"Ah, he is my brother," Clarence said. "And he wanted to so badly..."

For some reason I never quite got, Max loved to drive. He wasn't real good at it, especially in the city. It was like he expected cars to step aside for him the same way people did. He'd banged the Plymouth up more than once. But he was handling the Rover like it was a fragile child, keeping a nice cushion of air around him as we wove through the narrow streets of Chinatown. It was just past two in the afternoon- plenty of time to get to the midtown address Kite had given me.

"It'll be okay," I assured Clarence. "Max knows you love your car."

A truck blocked the cobblestoned street ahead of us. Oneaway street, traffic behind us. There was almost room enough to get past. Max inched the Rover forward. Clarence clasped his hands in prayer. A parked car on our right, the outside rearview mirror of the truck to our left. We were only about four inches short of slipping by, but that still left us wedged in- no place to go.

I signaled Max to stay put and climbed out of the back seat. Three guys were sitting on a loading platform, drinking something out of big white styrofoam cups.

"That your truck?" I asked them.

"Who wants to know?" the guy in the middle asked back, chin up, neck muscles starting to tighten.

"You're blocking the road, pal," I told him. "Just pull over a few inches and we can get by."

"In a minute," he said, dismissing me. The guy on his right nodded approval.

Asshole. I got back in the car, lit a cigarette. Max rapped the dashboard. I leaned forward, caught his eyes. Put my inside wrists together, clapped my hands, making a "yap yap" gesture. I tapped my watch, held up my hand, fingers spread. Meaning: another five minutes, they'll get tired of the game and move the truck- no big deal. Max started to get out of the car. I held my palm out like a traffic cop. No- it wasn't worth it.

"He wants to tell those guys to get a move on?" Clarence asked me.

"Yeah," I said. "But he wouldn't tell them nicely and I don't want trouble."

"I tell them, mahn," Clarence muttered, his hand snaking under his jacket.

"Chill," I told him. "They're just profiling. Give 'em a minute, they'll move the truck. Nothing to it."

Horns honked behind us. I smoked my cigarette. A redafaced fat slob knocked on my window. I hit the switch to let it down- his sweatasmell flooded in.

"What's the fucking problem?" the slob wanted to know. His face looked like an overripe muskmelon, about to burst from the heat.

"There's no room to get by. The truckers said they'd move out the way in a minute. We're just waiting."

"Well, I'm not," Fatso snarled, walking over to the guys on the loading dock.

He came back with the three truckers. All screaming at each other, lots of fingers being pointed. And nothing moving. Horns really blasting now- a lot of them, it sounded like. Someone was going to do something stupid, guaranteed.

Max hit the switch and his window came down. One dark, deepaveined hand extended out. He grabbed the mirror on the truck and twisted. There was a crack and the mirror came free in his hand. Max held the mirror in one hand high above the car. As soon as he was sure the truckers saw it, he flipped it over the top of the Rover in their direction, flicked the gear shift into first, let out the clutch and pulled away. Slow.

By the time we got over to Canal, Clarence had calmed down a bit.

We were heading up First Avenue, pointed toward Sutton Place, the address Kite had given me. "I'll ring every fifteen minutes or so," I told Clarence, holding up the cell phone. "Don't answer it. Don't do anything. A half hour goes by and it doesn't ring, call this number and ask to speak to me," I said, handing him Kite's card. "You don't get an answer, or they won't put me on the phone, come on up. Both of you."

"Got it, mahn."

"The Prof looked it over?" I asked him.

"My father says it is Old Money, mahn. Very exclusive. No funny stuff in that place, that is for sure."

"And he's in the penthouse?"

"Yes. It has a separate elevator, the last one in the row."

"Security?"

"My father did not go up, mahn. But even when they had to throw him out of the lobby- he had his shoeshine kit- they only had a couple of old men with uniforms. No professionals, not on the ground floor, anyway. If he has muscle, it will be inside his apartment, I am sure."

When we pulled up front, Clarence was out the door before I was, going over his beloved Rover with a chamois cloth, checking for scratches.

Max just sat there, waiting.

I told the deskman my name. He didn't bother to pick up the phone, just pointed at an elevator standing open at the end of a fouracar row.

At the top of its ride, the elevator car opened inside a small foyer painted a robin'saegg blue. It was all cleanacut lines in the wood, stark and sharpaedged, without a scrap of furniture. On the far side of the foyer was a narrow opening covered top to bottom with wroughtairon grillwork- it looked like the door to an upscale prison cell. As I walked closer, a dark shape materialized behind the grille. A woman, thickabodied but curvy, with the kind of pinchedain waist that you can't get from genetics. Another step and I could see she had jetablack hair, straight and thick, curving sharply just past a tiny, pointed chin to frame a fleshy face. Small red rosebud mouth. Heavy blusher on her babyafat cheeks, eyebrows plucked down to pencil lines, curved to parallel the hairdo. The orange eyes Bondi told me about. There was a hard shine to her face, like a ceramic glaze. Her small eyes were as bright as a bird's, and about as warm. She was wearing a black dress of some shiny material, slashed deeply down her chest, thin black straps crisscrossing the cleavage.

"Mr. Burke," she said, the husky voice of the woman who had answered the phone.

I nodded. She turned a knob- I heard the heavy bolt giving way. She pulled the gate toward her, stepping back as she did. I crossed the threshold, closing the space between us.

"Come with me," she said, moving away in a smooth, flowing motion.

Her hips were wide and rounded, muscular bottom outthrust in the tight skirt. Her heels clicked on the floor as she walked down a hall lined with framed certificates. I stayed a couple of paces behind, hands at my sides.

She turned a corner. When I followed, I found myself in a long narrow room. The wall to my right was pitch black, empty. A white formica table ran its full length, its top covered with machinery: three computer screens, only one of them alive with what looked like a color spreadsheet, fax machine, copier, a reelatoareel recorder with four separate mikes, each with its own VU meter, a fat box with something that looked like a bloodapressure cuff attached to a standing tube. The wall to my left was pure dazzling white, as blank as its mate opposite except for a bright chrome picture frame maybe two feet square. The frame was empty, the white wall gleaming from within its borders.

Between the walls was a big fanabacked chair with a diagonal bisected design, white leather on one half, black on the other. Behind it, nothing but windows. Oldafashioned casement windows with small individually framed little squares of glass. Behind the glass, the East River.

Next to the chair, a little round cafe table with black legs, topped with a white marble disk. On the table, a miniature dumbbell, gleaming chrome. I'd seen one like that before. They use them to test for telekinetic power. A long time ago, I met this wildahaired, calmaeyed girl- a graduate student at NYU. She was in the wrong place, a storefront in Bushwick where somebody told her she'd find a psychic who could speak to the dead. The storefront was empty, another Brooklyn burnout. But the ratapacking teenagers who surrounded her thought it would still do just fine for the games they had in mind. They weren't real bright, those little beasts, but they knew what the sawedaoff twelveagauge I was holding would do to their futures, so they backed off quick enough. I stuffed her into the Plymouth and took her back where she belonged. Tanya was her name. She was doing her Ph.D. on psychic phenomena. After we got to know each other better, she got convinced I had this telekinetic power...and I spent hours trying to move one of those little dumbbells. She told me I could, if I would only care about it enough. I guess I never did.

"Mr. Burke." A man's voice, the titanium wire I'd heard before, snapping me out of the memories.

I turned slowly. He was moving toward me, coming from around the same corner I'd turned. Short, slim man. Elegantly dressed in a doveagray suit with a faint red chalk stripe, a white shirt and a red tie with a black swirl pattern running wild against it. His hair was white. Not goneafromagray white- noacolor white. His face was the same noacolor, a faint network of capillaries clearly visible beneath the skin. Pinkatinted glasses covered his eyes. He stepped closer, holding out his hand for me to shake. A white hand, the veins clear blue against the translucence.

An albino.

His grip was moderate- measured, like there was plenty left. His skin was dry; I felt a faint trace of powder. He smelled like lime.

"What sort of chair do you prefer?" he asked, inclining his head toward the fanabacked one sitting under the windows, telling me that one was his. "Straightabacked, armchair, director's...I thought you'd be more comfortable with your own preference."

"Doesn't matter to me."

"Please," he said quietly. "Indulge me. It's one of my pleasures to give people exactly what they want."

"An armchair, then."

The woman spun sharply and left the room. He remained standing, hands clasped behind his back, saying nothing. The woman came back in, carrying a butterscotch leather armchair in her hands as easily as if it was a portable typewriter. She held it level, using only her wrists, walking it over next to the fanabacked chair. She moved back and forth, still holding the chair aloft, until she was satisfied. Then she put it down gently.

"Please...," he said.

I took a seat just as he did. We were facing each other. I was looking over his shoulder at the bright windows. His face was in a shadow just past the light. I couldn't see the woman- she was somewhere in the room, somewhere behind my back.

Maybe two minutes passed. I kept my eyes on the lenses of his glasses, breathing shallow. If he thought waiting was going to make me nervous, he didn't know as much about me as he thought he did.

"You probably think I went to a great deal of trouble," he said, finally.

"Depends on what you wanted," I answered. "If it was just to impress a smallatimer like me, you wasted your money."

A flickering just to my left. The white wall. Only now it was a painting. No, a photograph...a giant photograph of a child's kite, dark blue against a paleablue sky, a long tail dangling, strips of differentacolored ribbons tied on. The kite seemed to float on the wall, moving in a breeze I couldn't feel. A hologram? It was hypnotic, pulling me into it. I turned my eyes back to the man, focusing on the lenses of the pink glasses.

"What I wanted," he said, like he hadn't noticed me looking away, "was to prove to you that I am a fellow professional. A serious person, with serious business."

"What business is that?" I asked him, getting to it.

"I'm an investigator," he answered. "Like you. In fact, we investigate the same things."

"I'm not a PI," I said. "I may have looked into a few things for some people over the years. But that's not what I do. That's not me. You've got me confused- "

"No, Mr. Burke. I don't have you confused with anyone else. Confusion is not a problem for me. Not in any area. I had thought- what with all the trouble I went to- that perhaps we could dispense with the need for all the tiresome fencing about and just talk business. As professionals."

"Professionals get paid," I reminded him.

"Yes. And if you accept my offer to...participate in what I'm working on now, you will be paid, I assure you. You and I will have no financial problems, Mr. Burke- there is money in this for you. And more, perhaps."

"More?"

"Perhaps. What I need from you now is a quality you have already demonstrated amply. Some patience, that's all. I went to all this...trouble, as I continually refer to it, to set the stage. Not out of any sense of theatricality, but to make a point. I have an offer for you, but it will take some time to explain. If you'll grant me that time, you will be rewarded."

"How much time?"

"Say, an hour," he said, glancing at the waferathin watch with a moonaphase chronograph face he wore on his left wrist. "Perhaps ninety minutes. Right now. All you need do is listen...although you are free to interrupt, ask me any questions you wish."

"And the reward?"

"The reward is down the road, Mr. Burke. And like all rewards, it is not guaranteed. But professionals don't talk about rewards, do they? Professionals talk about compensation. Payment. Will you agree to, say, a thousand dollars. For listening. One hour. That's a better rate than any lawyer gets."

"I'm not a lawyer."

"I am. Do we have a deal?"

"Yeah," I said, tapping one of the tiny buttons on the cell phone in my pocket to autoadial the phone in the Rover. The audio had been disconnected- the little phone didn't make a sound- but Clarence would get the ring at his end.

I heard the tap of the woman's spike heels, felt her come up behind me on my right side. Smelled her thick orchid perfume, felt a heavy breast against the back of my shoulder. A small, chubby hand extended into my vision. Her manicure was perfect, the nails cut short and blunt, burstaorange lacquer matching her eyes. Her hand was holding what looked like freshaminted bills. I took the bills, slipped them into my inside pocket. Her breast stayed against the back of my shoulder for an extra couple of seconds, then she moved back to her post, somewhere behind me.

"Would you like to smoke?" he asked, tilting his head to look at the woman.

"Smoke?" I asked, a puzzled look on my face.

"Oh. Excuse me. I thought you..."

I looked at him blankly. The faintest tremor rippled across his face. He was a man who relied on information. Needed it to be right- because he was going to use it.

He cleared his throat. "Very well. As I said, I am a lawyer. Law school was a great disappointment. A simpleaminded exercise- not exactly an intellectual challenge. You know what excites law students- those budding little sociopaths? The great apocryphal stories: Like the man who paid his lawyer a fortune to create an unbreakable will...and was later hired by the same man's widow to break it. And the professors- those pitiful little failures with their practiced little affectations. The older ones bombard you with pomposities, the younger ones act ohaso cynical, so blase. You know: 'A trial isn't a search for truth, it's a contest to determine a winner.' Well, it was then I decided: my career would be precisely that- a search for the truth."

I shifted position in the armchair just enough to show him I was listening, counting time in my head.

"But it was all a lie," he said, the titanium wire clear in his voice. "Ninety per cent of all cases are over as soon as the jury is picked. Juries today are overaamped on their own power. They're treated as celebrities- the garbage press waits with bated breath for their 'revelations,' as though the morons actually have something of value to contribute to our collective store of knowledge. Ah, the sacred 'impartial' jury...with each member trying to outpace the others in getting their story to the media first. It's all media now. Haven't you ever seen them walk out of the courtroom holding up their index fingers, doing their stupid 'We're Number One!' routine because they just awarded some mugger ten million dollars...some poor soul who was shot by the police trying to escape? It's disgusting."

I shrugged my shoulders. Me, I was never in front of a jury. Like most people who live in my part of the city, I had the opportunity plenty of times...but that was one chance I never took.

"Do you understand the concept of jury nullification? Where the jury just decides to ignore the evidence and substitute its own will?"

"What's to understand?"

"What's to understand, Mr. Burke, is how the concept has become so perverted. Classically, jury nullification applied when the law was the problem, not the facts. So a father shoots and kills two men who had raped his daughter. The jury hears all about how he had no right to defend his daughter after the attack took place, but it decides to disregard the law in favor of justice, and they find him not guilty, yes? Today, jurors nullify the facts. If they don't like the way the police investigated the case, if they don't like the way the prosecutor presented it, if they don't like the way one of the witnesses spoke on the stand...whatever...they simply refuse to convict.

"It's a disgrace. A foul, disgusting perversion," he spewed venomously. "It makes me sick to my stomach. Did you know there are actually 'Jury Clubs?' And that they lobby for what they're calling 'Juror's Rights' now? It's as though some demonic trickster had rewritten the Bible: '...and a pack of imbeciles shall lead us.'"

"That wouldn't be a major change," I said. "What with Congress and all."

"It's not a source of humor to me, Mr. Burke," he said quietly. "With Congress, there is at least some sense of reviewability, do you understand? But once a guilty man is set free by jury nullification, that's the end. The injustice is permanent."

"Yeah, okay. So, then you...?"

"First I tried matrimonial law," Kite said, brushing aside my interruption like I hadn't spoken. "I thought that would be a way to make a difference. So many divorces. So many children cast adrift. But the practice of matrimonial law requires you to be morally malleable when it comes to those same children. Everyone in the courthouse whines about the 'best interests of the child,' but if you ever put a child's interests ahead of your client's, that would be malpractice. Some people are perfectly willing to destroy their children's lives to gain a financial advantage in a divorce. Or to play out some personal, neurotic script. And when you're their lawyer, it's your job to help them do it. That's no problem for most lawyers. When I was in school, there was a lot of rhetoric about 'ethics.' I remember the stupid ethics exam I took. An idiot could have passed it...but I saw some students cheating on it anyway."

"There's other kinds of law," I said, playing the role like I gave a damn about this guy's moral dilemmas. A red stone set in a heavy silver ring sparkled on his right hand- I hadn't noticed it before. I'd never seen a ruby sparkle like that, pulling at my eyes...

"Of course," he said, interrupting my thoughts. "Have you ever watched one of those odious talk shows? That steady parade of damaged people: children molested by their fathers, rape victims, psychotic females who think they're in love with serial killers. You know what they have in common? Look closely at those shows- you'll always see their lawyers hovering near the camera. They sell their clients to obtain publicity...for themselves. Because the average dolt who suddenly needs to hire a lawyer only remembers he saw the lawyer on TV, or read his name in a newspaper. It doesn't matter if the lawyer lost every case. Actually, it doesn't matter if the lawyer ever tried the case. There are whore lawyers in this town whose names are household words simply because they 'cooperate' with the press. They do some chestabeating public display like the performing seals they are, then they go into court and plead their clients guilty. And the public laps it up."

I shrugged my shoulders again. Some wetabrain who wanted a divorce might hire a lawyer he saw on a talk show, but in my part of the world, we knew the kind of operator we needed when they dropped the indictment. Some wars are better fought by mercenaries.

"I switched to entertainment law," he continued. "That was about as intellectually stimulating as Saturday morning cartoons. So I invented a software screen for movie contract boilerplate. It picks out certain language, references the user to the case law in the field, alerts them to the mousetraps. I sell it privately. It saves lawyers a ton of hours."

"Which they still bill for, right?"

"I'm sure," he said dismissively. "The law is such a common, lowaclass profession. You've had some...experience with it yourself. Don't you agree?"

"I haven't had much experience with any highaclass professions."

"Well said," he smiled thinly. "And, sometimes, if there is no path to follow, you create your own. That's what I did. My own search for truth. I started out as a debunker."

"Like the UFO stuff?"

"No. When it comes to alien activity, the real challenge is to prove that it actually exists, not that it doesn't. No, my interest is in a particular phenomenon. It's still in development. Provisionally, I am calling it the Fabrication for Secondary Gain Syndrome."

"Lying is a syndrome now?"

"Not lying, Mr. Burke. Lying without apparent motive. Oh there is a motive, that's true. But a motive only a specialist could detect. For example: a man who sets fires. Not for the insurance money, not because he's a pyromaniac...but so be can put them out and be a hero. Or a woman who writes threatening letters to herself...so she can stand up to the 'stalker,' understand?"