I-I-II

"Hullo, little one. Want a biccy?"

Miss Infant Kansas 2009 looks up at me with deep skepticism. Her sweat-slick and sunscreened family is negotiating with Azif the street vendor for four XXL 'Washington DC: Our Nation's Capital' tee shirts, and she has decided to split while the splitting is good. I reach into my green canvas messenger bag and dither between a tube of ginger snaps and a sheet of blotter acid. I decide to let her choose.

"Pick a hand." I hold out my fists. You can tell a lot about somebody by what kind of luck they have, and my first read of little blondie tells me she'll be spending most of her life getting lucky. "Come along now. Don't dawdle, Uncle Spex has to go get himself killed."

She sucks a finger at me. Then, spreading her arms, she makes a grab for both of my hands at once, seizing my thumbs and looking up at me with blue eyes that hearts and fortunes could be lost in. In that brief moment we understand each other, and I shiver in the noonday heat. I return my humble offerings to my bag. In their stead, I pull out a square bronze medallion on a string -- got it off a Byzantine chap, and this seems like a brilliant opportunity to unload it.

I squat down to whisper in her ear. "This," I say, hanging it around her neck, "is for protection. We'll fucking need it. Paribaadhate, deliver all foolish men from thee."

"Hey! Excuse me? Excuse me, sir?"

The materfamilias has noticed that her offspring has escaped and is talking to strangers. I waggle my fingers at little blondie and continue on my merry way through the Circle. It's summer, so the fountain's splashing away. The park is crammed with dogs and bicycles and pale people trying to turn red -- they clear a path for me, however, because I've got on a pair of bright orange hunting trousers and a white undershirt and look as if I may be stark, raving bonkers. This is important. If you make a habit of talking to people nobody else can see, it's better for everyone if you appear to have an excuse.

I feel a bit of a weight in my tum-tum as I head for the Metro. You see, I may look as if I robbed my costume off a homeless person -- actually, I won it in a game of strip gomoku from a gentleman who lives under the Key Bridge -- but I am, in fact, violating the sacred $100 Limit. The $100 Limit is one of my cardinal rules for business involving planes of reality other than this one, and violating it like a bally catamite makes me most uneasy. The rule is quite simple: the total market value of everything you're carrying and wearing positively must total less than one hundred American dollars. It is a very important rule, for two reasons.

Reason one: If things get fucked up, and you cease to exist in any meaningful sense, at least you've only wasted a hundred dollars.

Reason two: Mindset is everything. If you think that you can buy your way to safety in this line of work, you'll prove yourself wrong jolly quick.

A good bulletproof vest, or a respectable collection of charms, wards, talismans and relics, can cost thousands. Swanning about imagining yourself to be invincible, on the other hand, will cost your heirs whatever it takes to bury whatever's left of you afterwards. The same principle goes double for holy water, wooden stakes, and silver bullets; when you walk into the sort of situation that I seem unable to avoid, you cannot let yourself think in terms of winning a fight. It does ... not ... happen. That's why I obey the $100 Rule religiously. If you can stop yourself from trying not to die, you might just save your life.

Sunglasses, incidentally, are exempt from the $100 Limit. Mine are spiffing black things that I can, and do, wear indoors. They do not cloud my judgment because I only expect them to protect me from two things: bright lights, and not being the dashingest fucker in the room.

I jog down the escalator and hop the station gate. I'm quite fond of the Metro. Can't abide automobiles; depending on where you find yourself there's no telling which side of the road they want you to stay on, and if you guess wrong everyone gets cross. Besides that, you can do all sorts of things on the Metro that would amount to suicide if attempted behind the wheel. I have tied a flawless double Windsor, uncorked a delightful Pol Roger Brut, waltzed with a perfect stranger, made passionate love, and broken an empty bottle over a chap's head, all in the course of a single trip from Farragut North to Union Station. Besides, my flat's in Dupont, and there's simply nowhere to park.

"'Scuse me. Do beg your pardon. Madam, if you do not move that umbrella I shall feel compelled to tip you." The platform has been taken over by clones of little blondie's family, and I'm forced to wedge in as best I can. As dictated by tradition, the tourists have arrived with the cherry blossoms like some sort of biblical plague, gaily bedecked in Washington Nationals baseball caps and bum-bags with the American flag on them. I rather like tourists. They may behave like herd animals, but there is a sort of chaotic order in how they move, patterns within patterns as they lumber across the National Mall and down towards the Tidal Basin. Large groups of uprooted people have their own unique and significant rhythms. This afternoon, if I'm not dead, I'll pay a visit to the observation level of the Washington Monument to see what can't be seen on a Metro platform: a vast flock moving freely, guided by the hand that is visible only through what it touches. I've read broken bones and STDs in the flight of birds. I'm curious to see what I'll learn from the tourists.

I jostle with these hearty pilgrims until the train arrives. When it does, I find myself in rather a pickle. "I say, move along the car, what? Hallo? Plenty of room in the middle, don't you know. Oh, you fucking bastards." The doors stand open, but I can see no geometric solution to the problem of how to get myself through them. A tee shirted band of merry nomads has congregated near the doors of the otherwise empty car, obstructing passage with arses as big as the Kansas sky. So here I am, trapped on the outside looking in, faced with a bally Symplegades of flesh that threatens to crush me if I should dare to enter.

I shall now relate the story of how I came to break the sacred $100 Limit on this fine day. The fact is, I have one of my hunches about the troublesome guest that Blind Allie has summoned me to inspect, and I do not have hunches the way other people have hunches. My hunches are the hunchy equivalent of those chaps who wear dusty robes and sit on mountains and can kill you with a Mars bar. They are not to be trifled with, and that is why I have the VoltMeister v350 in my pocket. It hardly counts as a weapon even by human standards -- postmen and bill collectors carry them in case they have a misunderstanding with Mister Fido -- but the little chappie can deliver three doses of sparky goodness before needing to be plugged back into the mains. That makes it a dashed useful tool under certain circumstances. It puts me squarely on Queer Street with the $100 Limit, because at $99.99 retail I can only technically excuse it if I plan on charging into battle Pict-style wearing only a bit of blue mud, but well ... I'd look a bally hypocrite if I went around breaking everyone's rules except my own, what?

Bzzzzzzzt

Somebody squeals. The obstruction clears, and an oceanic current sweeps yours truly and my fellow platform-dwellers into the train and onward to glory. I feel somewhat vindicated about turning up to the Mortal Coil less empty-handed than usual.

I’ve just started haggling with a high school girls’ lacrosse fieldtrip over weekend plans and a bottle of ketamine when my headset buzzes. "Hullo again, Allie. New developments with your new friend?

"Not yet, sweetie." Allie sounds the way she sounds when she's sounding not-worried -- not what a chap wants to hear when he's about to risk his life for a plate of eggs. "Just checking to make sure you haven't forgotten me. Oh, and your brother left a message for you."

"Dear brother Adrian?" This news always calls for a flip of the coin. I dig a quarter out of my pocket, chip it into the air with my thumbnail, and catch it on the back of my left hand. "Oh, fuck me."

"He says he's gonna be in town," Allie continues. "He wants to take you out to dinner to talk about something he calls 'planching'."

"Fuck me sideways with a bargepole."

She giggles. "He sounded really excited. What is it, anyway?"

"Nothing a nice girl like you should be mixed up in." I slip two fingers under my shades to massage my poor aching eyeballs. "Hang about, I'm almost to my stop -- be at the Coil in ten minutes. If dear brother Adrian calls again, tell him I'm dead. Chances are, by then you won't be lying."