Once upon a time I’d had to kill a few people, mostly in self-defense. More than one club owner had told me never to set foot in his bar again. After that, a lot of my friends decided that they could do without my company, but Chiri had more sense.

She’s a hard-working woman, a tall black African with ritual facial scars and sharply filed cannibal teeth. To be honest, I don’t really know if those canines of hers are mere decoration, like the patterns on her forehead and cheeks, or a sign that dinner at her house was composed of delicacies implicitly and explicitly forbidden by the noble Qur’n. Chiri’s a moddy, but she thinks of herself as a smart moddy. At work, she’s always herself. She chips in her fantasies at home, where she won’t bother anyone else. I respect that.

When I came through the club’s door, I was struck first by a welcome wave of cool air. Her air conditioning, as undependable as all old Russian-made hardware is, was working for a change. I felt better already. Chiri was deep in conversation with a customer, some bald guy with a bare chest. He was wearing black vinyl pants with the look of real leather, and his left hand was handcuffed behind him to his belt. He had a corymbic implant on the crest of his skull, and a pale green plastic moddy was feeding him somebody else’s personality. If Chiri was giving him the time of day, then he couldn’t have been dangerous, and probably he wasn’t even all that obnoxious.

Chiri doesn’t have much patience with the crowd she caters to. Her philosophy is that somebody has to sell them liquor and drugs, but that doesn’t mean she has to socialize with them.

I was her old pal, and I knew most of the girls who worked for her.