“Not bad, actually.” What I wanted to say was, “Have you found out anything? What’s Rico up to?” and, oddly enough, “How is Rico?” though nothing suggested that she should be any different from the way she’d been when I’d seen her last. But the words were hanging in off-the-case limbo, and it seemed important to pretend that that didn’t bother me.

“Have a seat,” Tick-Tick said, pulling up a Louis XIV side chair with dairy-cow-print cushions.

He turned his head aside and coughed. The hand he covered his mouth with was nicely manicured; the Ticker’s hands usually had something black under the fingernails. “I will, if each of you will take a seat, as well.”

Tick-Tick shrugged. “You want to talk to Orient. I can get out of the way.”

Tick-Tick’s verbal style usually slid easily from fey to human idiomatic and back, but I’d noticed this about her: in the presence of another elf, one she didn’t know well, her language was adamantly human and embarassingly graceless. It was her version of a Brooklyn accent, I guess. I also had a few guesses about why she felt the need to do it when she did it, but that was her business, very little of mine, and not a bit of anyone else’s.

Linn made no sign that he’d heard anything unusual. He shook his head. “You know of these devices, I believe. If you will, sit and listen, and what I neglect to ask, speak out upon. I would be glad of it.”

“I guess I can do that.”

Honestly, she sounded as crass as me. Which was probably where she learned a good bit of it. I scrunched my mouth up at her, which she pretended not to see.

Linn asked questions like paleontologists dig up bones. It’s hard to accurately describe catastrophe after you’ve taken part in it; each successive loud noise tends to obscure the last one, until the only thing you’re sure of is that everything came unglued, somehow. But Linn demanded, patiently and politely, every tiresome detail in order, from the time I arrived at the corner down the block from Walt’s. He did it by the steady application of “What happened then? No, before that.” Except, of course, that when Linn said it, it sounded better.

The Ticker seemed to relax as the questions progressed; things that explode were, after all, one of her areas of expertise. Several times she rephrased Linn’s questions, when she caught on to what he wanted to know and had a better idea than he did how to get it out of me. I think she was impressed by his attention to detail. I certainly was.

When he finally had everything out of me that I could remember, Linn said, “So we may have a witness to the art.”

“We may?” I asked, startled.