“Best if we walk from here,” Lucas said The Rolls came to a silent, silken halt and Lucas stood, buttoning his suit coat. “Ahmed attracts too much attention.” He picked up his cane, and the door made a soft chunking sound as it unlocked itself. Bobby climbed down behind him, into the unmistakable signature smell of the Sprawl, a rich amalgam of stale subway exhalations, ancient soot, and the carcinogenic tang of fresh plastics, all of it shot through with the carbon edge of illicit fossil fuels. High overhead, in the reflected glare of arc lamps, one of the unfinished Fuller domes shut out two thirds of the salmon-pink evening sky, its ragged edge like broken gray honeycomb. The Sprawl’s patchwork of domes tended to generate inadvertent microclimates; there were areas of a few city blocks where a fine drizzle of condensation fell continu- ally from the soot-stained geodesics, and sections of high dome famous for displays of static-discharge, a peculiarly urban variety of lightning. There was a stiff wind blowing, as Bobby followed Lucas down the street, a warm, gritty breeze that probably had something to do with pressure shifts in the Sprawl-long subway system. “Remember what I told you,” Lucas said, his eyes nar- rowed against the grit. “The man is far more than he seems. Even if he were nothing more than what he seems, you would owe him a degree of respect. If you want to be a cowboy, you’re about to meet a landmark in the trade.” “Yeah, right.” He skipped to avoid a graying length of printout that tried to wrap itself around his ankle. “So he’s the one you an’ Beauvoir bought the A” “Ha! No! Remember what I told you. You speak in the open street, you may as well put your words up on a bulletin- board…” Bobby grimaced, then nodded. Shit. He kept blowing it. Here he was with a major operator, up to his neck in some amazing kind of biz, and he kept acting like a wilson Oper- ator. That was the word for Lucas, a’nd for Beauvoir, too, and that voodoo talk was Just some game they ran on people, he’d decided. In the Rolls, Lucas had launched into some strange extended number about Legha, who he said was the ba of communication, “the master of roads and pathways,” all about how the man he was taking Bobby to meet was a favorite of Legba’s. When Bobby asked if the man was another oungan, Lucas said no; he said the man had walked with Legha all his life, so close that he’d never known the ba was there at all, like it was just a part of him, his shadow. And this was the man, Lucas had said, who’d sold them the software that Two-a-Day had rented to Bobby. . Lucas rounded a corner and stopped, Bobby close behind. They stood in front of a blackened brownstone whose win- dows had been sealed decades before with sheets of corru- gated steel. Part of the ground floor had once been a shop of some kind, its cracked display windows opaque with grime. The door, between the blind windows, had been reinforced with the same steel that sealed the windows of the upper floors, and Bobby thought he could make out some sort of sign behind the window to his left, discarded neon script tilted diagonally in the gloom. Lucas just stood there, facing the doorway, his face expressionless, the tip of his cane planted neatly on the sidewalk and his large hands one atop the other on the brass knob. “First thing that you learn,” he said, with the tone of a man reciting a proverb, “is that you always gotta wait . Bobby thought he heard something scrape, behind the door, and then there was a rattle like chains. “Amazing,” Lucas said, “almost as though we were expected.” The door swung ten centimeters on well-oiled hinges and seemed to catch on something. An eye regarded them, un- blinking, suspended there in that crack of dust and dark, and at first it seemed to Bobby that it must be the eye of some large animal, the iris a strange shade of brownish yellow, and the whites, mottled and shot through with red, the lower lid gaping redder still below. “Hoodoo man,” said the invisible face the eye belonged to, then, “hoodoo man and some little lump of shit. Jesus ..~” There was an awful, gurgling sound, as of antique phlegm being drawn up from hidden recesses, and then the man spat. “Well, move it, Lucas.” There was another grating sound and the door swung inward on the dark. “I’m a busy man~.~.” This last from a meter away, receding, as though the eye’s owner were scurrying from the light admitted by the open door. Lucas stepped through, Bobby on his heels, Bobby feeling the door swing smoothly shut behind him. The sudden dark- ness brought the hairs on his forearms up. It felt alive, that dark, cluttered and dense and somehow sentient. Then a match flared and some sort of pressure lamp hissed and spat as the gas in its mantle ignited. Bobby could only gape at the face beyond the lantern, where the bloodshot yellow eye waited with its mate in what Bobby would very much have liked to believe was a mask of some kind. “I don’t suppose you were expecting us, were you, Finn?” Lucas asked. “You wanna know,” the face said, revealing large flat yellow teeth, “I was on my way out to find something to eat ” He looked to Bobby as though he could survive on a diet of moldering carpet, or burrow patiently through the brown wood pulp of the damp-swollen books stacked shoulder- high on either side of the tunnel where they stood. “Who’s the little shit, Lucas?” “You know, Finn, Beauvoir and I are experiencing diffi- culties with something we acquired from you in good faith.” Lucas extended his cane and prodded delicately at a dan- gerous-looking overhang of crumbling paperbacks. “Are you, now?” The Finn pursed his gray lips in mock concern. “Don’t fuck with those first editions, Lucas. You bring `em down, you pay for `em.” Lucas withdrew the cane. Its polished ferrule flashed in the lantern glare. “So,’~ the Finn said. “You got problems Funny thing, Lucas, funny fucking thing.” His cheeks were grayish, seamed with deep diagonal creases. “I got some problems, too, three of `em. I didn’t have `em, this morning. I guess that’s just the way life is, sometimes ” He put the hissing lantern down on a gutted steel filing cabinet and fished a bent, unfiltered cigarette from a side pocket of something that might once have been a tweed jacket. “My three problems, they’re up- stairs. Maybe you wanna have a look at them He struck a wooden match on the base of the lantern and lit his ciga- rette. The pungent reek of black Cuban tobacco gathered in the air between them.