He tried to explain this to Inge.

“Events we describe as random often aren’t,” he said, watching her hands shuffle and deal, shuffle and deal. “They’re only unpredictable.” He was anxious she should understand the distinction.

“It’s just a bit of fun,” she said.

She had taken him to bed eventually, only to become puzzled when he wouldn’t enter her. That, as she had said, was the end of it as far as she was concerned. For Kearney it had turned out to be the beginning of everything else. He had bought his own Tarot—a Crowley deck, its imagery pumped up with all of that mad old visionary’s available testosterone—and every journey he undertook after that, everything he did, everything he learned, had drawn him closer to the Shrander.

“What are you thinking?” Anna asked him after they landed in New York.

“I was thinking that sunlight will transform anything.”

Actually he had been thinking how fear transformed things. A glass of mineral water, the hairs on the back of a hand, faces on a downtown street. Fear had caused all these things to become so real to him that, temporarily, there was no way of describing them. Even the imperfections of the water glass, its smears and tiny scratches, had become in some way significant of themselves rather than of usage.

“Oh yes,” said Anna. “I bet you were.”

They were sitting in a restaurant on the edge of Fulton Market. Six hours in the air had made her as difficult as a child. “You should always tell the truth,” she said, giving him one of the haggard, brilliant smiles which had captivated him so when they were both twenty. They had had to wait four hours for a flight. She had dozed for much of the journey, then woken tired and fractious. Kearney wondered what he would do with her in New York. He wondered why he had agreed to let her come.

“What were you really thinking?”

“I was wondering how to get rid of you,” Kearney said.

She laughed and touched his arm.

“That’s not enough of a joke, really, is it?”

“Of course it is,” Kearney said. “Look!”

A steam-pipe had broken in some ancient central heating system beneath the road. Smoke rose from the pavement on the corner of Fulton Street. The tarmac was melting. It was a common sight, but Anna, delighted, clutched Kearney’s arm. “We’re inside a Tom Waits song,” she exclaimed. The more brilliant her smile, the closer she always seemed to disaster. Kearney shook his head. After a moment, he took out the leather bag that contained the Shrander’s dice. He undid the drawstring and let the dice fall into his hand. Anna stopped smiling and gave him a bleak look. She straightened her long legs and leaned back away from him in her chair.

“If you throw those things here,” she said, “I’ll leave you to it. I’ll leave you on your own.”

This should have seemed less like a threat than it did.