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revealing in a way. You could probably have identified the guy from it, though Zak could have identified him perfectly well without a photograph. In any case, there was nothing very special about him. To Zak he looked like just another bruiser, a petty crook, not a rarity in this city or any other.
    Marilyn opened up the next picture, the one that seemed by far the most important, showing the pale, tattooed skin of the naked woman’s back. The photograph had been taken from an oblique angle, so that the camera’s automatic focus had struggled to find a center, and the framing was haphazard, but at least Zak could see that his impression had been right: it really was a map.
    â€œPretty crude,” said Marilyn Driscoll.
    â€œThe photographs?” said Zak.
    â€œI meant the tattoos. Which is to say, a very crude map.”
    â€œYes,” Zak agreed, “although in general, the cruder the map, the clearer the mapmaker’s intentions.”
    He hoped that didn’t sound too pretentious. It was true, as far as it went, but he was aware that he was saying it with more gravitas than it merited. He was playing the scholar, trying to impress this woman, attempting to do an impersonation of a shrewd, wise man.
    â€œI can enhance it a little,” Marilyn said.
    She played with the image of the woman’s back, sharpened it, adjusted the brightness and contrast, the shadow and highlight function, until it became a little clearer, though scarcely less enigmatic. Zak could now see, at the center of the woman’s back, running shakily down either side of her spine, two long, rough tattooed lines. One of them, in red, looked somewhat like the representation of a road. The other, a black line with cross-hatching, could have been a railroad track. Two other, more or less parallel, blue lines snaking lazily, horizontally across the woman’s shoulder blades might possibly have been the banks of a river or canal. Elsewhere on the exposed flesh were scattered squares and rectangles that you might interpret as buildings, though you could just as easily have interpreted them as something else. Dotted and zigzag lines might have signified routes or directions, but then again they might not.
    â€œSo what are we looking at here exactly?” Marilyn asked. “You think it’s a real map?”
    â€œAll maps are real,” said Zak, hoping that he wasn’t pushing his luck too far.
    â€œBut where’s it a map of?” said Marilyn. “Is it an actual place or an imaginary one? Can we use it to get somewhere? Is it maybe just decorative? Maybe it doesn’t have any use at all.”
    â€œEvery map has its use,” said Zak. “The problem may be working out what that use is. And it may be even harder to work out who’s the intended user.”
    Marilyn Driscoll nodded thoughtfully. She seemed to be impressed: he liked that.
    â€œAnd what’s that thing there?” asked Marilyn.
    She pointed at a small round tattoo located right on the flesh of the woman’s coccyx. The image was especially unclear in that area, but Zak knew well enough what it was.
    â€œThat’s a compass rose,” he said. “The kind of thing you’d see in the corner of a map or chart, showing cardinal directions—north, south, east, west—sometimes the intermediate ones too. Must hurt like hell to have it tattooed there.”
    â€œYou think?” said Marilyn.
    â€œThey’re called roses because some of them are very ornate. The first one was drawn by a sixteenth-century Portuguese cartographer named Pedro Reinel. And originally they were called wind roses because early mapmakers made no distinction between a direction and a wind that came from that direction.”
    â€œYou’re good,” Marilyn said.
    â€œAre you glad you came back?”
    â€œGlad might be overstating it,” she said, delicately touching her eye where Billy Moore had punched