At the moment, however, he was ready for William the Goldsmith and the Amaurian "Spirituals," who were the run-up, so to speak, to his favorite, the heresy of the Free Spirit. He was sliding his hand into his pocket, to retrieve the comfortingly worn volume, when a dark-haired girl in high brown boots and a short white jacket entered. He watched a transaction take place, the Korean giving her a receipt in exchange for two pairs of dark pants. Then, rather than leaving, she took out a phone, started carrying on a conversation in animated Spanish, crossed to the settee, and sat while talking, raking periodically and without much interest through the gossip magazines on the Korean’s plywood coffee table. President Bush in his flight suit went under almost immediately, but she didn’t manage to turn up anything Milgrim hadn’t seen before. Still, it was pleasant to share this vinyl bench with her, and to enjoy the sound of a language he didn’t understand. His seemingly innate fluency in Russian, he’d always assumed, had somehow been paid for with the loss of any ability in the Romance languages.