A block later, he said cautiously, “And I was beginning to think you didn’t like me.”

“Did I say I liked you? I said I owed you.”

“No, you don’t. They thought you were me; it was my fault. I’d have felt bad if they got hold of you. Purely selfish on my part.”

“Philosophical tail-chasing,” I muttered. He walked beside me in contemplative silence, as if he hadn’t heard me anyway.

The only break in that silence happened at the sight of the car. It was long enough that in parts of town it might scrape walls when it turned, black enough to have been cut from Death’s own tailcoat. The windows were black, too, the windshield one-way, the engine no louder than snow falling. It appeared like a cruising shark at the end of the street, and Skinner swatted me into the deep shadow of a courtyard entrance. “Back!” he whispered.

“What are you—”

“Turn your face away!” The black car swept slowly past.

“What was that?”

“Trouble,” Skinner said firmly, but would say no more.

There were a number of places around the City where I could spend the night. There was a room on the second floor of the Underbridge, behind the sound balcony; it even had its own outside entrance. There was a squat in an underground garage, which was more comfortable than it sounded. But there was only one place I thought of when I heard the word “home.”

On the south side of the Night Fair there was a rose-red sandstone office building, dating from the far end of the twentieth century. It was over half empty, like many of the buildings in the Fair. On the third and sixth floors, the windows were wide, many-paned arches set in ornamented openings like baroque half-moon picture frames. On the seventh floor, jutting from the mansard roof, were dormers with arched tops, like wide-open cartoon eyes. It was an interesting structure.

Home was a corner of the seventh floor, and the rooftop, somewhat. Or, certain things that were mine took up space on the roof. The stairway that rose out of the lobby inside the front doors was railed with ornamental cast iron, and wrapped level by level around the open center of the building to the third floor. Where it stopped. The back stairs were nearly rotted away; it would have been safer to climb the sandstone bare-handed than to try them. The lobby elevator was ruined; the car was jammed in the shaft between the second and third floors, and the cables were ripped out. The doors were boarded shut.

I was the only tenant above the third floor, because I was the only one who knew where the service elevator was, and that it worked.

I saw the place with Skinner’s eyes when I brought him in the side entrance. The shabby grandeur missed being romantic and fell back on pitiful: the broken black-and-white marble floor, the gouged oak wainscoting, the bits of mirror clinging to the wall above it. The hall smelled like cooked cabbage, and I heard an old-man voice behind one door, singing a pop song with only occasional reference to the tune. The huge brass light fixtures were all defunct; instead there was a swagging of wire from the ceiling, with a bulb every twenty feet. It was dim, but it worked, and no one there could have afforded the juice for the original wiring. Still, it depressed me suddenly, and I blamed Skinner for that.