to something new in the world of fashion. The mother-and-daughter team named Marie and Michelle had been agog with pride when Megan photographed them and gave them each for their “personal story and image rights.”
Megan stopped to chat, noticing as she did, the girls’ pimp, a large and muscular mulatto named Sky, watching them through the plate glass window of the pizzeria on the corner. It was Sky who had actually taken the girls’ hundred dollars and signed their names to the releases that Megan carried in her bag at all times. Sky had hit on her, and Megan’s smile in response had not been one of complete dismissal. Afterward, she made it a point to stop by the pizzeria — Sky’s office — to chat him up. A graceful and attractive man of about thirty-five, with close-cropped hair and incredible light blue eyes, Megan was not going to sleep with him, although in another lifetime she might have. Her instincts however — the instincts of a woman alone whose only protection was her wits and her cunning — told her that such a man would be worth knowing, if only to have a friend in the wilds of Montmartre.
On the next block, Megan turned into an alley that led to a weed and rubble-strewn courtyard that serviced several of the six-story apartment buildings on Rue Durantin and the street behind it, including Annabella’s. In the good weather, she would sometimes find Annabella in the courtyard hanging clothes or sitting drinking tea with her gypsy women friends, some of whom were young mothers watching their children playing. Megan, beginning around the age of sixteen, was acutely aware of the envy and jealousy she aroused in other females. Their eyes were paint brushes dipped in fear and hate. Annabella’s friends — gypsies