“Sez Kate Winslet ’as broke up with that bloke of ’ers wot made American Beyootie,” said the one with the paper.

“Don’t look at me,” said the other businesswolf. “I didn’t ’ave nuthink to do with it.”

And they both yapped—playful, puppylike yips.

There was a fifth passenger in the car, a woman, a human woman, not a wolf. She was sprawled on her side across one of the seats, so all he could see was her right leg, sticking into the aisle. She wore black stockings, a very bad run in the one that Saunders could see. It was a nice leg, a handsome leg, a young girl’s leg. He couldn’t see her face and didn’t want to. She had lost her heel—it had dropped into the heap of her entrails that were piled in the center of the aisle. Saunders saw those entrails last, a glistening pile of fatty white coils, lightly basted with blood. A string of gut stretched back out of sight in the direction of her abdomen. One of the woman’s high heels rested on that mound of intestines, set there like a single black candle on a grotesque birthday cake. He remembered how they had seemed to wait at Wolverton Station forever, the way the train shook now and then as if something were being forcibly loaded into coach. He remembered hearing a woman’s sob of laughter and a man yelling orders, Stop! Stop it! He had heard it the way he wanted to hear it. He had known what he had wanted to know. Maybe it was always that way for almost everyone.

The businesswolves hadn’t noticed him, but the two louts in the back had. The one in the rock T-shirt elbowed Manchester United, and they rolled their eyes meaningfully at each other and lifted their snouts to the air. Tasting the scent of him, Saunders thought.

One of them, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, called out. “’Ey. ’Ey there, mate. Comin’ to sit with the lower classes? Goin’ to roost with the plebes?”

Manchester United made a choked sound of laughter. He had just had a bite of that glistening chocolate doughnut that he held in the white napkin, and his mouth was full. Only it wasn’t a napkin, and it wasn’t a doughnut. Saunders was determined to see and hear things as they were, not as he wanted them to be. His life depended on it now. So. See it and know it: It was a piece of liver in a bloodstained hankie. A woman’s hankie—he could see the lace trimming at the edges.