“Yeah?”

“People around here can be quite religious, you know. You can easily tread on their beliefs, you’re not careful. Gotta be respectful, man.”

“I heard they based a religion around Haussmann. That’s about as far as my knowledge goes.” Again, I nodded at the decor, noticing for the first time what looked like the skull of a dolphin stuck to one wall, oddly bumped and ridged. “What happened? Did you buy this place from one of Haussmann’s nutcases?”

“Not exactly, no.”

Dieterling coughed. I ignored him.

“What, then? Did you buy into it yourself?”

Vasquez extinguished his cigarette and pinched the bridge of his nose, furrowing what little forehead he had. “What’s going on here, Mirabel? Are you trying to wind me up, or are you just an ignorant cocksucker?”

“I don’t know. I thought I was just making polite conversation.”

“Yeah, right. And you just happened to call me Red earlier on; like it just slipped out.”

“I thought we were over that.” I sipped my pisco. “I wasn’t trying to rile you, Vasquez. But it strikes me that you’re an unusually touchy fellow.”

He did something. It was a tiny gesture which he made with one hand, like someone clicking their fingers once.

What happened next was too fast for the eye to see; just a subliminal blur of metal and a breezelike caress of air currents being pushed around the room. Extrapolating backwards, I concluded that a dozen or so apertures must have slid or irised open around the room—in the walls, the floor and the ceiling, most likely—releasing machines.

They were automated sentry drones, hovering black spheres which split open along their equators to reveal three or four gun barrels apiece, which locked onto Dieterling and me. The drones orbited slowly around us, humming like wasps, bristling with belligerence.