“You didn’t say that to my mother.”

“No.” Gini sighed. “And you can understand why, I think.”

“I guess so.”

Gini looked away. She could hear Mitchell’s voice. According to him, Star was charging twenty pounds for Anneke when Mitchell first met her. Some months later, when he next saw her, the price had dropped by half, so it took twice as many men to buy the same fix. Star had said he was teaching Anneke the laws of supply and demand, that this was economics, a graduate course. “Get this straight,” Mitchell had said with an air of self-righteousness. “She gave me a dose the first time, and by the second—no way. She was filthy. She had lice. She was a junkie—okay? She had those dead eyes junkies get, like all they can think about is smack, get me smack. She was a zombie… And Star thought that was pretty amusing. That’s what he gets off on. A power trip.”

None of this could be said, of course, or even intimated. Gini turned back to Fricke; they looked at each other. Perhaps something in her face communicated—afterward Gini was still unsure—but where persuasion had failed, silence was effective: Fricke suddenly began to talk.

“She met him in France,” she said. “On that school trip my mother mentioned. February last year, about two months before she ran away with him. They ran into each other in Paris—I don’t know where, in some art gallery, or a museum café maybe. But he must have been a quick worker, because those school trips are really tightly supervised, curfews, teachers crawling all over the place. He couldn’t have had more than fifteen, twenty minutes before the next patrol. That was enough. He gave her an address. Anneke was writing to him after that. She told me—she’d met this really wild guy, she’d written to him, and he was writing back.”

“She was writing to France?”

“I don’t know. Anneke said he moved around a lot. She got secretive after she met him. She’d just throw out these little hints. She never told me what they were planning, that she was going to run off with him. I would have done something then if I’d known. I’m not a fool. I would have gone to my father—”

She hesitated once more, eyeing Gini. Then, as if she had come to a sudden decision, she reached down into her shoulder bag and drew out a book.

“Here.” She slid it across the table. “It’s Anneke’s address book. The first time she called me—that’s why she called. Because she was worried about this book.”

Gini stared at the girl, who had blushed crimson. Carefully, she opened the book; it was a small loose-leaf binder crammed with names, numbers, and addresses.

“Where was this, Fricke?”

“In this special hiding place she had. Under a loose floorboard in her closet. She kept her diary there. Her supply of birth control pills. Grass sometimes. She’d taken Star’s letters and the diary, but she’d forgotten this. You were going to ask, weren’t you? It was going to be your next question, I could tell.”