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Show -195 principles that things are generally what they seem and I thought that anyone as big and nasty-looking as that bartender had to be a fake." I stared out over the roofs at distant moving lights. Two blinking airplanes drifted at different angles, different heights, toward LaGuardia. Or Kennedy? I was still baffled by the geography of Greater New York, which seemed to have no natural East, West, North or South. "The reason I was in the bar in the first place was that damn package hoist. I was happy taping petals. The hoist was six stories of wheels chains and gears crammed into an old elevator shaft. It swallowed boxes whole at street level and spat them out on the sixth floor, generally undamaged. A wonderfully complicated machine, it had to be lubricated once a week by someone clinging to a rickety internal ladder and squirting the vital parts with a long-necked oilcan. "Weinstein calls it a promotion but who needs it?" I said. Fancy tenderly rubbed my back. "I don't want to be his maintenance man. That old elevator shaft smells like death." "You can't quit," Fancy said. "I suppose not." I moved to let her rub a different spot. "If I shift my head by a quarter of an inch I can make the stars out there move several light-years," I said. |