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by a smoky sultry glissando, and he froze in his tracks. He knew that sax, a tone and style unique to one blind jazz genius escaped from the slums of São Paulo, but the short phrase wasn’t on any recording or broadcast he’d ever heard . . .
    He’d never seen Lula perform live, hadn’t known he was in town. The jazzman never booked gigs. He just showed up sometimes at a bottle-club door for a one-night stand, no publicity, take it or leave it, and word spread like wildfire among the fans. Live music was so much better than any recording, almost a different species. It was, well, it was live.
    By whatever God you recognize, he was tempted. Another night he would have followed that sound, his own peculiar vice. He stopped and listened for a few minutes, there in the electric darkness, even turned. The demon’s chore could wait. Then he thought about what he knew of demons. Odds were, Legion wouldn’t just kill him, it would burn down the whole block with Lula and the audience and a hundred random strangers added to the toll. Sodom. Gomorrah. Pillars of salt optional.
    Or maybe not. Never trust a demon.
    Albert winced, remembering his apartment and the flames of hell, remembering the sudden searing heat and his flesh turning black in front of his eyes. He walked on.
    That same hell kept his appointment book, and he had already decided he didn’t want to die just yet. Add that missed jam-session to the “bad” side of Legion’s karma account.
    Did demons have karma? Damned if he knew. Maybe literally.
    First a whiff, then stronger—cold char rode the evening air, not smoke but the memory of a fire not long dead. Not the resin smell of wood in a fireplace or stove, not sulfurous coal or greasy sooty oil, not the burned-rope of hemp smoke—a dead building. Most humans couldn’t tell the difference, but Albert could. A stench of death hung over and after a building fire, a mix of smoldering wood and cloth and plastic and tar and hot metal, all quenched by the fire-company’s cold hoses. He could have followed his nose to find it, rather than searching for the address Legion had given him.
    This neighborhood was bad. Albert stopped and scanned the shadows, weighing dangers. He lived in a slum, yes, but borderline in the many grades of slum. Now he’d walked through three, maybe four levels straight down in the economic strata. Gaps opened out along the street, places that had burned out or just lost their battle with gravity and weren’t worth repair. He passed under dead streetlights, saw candles flickering behind broken windows patched with cardboard or plastic sheets, smelled drifts of trash and burned-out cars and moldy mattresses in the weeds of vacant lots.
    He hadn’t walked this neighborhood in maybe twenty years. Too dangerous. But Legion said to go there, so he went.
    And then Albert stood in front of it, a burned-out shell with blackened ragged holes for windows and door, an old ill-kept frame building surrounded by fresh yellow plastic “Fire Line” tape. He searched his memory. Paired six-pointed stars flanked the gaping doors. He remembered plain-dressed gray-haired men with beards and black hats or yarmulkes, Orthodox Jews long ago. A synagogue.
    He smelled something faint within the char—a whiff of sandalwood, almost a trace of incense. His nose pulled him along those drifting traces, past the yellow tape and inside. Salamander? That made no sense, no sense at all. The Star of David, Solomon’s Seal on the doors, should have kept it out.
    He thought about the decaying, no, decayed neighborhood. He thought about the peeling paint and cracked clapboards even where the fire hadn’t touched. Had they abandoned the building when they couldn’t raise a minyan? Without the living faith, the stars would not have guarded. He smelled something else, something of worked iron there, old and beyond old, heated and broken by the fire or by something else. It had a touch of Other about it . . .
    White