“And that was that. In no time flat, your granny’s picture was appearing in every glossy magazine in the United Kingdom. And perfume-makers were saying, I want her to be a spokesman for my perfume, and movie directors were saying, Can she act, I think she’d be just brilliant in the next James Bond, and music producers were saying, Can she dance, I think she might do a number with the Rolling Stones …”

“Cool.”

“That’s not what her parents thought.”

“What did they think?”

“Well, they were upper-class snobs who thought it was a disgrace to have their daughter’s picture in the papers, especially in miniskirts up to her crotch.”

“So what did they do?”

“What could they do? It was a bit too late, because by that time she’d left home, and was living with the photographer, who was teaching her how to eat with chopsticks and not cough when you smoke a joint, and fashion magazines were flying them all around the world so he could photograph her on the Pyramids or on beaches in Tahiti.”

Rat chuckled. “Did she marry the photographer?”

“No, she never married the photographer. She married Gillem’s daddy—your grandfather—who was this megarich Canadian, and later on she married this gay filmmaker, but she never married the photographer. They stayed good friends, though.”

“Did she ever meet me?”

“You? No. Your own daddy never met you.”

“Do you think she’d like me if she met me?”

Vanessa flicks the briefest of glances sideways at Rat. “Not if you had chocolate smeared all over your face.”

“No, seriously.”

“Seriously? Sure. You’re gorgeous. You’re a gorgeous girl. One gorgeous girl likes another. Besides, you’ve got her long, long legs. Those Kidd legs.”

“I do?”

“Well, you don’t get ’em from your half-pint mama, that’s for sure.”

Chapter 3

They are rattling along the coastal road, on their way to the flea market at Brix.

It’s not yet dawn, with a crescent moon and a couple of silver-bright stars in the sky. You have to get to the market early—five thirty, six—to make sure you get a good place.

The Tramontane is hurtling their van from side to side. It feels like a hurricane. The Pyrénées-Orientales is the Command Center of winds. Here they all congregate, quarrel, barter, and rule. There are said to be 119 different winds in the Pyrénées-Orientales. (If you could sell wind we’d be rich, people used to say in the days before the foothills got sown with rows of gigantic new wind turbines, without bringing a marked improvement to anybody’s fortunes.)