Gotham (8 page)

‘Look at all those pants,' he says, taking the list from Andie. ‘Not just the Alexander Wang neither. How many legs you got, LyDell? You
some kind of centipede, you need all those pants?'

It's enough. Na
ti laughs. ‘That'd be one fine pair of pants. Centipede pants. Prolly a set of pants, not a pair, all those legs. Let me see 'em, ladies. Let me see the four and I'll decide which two.'

Eloise and Andie start unpacking one bag, lifting folded items out and setting them in neat piles. They hit the cargoes near the bottom and step out from behind the counter with two pairs each in their arms.

Smokey gets another message and checks his phone as Eloise and Andie spread the cargoes out across the chaise lounge.

‘She's eight centimetres,' he says, in Na
ti's direction. ‘I got to get there.'

‘My dick is eight centimetres,' Na
ti says, but towards the splayed cargoes and without
turning. ‘How big is a centimetre?' He glances over his shoulder. ‘Be cool. We'll get there.'

I can't tell the pants apart. Two pairs might be charcoal and two black, but it might just be the way the light's working on them. As Na
ti slowly walks the line, weighing up his choices, Smokey steps past the huddle of mannequins with his phone to his ear.

His voice is soft and, from the start, he's beating a retreat. ‘I know, honey, I know…'

The van is waiting directly outside the 59th Street entrance, taking up a space and a half. It's black, with deeply tinted windows, and clearly announces itself as the conveyance of a pimp or gangster or young rapper with his head spinning too fast to settle on anything tasteful.

Smokey mentions the hospital again as the Big Brown Bags are lifted from a trolley, and Na
ti says, ‘Sure,' but means nothing like it. He's watching his Robert Palmer girls lugging the purchases and his driver standing with his hand on the van door, directing them. The driver is wearing a black collared shirt, a charcoal suit—he's picking up the colours of the Alexander Wang cargoes without knowing it—and round, cool sunglasses, though it's close to eleven. The lights of Bloomingdale's gleam on his fabulously polished shoes.

‘Which way you want to look?' Smokey says to me. ‘Front or back?'

‘Front, if that works for everyone else.' I'm not always asked about my seating preference in a vehicle like this, not that I find myself in them often. Facing backwards gives me motion sickness, but the journalist has to fit in around
the edges. Everyone else already knows where they sit.

‘It works, man.' Na
ti claps his hand on my shoulder.

There's a flash from across the street, someone taking a photo with a phone.

‘Oh, look, it's…' a man nearer the intersection calls out. His phone snaps, too, three flashes, even though the sentence trails off into nothing.

Na
ti gestures for me to board. It's a bigger, clearer sweep of the arm than it needs to be. He's the host, under the Bloomingdale's marquee. His staff, Bloomingdale's staff, me, we're all taking his direction. It's an image of himself he seems glad to compose—high-end but magnanimous, entitled as a pharaoh or a Monégasque prince, but full of largesse.

I can't tell whether he has made this moment for me or for himself, but it is already implausible that his credit card could be declined. One
Bloomingdale's security guard covers the front of the van, another takes the back. The driver reaches his arm out to beckon Na
ti. Smokey scans the streetscape, clutching his phone, as if he's guarding a Kennedy. His mouth is slightly open, streetlights sparking from his grills.

‘Paps,' Na
ti says to me, though they were just people, bewildered passers-by glimpsing star activity and not wanting to miss a New York moment.

Shoot first and ask questions later. Maybe they'll recognise him when they open the images, maybe they won't. I have my own collection of moments, stars of various wattages making entrances and exits. I have a photo of Dame Edna on her way into the Tonys, gladioli, glasses and bouffant do bobbing along above the heads of the crowd.

The van has fat leather seats, a faint smell of dope, a stronger smell of sanitiser and a compact
fridge loaded with piccolos of Krug. Na
ti passes me one right away.

‘Some people drink it with a straw,' he says. ‘They
require
a straw. Assholes.'

Smokey climbs in next to him, picking up the Little Brown Bag that's on the seat and placing it in his lap. The two big bags are next to me. The door clunks shut.