"Well, Swain'll have something for you. Eats a lot of Jap food, Swain." He made a strange little ticking sound with his tongue. He glanced back at her.

She looked past him, seeing the kiss of snowflakes, the obliterating sweep of the wipers.

Swain's Notting Hill residence consisted of three interconnected Victorian townhouses situated somewhere in a snowy profusion of squares, crescents, and mews. Petal, with two of Kumiko's suitcases in either hand, explained to her that number 17 was the front entrance for numbers 16 and 18 as well. "No use knocking there," he said, gesturing clumsily with the heavy cases in his hand, indicating the glossy red paint and polished brass fittings of 16's door. "Nothing behind it but twenty inches of ferroconcrete."

She looked down the crescent, nearly identical facades receding along its shallow curve. The snow fell more thickly now, and the featureless sky was lit with a salmon glow of sodium lamps. The street was deserted, the snow fresh and unmarked. There was an alien edge to the cold air, a faint, pervasive hint of burning, of archaic fuels. Petal's shoes left large, neatly defined prints. They were black suede oxfords with narrow toes and extremely thick corrugated soles of scarlet plastic. She followed in his tracks, beginning to shiver, up the gray steps to number 17.

"It's me then," he said to the black-painted door, "innit." Then he sighed, set all four suitcases down in the snow, removed the fingerless glove from his right hand, and pressed his palm against a circle of bright steel set flush with one of the door panels. Kumiko thought she heard a faint whine, a gnat sound that rose in pitch until it vanished, and then the door vibrated with the muffled impact of magnetic bolts as they withdrew.

"You called it Smoke," she said, as he reached for the brass knob, "the city ... "

He paused. "The Smoke," he said, "yes," and opened the door into warmth and light, "that's an old expression, sort of nickname." He picked up her bags and padded into a blue-carpeted foyer paneled in white-painted wood.