Forty-five minutes later, after the engineers had sensibly gone to bed, Donny and the chief inspector were into their second drink and laughing hard trading notes on their favorite bad album covers of their youth. It started when Donny discovered the shelf they had there in one of the alcoves off the lobby, a little music room that had a bin of old records, a ton of cassettes, and the means to play both. Chief Inspector Abboud produced a joint from her purse, to Donny’s immense surprise. She seemed slightly embarrassed at first, or maybe just wary of letting down her prosecutorial guise so completely, but Donny encouraged her, even as the atrophied but still dutiful part of his brain that was mindful of his ethical duties as a lawyer reminded him of what was coming in the morning. It had rarely stopped him before, though, and soon they were lit up, and Marianne was rummaging through the tapes until she found one she liked better than what was playing and popped it in. Traumfunk’s Journey to the Far Side of the Sun. Marianne did not even know that the album was a soundtrack. In her defense, the movie was made in East Germany. Donny gave her something approaching a free-verse synopsis of the plot, which involved a coed crew of astronauts with burnt-orange bell-bottomed uniforms traveling in a ship made from mixed-up plastic model parts to a mirror Earth in which cats have evolved to be the most intelligent species and dominate the planet. Marianne said that sounds like a place I would like to visit, and Donny said just as long as you’re not mistaken for a big bird like the first human who stepped off the ship.