rough
some photos. There's a toilet there."

"It can't wait that long, officer."

PC DeMoss gave him a reproachful look.

"I'm sorry, all right?" Art said. "I lack the foresight to empty my bladder
before being accosted in the street. That being said, can we arrive at some kind
of solution?" In his head, Art was already writing an angry letter to the
*Times*, dripping with sarcasm.

"Just a moment, sir," PC DeMoss said. He conferred briefly with his partner,
leaving Art to stare ruefully at their backs and avoid Linda's gaze. When he
finally met it, she gave him a sunny smile. It seemed that she -- at least --
wasn't angry any more.

"Come this way, please, sir," PC DeMoss said, striking off for the High Street.
"There's a pub 'round the corner where you can use the facilities."

9.

It was nearly dawn before they finally made their way out of the police station
and back into the street. After identifying Les from an online rogues' gallery,
Art had spent the next six hours sitting on a hard bench, chording desultorily
on his thigh, doing some housekeeping.

This business of being an agent-provocateur was complicated in the extreme,
though it had sounded like a good idea when he was living in San Francisco and
hating every inch of the city, from the alleged pizza to the fucking! drivers!
-- in New York, the theory went, drivers used their horns by way of shouting
"Ole!" as in, "Ole! You changed lanes!" "Ole! You cut me off!" "Ole! You're
driving on the sidewalk!" while in San Francisco, a honking horn meant, "I wish
you were dead. Have a nice day. Dude."

And the body language was all screwed up out west. Art believed that your entire
unconscious affect was determined by your upbringing. You learned how to stand,
how to hold your face in repose, how to gesture, from the adults around you
while you were growing up. The Pacific Standard Tribe always seemed a little
bovine to him, their facial muscles long conditioned to relax into a kind of
spacey, gullible senescence.

Beauty, too. Your local definition of attractive and ugly was conditioned by the
people around you at puberty. There was a Pacific "look" that was indefinably
off. Hard to say what it was, just that when he went out to a bar or got stuck
on a crowded train, the girls just didn't seem all that attractive to him.
Objectively, he could recognize their prettiness, but it didn't stir him the way
the girls cruising the Chelsea Antiques Market or loungin