"Yes, now."

"Are you in trouble?"

"Turn on the TV news."

"What?"

"Turn on the TV and I'll see you in as long as it takes."

Vickers could almost hear him shrug,

"Okay."

Joe Stalin was the closest thing that Vickers had to a friend. The name wasn't real. He'd adopted it years ago in the days when he'd been a bright young cultural rebel. It had stuck. The black man in the dreadlocks and gold was moving in his direction. Vickers ducked through the crowd, scanning the street for an available cab that would actually brave the area's reputation to make a pick-up.

Down the block someone started screaming. Another head-case had popped. Vickers could feel the anxiety that spread like a wave through the crowd. You never really knew who might be next. It might be the guy next to you. A couple of local merchants' association goons with kamakazi headbands pushed past him heading for the source of the disturbance. They carried short black billy clubs. Therapy was rough in this area.

An empty cab was headed down Seventh. A city bus turning out of 42nd Street cut across it and brought it to a halt. Vickers sprinted. He skipped through the traffic and reached for the handle of the rear door. He wrenched it open. It wasn't locked, an oversight on the part of the driver. As Vickers scrambled inside, the driver turned and snarled. "I don't pick nobody up 'round here."

Vickers just stared at him. The driver saw something in Vickers' eyes with which he just wasn't prepared to argue.

"Okay, sure. Where to?"

"WHEN DEMOCRACY GOES down the tubes, murder, by necessity, becomes an instrument of policy. If you can't vote 'em out you gotta kill them."

"Don't ride me, Joe."

"You suckers with your intrigues and killings are turning public life into the court of the Borgias."

"Me? I'm usually the one that's being shot at. I just do what I'm told."

"That's what they always say. You're as much a part of it as anyone. You labor in the deepest pits of the corporate fantasy."

"I asked you not to ride me, Joe."

It had just taken twenty minutes for Vickers to feel confident enough to let go his grip on the Yasha, but Joe Stalin didn't seem willing to indulge him. He was greatly upset by the reports of the carnage in front of the Plaza.

"I'm not riding you, damn it. I'm just hoping that you'll eventually get wise. I thought you were supposed to be good at the shit you do. How the fuck could you be mixed up in a mess like that?"

"Amateurs."

"Is that all you can say?"

Joe Stalin turned back to his stove and removed a pan of kippers from under the grill. He inspected them as though daring them to be anything but perfect. Joe Stalin was a mass of contradictions. Despite his anger at the massacre, he had, between the time of Vickers' call and his arrival, organized a gourmet breakfast, Norweigan kippers, Oxford marmalade, coffee and Jack Daniels, which he now placed truculently in front of Vickers.

"Eat."

Vickers hung his head.

"I swear to God, Joe, I'm in no condition."

Joe Stalin brooked no argument.

"Sure you are. Booze, caffeine, sugar, protein, salt. All the right stuff for a homicidal maniac in shock."

Vickers had to admit that the smell was appealing. He jabbed at the kippers with an experimental fork. Joe Stalin grinned. Vickers ate a little. It was good. He ate some more. He sipped his coffee. He sipped his drink. He realized that he was ravenous. He slid his fork under another section of kipper. Joe Stalin grunted like a man who's been proved right and started on his own food.

"You only pretend that your stomach's knotted with guilt. It's a corporate trait to observe the niceties. Suffer as you kill. It's like putting a Henry Moore in the executive parking lot the same time as poisoning the air, right? The truth is that you're a feral animal. You just killed and now you want to eat. Civilization, like beauty, is only skin deep."

Joe Stalin poured himself some more coffee. He spent a lot of time on his own, so whenever he had company he tended to expound. He was such a fine fellow in so many other ways, he felt that he had the right. At the root of his charm was the fact that he was someone who didn't have to worry about money. Back in the early nineties, he had written a piece for Playboy on the Ghoul Children, which had been turned first into a TV documentary and then into a monstrously successful and degenerately violent movie. From that point on, the checks came faster than he could spend them and he had devoted the rest of his life and energies to a singular self-indulgence that had cost him three wives and all but the most irrational of his friends.

As far as Vickers could tell, he was in his mid-to-late fifties. He was seriously overweight and his liver had little excuse for continuing to function. On that particular day, his full head of gray hair was shaggy and uncombed. He had been living in the same filthy sweatsuit for at least a week and appeared not to have shaved during the same period.

The loft, which he rarely left, was more like a natural formation than part of a building. It was like a long, low cavern, dark and encrusted from floor to ceiling with his million-or-so possessions, the gadgets and toys and the random junk. One long wall was filled with a huge accumulation of books and tapes that had long exhausted the shelf space and spilled over onto floor and furniture. A personal robot attempted unsuccessfully to deal with the tide of dust and made soft electronic whimpers. The windows had long ago been sheeted over with steel and the only light came from within. It seemed to gather in isolated pools. Five TV sets were playing as well as two computer displays and the four tiny monitors of the security system. In one strange, homemade construction, organic cultures, like brown stains, were growing on glass plates under a battery of blue-white floods. In the last five years, Joe Stalin's narcosis had spread into outlandish territory. A magnificent antique jukebox pulsed red and amber. It was stocked with genuine 45s from the rock era. Vickers had heard they were worth many thousands of dollars.

The focus of the whole cave was the bright corner area that, with the stove, the sink, the refrigerator and the larger of the computers, served Stalin as a combination of kitchen and study. It wasn't only that Stalin rarely went out. He stayed mainly in this one spot, leaving most of the rest of the loft to the four prowling cats and the robot. In fact, it wasn't too surprising that Stalin didn't leave the loft except when it was totally necessary. It was the top floor of an abandoned factory in a twilight zone that had been promised a half-dozen renaissances but had been let down each time. All had foundered on private graft, public corruption and politics. The nighborhood had fallen slowly but surely to winos, weirdos, shot-spans and gangs of vicious children. The cab driver had been even more unhappy bringing Vickers to the area than he had been at picking him up.

As a counter to the menace of outside, the loft was nothing short of a fortress. Cameras watched all the possible approaches; traps and alarms lurked in the dark of stairwells and hallways. Steel doors and state of the art locks provided Stalin's final redoubt against the ghoulies, A-boys and gutter-jumpers who would just love to get him and loot his home. Three of the five TV sets were tuned to the Natcom Non-Stop News. The top stories were still the deaths at the Plaza, Tomoyo Nakamora's upcoming bout with the mountain gorilla and the opening by the Tyrell Corporation of a brand new free hospital in Quito, Ecuador.

Reporters had dug up some background on the steroid woman. She had indeed been an athlete. Her name was Jessica McKenzie and she had tried out for the Canadian shotput team in the 1996 Olympics. She had failed. After that, she'd wrestled on local TV in West Texas under the name Diamond Head. Conservation groups were searching Japanese law for a way to stop Ms. Nakamora from being fucked by an endangered species. Tyrell were proving their generosity and compassion in concrete and steel. There was footage of Norman Tyrell with crippled children. Joe Stalin found this part particularly vexatious.