How It All Goes Down
- We enter the world of high fashion. Bourne goes to the fashion house Les Classiques, after some more planning and declarations of love and melodrama with Marie.
- Bourne identifies a woman at Les Classiques. He thinks she must be Carlos's contact. He pretends to be a high-rolling fancy buyer in order to impress her and draw her out.
- And of course he succeeds, because he is superspy fashion man.
- The woman, Jacqueline Lavier, is the head of the fashion house. She comes over and tells him about their designer, René Bergeron. She gets a bunch of dresses for Bourne at his request.
- Bourne is impressed and disturbed by his own ability to fool Lavier.
- Suddenly Bourne sees a familiar face at the fashion house's switchboard. You know: someone he knows he knows from the time he can't remember.
- Bourne gets into Lavier's office and sends her off to get him more dresses. In the meantime, he does Shmoopy—er, snoopy spy stuff, because this is a spy novel, naturally.
- René Bergeron interrupts Bourne in the office. Bergeron is all sinewy and tough-looking. Why might that be, hmmm?
- Lavier comes back with dresses. Bourne tells her gobbledygook about how he's from the Bahamas and is buying for his spoiled young wife. He also flirts with her, which Shmoop is fairly sure is supposed to be repulsive.
- Bourne tells her he'd like to set up a Les Classiques branch in the Bahamas and asks to meet her later for dinner.
- Bourne thinks about how he's going to break her and/or kill her, which seems kind of excessive, really.
- Now we hop on over to Marie, who is calling Alan, a contact in the Canadian government.
- Alan tells Marie, on orders from the government, to for pity's sake to get out of there and stop hanging around with the wanted violent assassin guy—which does seem like good advice.
- But of course Marie refuses, and then there's some internal dialogue about how much she loves Bourne. And that's pretty much what all her internal dialogue is about. It must get a little tedious up there in her head.
- There's an abrupt transition, and then we're back at Les Classiques, in the head of the switchboard guy that Bourne recognized.
- The operator thinking about his more luxurious past as a muckety-muck in Saigon, Vietnam, and looks up to see Bourne going out with Lavier.
- The operator recognizes Bourne and freaks out, rushing to Bergeron to tell him that Bourne will kill Lavier (which is actually a reasonable fear, based on what we know of Bourne's intentions).
- The switchboard operator tells Bergeron (who seems to be his boss and in the know about spyish things) that Bourne is Cain (the assassin name we already heard about from the dialogue between Carlos and his minion.)