Hanging up, Hardy stewed for thirty seconds, then stood and walked out of his office on the top floor of the Freeman Building on Sutter Street in downtown San Francisco. His was the only office on the top floor, and he had decided to take the stairs to the lobby a floor below him. Hardy leased his office directly from David Freeman and was the only attorney in the building who did not work for Freeman's firm.

His landlord was pushing seventy. He was short, almost fat, always slovenly dressed; his greatest female admirers, and he had several, would concede that he had a prodigious, nearly mythic ugliness – unkempt hair, eyebrows of white steel wool, a turnip nose scarred by rosacea and alcohol, hanging jowls, liverish lips. But he had a great if unorthodox personal charm. And no one disputed that Freeman was a brilliant lawyer who lived for his work. With Mel Belli's passing, he had assumed the mantle of most famous attorney in the city.

The receptionist's station commanded the center of the lobby. At the phones, Phyllis, an attractive elderly witch with whom Hardy had an off-again, off-yet-again relationship, was handling what appeared to be several calls at once.

Hardy sauntered casually past her station. He even nodded genially as he took a few extra steps toward the long hallway that housed the tiny airless cubicles of the firm's associates. It was all an elaborate ruse – his intention was to go and interrupt Freeman without having to explain himself to the Keeper of his Gate. And for an instant, even as he hung a hard left and strode toward the great man's door, he thought he would make it unmolested.

But it was not to be.

'He's busy, Mr Hardy. He's not to be disturbed.'

Hardy stopped. Phyllis was facing the other way. How could she have seen him? Further proof that she had a personal connection to the devil. She could spin her head around in a full circle like the girl in The Exorcist.

Now she fixed him with Favored Visage No. 1, Stern and Unyielding. He gave her back his winsome, disarming Irish smile, pulled a De Niro. 'Are you talking to me?'