The radiator moaned softly, a sleepy hungry bear under the shadows of dis-illumination. The lights were all outside, aligned in a perfect mess, a perfect tangled mess of flickering incandescence. But inside, there were just shadows, rolling waves of gray of several shades. Overlapping, layered onto each other, and side by side layers of waves all rolling into an ocean that was sliced into a gold plain of artificial luminosity with the clinking of jagged metal pieces that unlocked and opened the door to apartment 203.

Outside and dark below the tall narrow steps of the last floor, stood a man in a trench coat. He wasn't a spy and he wasn't a foreigner, he didn't hold untraceable telephones scrabbled onto diner napkins in his pockets, but he was strange. Consistent, but strange. Every afternoon he would sit there. On the steps outside the deserted building across the street from the shadow filled apartment of 203. Smoke and stare and sit there, every day for the past month. At first, it seemed as if he...