this very night! Some old black guy, singing his heart out about misery. But to Hinch's mind the only misery lay in having to listen to it over and over again.'So, you don't care for my music, Mr Hinch?' The voice was deep yet oiled; it seemed to rumble, or purr, yet was in no way cat-like. On the other hand, Milan's movements were cat-like as he came from the bar with a drink in his long-fingered hand, to gaze out on the night through an open window.
But if it wasn't painted black, (Hinch thought), there'd \>e no need to open the fucking thing! Not that there's anything to see out there. While out loud he said, 'Er, did I say something about your music? I have a habit of talking to myself while I'm working. It doesn't mean anything.' Oh yes it fucking does! It means that I'm pissed to death with you, and your bloody music, and with bloody Kanadu, and all of this bloody black paint!
He looked down on Milan from a height of some twelve feet, from a wheeled scaffolding tower where he had just put the finishing touches to the last pane of a high window. And that was it: the entire interior surface, every square foot of hundreds of square feet of glass, varnished for adhesion, painted black, and finally layered with polyurethane lacquer for durability. A double-dyed bastard of a job!'Perhaps I don't pay you enough?' said Milan, as Hinch put down his roller, wiped his hands, came clambering down from on high.'The money's fine,' the bad-tempered Hinch said. He stoodsix feet tall, but still had to lift his head a fraction to look up at his employer. 'And I'd like it now, for I'm all done.''Then if the payment is fine,' said Milan, 'it can only be that I was right and it's the music. Or perhaps it's me? Do you find my presence unsettling?'While he was speaking, Hinch had checked him out - again. For Aristotle Milan was the kind of man you looked at twice. At a guess he'd be maybe forty, forty-five years old. Difficult to be more specific than that, because his looks were sort of timeless. He was probably sixty but topped-up with expensive monkey hormones or some such. Something was running through his veins, keeping him young, for sure. Spoiled, rich bastard!But foreign? Even without the name to give him away, there could be no mistaking that: Italian with a touch of Greek - but in any case a mongrel, in Hinch's eyes. Milan's hair was black as night; worn long, it swept back from a high, broad forehead, and its shining ringlets curled on his shoulders. And handsome: he had the kind of Mediterranean looks that seemed to appeal to a lot of women. Hinch would guess that his bedroom crawled with all kinds of young, good-looking, dirty women.His ears were fleshy - what could be seen of them - but he wore his sideboards thick and lacquered back to cover the upper extremities. Something odd about his nose, too: a flatfish look to it, as if Nature had pushed it back a little too far, and his nostrils were too large and flaring. And then those arcing eyebrows over deep-sunken, jet-black eyes ... those eyes that were Milan's most startling feature. Jet-black, and yet Hinch couldn't be certain. Catch them at the right angle, they'd sometimes gleam a golden, feral yellow. And despite the nose, still those eyes loaned Milan the looks of a bird of prey.
But handsome? Maybe Hinch was all wrong about that. It was simply the attraction of Milan's odd - his strange or foreign, his almost alien - features, that was all. And as for Mediterranean: well, that didn't seem quite right either, not with the cold pallor of his flesh, and the blood red of his lips. He was something of a weird one, this Milan, for sure. Something of an enigma. An unknown or unspecified quantity.
'Payment when the job is done,' Milan spoke again, the rumble lower than ever. 'Which it isn't, not quite, not yet.''What?' Hinch stared hard at him, tried to look hard, too - difficult with a man as sure of himself as Milan. Or as sure of his filthy money! But Hinch reckoned that for all his lousy millions, still Milan would be a cinch in a fight. Hinch was