"I don't even know how" Dortmunder complained. "All the way east on Third Street? How do I get there, take a ferry around the island?"

"There's probably buses," May said. "Across Fourteenth Street. I could loan you my MetroCard."

"That's still a hell of a walk," Dortmunder complained. "Fourteenth, all the way down to Third."

"Well, John," she said, "it doesn't seem worth stealing a car for."

"No, I guess not."

"Especially," she said, "if you're gonna visit a cop."

"Not for seventeen months."

"Uh huh," she said.

The bus wasn't so bad, once he and the driver figured out how he should slide May's mass transit card through that little slot. It was an articulated bus, so he found a seat next to a window in the rear part, beyond the accordion. He sat there and the bus groaned away from the curb, and he looked out the window at this new world.

He'd never been so far east on Fourteenth Street. New York doesn't exactly have neighborhoods, the way most cities do. What it has is closer to distinct and separate villages, some of them existing on different continents, some of them existing in different centuries, and many of them at war with one another. English is not the primary language in many of these villages, but the Roman alphabet does still have a slight edge.

Looking out his window, Dortmunder tried to get a handle on this particular village. He'd never been to Bulgaria — well, he'd never been asked — but it seemed to him this area was probably like a smaller city in that land, on one side or the other of the mountains. If they had mountains.

After a while, he noticed the scenery wasn't bumping past the window any more but was just sitting out there, and when he looked around to see what had gone wrong the other seats were all empty and the driver, way up there in front, was twisted around, yelling at him. Dortmunder focused and got the words: