Re: 'delivery'
[He carefully checks the length and breadth of both bars and finds no one, so he returns to the fragmentary lock of hair, and the perfume on it. He may know it, but he isn't sure - unforgettable it might be, but forgetting comes easier to some than to others. There is something about it that imparts both warmth and cold, real and artificial. That it evokes anything means it has to be tied to something. Even if the memory of it is a blank page, that page has color.
He turns to a higher power - an internet search. Soviet perfume is more than a hunch, since he knows where, roughly, this scent would have been on a woman's hair in his own history, and he has no doubt now that this person knows him. There would only have been so many opportunities for him to build a memory on it.
The search leads him to a pair of stores. At the first, he converses in Russian with a small, aging woman about a perfume for his grandmother. The description of the scent earns him a name, and while there is no flood of memories with it, there is a sense of rightness. Krasnaya Moskva. It's almost Chanel No. 5, which has more distinct associations in his mind, particular faces, individual moments, opulent homes, dead and live women. But Krasnaya Moskva - that's it.
The second shop is the correct one, in a neighborhood where half the people on the street are speaking casual Russian in a way that puts him on edge.
He can see the bottle behind the counter when he enters the store. He doesn't have much cash on him, but he asks to buy a bottle all the same.]