“Not me,” replies Slothrop with his mouth full.

“You interested in some L.S.D.?”

“That stands for pounds, shillings, and pence. You got the wrong café, Ace.”

“I think I’ve got the wrong country,” Schweitar a little mournful. “I’m from Sandoz.”

“Aha, Sandoz!” cries Slothrop, and pulls out a chair for the fella.

Turns out Schweitar is very tight indeed with Psychochemie AG, being one of those free-floating trouble-shooters around the Cartel, working for them on a per diem basis and spying on the side.

“Well,” Slothrop sez, “I’d sure like anything they got on L. Jamf, a-and on that Imipolex G.”

“Gaaah—”

“Pardon me?”

“That stuff. Forget it. It’s not even our line. You ever try to develop a polymer when there’s nothing but indole people around? With our giant parent to the north sending in ultimatums every day? Imipolex G is the company albatross, Yank. They have vice-presidents whose only job is to observe the ritual of going out every Sunday to spit on old Jamf’s grave. You haven’t spent much time with the indole crowd. They’re very elitist. They see themselves at the end of a long European dialectic, generations of blighted grain, ergotism, witches on broomsticks, community orgies, cantons lost up there in folds of mountain that haven’t known an unhallucinated day in the last 500 years—keepers of a tradition, aristocrats—”

“Wait a minute… .” Jamf dead? “You say Jamf’s grave, now?” It ought to be making more of a difference to him, except that the man was never really alive so how can he be really—

“Up in the mountains, toward the Uetliberg.”

“You ever—”

“What?”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“Before my time. But I know that there’s a lot of data on him in the classified files at Sandoz. It would be some job getting you what you want… .”

“Uh…”

“Five hundred.”

“Five hundred what?”

Swiss francs. Slothrop hasn’t got 500 anything, unless it’s worries. The money from Nice is almost gone. He heads toward Semyavin’s, across the Gemüse-Brücke, deciding he’ll walk everywhere from now on, chewing his white sausage and wondering when he’ll see another.

“First thing you want to do,” Semyavin advises him, “is go to a pawnshop and raise a few francs on that, ah,” pointing at the suit. Aw no, not the suit. Semyavin goes rummaging in a back room, comes out with a bundle of workmen’s clothes. “You should start thinking more about your visibility. Come back tomorrow, I’ll see what else I can find.”

White zoot in a bundle under his arm, a less visible Ian Scuffling goes back outside, down into the mediaeval afternoon of the Niederdorf, stone walls now developing like baking bread in the failing sun, oboy oboy he can see it now: gonna turn into another of them Tamara/Italo drills here, ’n’ then he’ll be in so deep he’ll just never get out… .

At the entrance to his street, in the wells of shadow, he notes a black Rolls parked, motor idling, its glass tinted and afternoon so dark he can’t see inside. Nice car. First one he’s seen in a while, should be no more than a curiosity, except for