As he descended the two flights Rainey insisted were healthier than the lift, he remembered having first seen it, before it had become Flynne’s, in the lurid blue dusk of an upper parlor of what Lev archly termed his father’s house of love, a monstrosity of erotic kitsch in Kensington Gore. It had noted him, he recalled, with a benign disinterest, as though he’d attracted the attention, such as it was, of a giant semisentient orchid.