‘Julian’. A white oxford and solid color tie, navy blazer fastened by three brass buttons, chin scraped clear of a week’s paltry stubble, wily curls clipped to half-inch potentilla — all of this as unnatural as wearing a fat suit to star in comedies or a grayer uniform to infiltrate enemy ranks. But, per the Boss, police leave the well-dressed alone — even as the city is twilit with crime and their walkies chatter, They’re more likely to ask after the quality of ‘Julian’s’ day than question his activities. He buzzes at the intercom of a high-rise, says this name he gives to clients, and Sal lets him in with a screech of outdated electronics and a yeehaw of enthusiasm.

“Always wanted to be a criminal of some sort,” Gus says. He’s wearing just the pants and jacket of one of his three suits, this one charcoal grey, 100% wool, single-breasted. The jacket has a cauterized hole at the elbow from when he bumped into that twitchy skycap in Reno. “Not a murderer. A smuggler, maybe. Something I wouldn’t regret.”

The best morels emerge in the spring after a burn. A cigarette butt or a lightning strike or a campfire left to smolder. And then monstrous flames, an almost biblical trampling of heat through the hackberry and mountain ash until only the strongest are left standing blackened on desolate slopes. Then a winter. A closing down and resetting. And then spring, in the light of those first vernal dawns, up come the morchella eximia — delicious, a raisin-like texture to their fruiting, an otherworldly intelligence to the way they sit there pondering in the black dirt.