Unlike London, at a brisk walk one could actually cross downtown Seattle east to west in less than an hour, working the streets—though he preferred to sit in his apartment and wait. The bird-catcher’s patient facade, so deceptively like repose.

He found the gray Mercedes in a dingy pay parking lot, its rear windows golden with smoke, the dash littered with twelve receipts, one for each day. Sharp fingernails had clawed paths through the soot near the door locks. So it was true: the Chandler and his incendiary partner were in town. Turning east, Glaucous paused to stare at building numbers, until he found the entrance to the Gold Rush Residential Hotel. Here he stopped, tapped his cane, and let out his breath in a low, contemplative moan. Beyond the heavy glass door, pinched between an Oriental antiques shop and an abandoned secondhand store, the hotel’s narrow lobby proffered a dusty, coffee-colored hospitality. Thick paint smothered undecorated walls and lay dirty and cracked over plaster moldings. Two square brown couches and an old chair waited vacant and worn around a cigarette-scarred black table. The table carried stacks of The Strangerand The Seattle Weekly, cut bundle-strings dangling. A middle-aged clerk ambled out of his retreat behind the desk and checked out Glaucous, who nodded pleasantly, as if they had met before. “Do you have a Mr. Chandler in residence?” he asked. “I believe he’s expecting me.”

The clerk scowled. “Use the house phone or just go on up,” he said. London—barbed nest for all its poor fledglings—had soon pricked young Max into a burly squint, low, lashed, and ugly. After the death of the bird-catcher, the twelve-year-old, dumped on the streets once again, proved himself a fair hand at penny-toss and cards. Hunger and inexperience led to street fighting, where he acquired scarred knuckles, puffed ears, and three bends in the bridge of his nose. In a music-hall riot, one hard roll down a flight of stone steps dealt the final knock to his bulldog physique,

stunting his growth at five-four. Few would tangle with such a glowering brute, and so within a few months he secured work as a bodyguard for well-heeled gents possessed by hungers that would not be sated: cards, whoring, the Fancy. The things and events he now witnessed and the deeds he was called upon to perform were more awful than any he had seen as a bird-catcher’s boy. Clients, associates, and their enemies came to refer to him by a variety of epithets: dandyshield, bone-smith, batbreak, fistfolly; cane snipe, johnny-brute. In two years he learned to keep his mouth shut and skim what he could while his employers lolled senseless with drink or drug.

During Max’s last stint as a batbreak, his then-master lapsed into the croaking and squeaking of a paretic. Max was instructed by a private nurse how to fit the master’s ruined face with wax and tin parts, to fill fissures and replace lost bits while the syphilitic grotesque whistled his stinking breath through vacant nose holes.

Soon Glaucous found himself once more at liberty, the master’s house boarded, the last drib of wealth wasted on quack nostrums. Nothing left, nothing gained. And yet…

Glaucous was becoming aware that he might possess an unusual talent. He hardly believed in it; rarely used it. Yet within a week of being ousted, on the streets again, freshly charged by hunger, he had no other option. He honed his gift, and in the close-knit world of the Fancy, quickly acquired a reputation—a dangerous one. At the heel of one of the “ton,” an ability such as his was tolerated, but on his own, Glaucous was of no use to anyone but himself, and so, no use whatsoever. A gentleman of noble blood, his ancestry within hailing distance of Westminster, caught Glaucous

“cheating” at cards. The gentleman’s toughs corralled the remorseful, ugly young man. The gentleman ordered him transported to his country estate, caged like a dog.

There, Glaucous was confined to a series of basement rooms, heavily padlocked, each larger and a little brighter than the last. The housekeeper eventually assigned him to a plump, foppish man named Shank, either to punish for the gentleman’s amusement or to discover and refine whatever genuine talent this rough lad might have. And so it was done.

In time, Shank informed the young tough that there was a name for his crude ability. Glaucous was a natural-born Chancer. “Else a pug like you would been crushed in the streets and died ere now,” he explained. “Some call it luck, others fortune. We know it here as Chancing, which is great Will, consistently applied to random circumstance to guide favor—for your gentleman and for him alone, of course.”

Under Shank’s guidance, Glaucous made coins land as desired, reordered cards without touch, directed the plunk of a silver ball on a spinning roulette wheel and the tumble of wooden spheres in a rolling cage. Their handsome and noble master was not himself a gambler, but recognized that many of that persuasion would extend favor and even cash for the company of such a lad in the clubs of the day. And so Maxwell Glaucous’s lot improved, while the company he kept declined in character, if not dress and station.

Glaucous picked up a copy of The Strangerand lucked it open to the classifieds. There it was…the ad, but not hisad. He dropped the paper on the table and took the hotel stairs with silent footsteps.

On the second floor, he sniffed and reached out his hand, searching for retrograde fluxes. Two more flights to go. On the fourth, Glaucous paused by a fire door, tested its hinges for squeaks, then pushed. Beyond lay six rooms, three on each side of the hallway, and at the end a milky window reinforced by steel wire. The light from the window quivered. Light resented Chancers, and now there were two in close proximity.

Glaucous brushed the knob of the first door on his left. Harsh music competed with the grating voices of overgrown children— television. Quiet as a cat, he crossed the hall and felt the opposite door. Room empty but not silent—not to his questing fingers. Someone had allowed himself to be murdered. The knots of bad luck still vibrated with a singing whine.

Glaucous slid down the hall. Behind the next door, he found what he was after: soft, steady breathing, comparative youth—the Chandler was less than a fifth his age—and strength, but profligate and poorly managed.

Again his nostrils quivered—this time at a smell like candle smoke. This had to be the Chandler’s partner—a veiled woman, very dangerous. Glaucous leaned in and heard the flip of a coin—a Morgan silver dollar, judging by the muted ring as it bounced off the room’s thin carpet. The Chandler was practicing. The dollar landed heads. Anyone could do such a trick, but he was not counting the coin’s spins. He was drawing down the coin’s lines. From different heights—including a ricochet from the ceiling and another from a wall—the dollar always landed heads.

Glaucous matched his breath to the man’s. He also matched other rhythms: pump of blood, drip of lymph and bile. He made himself a shadow.

Squatted back to the wall, eyes shut.

Waited.

Shortly after his last visit to Hounslow, at the height of his employment as a gambler’s companion—his fame beginning to spoil prospects—the noble gentleman had informed him it was time to move on. Glaucous’s gambling days were over, in London at any rate, and probably across Europe.

“You should try Macao, young friend,” Shank suggested, but then added, in a low voice and with eyes averted, that a special appointment might be arranged—if he desired, at long last, a secure and permanent position.

Glaucous had long since grown leery of the streets.