Crocodile had spent considerable time in his life studying the nature of problems.
Most problems, in his experience, fell into one of two categories. The first kind announced themselves — loud, visible, demanding immediate response. The second kind were quieter. They walked beside you, ate marshmallows, waved goodbye to strangers on docks, and accumulated until the moment they became the first kind.
Evan Lindsay was firmly the second kind.
He grabbed a fistful of Crocodile's sand-form shoulder with his bare hand — no Haki, no particular effort, just the passive destructive property of the Earth Demon form reaching out and finding purchase in material that was supposed to be untouchable — and Crocodile had to stop mid-stride and reconstitute himself simply to avoid losing structural integrity in a public street.
The implications of that exchange continued to be uncomfortable.
Gravel was a subset of earth. Compressed gravel was still earth. The Sand-Sand Fruit's elemental body, which had deflected every conventional attack for years, apparently registered to the Earth Demon form as simply another variety of raw material. No Haki required. Possibly no transformation required, if Lindsay developed the application far enough.
Crocodile filed this under reasons to conclude the Alabasta business quickly and part ways.
"What," he said, reforming.
Lindsay, who had stopped because of the grab rather than anything verbal, was looking at a street stall. Specifically, at two large objects on the stall that bore approximately the same relationship to a standard food item as the Grand Line bore to a standard ocean.
He purchased both. Returned. Extended one toward Crocodile.
It was a marshmallow. An enormous, cloud-white marshmallow on a stick, large enough that holding it required a minor adjustment of grip.
Crocodile looked at it.
"No."
"You haven't tried it."
"I don't need to try it."
Lindsay shrugged and bit into his own, eating without particular ceremony, and resumed walking. The marshmallow disappeared faster than its size suggested was reasonable.
Crocodile walked beside him and did not eat the marshmallow. He did, eventually, stop holding it at arm's length and simply carry it, which was as much ground as he was prepared to concede.
Around them, the tourist Grove did what tourist Groves do — sold things, displayed things, made noise about things, all of it filtered through the peculiar quality of light that existed only in the Sabaody Archipelago, where the bubbles rising from the mangrove roots refracted everything into something slightly more colorful than it deserved to be.
Lindsay looked at all of it with equal attention. The stalls. The people. The bubbles drifting through the canopy. The way the roots of the great trees created natural corridors and chambers, the whole archipelago a kind of architecture that had grown rather than been built. He ate his marshmallow and kept walking and looked, and the looking had the quality it always had — not tourist curiosity but something more fundamental, the attention of someone for whom every new piece of sensory information was still a gift.
Crocodile watched him looking and felt the familiar and increasingly routine experience of not knowing quite what to do with the person walking beside him.
He tried, once more, to establish basic operational parameters.
"The transaction," he said. "Underground dealers. I need funds moved into Alabasta through legitimate channels to establish an organization there." He kept his voice flat and informational. "Baroque Works. The details aren't relevant to you. What's relevant is that the meeting requires a certain atmosphere — discretion, controlled tension, professional conduct. Are you familiar with these concepts?"
Lindsay considered this.
"Discretion," he said. "Controlled tension." A pause. "Professional conduct."
"Yes."
"I didn't listen to most of that."
Crocodile stopped walking.
Lindsay stopped beside him, looking mildly apologetic in the way that people look mildly apologetic when they're not actually apologetic but understand that some acknowledgment is socially appropriate.
"I know the sea," Lindsay said, simply. "I know what you're trying to build. I know what Alabasta is, what it contains, what it costs to take. You don't need to explain the architecture of ambition to me." He finished the last of his marshmallow. "What I don't know is what that stall is selling on the left, and that seems more immediately interesting."
Crocodile looked at the stall. Back at Lindsay. At the marshmallow stick Lindsay was still carrying. At the marshmallow he himself was still, apparently, holding.
He dropped it into a waste bin as they passed.
"Fine," he said. "But when we reach the transaction point, you stay quiet or you stay outside."
"Outside is probably better," Lindsay agreed, cheerfully. "More things to look at."
Crocodile almost preferred that answer.
---
The edge of the lawless zone was where the tourist Grove's careful pleasantness ended and something more honest began. The light changed here — fewer bubbles, more shadow, the canopy closing in over establishments that had decided ambiance was less important than privacy.
They felt the music before they saw the source — a bar at the corner of two root-corridor streets, its entrance framed by hanging colored glass, the sound of something with a strong rhythm finding its way out through the walls. At the door, several women in performer's dress were managing the street-side approach to their evening's business, which involved a great deal of eye contact and considerably more warmth than the transaction zone warranted.
Crocodile looked at this arrangement, then at Lindsay, and made a decision with the calm efficiency of a man who has just found the solution to a logistical problem he didn't want to have.
He produced another stack of bills. Extended it.
"The transaction is straightforward. You'd find it tedious." He nodded toward the bar. "The Grand Line produces excellent wine. You haven't tried any yet."
Lindsay looked at the bar. At the bills. At the street beyond Crocodile's shoulder where the lawless zone's proper establishments began.
He took the money.
"Fair," he said.
Crocodile turned and walked without looking back, because looking back at this juncture would accomplish nothing positive.
---
The dancers at the door received Lindsay with the professional warmth of people whose work required them to be pleased to see everyone equally, and who had gotten very good at it.
Lindsay returned this warmth with the complete sincerity of someone who had not yet developed any of the social filters that normally modulate such interactions, which produced a slightly unusual dynamic — the professional warmth meeting something that was simply and actually warm, which the dancers found disorienting in a way they couldn't quite name.
He was almost inside when the other man appeared.
The interruption came in the form of a figure stepping into the doorway from the side — a lean, middle-aged man in a suit cut for someone who wanted to appear more substantial than he was, a thin mustache maintained with obvious effort, a top hat set at an angle that suggested he had practiced it. Two large men stood behind him with the patient stillness of people paid to be in the background.
The man's eyes moved over Lindsay with the specific quality of assessment used by people who had reduced human beings to resource categories.
"Fine physique," he said, pleasantly. "You train seriously."
Lindsay stopped.
He looked at the man. At the two large men behind him. At the dancers beside him, whose expressions had shifted into something careful and small.
He pointed at the mustache.
"Is this a specialty of the bar?" he asked the dancer nearest to him.
She shook her head, quickly.
"Ah," Lindsay said. "I see."
The mustache smiled wider, apparently taking the pause as consideration. "We represent certain clients who value quality and are willing to compensate accordingly. A physique like yours — rare. The market for rare things is always good." He spread his hands in the gesture of a man presenting a reasonable business proposition. "Think about how much money — "
"You're a source of entertainment," Lindsay said.
He said it the way he said most things — directly, without particular inflection, as a statement of observed fact. He was smiling, but the smile had shifted from the one he wore when he found things delightful to a quieter variety, the one that appeared when he found things interesting in a more considered way.
The mustache blinked.
"Sorry?"
"I've met slave traders once already today." Lindsay tilted his head slightly. "The first time was educational. The principle, the practice, the social infrastructure that makes it function." He glanced at the two large men, who had shifted their weight slightly forward. "I understand the system better now."
He looked back at the mustache.
"So you're not interesting in the same way the first ones were." The quiet smile held. "You're interesting in a different way."
The mustache began to understand that this conversation had not developed in the direction he'd intended.
"What way?" he asked, though something in his voice suggested he didn't entirely want the answer.
Lindsay's pupils caught the colored glass light from the bar entrance and held it for a moment — that faint red quality surfacing briefly at the edges.
"The kind," he said, "where I find out exactly how much of this I can do quietly."
The two large men exchanged a look.
The street was not empty. The lawless zone had its own version of public — not the tourist crowd of the Grove proper, but people nonetheless, moving between the establishments, conducting their various businesses, not especially inclined to intervene in anything.
Lindsay was aware of all of them. The specific awareness — perimeter, witnesses, lines of sight, the difference between a quiet outcome and a loud one — came without calculation, the way it had come on the Red Line.
He was not going to knock the mustache through a wall.
But he was going to have a very good time.
"Shall we," he said pleasantly, "step inside?"