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the change from her small purchases. Fearful of what awaited her if she refused to cooperate, she readily agreed to take John into Deveneau’s circle.
    Tressa’s apartment complex was run-down, the brick façade as black as a bruise from numerous fires. He had been here only once before but noticed very little had changed. From behind a chain-link fence, a grouchy Airedale barked at him as he walked by. The noise attracted several pairs of eyes, all of which peered out at him from darkened first-floor windows like the beady eyes of bats from a cave. Above him, a group of messy-looking children sat on a fire escape and watched him the way peasants might watch someone from a faraway land entering their village.
    An emergency exit door at the rear of Tressa’s building was propped open with a plastic trash receptacle. John stepped over the receptacle and passed into a dark, mildew-rich hallway. The bite of fresh urine struck him. Somewhere far off he could hear a small child crying, some television game show turned up too loud. Tressa Walker lived on the second floor. Though John had been to the building once before, he’d never entered her apartment.
    He turned up the stairwell and walked lightly. Graffiti along the stone walls offered advice, such as
phuck off and smoke it
. The top of the stairwell faced the door to Tressa’s apartment. John knocked once and heard some commotion from inside, but no one came to the door. Casually, he glanced around. The hallway was empty, with the exception of a hungry-looking cat staring at him from its perch on a windowsill.
    He knocked again. “Tressa?”
    He heard footsteps approach the door, heard a series of bolts turn, and the door cracked open. Wide-eyed Tressa Walker stared at him from the other side of a security chain. She looked distrustful. A single whip of hair curled down over her face, obscuring her left eye. As she began to recognize him, her brow creased and she looked like someone forced to concentrate on too many things at once.
    “Uh …”
    “You alone?” he asked.
    Chewing at her lower lip, she nodded, seemed to consider the situation, then undid the chain and let him inside.
    “Place is a mess,” she said.
    The apartment was small and drafty, with only one main living area and a kitchen vestibule as well as a brief corridor that communicated with what was probably a bathroom and bedroom. For the most part, there was no decor—only a conglomeration of junked and salvaged
things:
of splintered furniture and wounded armchairs with springs coiling out like snakes from a den; of crepe garden lanterns, strung together and draped from the ceiling; of mismatched ceramic vases; of dusty record albums fanned out across the carpet; of tiny pictures in wooden frames hanging from the walls, the photographs themselves so small it was impossible to make out any of the faces. Despite the more bizarre artifacts lying around the room—most noticeably, a taxidermic iguana atop an old Zenith—it was these framed pictures that commanded the most attention. It took John a moment to realize why that was: in her own way, those pictures were Tressa Walker’s attempt at humanity, at civility. Unlike the ceramic ashtrays and the crepe garden lanterns and the stuffed lizard, those framed pictures were
planned
and were
human
. He, too, had pictures on his walls at home.
    “You expecting company?” he asked.
    She shook her head and rubbed her left arm slightly before slipping into the kitchen nook, pretending to look busy. Through the single window over the sink, gray daylight cast a dull gloom across a filthy Formica countertop. A light drizzle pattered against the pane. “No.”
    “Deveneau not around?” He glanced down the hallway, tried to see into the bedroom. The door was closed.
    “He’s out. Why’d you come here?”
    There was a baby’s crib in the center of the room, half hidden beneath a swell of unwashed laundry. Like the pictures, this too provided a strangely