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light poles and store windows. He took it into the lighted street and looked at it.
    LIGHTS ** CAMERAS ** ACTION, it said, most visibly, in bold letters. It was an ad for Smykal’s little hobby. The large words, meant to catch the eye, were followed by a short paragraph of almost random junk—small fee; equipment provided; work with ** LIVE ** MODELS ** in perfect privacy; release the hidden talent that resides in you—and a telephone number.
    Smykal was a geek, absurd and absolute, and he’d told Fred the grudging, automatic half-lie that’s always the one most likely to succeed because it carries a fragmentary ring of truth. Smykal did indeed have an order at Kinko’s—but not what he owed Clayton.
    He’d lost a good deal of time waiting for Billy’s peristalsis and the march of democracy at Kinko’s. Good. Smykal should be more responsive if he had to be awakened.
    Fred headed back for Turbridge Street, checking his watch when he reached Smykal’s building. It was 3:35 A.M ., with early random tulips in front of the three-decker sucking at the chill damp of the dark. He tossed Smykal’s posters into a rubbish barrel next to the building before he went to the entrance door again.
    *   *   *
    Fred held the door for a young man dressed in formfitting rubber, coming out into the world alone and wheeling a bicycle. He received his smile of thanks and slipped into the building. The smell in the stairwell eased gratefully into his reluctant nostrils. Immediately his nerves jumped with the wrong current bristling in the air as his feet hit the stairs, moving quickly and as silently as his bulk and the old wood allowed. The air in Smykal’s building had gone wrong.
    Amid the dust and the brown painted plaster walls, nothing was remarkable or changed in the stairway to the third floor (above which would be only the standard flat tar roof), other than the increase of stench that Fred knew was normal to it. But Smykal’s door was ajar and, where earlier hot lights had shone, dim. He stood a few moments listening outside the apartment door, letting his instincts work.
    The stench had turned worse. It was no longer Essence of Jersey City but rather Old Calcutta, with the addition of fresh blood and feces. Old Man Death was in there. Old friend. Fred knew it well.
    â€œBeautiful,” Fred said, enveloped again in the persuasive reek of mortal danger.
    He listened until the silence was convincing. Nothing lived in there, not even the man’s buzzards.
    Fred edged into the room, using his shoulder to open and then close the door behind him, checking to see that it locked so he could be alone with whatever he was going to find. The front room was dark and empty except for the clutter he had seen earlier today, even more kicked and broken now. The red toolbox was overturned, the space on the wall still waiting. Fred pushed open the door to the studio that he had earlier declined to visit. Henry Smykal lay on the floor, grinning up at a dim overhead light and staring.
    Smykal’s teeth were stained. The gash in his face where his teeth were, amid the trimmed hair around his mouth, looked like something in one of his art photos. He had bled a good deal from the crushed place on the right side of his head. Fred saw where a hammer had been tossed across the room and now lay against the wall. The simple story winked with eloquence: a man and his hammer. The hammer’s claw had got into the act also; the blow to the skull had been the last in an organized series.
    Smykal’s blue suit stank and shone, so maculate with blood that nobody was going to use it again, not even to burn him in. Aside from the body, the room was surprisingly empty after the hectic, tawdry flea-market-and-whorehouse ambience of the sitting room. Its floor was carpeted in fabric as cheaply fake as it was white: a big remnant spread across the room for Smykal to bleed into. The red stains