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I was always being surprised by the sight of some gaudy Ardenite stepping from behind door or tree.
    One thing I noticed was that no one wore black. Black was out, black was declasse , black had been done to death. This was the Neochrome ’Nineties, after all, the fin de siecle. The Wilderness Years were over, it was damn the smart torpedoes, and full-fusion ahead. Who wanted to wear black? Not the upper crust, not the underclasses, not even the few disaffected.
    No one, in fact, except Nadya Tajir.
     
    It all began so innocuously, with a bundle of wet grey leaves lying in the white sand. It still seems impossible now, that they could have led where they did.
    I was out for my morning run along the beach. I stayed on the wetter, more compact sand below the highwater mark, but still the mutable footing pulled at muscles in my legs that no pavement ever did. The strain felt good. I thought about my years as a detective with the LAPD: taking my exercise on city streets, breathing exhaust, going in to my job-more and more reluctantly each day-to face the paperwork, the strictures, the orders, the tension. This morning, with the salt air filling my lungs, and myself my own boss, those days seemed ineffably far away. I looked to my right, toward the mainland, just to make sure it hadn’t vanished. There was a light haze over the sea, veiling the coast, and I could almost pretend the California shore really wasn’t there. But I knew the haze would bum off later, and the mainland and all it held would return.
    It was still early—or, if you had been up all night, like many Hesperideans, just growing late enough to contemplate falling into bed—and the big island was quiet as a sleeping child. The Comiche road that ran atop the cliffs on my left was empty of scooters. Only the sporadic cries of gulls and the uneasy murmur of surf broke the silence. Soon enough, I’d be hearing the self-indulgent braying of the rich inmates of the islands, and the shrill exclamations of the daytripping tourists. I savored the silence now, while I could.
    Rounding a curve where cliff pushed the beach out toward the water, I came upon it.
    There was something in the way the sunlight caught on the cellophane that attracted my eye. Otherwise, I’m sure I would have passed right by it as unimportant flotsam. As things went, however, I was moved to stop and kneel by it.
    A soggy chunk of some kind of small-leafed shrub wrapped in heat-sealed plastic, like a vending-machine sandwich.
    I couldn’t make any sense out of this wave-delivered package. The stems did not terminate in any sort of roots, so it couldn’t be meant for planting. A botanical sample for some pharmaceutical firm? An odd souvenir? I just couldn’t figure out why anyone would bother to carefully package up such a thing. Were they coco leaves? I bit one. Nope. What then?
    The mysterious package stirred bad feelings in me. So many odd, disturbing things were always washing up on my refuge. I thought of Kid Charlemagne’s murder, a year gone by now. It hadn’t been far from here that I had found the tab of estheticine, whose lure had underpinned his death. Was this piece of stormwrack to lead to something similar?
    I had no answer. Picking up the bundle, I continued my run, gripping it by one corner and pinning it beneath my arm against my side. It leaked tepid water into my shirt, soaking the fabric like the thin colorless blood of a rare species of fish.
    Back home I changed into white trousers, a blue polo shirt, and beat-up huaraches on bare feet. The bundle sat in a little puddle on an endtable, holding my thoughts focused on it. I brought it with me to my office on the waterfront promenade, a couple of small rooms which were situated then between Ybarrondo’s hotel and Bascombe’s art gallery.
    Bert Tanager was waiting there for his morning’s orders.
    (Normally, I had two men working for me, but I had recently discharged one for unnecessarily roughing up a feisty drunk who