasn’t mine. Finally, a wallet containing my New York driver’s license, a thousand euros, and the black-and-white photo I’d taken of the teenage Quinn O’Boyle back when “Walk on the Wild Side” first burned up the airwaves.

Even now, decades later, that photo made me shiver. Quinn had been the one constant in my life since we were lovers back in high school. He’d been my first muse, the boy whose face I still saw when I closed my eyes, the face I imagined when I stared through a camera’s lens. We’d lost touch after he went to prison in the late 1970s.