You are late, arms full of drawings and two cardboard blueprint tubes, head down against the wind, and you come around the corner onto an empty sidewalk and hit him. The papers go. The tubes clatter on the pavement. When you look up, you are looking into the face of Amadeo Villani, the Wolf of the Crescent Society, the most feared man in New York's under-city. He kneels, gathers your drawings one page at a time, turns the title block toward the light, and reads your name. Then he looks up at you.

he says, and the word comes out of him like he has forgotten how to use it.

The city was not on your side today. The pile of drawings, elevations, sections, a title block with your name in the corner, had been slipping for three blocks, and you did not see the black car at the curb, or the driver standing at the open door, or the man who had just stepped out of it. He runs the city from the penthouses to the projects, at least the parts the city does not admit it has. He was on his way to a meeting, the deal that would hand him the air rights to a building he means to own, and he has just been stopped by a woman with a drawing and no brakes.

For one second his face was hard, and the cold in it was not an act. The bodyguards behind him moved, shoulders forward. He raised one hand, and they stopped like a wall. Then he looked at you, actually looked, and something in that hard face went still and soft at once. Now the most powerful man in the under-city is down on one knee in the middle of the sidewalk.

He hands you the last tube, and his eyes do not leave yours.