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gave the residents their eviction notices. What have you been keeping there?”
    “Think about it. What have I been keeping there? I told you a moment ago.”
    “Oh no. Oh no. You can’t have.”
    “And now you are telling me that this is your fault. That you have bought the building that contained my things. That you have precipitated their capture.”
    “I didn’t know! How could I know? You weren’t supposed to tell us! Hell, you weren’t supposed to keep the fucking guns—”
    “You had no rights over them. They were mine. They were sacred. They had done powerful things and were not to be tossed away like used toys the day after Christmas.”
    The hunter smiled when he said that to Machen because he had a strong feeling that he had not remembered the existence of Christmas for some weeks.
    “Well…what am I supposed to do?”
    “Fix it,” said the hunter quietly. “You must understand, Mr. Machen. If the other two men decide that you have become an impediment to their success, you must understand what I will be asked to do.”
    The hunter hung up the phone. He went to cross the road but saw a CCTV camera hung from the entrance to a bank on the far corner. So instead, he turned left, down an alley, and melted into an imaginary forest.

Ten
    VIVICY WAS housed in the top ten floors of a 1980s skyscraper that looked like a spaceship standing on its launch gantry. A spaceship that had been staging, melancholy, since that decade’s recession, waiting for someone to come along who could afford to fuel it up for its leap to the sky. It was oddly sad, seeing the city soot barnacled to the clamps and pylons affixed at the building’s edges as an architect’s smiling decorations.
    Its launch date was as long past as the days of the three-martini lunch in the financial district. Midafternoon, and the people still on the street were darting toward buildings with panic in their steps, chewing the last woody lump of a power bar or quickly stamping out a half-smoked cigarette.
     
    Tallow, back in the 1st Precinct, had smoked a cigarette for lunch as he considered the building. He’d placed the phone calls to Vivicy he’d needed to on the long drive back downtown but had decided to reinforce a few points in person.
    Inside the building, the spaceship metaphor held. A mother ship’s cathedral, with huge aluminum pipes for pillars and a burnished metal floor. Magnesium or something, Tallow thought, as he walked on it; it was sprung, or suspended on joists somehow, so that his feet lifted a little as he moved. A floor for Masters of the Universe that put a spring in their steps on the way to the elevators in the mornings. Inside, the building didn’t feel like an unfueled article on an abandoned launchpad. It felt like it was just waiting to fill up with all the world’s money before it took off for new maps.
    Recessed golden spots attempted to throw Constable-like shafts of God’s light into the hall. The near-ambient background music was clever. Waiting in line at the security station, he realized the music swelled to a little climax every couple of minutes. Some Muzak-laboratory mutation of the theme to The Big Country, where the orchestral strike was muted and the motorik beat of German Krautrock from the seventies flowed under and past it. When the metal buttresses of this church were first flown, the music had probably still sounded like the future, he thought.
    Tallow badged through the security station. The guards, bearing on their black shirts the embroidered brand of a firm called Spearpoint, nodded at Tallow in the conspiratorial and collegiate manner of those security employees who consider themselves brothers and sisters of police. Tallow nodded back, just to make life easier. He took the elevator with a man who was compulsively raking the base of his thumb with bitten fingernails. Hard enough to raise tiny red blooms from between the flecks of old scarring.
    Tallow got off at Vivicy’s first floor and,