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floor, then suddenly up at him, her eyes bright and afraid.
    Squeaky cursed to himself. He really was losing his grip.

O ver the next two nights Squeaky went with Henry, Crow, and Bessie deeper and deeper into the squalid world of illicit pleasure. In New Bond Street they turned into an alley westward and immediately found themselves on steps down into a garishly lit cellar where both men and women were lying around, some on makeshift beds, others simply on the floor.
    Henry stopped a few paces in, his mouth pulled down at the smell.
    “Don’t stop,” Squeaky warned him. “It’s opium, an’ sweat, an’ sex. Don’t take no notice.”
    Henry started moving obediently. A little ahead of them a man in a black coat reeled on wobbly legs, laughing at nothing. To his left someone was weeping; in the red light it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman. It was hard for him to think of this as a place of pleasure, andyet these people had come here willingly, at least to begin with.
    He watched a man rocking back and forth, his face distorted as in his mind he clung to an ecstasy so brief, so illusory it slipped from him even as they watched.
    Bessie led them, occasionally faltering. Often she looked back to make certain they were all there, as if she feared suddenly finding that she was alone, and somehow betrayed. At times she clung to Squeaky, gripping his thin hand so her hard, strong little fingers dug into his flesh. He found it painful, and yet the couple of times she let go, he was hurt, as if she had stopped needing him.
    “Squeaky, you’re losing your wits,” he said to himself with disgust. “You always thought being respectable was stupid. Now you know for certain.”
    To Henry Rathbone it was a descent into a kind of hell that was not just visual. The noise of it, and the stench of body fluids and stale alcohol were almost worse. His stomach clenched at the sight of ground-in filth mixed with the harsher stench of sewage. Voices were loud, angry, then whining. Ahead of him someone laughed hysterically and without meaning.
    To Crow it was a series of sicknesses. A man shambled across the floor with the gait of the drunkard and collapsed sideways. His nose was swollen and broken-veined, the skin of his arms flaccid. Crow recoiled without meaning to, and knocked into another man who turned on him. His face was scabbed and ulcerated, yellowed with jaundice, the whites of his eyes the color of urine.
    The nightmare grew worse.
    Crow bumped into a couple who seemed to have no control of their limbs, and little awareness of where they were, their eyes vague, unfocused.
    The man, no more than thirty years old, reached to grasp a bottle, only to have it slip from his fingers and smash on the floor.
    Two old men engaged in disjointed conversation, then became lost, as if the ideas behind it escaped them into the fog.
    Crow knew the reasons. He knew that those who drank to oblivion seldom ate. Their bellies were bloated, and yet they were starving. Perhaps that was the core of it all: their dreams and their senses were frantically consuming but never fed.
    Then in all the babble and moaning someonementioned Lucien’s name. Crow spun around. An old woman with unnaturally bright hennaed hair was telling Henry very clearly that she had seen Lucien, only two days ago.
    “Pretty, ’e were, an’ gentle spoke,” she said with a toothless grin. “Twenty years ago, in me prime, I’d ’ave ’ad ’im.”
    Crow thought her prime was more like forty years ago, or even fifty, but he did not interrupt.
    “Who was he with?” Henry asked her patiently.
    “Another pretty feller,” she replied. “But got a nasty eye. Looked at yer like rats, ’e did. Ol’ Roberts ’ates rats. Breaks their necks if he catches ’em.” She held up both her hands and twisted them sharply, as if she were wringing the water out of laundry. She made a clicking sound with her tongue, to imitate the breaking of bone.
    “Were they