When the last were gone from Rat's Alley, the man with the clown face shut the door. Its outside was enameled a chipped green. He took hold of the frame with white-gloved fingers, pulled it away from the wall. What lay behind was brick. He folded door and frame into a bundle, like a collapsed artist's easel, and tucked it into the billow of one armpit.

"Be good, Mackie," he said, reaching up to pet the thin cheek, just showing a scum of downy whiskers. Mackie didn't pull away. Gatekeeper wasn't queer, he knew that. He liked it when the masked man touched him. He liked approval. A skinny teenage expatriate hunchback didn't get much of that. Especially when Interpol wanted to talk to him.

"I will, Gatekeeper," he said, grinning lopsidedly and bobbing his head. "You know I'm always good." His words had a broad loopy north German lilt to them.

Gatekeeper regarded him a moment longer. His eyes were only visible sometimes. Right now they were just hooded blacknesses in his mask.

His gloved fingertips slid down Mackie's face, rasping softly. He turned and walked away, down the alley with a slight waddle, carrying his bundle beneath his arm.

Mackie went the other direction, picking his way carefully around the puddles. He hated to get his feet wet. Tonight, Rat's Alley would be somewhere else. He'd find it, no worry. He'd feel the call, the siren's song of jokers Wild, like the rest of those who belonged, the victims and the audience, whose thrills sprang in part from the knowledge that their roles were interchangeable.

Not Mackie, though. In Jokers Wild, Mackie was untouchable. Nobody fucked with him in the nightclub of the damned.

He emerged on Ninth into a breeze full of Hudson River and diesel fumes. Motile features contorted in a brief twitch of nostalgia and loathing: it was just like the Hamburg docks where he'd grown up.