And so he knew he could not enter the Billy Joel. Instead, he had found a dirty window in an alleyway behind the club and had used his two-inch-long glass cutter to make a hole so small that it would probably not be noticed till someone came to clean the window, if that ever happened.

He had watched her through the hole, had watched the others, had seen drugs passed, bodies sold. Somewhere within him he was ill. It was not so much that these young people were corrupted but that after seventy years of Soviet rule there was more chaos than there had been since the czars. The club had been chaos, noise, decay. Had he entered, he knew he would be enduring one of his headaches within minutes. So he had watched from the window, patiently. Had watched as he had so many times in the past.

The beautiful, restless young woman had consumed four drinks and with withering looks and hissed words of acid had disposed of two young men and one young woman who made advances to her as she sat alone at a table commanding an unobstructed view of the madmen screaming on the platform. Her name was Carla. That was one of the facts about her that Emil Karpo had entered in ink in his pocket notebook. This information and whatever he discovered this day would be transferred to thicker lined notebooks when Karpo got back to his apartment.

Carla spent most of her time staring at her drink. She appeared to pay little attention to the band that blared not five yards from where she sat. Suddenly, in the middle of a song about hatred of cowardly parents screamed by a woman-child with orange hair, Carla got up and strode out.

She had signaled for a cab in front of the cafe. She had no difficulty getting one. Taxis stopped for beautiful girls. And this beautiful girl was dressed in a very tight-fitting red dress with a three-inch black belt of patent leather. Her thick red hair, which matched the dress, tumbled wildly down her back and over her shoulders.