He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn he'd never make.

It was a flat pink octagon, a potent species of Brazilian dex he bought from one of Zone's girls. The Jarre was walled with mirrors, each panel framed in red neon.

The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese. Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a web work of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone's whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with precise rows of tribal scars.

You are too much the artiste, Herr Case. Ratz grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw. You are the artiste of the slightly funny deal. Sure, Case said, and sipped his beer.

His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic.

It was vibrating with the speed he'd taken. The brown laminate of the table top was dull with a patina of tiny scratches.

Crossing the arcade to stand beside her, high on the deal he'd made, he saw her glance up. Gray eyes rimmed with smudged black paintstick. Eyes of some animal pinned in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.

Wage was in here early, with two Joe boys, Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his good hand. Maybe some business with you, Case? Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged him.

Miss Linda Lee. Case shook his head. No girl? Nothing? Only biz, friend artiste?

At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the con sensual hallucination that was the matrix.

The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.

He stole from his employers.

Take it. I got more coming, he lied, as he watched his New Yen vanish into a zippered pocket.

Threading his way through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell his own stale sweat.

Port and city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. It's not like I'm using, Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat.