And the black lover of the dead boss’s wife, he added wryly to himself.

Paul had never liked New York. As his limo headed through the swarming traffic along the bumpy, potholed throughway toward the bridge into Manhattan, Paul thought that New York wasn’t a city, it was an oversized frenetic anthill, always on the verge of explosion. Even twenty years after the so-called Renaissance Laws, the place was still overcrowded, noisy, dangerous.

Electricity powered all the cars, trucks and buses bound for Manhattan. Old-style fossil-fueled vehicles were not allowed through the tunnels or over the bridges that led into the island. That had cleaned the air a good bit, although hazy clouds of pollution still drifted in from New Jersey, across the Hudson.

Police surveillance cameras hung on every street corner and miniaturized unmanned police spotter planes were as common in the air as pigeons. Vendors, even kids who washed windshields when cars stopped for traffic lights, had to display their big yellow permits or be rousted by the cops who rode horseback in knots of threes and fives through the crowded streets.

Yet the streets still teemed with pitchmen hawking stolen goods, kids exchanging packets of drugs, prostitutes showing their wares. All that the Renaissance Laws had accomplished, as far as Paul could see, was to drive violent crime off the streets. There was still plenty of illicit activity, but it was organized and mostly non-violent. You might get propositioned or offered anything from the latest designer drugs to the latest designer fashions, fresh off a hijacked truck. But you wouldn’t get mugged. Probably.

Still, the limo had to thread its way across the ancient bridges and along the narrow, jampacked streets. The windshield got washed — partially — four different times, and the chauffeur had to slip a city-issued token through his barely-opened window to the kids who Splashed the brownish water onto the car.