Aristide let that strike him and pass through, ignoring the ache it left behind. “I had hoped you might have a minute to chat.”

“About?” Kostos looped his scarf around his neck. “’Night, Marlene.”

She bobbed a nod, alarmed and sparrowlike, and let them leave without a word.

Before Aristide could answer Kostos’s question, the elevator operator, still parked on their floor, levered the grate open. Kostos stepped on. Aristide did likewise.

As the doors closed them in together, Kostos said, “Does this have to do with DePaul?”

The elevator operator stiffened, fist tightening on the lever.

“No,” said Aristide. Although it was a lie, and the question wasn’t what he had been expecting, he did not hesitate in answering. If it came out a little snappish, could he be blamed?

Kostos put his hands up in surrender, hat facing out like a shield. “Tits, just asking. I did a little digging, when the family started cropping up in the news again. Only reason I could think you’d be here.”

Straightening the bar of one cuff link and sinking into the velvet-upholstered depths of a Central City drawl, Aristide said, “Then your imagination must be sadly lacking.”

They bumped to a stop back in the lobby. The young woman at the lever cranked the grate open. Aristide handed her a tip and waited until she met his eyes, then gave her his best flirtatious smile. Her hostile frown broke into confusion.

Rubbing the brim of his hat thoughtfully with his thumbs, Kostos stayed for a moment in the lift. He already had a canny face—a skeptical squint ironed in by years on whatever beat he’d covered to end up here—but a shadow of suspicion threw its planes and wrinkles into sharp relief. “What’s your angle?”

“I want to talk,” said Aristide. “And I want you to listen.”

“Usually I get to ask a couple of questions somewhere in there.”

“We may get to that,” said Aristide. “Let’s see how the evening treats us.”

Kostos took him to an all-night automat down the block, dead besides a group of drunken students, two prostitutes in laddered stockings passing a bottle in a paper bag, and a rag man smoking a scanty twist. A matted dog slept underneath his table.

Aristide had seen the seedy side of Amberlough, in his day. But this was something else; no energy crackled underneath the surface of this scene. The ponies kept quiet over their cheap liquor; even their makeup looked dull. Something had gone out in the city’s soul.

The students didn’t laugh, except once, cruelly and too loud. He noticed a few of them wore armbands, or cloths tied around their foreheads: ragged edges and different colors, but all painted or embroidered with the Catwalk’s train tracks. Saeger’s sigil. Had there been a rally in the city this evening? The sound of it hadn’t carried to his hotel.