“All right” he said stubbornly. “So he could go down there.” He shrugged. “But hey —you maybe don't remember that things are sort of tight down there? I mean —there's no way he gets away with anything like this.” He smacked the notebook with the back of his hand again. “Not in Cuba. The cops would be all over him like ...” Chutsky frowned and thoughtfully raised his bright silver hook toward his face. He caught himself just before he put the hook into his eye. “Unless ...” he said.

“What?” I said.

He shook his head slightly. “This guy's pretty smart, right?”

“Well” I said grudgingly, I know he thinks so.”

“So he's gotta know. Which maybe means” Chutsky said, politely refusing to finish a sentence with anything resembling a noun. He fumbled out his phone, one of those larger ones with the bigger screen. Holding it in place on the table with his hook, he began to poke rapidly at the keyboard with a finger, muttering, “Damn ...

okay ... Uh-huh” and other bright observations under his breath.

I could see that he had Google on the screen, but nothing else was legible from across the table. “Bingo” he said at last.

“What?”

He smiled, clearly pleased with how smart he was. “They do all these festivals down there” he said. “To prove how sophisticated and free they are.” He pushed the phone across the table at me. “Like this one” he said.

I pulled the phone to me and read the screen. “Festival Internacional de Artes Multimedia” I said, scrolling down.

“It starts in three days” Chutsky said. “And whatever this guy does —projectors or film clips or whatever —the cops will have orders to back off and let him do his thing. For the festival.”

“And the press will be there” I said. “From all over the world.

Perfect.” And it was —it would provide Weiss with a free pass to set up his awful project, and then deliver all the attention he so desperately craved, all in one gift-wrapped holiday package. Which did not seem like it could possibly be a good thing for me. Especially since he knew that I could not get to Cuba to stop him.

“All right” Chutsky said. “It might make sense. But why are you so sure he will go there?” It was, unfortunately, a fair question. I thought about it. First of all, was I really sure? Casually, not wanting to startle Chutsky in any way, I sent a careful, silent question mark to the Dark Passenger. Are we sure about this? I asked.

Oh, yes, it said with a sharp-toothed smirk. Quite sure.