“Not for me. No.”

“Come on, Lindy. You’re not convincing yourself. You’re not convincing me. I can see this little ray of hope way back there in the eyes.”

“The hell you can. With those damn glasses, I doubt you can see me at all. I’ll test you. Who came in about two minutes ago?”

“Quest did,” Markov replied, despite the fact that he had not turned his head once during the conversation. “And the magnificent one is now at her usual table, table five, right behind me in the corner. She’s just got her usual waiter to bring her usual carafe of vin ordinaire, and she’s just lit the first of the many Gauloises she will smoke throughout her meal. Excuse me, Liebling. I have work to do…”

Lindsay watched as Markov rose and crossed to the table Quest occupied, in the darkest corner of this dark bistro. Lindsay did not expect Quest to acknowledge her own presence, although they knew each other. She was correct. As Markov rose, Quest turned her beautiful blind stare in their direction, then looked away. As Markov, uninvited, sat down opposite her, and—being Markov—at once drank some of her wine, and lit one of her cigarettes for himself, Quest yawned. In her guttural voice, and in an affectionate tone, she said, “Markov, piss off.”

Markov looked delighted at this reception. He leaned closer and began to talk; Quest responded, inaudibly to Lindsay. Lindsay watched her with fascination. Her real name was Russian, and unpronounceable. She had been born in Smolensk, the daughter of a steelworker and a factory hand. She had come to the West four years before; she was over six feet tall, thin, and big-boned for a model. She was Garboesque in that her build was mannish, with wide shoulders, long legs, narrow hips, and large hands and feet. She had the most haunting face Lindsay had ever seen, with gaunt high cheekbones, strong vivid brows, and huge angry eyes of a brown so dark it caused lighting difficulties in the studio, for her eyes photographed too black, too deep. It was for this reason that despite her discovery by Lazare, and despite the use Cazarès made of her as their star runway model, magazines had been slow to use her.

It was Markov who had seen her possibilities. Quest obeyed none of the rules—which had interested Markov from the first. She was solitary, gruff, profoundly indifferent to money, fame, and—it was rumored—either sex. She was without the plasticity usual in most successful models; she never attempted to act or to adapt. She simply turned up, on time, allowed herself to be dressed, coiffed, made up with an air of sublime indifference, then she stood towering in front of the camera and glowered at the lens. She had one expression only, of distrustful and magnificent contempt. Markov adored her. He said, in his more extravagant moments, that she was half man, half woman, a female for the twenty-first century. “When she’s milked the decadent West of enough money,” he’d said with delight, “she’ll go back to Smolensk. She wants a farm. She wants to keep sheep and cows. Seriously. She’s astonishing. She knows exactly who she is, what she wants, and how to get it. I love her. I learn from her. I worship at her shrine.”