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to wipe your hands. People with money who didn’t spend any of it on their appearance wore their contempt for their fellow human beings like a six-hundred-dollar suit. Quincy himself favored colored shirts—it was lavender today—jackets with natural shoulders, peg-top pants, and ostrich half-boots that zipped up inside the ankles. He never wore a hat. Hats were for pimps.
    At six-three and 220 pounds, Quincy was a hard fit, which was why tailors received much of his income. The skin of his face was blue-black, almost plum-colored, and stretched tight over thick bones with chiseled edges. His prognathous jaw, which resembled the underslung bucket of a steam shovel, frightened the people he wanted to frighten, but when he smiled—not often—it receded, transforming his features. There was gray in his modest Afro. He was thirty-five.
    Devlin removed the last packet from the satchel, stripped off the rubber band, and counted, his meaty thumb separating the bills with scalpel precision. He could have done it much faster, but he obviously enjoyed making Quincy wait. In so far as it was possible for a man like Devlin to enjoy anything. Any other courier would have been dismissed upon delivery, to be recalled later if there was a discrepancy in the count; and in fact the delivery itself would have been handled by a bag man, not by a boss like Quincy. But since the day three months ago that one of his couriers had pocketed fifteen hundred dollars, nothing would do but that Quincy carry the cash himself, one of many humiliations he had had to endure because he was Bass Springfield’s son. It made no difference that Quincy had apprehended the greedy bag man and made him curl his fingers around a doorjamb while Quincy kicked the door shut. If the man had eight broken fingers, his boss had suffered as much in loss of esteem.
    When he finished counting, Devlin grasped the arms of his chair, reddened from his hairline to his collar, and stood up. He went out through the door behind the desk without excusing himself.
    On the television screen, a blonde in a slippery gown was hanging all over a man who was shaving the way no sane man would ever shave if there were a blade in his razor. Quincy ignored it and looked instead at the view from the forty-third floor of the Penobscot Building. The river glinted in scallops of reflected sunlight between the block buildings of the warehouse district and Windsor on the other side. Quincy had never been to Canada, three minutes away across the Ambassador Bridge or through the tunnel. Despite the similarity of the Windsor skyline to Detroit’s, he pictured the country as a land of moose and snowy mountains and honkies in tight uniforms and Smokey the Bear hats who rode horses and sang to each other in deep fruity voices. He’d seen that in a movie his mother had taken him to see when he was five years old and the images were now more real than many of the other events of his childhood.
    Devlin returned and lowered himself derrick-fashion into his chair. His body was bullet-shaped and like his face gave no indication that there were bones beneath. “Patsy wants to talk to you.”
    The door behind the desk led into a corner office twice as deep as the one Quincy had just left. The adjoining windows would have presented the same view of Canada and another of downtown Detroit if they weren’t cloaked in blinds and drapes of some heavy green material with gold threads that glittered. There was a moss-green Brussels carpet wall-to-wall—Quincy had made a study of such fine things—and brushed aluminum panels on the walls that made the room look like something seen in a clouded mirror. Neither of its two occupants got up when the visitor entered.
    “Your receipts are off six percent this week,” Patsy said.
    He was looking at Quincy with both hands resting flat on top of an absolutely bare desk with a deep gloss that reflected the perforated ceiling and its recessed circles of light; a small man