I finished my first drink and slid the glass to the side. I wrapped my hand around the second one. “What can I do for you, Mr. Bogatyrev?”

“Why did you ask me to meet you here?”

I shrugged. “I don’t have an office this month,” I said. “These people are my friends. I look out for them, they look out for me. It’s a community effort.”

“You feel you need their protection?” He was sizing me up, and I could tell that I hadn’t won him over yet. Not all the way. He was intensely polite about it the whole time. They practice that, too.

“No, it isn’t that.”

“Do you not have a weapon?”

I smiled. “I don’t carry a weapon, Mr. Bogatyrev. Not usually. I’ve never been in a situation where I needed one. Either the other guy has one, and I do what he says, or he doesn’t, and I make him do what I say.”

“But surely if you had a weapon and showed it first, it would avoid unnecessary risk.”

“And save valuable time. But I have plenty of time, Mr. Bogatyrev, and it’s my hide I’m risking. We all have to get our adrenaline flowing somehow. Besides, here in the Budayeen we work on kind of an honor system. They know I don’t have a weapon, I know they don’t. Anybody who breaks the rules gets broken right back. We’re like one big, happy family.” I didn’t know how much of this Bogatyrev was buying, and it wasn’t really important. I was just pushing a little, trying to get a sense of the man’s temper.

His expression turned just a tiny bit sour. I could tell that he was thinking about forgetting the whole thing. There are lots of private strongarms usted in the commcodes. Big, strong types with lots of weapons to reassure people like Bogatyrev. Agents with shiny bright seizure guns under their jackets, with lush, comfortable suites in more attractive neighborhoods, with secretaries and computer terminals hooked into every data base in the known world and framed pictures of themselves shaking hands with people you feel you ought to recognize. That wasn’t me. Sorry.