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one could so much as dream of acquiring a MASSOLIT membership card--that brown card known to all Moscow, smelling of expensive leather and embellished with a wide gold border. Who is prepared to say a word in defence of envy? It is a biker cap leather skull despicable emotion, but put yourself in the visitors place : what he had seen on the upper fl was by no means all. The entire ground floor of the aunts house was occupied by a restaurant-- and what a restaurant! It was rightly considered the biker cap leather skull best in Moscow. Not only because it occupied two large rooms with vaulted ceilings and lilac-painted horses with flowing manes, not only because every table had a lamp shaded with lace, not only because it was barred to the hoi polloi, but above all for the biker cap leather skull quality of its food. Griboyedov could beat any restaurant in Moscow you cared to name and its prices were extremely moderate. There is therefore nothing odd in the conversation which the author of these lines actually overheard once outside the iron railings of Griboyedov : Where are biker cap leather skull you dining today, Ambrose? What a question! Here, of course, Vanya! Archibald Archibaldovich whispered to me this morning that theres filets de perche an naturel on the menu tonight. Sheer virtuosity! Two blocks west of the Chat, in a teashop called the Jarre de The, Case washed down the nights first biker cap leather skull pill with a double espresso. It was a flat pink octagon, a potent species of Brazilian dex he bought from one of Zones girls. The Jarre was walled with mirrors, each panel framed in red neon. At first, finding himself alone in Chiba, with little money and less

hope of finding a cure, hed gone into a kind of terminal overdrive, hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that had seemed to belong to someone else. In the first month, hed killed two men and a woman over sums that a year before would have seemed ludicrous. Ninsei wore him down until the street itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish, some secret poison he hadnt known he carried. Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling biker cap leather skull and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and youd break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like biker cap leather skull Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks. Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol. Alone at a table in the Jarre de The, with the octagon coming on, pinheads of sweat starting from his palms, suddenly aware of each tingling hair on his arms and chest, Case knew that at some biker cap leather skull point hed started to play a game with himself, a very ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire. He no longer carried a weapon, no longer took the basic precautions. He ran the fastest, loosest deals on the street, and biker cap leather skull he had a reputation for being able to get whatever you wanted. A part of him knew that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter biker cap leather skull of time. And that was the part of him, smug in its expectation of death, that most hated the thought of Linda Lee. Hed found her, one rainy night, in an arcade. Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, holograms of Wizards Castle, Tank War Europa, the New

York skyline. . . And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizards Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank biker cap leather skull War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon. He was riding high that night, with a brick of Wages ketamine on its way to Yokohama and the money already in his pocket. Hed come in out biker cap leather skull of the warm rain that sizzled across the Ninsei pavement and somehow shed been singled out for him, one face out of the dozens who stood at the consoles, lost in the game she played. The expression on her face, then, had been the one hed seen, hours later, on her sleeping face biker cap leather skull in a port side coffin, her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in flight. Crossing the arcade to stand beside her, high on the deal hed made, he saw her glance up. Gray eyes rimmed with smudged black paintstick. Eyes of some animal pinned in the