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tarmac now instead of cobbles, but the sidewalks were still paved in small squares of pale stone. The farther I walked, the wider the doors and windows of the buildings became, evolving slowly toward the eighteenth century and away from the medieval maze of the castle’s hill. This road was mostly shops atstreet level. Ground-floor frontages were more frequently of dressed stone than painted plaster, though the tiling continued in fits. One front I passed had a vibrantly glazed tile mural of fish and seaweed. Signs from the simple to the slick hung over doorways, businesses as divergent as a sleek contemporary furniture retailer side by side with hole-in-the-wall taverns and shops selling medicines and herbs.
    I tired to puzzle out some of the words as I passed, some like the Spanish I had grown up with in Southern California, but many more utterly meaningless. English words stood out in odd places, “snack bar” and “seaside” jostling with words like “malhas . ” I wondered what a “mundo das malhas” was. “World of Sweaters,” judging by the window display—an item I wasn’t feeling much use for at that moment, even on the shady side street that was busy with the cold spirits of merchants and farmers driving goods to some long-gone marketplace.
    An old-fashioned-looking yellow tram clanged its bell and rattled along the tracks in the street past me as I stepped out into a large public square shrouded in the memory of several past buildings that had disappeared long ago to leave the acre or so in the middle nearly empty. One of these buildings was a Victorian monstrosity that reminded me a little, in kind more than style, of London’s Smithfield Market. Another was a much older building I couldn’t peg. A bronze statue of someone I took to be a soldier or a statesman was riding his bronze horse on a huge white stone plinth beside a tree off to the side of the square’s central expanse of white and gray stone tiles. There was no tarmac or road paint here. Every street and sidewalk surface was paved in the black or white stone squares, right down to the lane markers and pedestrian crossing lines. I turned right and paused, looking in the window of the World of . . . whatever, sweating a little from the change of exertion and the heat rising in the nearlyshadeless square. The buildings facing the square were much more formal than the areas I’d already walked through, the shops giving off a higher-class sheen. This was saying quite a bit, since the last few blocks had been increasingly swanky in the modern era, in spite of being more working-class in the lingering past.
    A sign placed high on the wall at the corner told me I was at Praça da Figueira. I looked at Rafa’s map again, having almost missed my destination because she’d drawn a tiny picture of the statue, but not the square it was standing in. The drawing was very good and even caught the way the plume on the rider’s head seemed to be flowing in the wind of his movement. The address I wanted was number seven. According to the map, it was somewhere on the long expanse of Baroque buildings facing the horse’s backside, but there wasn’t anything that instantly stood out to my sight as likely to be a doll hospital.
    The openness of the square made me a little nervous about meeting Quinton here. There was no way to approach any of the shops, restaurants, or hotels without being in the open, and while the businesses on the square were moderately busy and traffic was heavy enough to qualify as the run-up to what passed for rush hour in Lisbon, it wasn’t exactly New York or Los Angeles busy. The cars, buses, and trams were more of a problem than the people, since the sidewalks had little raised curb to speak of and pedestrians were separated from the vehicular traffic by upright metal posts about hip high, placed every five feet or so along the white sidewalk edge.
    As I stood at the corner, I saw a small car swoop around a bus by hiking its