Stiffly, I said, “If you work for the City, I just live here.”

He smiled the impenetrable grin. “Hell, no. I just got here. Not long ago, anyway. It’s not a good thing to work for the City?”

“Depends on the work.” I stood up. “From the samples you’re giving out, I’d say you’re a traveling fertilizer salesman.”

“And you’re not buying.”

“You want something to grow around here, try sprinkling some truth on it.” I looked at him expectantly.

“Ooo-kay.” The truth, to judge from his face, gave him less pleasure. “They thought you might be me.”

I waited for something more; when it didn’t come, I said, “Gosh, we do look so much alike.”

“They don’t know what I look like. They’re hunting on the basis of something else.”

“What?”

“Just something else. Last night I — in the bar, you did things they thought were a giveaway. So they bagged you.”

In front of the brownstone that edged the sidewalk was a ruined wrought-iron fence. I caught and held it to keep me still. Last night. My whole downtime seemed to have been in the spotlight last night, illuminated for everyone but me. “You mean they expected you to order drinks you couldn’t pay for and get kicked out of a club?”

He seemed to find that quietly funny. “Nooo. That was when you began to act like somebody else to throw ’em off the scent. Too late, though.”

Now I had motives, too, out of my control, beyond my comprehension. I wished that the curb was twenty feet high, so I could throw myself off it. And drag Mick Skinner with me. “What else do you know about last night?”

A swift look up into my face. It wasn’t startled or guilty or meaningful at all; it was just a look. “Nothing,” he said.

“And how do you know it?”

“I was there.”

“The hell you say. In what capacity?”

“An observer of the human condition.”

I figured out, then, what his eyes reminded me of. I’d once seen a pet wolf, tame as any dog, loyal and trusty and true. But around the eyes was an incipient feral craziness, a sense that this animal didn’t figure the odds like a real dog did. Skinner’s eyes made his most earnest expression seem ironic.

I pushed off from the railing. “Sure. I’ll go find the guy in the gray suit and ask him.”

“No!” Skinner sat up with a wince. “My God, don’t go making deals with those people, they’ll peel you like an onion. Your one chance now is to make sure they mark you for an innocent bystander.”

I was shaking. Maybe it was anger. Maybe not. “You listen to me. You have no business knowing one goddamn thing about my life. You have no business giving me advice. If I bump into that guy again, I’m going to tell him what you look like and where you are. Then you’ll all be out of my hair.”