Mookie doesn’t belong in this neighborhood. Upper East Side, Museum Mile, Central Park – it smells of money. It’s all trees and top-shelf condos and mansions crammed next to mansions. It’s restaurants that wouldn’t let him through the front door (much as he might secretly like the chance), people with dogs from breeds he’s never heard of and probably couldn’t pronounce, views of the city and the park that some buyers would literally kill for.

The air, fresh, crisp. Like the bite of an apple.

No gangs here. Nobody owns this territory – not the Get-Em-Girls, not the Three-Eyed Jacks or the Switchblade Charlies. The gobbos try once in a while, but neighborhoods like this are well-lit, clean, lots of cops. The gobs and other Underworld beasties can masquerade, but the mask is imperfect. And it’s only skin deep. Besides, the Organization has a strong presence here. The Boss. Couple lieutenants living in the neighborhood. Most they get is some gobbos slinging Blue where they shouldn’t.

Mookie comes up on the Boss’s place – middle of the block off of 5th on 82nd Street. In some ways the mansion looks like a long, lean face with many eyes and a mean, hungry mouth.

Through the front door.

He thinks for a moment he has the wrong house. His heavy boots fall on black marble, kicking up little clouds of powder and leaving behind a small trail of sand, and all of it echoes, and nobody’s here, and for a second, Mookie’s about to back out slowly–

He smells something. A whiff of a scent…

Then: Mookie hears a ding, and crossing the foyer comes Werth, hobbling along on his cane.

Werth, the old goat. Literally so. He with a pair of cracked hooves clomping on the floor and a set of ram’s horns jutting out over his furry, crooked ears. Chin whiskers now more than that – from his jaw sprouts a wispy salt-and-pepper goat’s beard. His face is still human. Hands, too. The rest of him: not so much. All this, revealed by the Blue.

Mookie asks, “What happened?”

“C’mon. Upstairs.”

“Where is everybody?”

“We’re the ones they called.”

“Are we at war?”

Werth pauses. “Not yet. Like I said: upstairs, let’s go, let’s go.”

Mookie feels suddenly raw, like skin peeling off a popped blister. When Cerulean leaves you, it’ll do that. Make you feel restless, listless, tired and wound up all at the same time as if you just pounded a double-espresso right before sucking down half-a-bottle of codeine cough syrup.

The Blazes gutter and go out. Werth goes from goatman to just a man in the blink of an eye. The Blue is gone. Blindness to that world returns.

Werth asks, “You OK?”

Mookie doesn’t say shit. He just keeps walking.

Upstairs, then.

Werth steps into the elevator. Mookie pulls the wrought iron door across. Inside are old elevator buttons like something off an antique typewriter.

As they go up, Werth looks at Mookie’s side. The shirt soaked through from where the gobbos got him. Arm, too. “You tussle with someone?”