The front door opened, causing a flash of hot sunlight to intrude on their retreat, bringing with it fresh smells of a city cooking in its own noonday juices. Whoever was at the door had thought twice about it and quickly retreated back onto the street. The jukebox suddenly surrounded their reverie with a blast of drum-pounding disco music.

“I hate beer,” said Statue. “It’s like a thousand little flies buzzing in my stomach. And every one of them wants out.”

Condley kept watching them. They were growing uneasy under his stare. The heat and the beer had made them woozy. They were in their early twenties, but now they looked like children acting out a grown-up game of war and bravado. Finally he smiled. It was as close to feeling paternal as he could come.

“You’ll change. Just wait. You stay long enough in Asia and it takes over. It doesn’t have any answers, and after a while you stop asking for them. That’s what I like about it and that’s what I hate about it. In the States everything is, ‘What’s the bottom line?’ There isn’t any bottom line in Asia. There’s always one more paragraph, two more choices. The problem is, none of the choices are for good, because tomorrow there’s a different reason and maybe it totally contradicts today.”

He was enjoying the confusion his words were bringing to their faces. “Try Java. I was there for six months once, on a security job for an oil company. In Java they tell the story of a fruit called the simalakana. It kills your mother if you eat it. It kills your father if you don’t. That’s Asia. Get it? You look at something and it’s clear as a bell. Just a little problem, right? But no matter what you do, you may end up paying. And you see as much or as little of what’s in front of you as you dare to. If you see too much, you kill your friends. If you see too little, you kill yourself. Simalakana.”

“Semilock on your what?” No Neck, the tough little bastard, had come up for air. He grinned triumphantly at his joke as the other three laughed again.

“On your brain, No Neck. If you had one.”

They didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. They’d gone through tough training and they were physically hard. Somebody had convinced them that they could run through a brick wall if it came down to it. But they didn’t have any idea what was on the other side of the wall. Maybe a fifty-foot drop-off. Maybe the mayor, with the key to the city. Maybe somebody sitting in an easy chair, waiting to shoot them. Who the hell knew?

“I’ll tell you what, let me buy you a round. How’s that? Are you up to it?”