“Yes,” said Aristide, and though he was drunk, anger made his diction sharp as broken glass and dragged the sibilance across it into tatters. “Twice.”

“Why, Aristide? You are so canny about everything else. Why does he make you act so mad?”

Aristide swallowed another fit of laughter, wary of aching lungs. “Maybe I just like a challenge. And Didi, you are anything but.”

Aristide only caught Kostos by the grace of a loose-lipped receptionist at FWAC. She told him when news was likely to drop after dinner, Kostos drank his at Sarah’s on Adler Street, just south of Ionidous Avenue.

The place had been something else before—Aristide tried to remember and it eluded him. Something he hadn’t had much interest in. Bad restaurant, perhaps, or a soda fountain. Something inoffensive where he had no important business. Now it had become a smoky bar with a low tin ceiling, kept too warm by ugly radiators. The place teemed with men and women not unlike Kostos: fast talkers and hard drinkers with cynical expressions and wrinkled shirts.

The man himself stood at the bar over a greasy piece of newspaper covered in the remains of something fried. The smell of vinegar was thick as Aristide approached, mingling with sweat and cigarette smoke.

“You stand out a little bit,” said Kostos, taking in Aristide’s fur collar and the razor crease at the front of his flannel trousers.

Aristide likewise cased Kostos’s rumpled jacket and loosened tie. The top button of his shirt was open, revealing stubble and the loose skin of his throat. “I should hope so.”

“I can guess what you’re here about.” He swiped a chip through mayonnaise, leaving streaks across yesterday’s news. Aristide saw Saeger’s name, read … rallied today, optimistic despite Frye’s gains … between oil spots and egg white. There was a picture of a young man lifted on the shoulders of a crowd, holding a ragged flag marked with Catwalk train tracks.

“My editor don’t go in for hearsay,” Kostos went on. “And that’s what I got now. Not a story.”

“You’ve still got the affair.”

But Kostos was shaking his head. “Nah. The peach resigned this evening. You ain’t heard? Frye works fast. Can’t say I don’t admire her get-it-doneness.”

Aristide’s extremities went cold. “Double martini, please,” he told the bartender.

“I don’t trust the gin at Sarah’s,” Kostos said. “Stones, nor the whiskey neither. But whatever they cut it with, at least it don’t repeat on me.”

Indeed, it seared like paint thinner. But it put his problems at a bearable distance and slowed the beating of his heart.