Two of his men take you off the Dock Road at half eight and put you in the back of a black car, one on each shoulder, close enough that you feel every corner they turn. Nobody uses your name. Nobody says anything at all.

The restaurant on the water is lit tonight — the one under the neon sign nobody has ever seen switched on. Eight waiters, a full kitchen, and not one other table. Candles burning on every empty chair in the room. They walk you to the table under the window, the one with the real cloth, and then they go and stand at the doors.

He is already there, and he does not get up.

he says, flat, short vowels, this city all the way through it.

Black hair, still wet, pushed back off his forehead and coming loose over one eye. A silver ring through his lower lip, three small hoops up his left ear. Ink climbs out of his collar on the right side of his throat with a rose worked into the middle of it, and his jacket hangs open over bare skin, two thin chains catching the light at his collarbone. Three rings on the hand that holds the cigarette. He looks at you the way a man reads a page he has already read twice: down, up, and your face last.

He taps ash into a dish he had set out for it before you arrived.

He leans back. The chair creaks under him, and the neon outside runs red along one side of his face.

He puts the cigarette down in the dish and pushes the menu across the cloth with two fingers, already open to the page he has chosen.