Something had snapped in him, a wildfire that raged way out of control. Hartmann s call for compassion and justice had twisted somehow into a call for burning action and revenge.

Shad's heart leapt as the crowd tore the spy apart, as the night burst out in fire and madness. It wasn't until later, when he saw Hartmann fall apart on television, that he knew how he'd betrayed the senator's ideals.

Even after the riot was over, he couldn't figure it out. He hadn't known such rage was in him. He found Hartmann, slipped into his apartment before the man had even had a chance to recover from the disaster of the convention, and asked him what to do.

Hartmann said, plainly and quietly, that he should turn himself in. But anger blazed up in Shad again, anger warring with anguish, and he argued with Hartmann for an hour, then left the apartment. A little while later he did it again, found a couple of homeboys mugging tourists on the Deuce and left them swinging, broken, from lampposts.

The lampposts were well on their way to becoming his trademark.

He was in vague contact with Hartmann after that. Hartmann always urged him to turn himself in but would never call the authorities himself. Shad respected him for the courage it took to do that.

And in answer to the guilt that clawed at him, he left more people swinging from lampposts.

The evil joy, the uncontrollable rage, that he'd first felt was less in evidence now. It hadn't flared up in years. Maybe he was growing up-he'd made a decision around the same time- to break with Hartmann. He didn't dare compromise the senator anymore.

Now he just hung people from lampposts because it was what he did. He didn't get much satisfaction out of it. It was an unsatisfactory thrill, like substituting pornography for good sex. Maybe it kept the crime rate down, kept a few people honest. He liked to think so.

But he was getting restless. People like Anton and the Werewolves weren't worthy of his talents.

He wanted to work on something big.

Shad went to a safe house in Jokertown and dressed as Mr. Gravemold, the joker who smelled like death. He put on Gravemold's feathered deathmask and doused himself with chemical stink.

People around him shrank from the smell. Shad liked that. It gave him privacy. But he didn't want to smell it himself. When he was Gravemold, he chemically numbed his nasal passages and taste buds, and he'd tried a lot of substances over the years. By far the best proved to be highquality cocaine he took off dealers. He could get used to the stuff, he figured, except he had much better ways of getting high.

The hallelujah chorus rang through Mr. Gravemold's sinuses as he walked around Jokertown looking for the houndfaced lady. He asked everyone Gravemold knew: Jube, Father Squid, people in relief agencies. People told Gravemold everything they knew, just to get rid of the smell, but nobody had seen the joker who had asked after Simon.

He walked beneath the lamppost outside the Jokertown Clinic as if it were any other lamppost. As if it were a place that had no meaning for him. It didn't. To Mr. Gravemold, it was just a lamppost.

A chalk landscape, its colors faded and scuffed, occupied part of the sidewalk. A kind of lagoon with odd-shaped boats on it. He found himself watching it to see if it came alive. Nothing happened.

After nightfall, Mr. Gravemold bought some lemons in a fruit and vegetable store, went back to the safe house, dumped his smelly clothes in a trunk, scrubbed himself with the lemons to kill the scent, then took a shower. He still had to use some of No Dice's cologne to cover what remained of the stink.

He tried to figure out who he was going to be. No Dice had no business in Jokertown tonight. Simon had been gone for years. People might be looking for Juve. This was the wrong neighborhood for Wall Walker, for the Gramercy Park identity, and for the cop. Maybe he could just be Neil Langford. The thought came with a rush of surprise.

What the hell.

He looked at the clothes in the wardrobe and wondered what Neil would wear for a night in Jokertown.

It came to him that he had no idea. He'd been playing all these parts for so long, he'd lost track of who he really was. He decided finally to dress in jeans, shirt, and a midnightblue windbreaker. The cocaine was still making him sniffle, so he put some tissues in a pocket. He pulled a watch cap down over his ears and set out into the night.

He made a businesslike quartering of Jokertown, starting with its southern tip around One Police Plaza. His senses were abnormally acute, and he was highly sensitive to body heat-he didn't have to walk down every alley or look in every doorway.

John Coltrane ran long arpeggios in his head, working on McCoy Tyner's "The Believer."

He moved down the street like a cool breeze, feeding as he walked, taking little pieces of body heat that no one would miss, pieces that made him stronger, made him glow with warmth. The mellow buzz of all the stolen photons zoomed along his nerves and were far more satisfying than the cocaine could ever be. People shivered as he passed, glanced behind them, looked wary. As if someone had walked across their graves.

As he walked, he found old chalk drawings, faded with time or rain. Fantasy landscapes, green and inviting, smeared or beaten by pedestrians. Urban scenes, some that Shad recognized, some so strange as to be almost impressionistic. None of them signed. But all of them, Shad knew, from the same hand.

Chalktalk. The perfect name. JUMP THE RICH.

He found her across the street from the graffito, under the theater marquee advertising Polanski's Jokertown. She had paused there, an old brown blanket around her shoulders, her stuff in a white plastic shopping bag. She paused in the theater's glow and glanced around as if she were looking for someone.

Shad couldn't remember ever having seen her before. He wrapped darkness around himself and waited.

The joker paused for a while, then shrugged her blanket further around her shoulders and walked on. The top of one of her tennis shoes, Shad saw, was flapping loose.

Darkness cloaked him as he walked across the street. He put out a hand, touched her shoulder, saw her jump. Took a little body heat as well. "What do you want with Simon?" His voice was low, raspy, faintly amused. Black Shadow's voice.

She jumped, turned around. Her hound eyes widened, and she backed away. He knew she was looking at… nothing. An opaque cloud of black, featureless, untextured, taller than a man, a nullity with a voice.

"Nothing," she said, backpedaling. "Someone-someone I used to know"

"Perhaps I can find him." Advancing toward her. "Perhaps I can give him a message."

"You-" she pushed out a breath, gasped air in, "you don't have to=" Her wrinkled face worked. Tears began to fall from her hound-dog eyes. "Tell him Shelley is, is…" She broke down.

Shad let the darkness swirl away from him, reveal his upper body.

"Simon!" Her voice was almost a shriek. She held out her arms, reached for him. "Simon, it's Shelley. I'm Shelley. This is what I look like now"

Shelley, he thought. He looked at her in stunned surprise as her arms went around him.

Shelley. Oh shit.

He took her to an all-night coffee shop and bought her a watery vanilla shake. She chewed on the plastic straw till it was useless, and tore up several napkins.

"I got jumped," she said. "I-somebody must have pointed me out to them."

"How do you know that?"

"Because whoever jumped me marched my body to the bank and cleaned out my trust fund. I'd just turned twentyone and got control of it. Almost half a million dollars." JUMP THE RICH, Shad thought.

"I went to court," she said, "and I proved who I am, but it was too late. Whoever was in my body just disappeared. I never went back to drama school-what's the point? And I got fired from my job at the restaurant. I can't carry trays with these hands." She held up padded flippers with fused fingers and a tiny useless thumb. Tears poured from her brown eyes. Little bits of paper stuck to her furry face as she dabbed at tears with bits of torn napkins.