He unlatched the door and opened it. The little Chinese blinked at him, his upper lip drawn up over incisors like a rodent's. "Mr. Seu say please, you come." Without waiting for an answer, he turned and rapped his way down into darkness.
Cudyk picked up a jacket from a wall hook, and paused for a moment to glance at the locked drawer in which he kept an ancient .32 automatic and two full clips. He shook his head impatiently and went out.
Lee was waiting for him downstairs. When he saw Cudyk open the outer door, he set off down the street at a dog-trot.
Cudyk caught up with him at the corner of Athenai and Brasil. They turned right for two blocks to Washington, then left again. A block away, at Rossiya and Washington, there was a small crowd of men struggling in the middle of the street. They didn't seem to be very active; as Cudyk and Lee approached, they saw that only a few were still fighting, and those without a great deal of spirit. The rest were moving aimlessly, some wiping their eyes, others bent almost double in paroxysms of sneezing. A few were motionless on the pavement.
Three slender Chinese were moving through the crowd. Each had a white surgeon's mask tied over his nose and mouth, and carried a plastic bag full of some dark substance, from which he took handfuls and flung them with a motion like a sower's. Cudyk could see now that the air around them was heavy with floating particles. As he watched, the last two fighters in the crowd each took a halfhearted swing at the other and then, coughing and sneezing, moved away in separate directions.
Lee took his sleeve for a moment. "Here, Mr. Cudyk."
Seu was standing in the doorway of Town Hall, his round-bellied bulk almost filling it. He saluted Cudyk with a lazy, humorous gesture of one fat hand.
"Hello, Min," Cudyk said. "You're efficient, as always. Pepper again?"
"Yes," said Mayor Seu Min. "I hate to waste it, but I don't think the water buckets would have been enough this time. This could have been a bad one."
"How did it start?"