This is the city: a soot-covered graveyard of a million vanished dreams, with fifty-story headstones rising from the dirt to cast gray shadows on the spirits of the damned; a rat-infested sewer where the law of survival was to kill them before they can kill you, and don’t look too close to what’s on your plate because you may not like it; a gaudy, unwashed, flabby old hooker with a thousands faces, none of them presentable; a prison whose dingy corridors I’ve walked for seventeen long years, trying to sweep just a little of the scum and garbage off the streets… my name’s Kowalski, and I carry a broom.