“Saeger was Catwalk,” said Aristide. “The Catwalk threw in with Tatié. I need to cross that border and she can help me.”

“Why—? Aristide, please.” He tried to pull away. “Pulan could—”

“She can’t. You can ring some other folk for me to make travel arrangements—from the office; make it sound like a business trip, maybe. I’ll write you out some notes for what I need.” The cruelty of it caught up with him a little late, and by then he was barreling on. “The Tatien border, though, I have to handle soonest, and I can’t be cabling back and forth with Porachis. That’s bound to put a hound or two on the scent we don’t want sniffing.”

“Sniffing what? That hurts!”

Aristide let go, hand aching, and the momentum of Daoud’s struggle pitched the younger man back.

“I’m getting out of Gedda one more time,” he said. “And I won’t leave him behind.”

Daoud, held up on one elbow and spread across the bed, blinked once before comprehension made him crumple, then stand up.

“I will call,” he said. “But only so you get some sleep.”

“Lyle’s,” Daoud told him. “That’s what the majordomo said. He wouldn’t wake her, but he said there isn’t an exchange in her datebook. She has met Saeger once, at a barroom called Lyle’s just off Temple Street. That is all I can give you.”

With that information in his possession, Aristide did not go back to bed.

He arrived at the place just past closing, scared a few regulars off their barstools, and mustered all of his old self that he could. Not the man Malcolm Sailer had hired to make bawdy jokes. Rather, the man who’d haggled Zelda Peronides to the bone, brought honest hounds around to graft, and scared scullers’ guts clean if they even dreamed of cheating him.

He brought it to bear on the bartender, who eventually yielded to the manager, who fell under the onslaught and gave up an address.

By the time his cab pulled up out front of Saeger’s building, dawn was seeping into the eastern sky. He tipped lavishly, half wondering if he’d be able to do so in the future. He’d given a lot of money to Frye’s campaign for nothing, and didn’t look likely to earn much more in the near future. What he was planning now was bound to be expensive, too.

A couple of bruisers, wearing Catwalk armbands and union pins, stood at either side of the stairs to Saeger’s second precinct tenement. The building was unremarkable, slotted between two more just like it on a street of dry cleaners, bookmakers, and a green grocer’s store. She hadn’t let fame go to her head, apparently. Or perhaps it just hadn’t reached her wallet.