The choice was simple enough. I could either answer the knock at the door or draw to a three-card diamond flush, a foolhardy act usually associated with those who maintain an abiding faith in elves, political platforms, and money-back guarantees. The door and whoever was behind it, even the Avon lady, seemed by far the more promising, so I threw in my hand, opened the door, and was only slightly disappointed when the knocker turned out to be Myron Greene, the lawyer, who announced, a little too loudly, I thought, that he needed to speak to me in private.

The game was at my place that Saturday, five-card stud and draw, and it was to go on all day and into the night. There were five of us and we had started at ten-thirty in the morning and by midafternoon when Myron Greene, the lawyer, knocked at the door, I was almost six hundred dollars ahead. I was living on the ninth floor of the Adelphi on East 46th and the only private place was the bathroom so we went in there. I closed the door, sat on the edge of the tub, and let Myron Greene have the one thing that resembled a chair. He lowered the lid and sat down, crossed his plump legs, took off his glasses, polished them with a silk tie that was fashionably wide, and breathed as he always did, a little asthmatically.

“You’re not answering your mail,” he said.

“I’m not even reading it.”

“You’re not answering your phone either.”

“The desk is taking messages. I pick them up once a day.”

“I left four messages yesterday. Urgent ones.”

“I forgot to check yesterday.”

“I had to drive all the way in from Darien,” Myron Greene said, and there was reproof and even petulance in his voice.

“Couldn’t it have waited till Monday?” I said. “I start answering the phone again on Monday.”

“No,” Myron Greene said, “it couldn’t wait. You have to be there on Monday.”

There must be a few places hotter than Washington in August. The Spice Islands, I suppose. Death Valley. Perhaps Chad down around Bokoro. The Washington Post that I read in the nonair-conditioned taxi that bore me from National Airport to the Madison had a small feature on page one boasting about how yesterday had been the hottest August day on record and that today should prove even hotter than that.

Congress had given up for a while and gone home the week before after accomplishing neither more nor less than usual. It wasn’t an election year, not that it mattered, and home — wherever it was, even Scottsdale, Arizona — was probably cooler than Washington. The Capital’s two major attractions, the Cherry Blossom Festival and the annual riot, had come and gone, the first in April, the second in July. So with Congress adjourned, the lobbyists on vacation, and even the tourists skittish of sunstroke, the lobby of the Madison was virtually deserted except for a couple of bored bellhops who looked as though they were seriously considering another profession.

The clerk at the reservation desk seemed delighted to have something to do when I asked if there was a reservation for Philip St. Ives. There was and I sneezed at the abrupt change in temperature all the way up to the sixth floor where one of the bellhops fiddled with the air-conditioning controls while making some pertinent comments about the weather.

After he left, the richer by a dollar, I took out the envelope that Myron Greene had given me Saturday and checked a name and a phone number. I dialed the number and when the operator’s voice said, “Coulter Museum,” I said, “Mrs. Frances Wingo, please.” After the operator there was only one secretary to go through. Then the next voice said, “This is Frances Wingo, Mr. St. Ives. I’ve been expecting your call.” It was a good telephone voice for a woman, a shade above contralto with a confident, penetrating quality which convinced me that no one ever called her Frannie.

“Myron Greene mentioned a meeting,” I said. “But he didn’t mention the time.”

“One o’clock. For lunch, if that’s convenient.”

“It is. Where?”

“Here at the museum. There’ll be the two of us and the three-man executive committee. Any cab driver will know where it is.”

“At one o’clock then,” I said.

“At one,” she said.

After we hung up I read through Myron Greene’s three-page memorandum again, but there was nothing in it that I had missed from previous readings. I had little else to do for the next 45 minutes so I took out my wallet and counted the money. There was a trifle more than $400. I had emerged at 3 A.M. Sunday from the poker session the winner of approximately $500 which was around $500 better than usual. If my mental tally was correct, I was nearly $35 ahead of the game, which had been running now for a little more than three years. My uncanny skill as a card player still seemed no viable substitute for industriousness, thrift, and pluck — character traits that somehow had eluded me over the years.

Because there was still nothing to do and time to waste I went into the bathroom, admired the lime green fixtures, brushed my teeth, and inspected my gums which were receding, a dentist had recently told me, at a normally healthy pace. I wondered what that was: a centimeter a year? Less? Probably more. A little depressed by my inspection and not at all confident that the Coulter Museum served a preluncheon drink, I went down to the lobby and into the bar and ordered a martini. It was half-past noon, but the bar was barely a fourth full. Only the truly thirsty seemed willing to brave the Capital’s noonday sun.

I knew two of the three men who stood at the small bar at the far end of the dining room. The tall, fragile one with the salt and pepper forelock that kept flopping down into his melancholy eyes was Senator Augustus Kehoel (pronounced “curl” for some reason) of Ohio, who was the delight of the political cartoonists. They always made him look like a grief-stricken sheep dog. At twenty-four and just out of the World War II army with something of a hero’s record, he had married into a car-wax fortune and over the years had spent goodly chunks of it getting himself elected to the state legislature, the U.S. House of Representatives, and finally to the Senate. It was as high as he would ever go although he once had hinted to me of some yearning to be vice-president, which only demonstrated that he was a reasonable man of limited ambition.

Next to him, with a carefully manicured hand in firm control of a double martini, was Lawrence Ignatius Teague, president of the million-member Aluminum Workers of America (AFL–CIO), and pink of cheek and white of hair. I wondered if he still used a blue rinse. During an internal union scrap five or six years before, one of his dissident staff members had sneaked us both into Teague’s suite at the Waldorf, ushered me into a bathroom, and grimly displayed a bottle of blue rinse that he swore the labor leader used faithfully, but I didn’t think it was anything to hang a man for.

“You know Senator Kehoel,” Mrs. Wingo said.

“Senator.”

“Good to see you, Phil,” he said, and we shook hands.

“And Lawrence Teague.”

“Hello, Larry.”

“Wonderful to see you, Phil,” he said, putting his glass down and grabbing my right hand with both of his. “Wonderful.” It really wasn’t, but this was called the Teague touch and I suppose it had helped him to stay in office for more than two decades at sixty thousand a year plus an unlimited expense account. For all I knew, he was worth it.

I told him that I thought it was wonderful, too, and then turned to the third man at the bar who stood quietly, a seemingly untouched drink at his elbow, and separated by far more than space from the senator and the union president. Only his green eyes moved as I turned to him. They settled first on my face, then traveled down to take in and assess my tie, jacket, trousers, and shoes, and finally rose again to fix themselves on a spot an inch or so above my left eyebrow. Somehow I resisted the impulse to finger the spot to find out how deep the hole went.

“And the chairman of our executive committee,” Frances Wingo was saying, “Winfield Spencer. Mr. Spencer, Mr. St. Ives.”

When Spencer moved, he seemed to do so reluctantly, as if it cost him a great deal of effort. He extended his right hand and I accepted it. Although not at all keen on meaty handshakes, I did expect something more than I got from Winfield Spencer, who held his own hand perfectly still while I either pressed or massaged or fondled it, I’m still not quite sure which, but he didn’t seem to care much for whatever I was doing and neither did I, so I dropped it as soon as I could.

“Mr. Spencer,” I said.

“St. Ives,” he murmured, lowered his gaze, turned quickly, rested his elbows on the bar, and began a careful study of the labels on the bottles behind it.

Only Winfield Spencer’s name would cause you to look at him twice if you were interested in money and three times if you were concerned with power. Even in August he wore a three-piece gray worsted suit that could have been tailored this year or in 1939; it was that kind of material and that kind of cut. His hair was pewter gray and it looked as if he trimmed it himself, but had botched the job. He had no sideburns and the back of his neck was irregularly shaved an inch or so above a frayed white collar displaying a few threads that the manicure scissors had missed.

Over the years Spencer seemed to have created a face for himself that was at once both shy and forbidding. It was an ugly face, purposely ugly, I thought, because the mouth was always pursed, the forehead was always frowned, and the chin, a little small by some standards, was always thrust out in an aggressively unpleasant manner. The clip-on maroon bow tie that he wore beneath it didn’t help things any either.

I found it difficult to believe that Winfield Spencer had once shot down nine Messerschmitts for the Royal Canadian Air Force. I found it even more difficult to believe that he was either the fifth- or sixth-richest man in the nation.

The Spencer fortune had been founded in the 1850’s on Pennsylvania coal. It was augmented by Colorado gold and silver, Montana copper, some short-line railroads, and later by Texas, Oklahoma, and California oil, and much later by Utah uranium. It was now buttressed by refineries, a fleet of tankers, and a Washington bank whose deposits, including the considerable pension funds from Teague’s aluminum workers, had been used to buy into some of the nation’s most profitable businesses; and Spencer’s bank made sure that these businesses continued to be profitable by a complicated, almost unravelable tangle of interlocking directorates.

Just out of Princeton in 1939, Spencer had joined the Canadian air force in September and got nine of his own before he was shot down over the Channel in the late summer of 1942. He was invalided back to the States that fall because of injuries, some said, while others claimed that he was eased out because of psychological reasons.

Since then Spencer had devoted himself to anonymity, the family fortune, and art. It was art that had brought him and Amos Coulter together. In the early 1950’s a Matisse had been auctioned in London by Sotheby’s. Spencer’s agents had been instructed to buy it; Amos Coulter was on hand to do his own bidding. But Coulter’s new fortune proved no match for Spencer’s older and considerably larger bankroll. Spencer got the Matisse and when informed how high Amos Coulter had bid for it, he had had the picture crated and sent to Coulter without any notice, not even a card.

The two men subsequently became friends, or close acquaintances at any rate, since Spencer was said to have no friends. Coulter was one of the three dozen or so persons who had been invited to view the Spencer collection that was carefully housed and guarded in a private gallery built on his plantation near Warrenton, Virginia, and which supposedly contained the world’s finest collection of postimpressionists. But despite the fact that he had been as close to Amos Coulter as he had ever been to anyone, it still took three personal phone calls from the President himself before Winfield Spencer agreed to serve as chairman of the Coulter Museum’s executive committee.

Some of this went through my mind as I stood at the bar between the Senator and the labor leader and half listened as they gossiped about the state of the union, and some of it I looked up later. Frances Wingo now stood at Spencer’s left, talking to him in a low voice while he continued his study of the labels on the bottles behind the bar. When the bartender slid my drink over to me I turned to Senator Kehoel.

“Good session?” I asked.

“Rotten,” he said. “But considering what we now have in the White House it was better than I expected.”

“Give him time,” Teague said.

“Why?”

Teague patted a stray lock of silvery hair into place while he thought up an answer. “He has good people around him,” he said.

“So did Caesar,” the senator said.

“Think I have time for one more of these?” Teague said, looking sadly into his empty martini glass.

“I don’t know,” the senator said. “You’ll have to ask God.”

As if on cue, God, or Winfield Spencer, turned from Frances Wingo and said, “I think we should start.” He walked slowly over to the carefully set table and took the chair at its head, not waiting for Frances Wingo. I noticed that Spencer moved with a slight limp. Lawrence Teague bustled over to Mrs. Wingo and held her chair which was on Spencer’s left. I sat next to her and the senator and Teague sat across from us.

Lunch, for four of us at least, was ordinary but eatable: grilled double-cut lamb chops, fresh peas, new potatoes, and salad. The bartender, who doubled as waiter, served it skillfully enough, but seemed to wince when he got around to Spencer whose plate contained two hard-boiled eggs and six soda crackers which he grimly washed down with a glass of buttermilk.

There was little conversation during the meal. Spencer ate slowly and when finished he brushed a few cracker crumbs from his vest and tapped a forefinger softly on the tablecloth. I assumed that he was calling the meeting to order. He was.

“When the coffee is served, we’ll begin,” he said, staring into his now empty plate. The dishes were cleared away, the coffee was promptly served, and I lit a cigarette. No one else smoked.

Spencer looked up from his plate and his green eyes seemed to fasten on some imaginary guest at the end of the table. From the tone of Spencer’s voice, the imaginary guest was apparently none too bright. “The museum suffered a theft on Friday night. That is the reason for this meeting. Mrs. Wingo will now give us a detailed report. Do not ask questions until she is finished.” With that he dropped his eyes back to the spot where his plate containing the two hard-boiled eggs and six soda crackers had rested. He didn’t look up until Frances Wingo stopped talking. She had quite a bit to say and she said it well.

“I’ll start at the beginning,” she said. “As all of you know, with the possible exception of Mr. St. Ives, we consider ourselves extremely fortunate to have secured what is known as the Pan-African collection. In truth it is somewhat misnamed because all of it comes from south of the Sahara, but even so it represents the finest collection of black African art ever assembled. Most of the pieces are considered national treasures and have never before been exhibited outside their respective countries. I will not attempt to catalogue all of the pieces that are of extreme value, or even priceless because of their historical worth, but only point out that none of them exceeds the shield of Komporeen in beauty, historical significance, value, and, unfortunately, political importance. The shield, of course, was stolen last Friday night.”

She paused for a sip of water. “The shield of Komporeen was first mentioned by an anonymous Portuguese pilot who wrote of it in his account of his explorations of the west coast of Africa in 1539. He described it as hanging behind the throne of the Odo, or natural ruler of Komporeen, and noted that it was, as he wrote, ‘the subject of much veneration.’ Komporeen, of course, is the former name for what is now known as the Republic of Jandola, which secured its independence from the British in 1958. It was not until the 1870’s that the shield of Komporeen was mentioned again. Sir William Cranville wrote a detailed description of it in what came to be known as the Cranville Report. He mistakenly described the shield as being of ‘obvious Portuguese derivation, but nevertheless of exquisite workmanship.’ Another near quote was when he wrote that ‘the native leaders insist that it portrays their history from ancient times, but I regard this as highly improbable.’”

Once again Frances Wingo sipped some water. “In 1910,” she went on, “the first detailed report on the shield was contained in a monograph privately published in London by Jonathon Twill, the archeologist. He described it as being cast by the ‘lost wax’ method which was first used by the people of the Nile. He measured and weighed the shield and found it to weigh 68 pounds and to measure 39 inches in diameter. He also noted that it was constantly guarded and for the first time reported its real significance.

“Winston wrote that the Komporeeneans believed that whoever possessed the shield was empowered to rule the nation. He also mentioned that possession of the shield had been the cause of what he described as ‘innumerable intertribal wars.’

“In the late 1940’s a special British commission was appointed to make a thorough investigation of the shield of Komporeen. Although it was unable to interpret the meaning of the bas-relief figures which stem from its center in a series of ever-widening concentric circles, it was able to establish the approximate age. The shield of Komporeen was judged to have been cast in the ninth century. As such, it is far older than the bronzes and brasses of Ife and Benin in Nigeria.

“The shield of Komporeen was on display in the Jandolaean National Museum in Brefu, the second-largest city in the republic. It was only with the greatest reluctance that the Jandolaean government agreed to permit the shield to become part of the Pan-African Exhibition. They did so, frankly, because of their intense feeling of nationalism which made them want to boast, understandably enough, I suppose, of their past civilization which was capable of producing such a magnificent work of art at a time when Europe was emerging from its dark ages.”

Again she paused, sipped some more water, and looked at Spencer. “I hope I’m not taking too much time,” she said.

“Go on,” Spencer said.

“The Pan-African Exhibit has now been on tour for nearly a year. During this time a revolution has broken out in Jandola, as I’m sure you know. Both the Federal government of Jandola and the breakaway province which has adopted the ancient name of Komporeen claim the shield as their own. Unfortunately, the shield has become a primary symbol in the civil war and both sides attach an extraordinary amount of significance to its possession. The U.S. has no diplomatic relations with the breakaway nation of Komporeen. Jandola, for the moment, is content to let the shield remain in the U.S. for obvious political and propaganda purposes. It was my unpleasant task to inform their embassy that it had been stolen. I might add that the reverberations from their embassy, as well as from our State Department, can only be described as severe.

“The theft of the shield was discovered at twelve twenty-five Friday morning. The Metropolitan Police were immediately notified as was I. Shortly thereafter I called Mr. Spencer and then the Jandolaean Embassy. Because of the shield’s unique political significance, it was agreed that news of the theft would not be released. After investigating, the police concluded that the theft was an inside job. You are aware that the museum contains the most sophisticated electronic warning and alarm devices available. Mr. Amos Coulter designed some of them himself. A theft by forced entry is virtually impossible. To bear out the inside-job theory one of the guards assigned to the Pan-African Exhibition failed to report to work the following afternoon. His name is John Sackett and police have been unable to locate him. He has been employed by the museum for nearly eight months.”

Frances Wingo needed another sip of water. “Last Friday, at 11:15 in the morning, I received a call from a man who seemed to be speaking with a voice that he artificially muffled. He informed me that the shield would be returned in exchange for the sum of $250,000. He then insisted that Mr. St. Ives here was to serve as the intermediary, or go-between. He gave me the name of Mr. St. Ives’ attorney in New York, said that more details would be forthcoming, and then hung up. I immediately called the police, told them what had happened, and then called Mr. Spencer. He authorized me to call Mr. Myron Greene who is Mr. St. Ives’ attorney and to arrange this meeting of the executive committee and Mr. St. Ives. I have heard no more from the man who demanded the $250,000.”

She stopped again and took another sip of water. I expected her to go on, but she remained silent and the silence lasted almost thirty seconds until Spencer spoke.

“I recommend that we pay the $250,000 — plus Mr. St. Ives’ fee which is, I’m informed, ten percent.” He addressed his remarks once again to the imaginary guest at the end of the table.

“We are responsible, I suppose,” Senator Kehoel said.

“What about insurance?” Teague said.

“We’re covered,” Spencer said.

“So it’s all right then,” Teague said.

It was the wrong thing to say. Spencer shifted his green gaze from the imaginary guest to Teague. “No,” he said, “it is not all right. This museum has suffered the theft of a priceless, irreplaceable work of art, one that threatens to cause an international incident. Furthermore, the museum’s reputation for security has been damaged, perhaps irreparably. No, Mr. Teague, it is not all right.”

Senator Kehoel hurried to say something while the flush rose in Teague’s face. “Perhaps we should first determine whether Mr. St. Ives is willing to serve as intermediary. Are you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose I am.”

“And to help apprehend the thieves?” Spencer asked.

“I’m afraid that’s not my job,” I said.

“Twenty-five thousand dollars should buy something more than a messenger boy,” Spencer said.

“It does,” I said. “It buys you a link to the shield, something you don’t have right now. All you’ve got is a phone call from a muffled voice and you really don’t know if it’s for real or a hoax. But you’ve already made your decision: you’ve decided that you want the shield returned more than you want the thieves caught and you’re willing to pay a quarter of a million dollars for what you want. Of course, what you’d really like is to get the shield back and the thieves caught at the same time. It’s an understandable reaction. Just about everyone would have it, but it doesn’t work that way.”

Spencer was once more staring at the spot an inch or so above my left eyebrow. “How does it work, Mr. St. Ives?” he said.

“You pay me twenty-five thousand dollars to make sure that you don’t pay a quarter of a million for nothing. It’s happened before, of course, especially in kidnaping cases where the ransom has been paid and the kidnap victim has been killed. The go-between business is really a matter of trust. You trust me with a quarter of a million in cash because you believe I won’t part with it until I’m convinced that I can get the shield back. The thieves trust me because they’re convinced that they won’t wind up with a suitcase full of cut-up newspaper and a couple of hundred cops popping up from behind the bushes. And the cops trust me because they know that I’ll give them every scrap of information about the thieves that I get — once the shield is returned. And finally, the twenty-five thousand pays me for whatever risk I take. There’s always the chance that I’ll wind up with a bullet in my back, you with nothing, and the thieves with a quarter of a million and an African shield that they can hang up in the living room next to the Playboy calendar.”

“And that’s as far as your services go?” Frances Wingo said.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s as far as they go and I think it’s far enough considering the risk involved. If what you think you need is a little derring-do, someone who’ll meet the thieves at the old mill at midnight, whip out his Smith & Wesson, and cart them, a 50-pound suitcase full of money, and a 68-pound shield down to the nearest precinct station, then I’m not a candidate for the job. I’m not even a dark horse.”

“That could be the reason that the thieves insist that you serve as go-between, Mr. St. Ives,” Spencer said, still fascinated by the spot on my forehead. “You must have something of a reputation for caution.”

“Some might call it cowardice,” I said.

“Yes,” Spencer said, “I suppose that some might.” He shifted his gaze from my forehead to the imaginary guest at the end of the table. “I recommend that we engage Mr. St. Ives to carry out the negotiations for the return of the shield. Senator?”

Senator Kehoel nodded. “I agree.”

“Mr. Teague?” Spencer said.

“He has my vote,” Teague said.

“Then it’s agreed,” Spencer said. “You will accept the assignment, Mr. St. Ives?”

“Yes,” I said, “provided you accept the conditions I’ve mentioned.”

“They are acceptable,” Spencer said. “Is a deposit or a retainer the usual form?”

“One half,” I said.

“Will you see to it, Mrs. Wingo?” he said.

“Of course,” she said.

“Now that you’re the museum’s official go-between,” Spencer said, “what will be your first move?”

“I’ll go back to New York and wait for someone to call or write me a letter or send a telegram.”

“You won’t remain here in Washington?”

“When whoever stole the shield asked for me, they knew that I lived in New York, so I assume that’s where they’ll get in touch with me.”

“You think the exchange will be made there, Phil?” Teague said.

“It could be,” I said. “There or here or Kansas City or Miami. They might be moving around.”

Spencer got up slowly from the table. “You’ll keep us informed through Mrs. Wingo,” he said.

“Yes.”

As the rest of us began to rise the bartender-waiter hurried over with a telephone. “It’s for you, Mrs. Wingo,” he said. “Your secretary says it’s important.” She nodded and he plugged the phone into a jack underneath the table.

After she said hello she said, “Yes, Lieutenant,” and then she listened for several moments. Finally she said, “I’m sorry to hear that, but thank you for calling.” She hung up the phone and the waiter unplugged it and took it away.

“That was Lieutenant Demeter of the Metropolitan Police Robbery Squad,” she said. “Two children playing in Rock Creek Park discovered the body of a dead man. He’d been shot. He was identified as John Sackett, the guard who didn’t show up for work Friday morning.”

When the young negro secretary with the pleasant smile brought the machine-signed check in, Frances Wingo merely glanced at it and then pushed it across her desk to me with the eraser of the unsharpened yellow pencil that she kept bouncing against the inlaid wood.

“You may still back out, right?” she said as I put the check away in my wallet.

“I’ve been thinking about it.”

“Because of what happened to the guard?”

“It did give me a new perspective.”

“The obvious one?”

“Obvious to me anyway.”

“You mean whoever killed the guard stole the shield?”

“That’s one.”

“What’s two?”

“That it was all a carefully planned operation which suggests professionals.”

Frances Wingo tapped the eraser some more. “They had three months to work it out.”

“Why three months?”

“Because that’s when we first knew that we were going to get the exhibition. Up until then, we weren’t sure.”

“And you announced it then?”

“Yes,” she said. “It made quite a nice splash.”

“Did the shield get more publicity or attention than any other piece?”

“The Jandolaean Embassy saw to that.”

“Then whoever stole it had three whole months to find themselves an accomplice,” I said. “You can do a lot of persuading in three months.”

Frances Wingo quit tapping the pencil and I almost thanked her. “Why do you think they killed the guard — provided they killed him?” she said.

I shrugged. “Probably to save money and to keep him from talking. Or maybe he planned the whole thing himself and someone got greedy, but that seems a little farfetched.”

“But the murder hasn’t yet changed your mind?”

“Not yet.”

“You mean it could later?”

“At any time.”

Frances Wingo didn’t like that so she started tapping the eraser on her desk again. “You didn’t mention that before.”

“An oversight,” I said.

“I thought that’s what you were being paid for, to take such risks.”

“No. You’re paying me to get the shield back, not to run risks. My principal problem is to arrange the transaction so that the risks are minimized. If I find that I can’t do that, then I’ll back out.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “You’re not exactly the boy adventurer, are you?”

“Not exactly,” I said, but the topic was beginning to bore me so I asked her a question. “What do I do if I suddenly find that I need a quarter of a million dollars in relatively small bills at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon in Pittsburgh?”

She didn’t hesitate or stop tapping the eraser. “You call me,” she said. “Mr. Spencer will either arrange for a corresponding bank to supply the money or it will be flown to you by private plane from Washington.”

“To wherever I need it?”

“To wherever you need it. Anything else?”

“A couple of things. If you get any more calls from the man with the muffled voice, tell him he can reach me at the Madison until nine in the morning; after that I’ll be at my place in New York.” I gave her the number and she stopped tapping the pencil long enough to write it down on a buff-colored pad.

“All right,” she said. “What else?”

“The last item. If you’re free this evening, you might drop by the Madison and I’ll buy you a drink.”

She leaned back in her chair and looked at me speculatively. This time I was no longer a slightly audacious water color; I was a forgery trying to pass as an old master and not a very good forgery at that.

“Don’t you think my husband might object, Mr. St. Ives?”

“No,” I said, “because I don’t think you’re married, at least not any more.”

“Why not?”

“You just don’t look married.”

She rose then and there was nothing else for me to do but rise with her. “If you need any more information about the shield, Mr. St. Ives, please feel free to call at any time.”

“If you change your mind, the offer for the drink still stands,” I said.

She looked down at her desk, picked up the yellow pencil, and began to tap the eraser against the wood. “Thank you, but I don’t think so.”

At the door I paused and looked back. I don’t know why I bothered because I really didn’t care whether I bought her a drink. “But you’re not married, are you?”

“No, Mr. St. Ives,” she said, “I’m not. Not any more. My husband died in an auto accident four weeks ago.”

I was surprised that it was a woman’s voice. She called a little before six, just after I had finished a second bottle of beer and an editorial in The Washington Star that took an extremely dim view of a Russian reply to a State Department note protesting the treatment of a couple of American tourists in Moscow. Not only didn’t The Star much care for the tone of the Russian note, but it also seemed to feel that the two tourists would have done far better to have spent their vacations at Grand Canyon or Rehoboth Beach.

“Would you please listen carefully to what I say, Mr. St. Ives?” the woman said, and it sounded as if she were reading the words and wasn’t at all used to it.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“You will fly back to New York tomorrow morning and stay in your room at the Adelphi Hotel until six o’clock in the evening. If you have not received a phone call by then, you can leave. If you are not called on Tuesday, then on Wednesday, at 11 o’clock in the morning, you will go to the first phone booth on the left in the lobby of the Eubanks Hotel on East 33rd. At exactly 11 o’clock you will be called. Do you want me to repeat it?”

“No,” I said. “I understand.”

There were no good-bys and when she hung up I went back to my chair and newspaper and beer, but I could no longer get interested in the danger of air pollution and the beer seemed flat. I tried to remember how many calls there had been during the last four years from nervous men in phone booths who had something that they wanted me to buy back for the persons from whom they had stolen it. Sometimes they whispered, sometimes they talked through their handkerchiefs, and a few had even attempted foreign accents. Each of them had his own complicated set of instructions, sometimes so complicated that they probably bordered on paranoia. Each of the schemes had begun as somebody’s daydream and each was wrapped in a curious childlike quality of “let’s pretend.” But if they seemed the product of a child’s fantasy, they invariably were enveloped in the unemotional and unpredictable cruelty that children often have.

My trade had one compensation, however, and I took it out of my wallet and admired it briefly. Then, tired of playing at Silas Marner, I put the check back, walked over to the phone, and dialed a number. When it stopped ringing I asked for Lieutenant Demeter. He came on briskly, barking “Robbery Squad, Lieutenant Demeter,” loudly enough for the phone to crackle.

“This is St. Ives. They just called. It was a woman.”

“Go on,” he said.

“They want me to go back to New York and wait for them to call. If they don’t call me at my place tomorrow, they’ll call me at a booth in a hotel on Wednesday.”

“How did she sound?”

“Like she was reading it.”

“She say anything about money?”

“No.”

Demeter sighed. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll get you some company tomorrow.”

“Who?”

“They’ll be wearing badges with New York Police Department on them. Or the FBI if you want. It looks like it’s interstate now.”

“No,” I said.

“What do you mean no?”

“Just what it usually means. I’ve been hired to buy back the shield. If I start moving around with cops or FBI agents in tow, there won’t be any buy. When I get the shield back you can have everything I’ve learned and everything I’ve guessed and between now and then I’ll keep you filled in, but until I get the shield back I work alone. If that doesn’t fit in with your plans, the museum will have to find another go-between.”

“That’s probably a damned good idea,” Demeter said. “I’d be all for it if the other side would, although I hear that they won’t so it looks like we’re stuck with you.”

“Get unstuck,” I said.

“What’d you say?”

“I said make up your mind.”

He was silent for a moment. “All right, St. Ives, we’ll go along. But if you’re interested in what I think, which you’re probably not, I think you’re making a mistake. The reason I think you’re making a mistake is because whoever you’re dealing with have already killed one guy. They could round it out to a couple and they’d still be way ahead after they got the money.”

“But not until after they got it,” I said.

“I hope you’re as bright as you think you are. I hope you’re even half as bright.”

“Not bright, careful.”

“Careful,” he said. “I almost forgot about that.”

“Anything else?”

“Just one item.”

“What?”

“The spade’s wife.”

“What about her?”

“She won’t be giving us any more information about Sackett.”

“Why?”

“She hung herself about an hour ago,” Demeter said, and banged his phone down in my ear.

Someday, I fear, I shall live in a house in the suburbs with crab grass that I can mow, snow that I can shovel, tax assessments that I can rail against, and a next-door neighbor’s wife who will jump into bed of an afternoon, forty-five minutes before she has to pick up the kids at school. But all of this, like my death, is some time off, and though I view both events with equal trepidation, I meanwhile shall continue to live in the disintegrating inner core of the city and make the most of the privacy it affords, the services that it offers, and the rude wit that can be enjoyed while trying to cross almost any street against the red light. “Whassamattah, shithead, colahblind or sumpthin?” Stimulating.

For nearly three years home had been the Adelphi, a medium-sized, medium-priced residential hotel that catered exclusively to anyone who could scrape up the monthly rent. I had what was known as a de luxe suite which meant that they installed a Pullman kitchen sometime in the 1950’s and the rent had been increased by fifty percent. In addition to daily maid service, the Adelphi offered a restaurant and bar that were steadfastly ignored by all the printed guides to New York, a cigar stand that was always running out of stamps, and a switchboard answering service which got the messages right at least a third of the time. Two aging bellhops, one during the day and the other from four till midnight, ran a small book along with whatever errands the guests might have in mind.

After the shuttle from Washington finally quit circling LaGuardia and the pilot brought the plane in only forty-five minutes late, I took a cab to the Adelphi. The phone rang while I was unpacking and when I answered it, Myron Greene wanted to know what had happened.

“I got the job,” I said.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“They paid me half in advance.”

“Go on.”

“The Washington cops figure that it was an inside job and the inside man’s already been killed. His wife hung herself. They were both heroin addicts. Or so the Washington cops say.”

“Jesus!” Myron Greene said.

“It gets better,” I said. “You’ll like the next part.”

“Just tell what happened.”

“Well, I got a call from a woman who said she’s representing the thieves. Somebody’s supposed to call me here in New York either today or tomorrow. Then there was Conception Mbwato, a representative of Komporeen which, he says, is the rightful owner of the shield. He offered me fifty thousand to hand the shield over to him, once I get it back. I turned him down — reluctantly, I might add — and he promised to steal it — either from me or from whoever’s got it now. And I asked Frances Wingo to have a drink, but she refused.”

“You’d better mail me the check,” Myron Greene said, “and I’ll have Spivack deposit it for you.”

“If they have any stamps,” I said.

“Who?”

“The cigar stand.”

“You’re dissembling again,” Myron Greene said. “You always do that when you’re nervous.”

“I’ll take something for it. The cigar stand might have something along with the stamps.”

“What do you do now?”

“I wait for the phone to ring.”

“What did the Washington police say?”

“That I make too much money.”

“Do they think that whoever stole it were professionals?”

“I don’t think I even asked,” I said. “It seemed obvious that they were. They killed the guard which means two things to me. One, they’re either professionals or gifted amateurs, and two, you didn’t ask for enough money.”

“It’s not too late for that in view of subsequent developments,” Myron Greene said. “I can probably work something out.”

“Do that.”

“What are your plans now?”

“As I said, I wait for the phone to ring. Then I might try to find out if anybody knows anything. The thieves know who I am. That means that they might know somebody whom I know. And since they’re the types who go around shooting people in the back of the head, perhaps I should find out.”

Myron Greene wheezed for a moment. “It might not be a bad idea,” he said finally. “As long as it doesn’t disrupt the negotiations.”

“If I find out that they’re the kind who don’t leave any witnesses around at all, there won’t be any negotiations.”

“You have to remember that you’ve already committed yourself.”

“Not to get killed,” I said.

“Of course not. I didn’t mean that.”

“You mean you need $2,500?”

“No, damn it, I don’t need $2,500 and if you think my fee is too high, I’ll forget about it.”

“Calm down, Myron. Remember what excitement does to your asthma.”

“Screw my asthma, St. Ives.” Myron Greene never called me St. Ives unless he was upset.

“What’s bothering you?” I said.

“I received a call this morning from Washington.”

“From Frances Wingo?”

“No. From the State Department.”

“What do they want?”

“They, or rather an assistant under-secretary for African Affairs, a Mr. Littman Cox, wants Jandola to get that shield back. This Mr. Cox — I think he said he was an assistant undersecretary, whatever that is — wanted to know if the State Department could be of any assistance.”

“How?” I said.

“That’s what I asked him. He said that he could bring in the FBI.”

“What did you tell him, Myron?” I said.

“Don’t get that tone in your voice, St. Ives,” he said. “I told him that it would be totally unnecessary and that we preferred to work alone and that if he wanted to be of assistance to us, he could make sure that the FBI stayed out of the case until the transaction was completed.”

I decided that Myron Greene liked having the State Department call him. Even more, he liked turning them down and getting himself into what he considered to be the thick of things and referring to us and we. “What else did the assistant under-secretary of State for African Affairs have to say after you said no?”

“Well, to be frank, he seemed upset. He kept telling me that I was in no position to assess the international significance of the shield and that its return was of what he called — I even wrote it down here — ‘paramount salience to the future relations between Jandola and the United States.’ He sounded like a prick.”

“All that means is that State is cozying up to the British and doesn’t want either France or Germany to start giving aid to Komporeen.”

“How do you know that?” Myron Greene said.

“Conception Mbwato told me.”

“I see,” Myron Greene said, and from the tone of his voice I could tell that he didn’t see at all, but the story was too long to tell. “Anyway,” he said, “I turned him down and told him that if he brought the FBI in, we would back out.”

“What did he say when you said that?”

“He wanted to know about your professional competence and integrity.”

“You assured him that they are of the highest order, of course.”

“Of course. I also pressed him about the use of the FBI; he promised me that they would not be called in. You know something?”

“What?”

“Perhaps I should have gone into the diplomatic service instead of law — especially if Cox is typical of what State has working for it.”

“You could have made a great contribution,” I said with as much sincerity as I could muster.

“I might’ve at that,” Myron Greene said. “Keep me informed, Philip.”

“Every step of the way.”

When he hung up I called down to the desk and asked Eddie, the day bellhop, to bring me up a steak sandwich and a glass of milk.

“Steak’s not too good today,” he said.

“How’s the liverwurst?”

“Better.”

“Make it a liverwurst.”

While I waited for him, I endorsed the check, put it in an envelope, and addressed it to Myron Greene. When Eddie arrived with the sandwich, I paid him, gave him two dollars to put on a horse I’d picked on the plane, and a letter to mail.

“They’re out of six-cent stamps at the cigar stand again,” he said. “But I got some.”

“How much?”

“Dime each?”

“I’ll buy one,” I said, and handed him a dime. It’s what I’ve always liked about New York. Neighborly.

I ate the sandwich and spent the rest of the afternoon waiting for the phone to ring and reading a paperback novel that I’d picked up in the Washington airport. It was about a CIA man who wandered around Red China for a couple of years doing good works like poisoning the water supply.

By six o’clock the phone hadn’t rung so I waited until six-fifteen and then dialed a number. A man’s voice said, “A to Z Garage.”

“Parisi there?”

“Who?”

“Parisi,” I said slowly, pronouncing each syllable with care. “Johnny Parisi.”

“Nobody here by that name.”

“Just tell him it’s Philip St. Ives.”

“St. what?”

“Ives,” I said. “You want me to spell it?”

“Lemme see.”

I waited a while and then Parisi came on the phone with, “Hello, Lucky.”

“I like your new secretary.”

“You mean Joey. He’s something, isn’t he?”

“Something’s as good a description as any.”

“By the way, when I got home last Saturday from your place, I found out I really took a bath. I dropped nearly nine hundred bucks and most of it to Ogden.”

“He needs it. His daughter’s starting to college next month.”

“Like shit he needs it. With what he knocks down he could send a dozen of them to college and never miss it.”

“Nobody’s that rich.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Parisi said. “It ain’t like when you and me were going to college. I don’t understand these kids today, always raising hell and trying to take over the schools.”

“They’re different,” I said.

“Maybe they ought to have to work their way through like we did,” Parisi said, apparently convinced that missing six set shots in a row qualified as work.

“You free for dinner tonight?” I said.

“I’ve got to see a guy downtown about ten.”

“Come over around eight and I’ll buy you a steak.”

“Dominic’s?” he said.

I sighed. Dominic’s meant a forty-dollar tab at least. “Dominic’s.”

“Okay,” Parisi said. “At eight.” I started to say good-by, but he said, “You’re working again, aren’t you?”

“I’m working.”

“I figured as much,” he said, and hung up.

At eleven o’clock the next morning I was standing in a musty phone booth in the lobby of the Eubanks Hotel, a seedy, almost furtive establishment that catered in an embarrassed kind of way to the old who, thirty years or so before, had believed those insurance-company advertisements which had lied about how they could retire comfortably on $150 a month.

Except for a middle-aged room clerk behind the desk who seemed to be suffering from a vile hangover, the only occupant of the lobby was a thin, bald oldster with milky blue eyes who looked to be in his seventies. He struggled out of the depths of a battered couch that probably was called a davenport when it was new and hobbled carefully over to the booth.

“You going to be in there long, son?” he asked. “I gotta make a call and the other phone’s not working. I gotta call my doctor about some medicine for my sciatica. It hit last night right about—”

The phone rang and I picked it up and said hello, closing the door of the booth as I nodded pleasantly at the old man who was having trouble with his sciatica, or who just wanted somebody to talk to.

“Mr. St. Ives?” It was a man’s voice this time, but it seemed fuzzy and blurred, as if he were speaking through a mouthful of wet cotton.

“Yes.”

“The old man who just spoke to you has been paid five dollars to hand you an envelope. In the envelope are instructions. If you follow them exactly, you’ll get the shield back.” There was a click and the phone went dead.

I turned in the booth and looked at the old man, who was grinning at me and nodding happily. It could have been the most fun he had had since the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago. I put the phone on its hook, opened the door, and stepped out of the booth.

“You the fella?” the old man said.

“If you’ve got an envelope, I am.”

“They gave me five bucks just to hold it till you got here.”

“Who gave you five bucks?”

“Kids,” he said. “A couple of hippies with long hair and beads. I was sitting here last night watching Lucy when they came in and I figured to myself that they were a little far uptown. But they just looked around and saw me, wasn’t nobody else, so they come over and say they’re going to lay five bucks on me to give an envelope to a gent who’ll be in the phone booth at eleven o’clock this morning. So I says, ‘Let’s see the five bucks,’ and they say okay and give me the five and the envelope. I ain’t opened it neither. You with the FBI?”

“No.”

“CIA maybe?”

I didn’t want to disappoint him. “Treasury,” I said.

“T-man, huh?” he said, and looked around the lobby to make sure that nobody was listening. The only one who could have been was the room clerk, who sat behind the desk with his head in his hands, wishing that the world would end.

“You got the envelope?” I said.

“What’s it worth to you?”

“Another five. I’d make it more, but they’re cracking down in Washington.”

“New administration, huh?”

“Right.”

He reached into the inside pocket of a shapeless gray coat and brought out an envelope. I reached for it, but he moved his hand away. “You said something about five bucks.”

“You’re right again.” I took out my wallet, found a five, and handed it to him. He handed me the envelope.

“I never opened it,” he said. “Can’t say I didn’t think about it, but I never opened it.”

“I’ll mention that to the chief,” I said.

“Aw, shit,” the old man said, turned, and hobbled back to his place on the sofa which was two feet from a television set that crackled happily away with lots of squeals and laughter.

The tall black young man who leaned casually against the front fender of the Chrysler that was illegally parked in front of the George Building wasn’t trying to be inconspicuous. Not with a lemon-colored suit and a shirt the shade of a ripe tangerine. When it came to the selection of a tie, he had deserted the citrus family for neckwear that had the luster and sheen of dark purple grapes. The oyster-white raincoat that was draped over his right forearm also helped to set him apart from the rest of the pedestrians, most of them in shirt sleeves. And then, too, it hadn’t rained in New York for almost three weeks.

I gave him only a glance as I came out of the building and turned left, headed for a bar or a drugstore and a phone book to look up the number and address of Frank Spellacy. I had taken just five steps when he caught up with me on the left, the raincoat still draped over his right forearm.

“Mr. St. Ives?”

I stopped and turned. “Yes.”

“Mr. Mbwato was wondering whether he could give you a lift.” He had a voice similar to Mbwato’s, though not nearly so deep. It was a nice tenor with all of the African edges smoothed away and if I had closed my eyes, it could have been David Niven asking, ever so politely, whether I could possibly use a ride.

“Not today, thanks,” I said, and started to turn away but stopped when the oyster-white raincoat dug into my side with something that could have been a gun or a pen or even an unusually stiff forefinger. I decided that it was a gun.

“Come on,” I said. “This is ridiculous.”

“Isn’t it just?” the tall young man said, and smiled gently. “But you see, I have my instructions and when I don’t follow them through to completion, Mr. Mbwato becomes most upset.”

“That’s a gun under your coat, not just your finger?”

“I’m afraid it’s a gun, Mr. St. Ives.”

“I could yell. For a cop.”

“There is none to hear.”

“I could just yell.”

He smiled again and looked to be genuinely amused. “What response do you think your fellow New Yorkers would make? A sidelong glance? A derisive smile? Come now, Mr. St. Ives.”

“I could run.”

“Then I would surely shoot you. Probably in the leg,” he added thoughtfully.

“All right,” I said. “Where’s Mbwato?”

“Just down the street. We had quite some difficulty in finding a place to park.”

I turned and the young black man turned with me, his raincoat-covered arm still aimed at my left kidney. “How did you know I was here?”

“In the George Building? We observed you going in; we assumed that you would be coming out.”

“You followed me from the hotel then?”

“Yes, Mr. St. Ives, we did.”

The car was an appropriately black seven-passenger Cadillac that, according to the license number, had been rented for the occasion. The tall young man opened the rear door for me and I climbed in. Mbwato was seated in the back, making the car look smaller than it was, and another black man was behind the wheel. The one with the raincoat walked around the car and got in beside the driver.

“Mr. St. Ives,” Mbwato said in his bass voice which sounded as though it had started somewhere down near the subway. “What a distinct pleasure to see you again. Where can we drop you?”

“My hotel would be nice.”

“Of course. Mr. St. Ives’ hotel,” he said to the driver. Mbwato, really dwarfing the rear of the Cadillac, wore a different suit this time, a dark green one with brass buttons on its vest, a white shirt with a widespread collar and a paisley tie. Everything fitted admirably and for all I knew he may have been patronizing Myron Greene’s tailor.

“Why?” I said.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Why the gunpoint invitation?”

“Gunpoint?” he said. “There was no gun.”

“Your friend in the front seat said there was.”

Mbwato chuckled and sounded like an amused bullfrog. “Did Mr. Ulado tell you that he had a gun?”

“He did.”

Mr. Ulado turned in his seat and smiled at me. He held up a fountain pen and winked. “This was the gun, Mr. St. Ives. I apologize for my method of persuasion, but Mr. Mbwato did so much wish to have this chat with you.”

“It’s really my fault,” Mbwato said. “I urged Mr. Ulado to make the invitation as convincing as possible. He must have been carried away.”

“He did fine,” I said, and leaned back in the seat and stared out at the traffic. We rode in silence for a while and when I turned I saw that Mr. Ulado was gazing straight ahead while Mbwato was staring out of his window at whatever there was to see at 38th Street and Third Avenue. “The persons who have the shield have been in touch with you by now, I presume,” he said, still looking out of the window.

“Yes.”

“I scarcely think that you would care to tell me what they have proposed?”

“No,” I said. “I can’t tell you that.”

He turned from the window. “I didn’t think that you would — or could, I suppose I should say. Nevertheless, I’m sure that you understand that I have to ask.”

“I can understand that.”

“I have exhausted all possibilities in Washington,” he said.

“Possibilities for what?”

“For recognition of Komporeen by your country. You’ve probably noticed the rather bizarre clothing that Mr. Ulado and I are wearing. It would be most difficult not to notice.”

“I’ve noticed,” I said.

“Yes. Well, we grew weary of waiting in the outer offices of your State Department in our conservative lounge suits, virtually ignored not only by your officials with whom we had appointments, but also by their clerks. Native dress would have been far more appropriate (especially in that ghastly Washington weather), but it was unobtainable so we purchased these rather garish garments off the peg.”

“It’s a nice fit,” I said.

Mbwato smiled. “They served their purpose. Rather than have us clutter up their reception rooms, your State Department officials no longer kept us waiting. Some of them were quite decent chaps, in fact. But it really made no difference. Their policy is set, their minds are closed, or at least made up. We even showed a motion-picture film to one of them, an assistant under-secretary of State for African Affairs.”

“Littman Cox?” I said.

“Yes. Littman Cox. Do you know him?”

“No. I’ve just heard of him.”

“I see. We had films flown in from Komporeen and in truth, Mr. St. Ives, they almost made me physically ill. They were films of our children as they literally starved to death before one’s eyes. One child, a seven-year-old boy, died while the camera recorded it. He died of starvation while we watched. He starved because of the Jandolaean blockade. I thought that surely this would have some impact.”

“Did it?”

Mbwato shook his head slowly from side to side and his eyes seemed to grow infinitely sad. “Your Mr. Cox said that it was terrible, but that there was nothing he could do. Then he thanked us for what he described as a ‘most instructive morning’ and excused himself to keep an important luncheon date. I must say that I found him rather ineffectual.”

“I’ve heard him called worse,” I said, remembering Myron Greene’s comment. “But you didn’t stop with an assistant under-secretary of State, did you? He has about as much influence as I do.”

“No,” Mbwato said. “We didn’t stop with Mr. Cox. We ended with him. He was at the tail of what has proved to be a rather long line. In the two months that Mr. Ulado and I have been in the States — planning the theft of the shield, if all else failed — we have seen scores of your senators and congressmen, the secretaries of your Departments of State and Agriculture and Defense. We have even spent an hour with your Vice-President, and all have been personally sympathetic, but none has been encouraging. Our one port remains blockaded. The British have provided the Jandolaeans with radar-guided antiaircraft weaponry so that it is impossible to fly in supplies except at great risk which only a few pilots are willing to take.”

Ulado had turned in the front seat and was following the conversation closely, nodding his head in sharp little jerks when he felt that Mbwato had made a telling point. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish there was something I could do. But there isn’t.”

Mbwato took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was more than a sigh: it seemed to be the cautious physical response of a man who has something important to say, but who also knows that his anger and rage might make it come out all wrong. “There is something you can do, Mr. St. Ives. There is indeed. You can return the shield of Komporeen to us once it is in your possession. I have been authorized to raise your fee to seventy-five thousand dollars.” There was no smile this time.

I shook my head. “I can’t do that; you know I can’t.”

The four weeks of the Washington run-around seemed to bubble and then boil over. Mbwato fought it. I could see the muscles in his large face working as he tried to recover his poise, but it was no use. When he spoke it came out as a deep roar. I thought it was the pained outcry of a man to whose desperate need too many persons had already said no.

“Can’t! Can’t, you say. Goddamn it, man, that shield can save a country, a nation, a people, and you sit there and say ‘I can’t do that.’ Let me tell you about starvation, St. Ives. Let me tell you what it’s already done to more than 800,000 children in my country. During the first few days they have stomach cramps, horrible, intense pain. Then the stomach bloats while it shrinks in size. They cry for the first few days. They cry and they eat anything that will stop the horrible pain. They eat mud and grass and straw and chalk. Anything. And then they grow weaker, so weak that they can no longer cry, only whimper, and their breath begins to stink and smell like acetone because they’re burning up their fat and they have no carbohydrates to replace it. Then, after this, they sink into lethargy and at least they can sleep. That’s all they have left. Sleep and death. The proteins are gone now and their stomachs are distended and the degeneration of the kidneys and the liver sets in. If they’re lucky, they’ll catch a disease which they can’t fight and which will finish them off quickly. Even a slight infection from a cut or a scratch will do it. If they don’t contract a disease or develop an infection, they just die — slowly and painfully. How much — how much do you want, St. Ives, to keep my nation’s children alive? A hundred thousand? Is that your price? All right. I’ll increase it to one hundred thousand. It’s cheap really. With the shield we can hold out until recognition comes from France and Germany, and with the recognition will come food, and perhaps only another hundred thousand or so children will starve instead of another five hundred or seven hundred thousand. It’s only a piece of brass to you, St. Ives. To my country, it’s life itself.”

Mbwato slumped back against the seat. He looked spent and utterly weary. I turned my head and stared out the window of the car at the well-fed pedestrians. Somehow they all seemed fat, almost blubbery. I didn’t look at Mbwato when I spoke and I could feel the flush rising in my face.

“What you ask is impossible,” I said, but it didn’t seem to be me who was talking. It was some totally rational stranger. I didn’t much care for him. “You’re asking me to take a quarter of a million dollars of other people’s money,” the Rational Stranger said, “and turn it over to a gang of thieves. Then I’m to hand the shield over to you while you slip me a hundred thousand or seventy-five thousand under the table. That turns me into a thief, of course, and that’s why I’m not going to do it. Because I’d get caught and go to jail and I don’t want to go to jail. Not for you. Not for Komporeen. Not even for the kids that are starving to death. It’s just not in me — do you understand? I just can’t do it.” The Rational Stranger hurried on. “All I can suggest is that you get the shield back from whoever stole it. Get it back anyway you can. Buy it back or steal it back. I don’t care which. But I won’t help you do that either.”

I looked at Mbwato then and found that he was staring at me. There was dislike in his gaze; not hatred, just dislike. And there was also bitter contempt, enough to make the flush in my face start up again. But he was calm now and when he spoke his voice was as cold and as hard as frosted chrome. “Is it that you fear your reputation as a go-between will suffer, Mr. St. Ives? Let me assure you that you won’t suffer nearly the agony that one child in Komporeen suffers as he starves to death.”

The Cadillac had drawn up in front of my hotel, but I made no move to get out. Ulado was still turned in the front seat and his head jerked in agreement with Mbwato’s last statement.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just can’t do it. I told you why and you’ll simply have to accept it. I’m sorry.” I reached for the handle of the door, but turned and looked at Mbwato again. He was staring at me and there was a half-smile on his face. Suddenly it became a full smile, that dazzling white-on-black smile that threatened to light up the world. He reached over and slapped me on the knee. “Don’t be sorry, Mr. St. Ives. Don’t ever be sorry about anything that you lack the courage to attempt, otherwise you will go through life with a burden of guilt that eventually will crush you.”

“All right,” I said, and again reached for the handle of the door.

“We’ll be seeing more of each other,” Mbwato said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Then you are mistaken.”

“All right,” I said again.

“Just one thing that struck me,” he said.

“What?”

“When you were describing why you could not return the shield to us. It sounded as though your excuses were coming from the lips of one of your minor State Department officials.” He smiled broadly as I opened the door and got out. “Good-by,” he said. I merely nodded and watched the car as it drew away from the curb. Considering what Mbwato said he had just been through in Washington, he could probably think of no more cutting remark for a parting insult. And it may have been that there wasn’t one.

The rational stranger took the elevator up to his ninth-floor de luxe efficiency, fetched a bottle of Scotch down from the cabinet above the Pullman sink, and poured himself a jumbo drink in the vain hope that it would help to erase the memory of the hopelessness and pain that seemed to have flickered in the eyes of Conception Mbwato.

It didn’t, of course. It merely transformed the Rational Stranger into the Sententious Slob who stood by the window and looked down at the street while mouthing to himself such pithy aphorisms as “the master of action oft becomes the servant of regret” and “the fool thinks with his heart; the wise man with his mind.” They weren’t very good aphorisms, and the Scotch didn’t help any, so I picked up the Manhattan directory and looked up the number and address of Frank Spellacy. There was only one Spellacy in the book and he had a Park Avenue address, which could mean something or nothing at all. I dialed the number and a man’s voice answered on the second ring with “Mesa Verde Estates.”

“Mr. Spellacy, please.”

“This is Mr. Spellacy,” the voice said, a pleasant, cheerful voice that seemed to be larded with great, fat streaks of sincerity. “My secretary’s just stepped out for the institutional coffee break.” He chuckled about that, as if he were gently tolerant of most of the world’s foibles. “Now how can I help you?”

“I’d like to talk to you,” I said. “This afternoon. My name’s St. Ives. Philip St. Ives.”

There was a moment’s silence; perhaps half a moment, only a beat really, and then Spellacy’s voice came over the phone again, still exuding its confidence, but tinged with a touch of regret. “I was just glancing at my appointment book, Mr. St. Ives, and it seems that I’m rather tied up this afternoon with a couple of important conferences. Perhaps we could make it later in the week — Friday would be good. Yes. Say Friday afternoon at three?”

“No. Friday at three’s no good. This afternoon at four is fine.”

“I just told you—”

“I know what you told me. A couple of important conferences. Postpone them.”

“Look, Mr. St. John—”

“Ives,” I said. “St. Ives.”

“Ives then. I’m not in the habit of having strangers call me up and tell me how to run my business.” He managed to get some real indignation into that.

“But I’m not exactly a stranger, am I? I believe we have some mutual friends. We have the art dealer, Mr. Albert Shippo, and that man about town, the noted sportsman, Mr. Johnny Parisi. In fact, I had dinner with Johnny just last night.”

“You mention my name?” Spellacy said, and all the cheerfulness and goodwill were gone.

“That’s something I thought we might talk about. This afternoon.”

There was another pause, this time a long one, and then Spellacy said, “All right. Four o’clock. Here.”

“At four,” I said, and hung up.

There seemed to be no reason for what I did next, no reason other than that I felt that the one word, the name, scrawled on the white pad by a dying man, was meant for me. It was mine, so I took it. I pulled the pad from underneath the lifeless hand that still clutched the Eberhard Faber yellow pencil and slipped it into my jacket pocket. And then, remembering lessons learned from five thousand hours before the tube and perhaps from another three thousand or so in darkened buildings that sold sustenance (popcorn) along with escape, I took out my handkerchief and used it to shield my palm and fingers from the doorknob. In the hall I looked around and then hastily wiped the outside doorknob, found the stairs, scurried down two flights, rang for the elevator, waited and fretted, and then tried to look nondescript to the three passengers who were already aboard when it finally came and also to the three others who got on at the seventh, fourth, and third floors.

Outside, the Nickerson Building looked just like what it was, an ordinary office building, perhaps 43-years-old or older, built in the late 1920’s on Park Avenue by a contractor who was doubtless dead by now, as dead as Frank Spellacy, and designed by an architect who didn’t give a damn about Mies van der Rohe or Walter Gropius or even the infamous Marcel Breuer who had threatened to saddle Grand Central Terminal with a 55-story mega-structure which I could have inspected if I cared to look over my shoulder, which I didn’t. Instead I walked quickly down Park Avenue for two blocks and then turned right, looking for a bar, any bar.

It was an ordinary place called The Cold Duck or The Green Rooster or something like that. The bar itself ran along the right-hand side and there were some tables and booths and checkered tablecloths and Chianti bottles that held half-burned candles. It was ten minutes after four and only a couple of dedicated topers were in attendance. I sat at the bar’s far end, near the door, away from the drinkers, and when the bartender waddled down my way I ordered a double Scotch.

“What kind?” he said.

“Bar Scotch.”

“On the rocks?”

“Just a straight shot with a glass of water.”

I should have told him to serve it in a large glass because when I picked it up my hand shook so that it sloshed a little of the whisky over the rim which chattered against my teeth. But I got it down, all of it down in two gulps, and then I signaled the bartender. He was in a deep conversation with the two tipplers, talking learnedly, no doubt, of sports or cars or politics, or whatever drunks and bartenders talk about at four in the afternoon, and he seemed reluctant to come all the way down to where I sat, or it may have been that his feet hurt.

“Another double?” he said.

“Make it a single. Where’s your phone?”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “In the back, near the men’s John.”

I didn’t even have to search for a dime on the way to the phone. I just picked it up, dialed 911, and when the voice answered — a policeman’s voice — I said, “I’m only going to say this once. There’s a dead man in room 1106 in the Nickerson Building on Park Avenue. His name’s Frank Spellacy. S-p-e-l-l-a-c-y. Spellacy.” Then I hung up.

The drink was waiting for me when I went back to my end of the bar. I didn’t really want it, but it was there so I drank it, put three one-dollar bills and some change next to the empty glass, and left. I caught a cab back to the Adelphi and once there, up in my de luxe efficiency on the ninth floor with its Pullman kitchen and its yellow-tiled bathroom, I took the pad from my pocket, the pad with the one-word, one-name message on it, and read it for the first time right side up. It still said Wingo. I tore the page off the pad, ripped it into small pieces, and flushed it down the toilet. Still remembering lessons well learned from screens both large and small, I tore the rest of the pad up and spent five minutes in the bathroom flushing the toilet six times. There was a cardboard backing for the pad, but it seemed too much trouble to tear up, so I tossed it into the wastebasket.

I slumped into my favorite chair, the one where scarcely two hours before I had been eating a cucumber sandwich, drinking a cup of tea, and demonstrating to a New York cop on the make just how smart I really was. I wondered about that for a while. When I discovered a dead man, a small-time grifter, in his office, killed by either a knife or a gun, I stole the one-word message that he used up his life writing because with magnificent egoism, I assumed that it was meant for me. Not for his wife or children or even the cops, but for me, someone he didn’t know, someone he had spoken to once, over the telephone, for forty-five seconds, perhaps a minute. That proved how smart I was. And instead of calling the police and reporting the murder, if that’s what it was, and waiting for them to get there and giving them all the information that I could, which might possibly have helped them find whoever killed the man, the small-time grifter who sold desert lots for ten dollars down and ten dollars a month, and then probably discounted the paper to some finance company, I instead acted like a fool who ran when he should stay and stayed when he should run. I was smart all right. Even brilliant. No wonder the country was going to hell.

I sat there in my favorite chair, smoking a cigarette and brooding and thinking about the one-word message that Spellacy had left for someone, possibly me, but probably not. I spent fifteen minutes thinking about it and then I picked up the phone and dialed O for long distance.

When she came on I told her that I would like to call the Coroner’s Office in Washington, D.C. There was some more palaver while she asked whom I wished to speak to and finally I told her that I would like to speak to the coroner himself, but would settle for whoever answered the phone. A man’s voice answered with “Coroner’s Office.”

I told him my name and then asked, “If a man were killed in an automobile accident, would he immediately come under your jurisdiction?”

“Yes, he would,” the good solid civil-service voice said.

“Would you perform an autopsy?”

“Yes, that’s automatically done in accidents, homicides, suicides, and what-have-you.”

I didn’t ask him what a what-have-you was, although it seemed to take in a lot of territory. But he wasn’t through yet; he warmed to his subject. “Now in the case of illness, if the deceased hasn’t seen a doctor or been attended by one within the last ten days, an autopsy is automatically performed. That also holds true if the deceased has not been seen by anyone — you know, vanished — for a period of twenty-four hours or more prior to his death.”

“I’d like to get some information on a man who was killed in a car wreck about four weeks ago.”

“Are you the next of kin?” the civil-service voice said.

“No. I’m a reporter. With The New York Times.” There was no use in going second class.

The voice relented a little. “What was the deceased’s name?”

“Wingo,” I said.

“His first name?”

That wrecked it. “Well, we haven’t been able to find out his first name. He died under rather mysterious circumstances.”

There was a pause at the Washington end, at the District of Columbia’s Coroner’s Office at 19th and E Streets, Southeast. It was a long, chilly pause. “I’m sorry, but in such cases the next of kin must grant permission for the release of such information.”

“Well, thanks anyway.”

He said that I was welcome, but I don’t think he really meant it.

I sat there in the chair with my hand on the phone thinking about all the influential persons that I knew in Washington who could pry the information out of the Coroner’s Office without going to the next of kin. For some reason I didn’t think that Frances Wingo would appreciate my attempt to find out why she had become a widow. But the influential persons whom I knew were probably too busy or too inept to get the information today and I was too impatient to wait for tomorrow so I called Myron Greene, the lawyer.

“I need a favor,” I told him after we said hello and he informed me that Spivack had deposited the check from the Coulter Museum.

“What kind of a favor?” Myron Greene said, and there seemed to be suspicion and distrust in his voice, but that was really how he always talked.

“I need to get a coroner’s report in Washington so I can find out how somebody died.”

“That takes the permission of the next of kin,” Myron Greene said.

“I know. I’ve already tried. That’s why I’m calling you. I need the information this afternoon.”

“That’s impossible.”

“No it isn’t, Myron, not for you, it isn’t. You have the influence down there and I don’t. That’s why I called.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m just too busy. Maybe I can do something tomorrow.”

“If I don’t get the information this afternoon, or this evening at the latest, then I’m walking off this thing.”

“What’s that — what’s that?” Myron Greene said, and began to wheeze at me over the phone.

“I’m through. Finished. Somebody else can get the shield back.”

“Something’s happened,” he said. “What’s happened? I have a right to know. I have every right—”

“Somebody else has been killed.”

“Who?”

“The name would mean nothing to you.”

“Was he connected with the… the thieves?”

“I don’t know. But he probably knew who they were.”

“God damn it, St. Ives, can’t you ever tell anything straight?”

“Get me the information I want and I’ll tell you the entire story. You may get to be a criminal lawyer after all. If I don’t get the information, it’s as I said. I quit. Now. This afternoon.”

Myron Greene gave me a long wheezy sigh. “Well, there’s one possibility. A good friend of mine is now an assistant U.S. attorney down there. He could probably get it.”

“This afternoon?”

“If I asked him. He was a year behind me at school.”

“Ask him.”

“What do you want exactly?”

“I want to know the cause of death of a man named Wingo. He supposedly was killed in a car accident about four weeks ago.”

“Wingo? Isn’t that the name of the woman who—”

“The same.”

“Her husband?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think that she—”

I interrupted him. “I don’t think anything, Myron. I’m just trying to find out what to think.”

“All right, all right. What’s his first name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Christ.”

“There shouldn’t be too many Wingos who died in a car wreck four weeks ago. Just have your friend find out what the autopsy says.”

Myron Greene was silent for a moment, except for a couple of wheezes. “Is this just a hunch on your part or do you think you really have something?”

“I don’t have a thing,” I said. “It’s just a hunch.”

“I’ll be back to you,” Myron Greene said, and hung up.

Frances Wingo was prompt. She knocked on my door at two thirty-five the following day, Thursday, which meant that she had flown by private plane or had caught the one o’clock shuttle from Washington and that it had had no trouble landing and that taxis had been plentiful at LaGuardia.

“Come in,” I said.

“Thank you.” She came in, carrying with some difficulty an inexpensive man’s two-suiter in her left hand. A striped blue and white raincoat was draped over her right arm.

“Heavy?” I said, reaching for the suitcase.

She let me have it, a little reluctantly, I thought. “Heavy,” she said. I turned in the room, wondering where to put the suitcase, which seemed to weigh between 55 and 60 pounds. I finally decided to put it in the tub in the bathroom. Before I put it there, I weighed it on the scale. Fifty-eight pounds.

When I came back out she said, “Why there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s because it would be the last place I would look if I were looking for it.”

“Aren’t you going to count it?”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Did you look at it?”

“Yes.”

“Pretty?”

“Not particularly.”

“Since you don’t care much for money, maybe you’d care for a drink.”

“I think I would.”

“Bourbon or Scotch?”

“Bourbon.”

“Pick out a chair,” I said. “Or the couch. They’re all about the same.”

“Thank you.” She draped her raincoat over a wingbacked chair and sank into it. She wore a blue dress that was neither too complicated nor too simple, blue shoes that seemed to both match and complement the dress, and in her lap she held a blue purse that seemed to be made of the same leather as the shoes. When I turned from mixing the drinks she was slowly surveying the room and she managed not to grimace at the prints on the wall which had been supplied by the color-blind management of the Adelphi.

“Horrible, aren’t they?” I said as I handed her a drink.

“A bit.”

“The management’s choice.”

“Not yours?”

“No. I’m still hung up on Maxfield Parrish.”

“He was 96 when he died. In 1966.”

“Do you like Parrish?” I said.

“No. Do you?”

“Probably because I know I shouldn’t.”

“Double reverse snobbism.”

“Really? I never thought of it like that.” I was seated on the couch opposite her. I put my drink on the glass-topped coffee table and lit a cigarette. “I’m sorry you couldn’t make it for lunch.”

She didn’t bother to make an excuse. “Will you get it back today?”

“I don’t know.”

“Haven’t they been in touch with you again?”

“No.”

“Will they?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you plan to do, or do you believe in plans?”

I took a swallow of my drink. “I’m going to rent a car. I don’t own a car, you know. I’m going to rent a car and drive to the third Howard Johnson on the Jersey Turnpike. I’m going to check in by six o’clock this evening accompanied by fifty-eight pounds of used tens and twenties. I will sit by the phone until they tell me what they want me to do. Then I will do precisely that because if I don’t, I could wind up just like your husband. Dead.”

She was either a very good actress or she didn’t know what I was talking about. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me, Mr. St. Ives. What does my husband have to do — or what connection is there between his death and the shield?” There wasn’t a blink, or a tremor, or even that oversupply of calmness which most good liars have. She merely sat there, a politely interested look on her face, as if she had just asked whether I thought she should take the four or the five o’clock shuttle back to Washington.

“Your husband was an addict. A junkie. He didn’t die from the wreck he was in. He died from a massive overdose of heroin.”

That didn’t bother her either. She smiled slightly; it was a cool, almost pitying smile. “You seem inordinately interested in my husband, Mr. St. Ives. Why?”

“Maybe I’m interested in knowing what kind of man would marry someone like you. Or rather, what kind of man would you consent to marry. Somehow a junkie doesn’t fit.”

“Is it really any of your business?”

I put my drink down on the glass-topped table with a clatter. “You’re damned right it’s my business. One person has already died because of this shield, two if you count his wife who hanged herself. Now with your husband dead from an overdose of heroin, I think the score is now three dead and I don’t want me to make it four.” I purposely left out Spellacy although his death would have helped to run up the total.

“You do become belligerent, don’t you?”

“It’s only one of many failings.”

“You should try to correct it.”

“I’ll work on it this Fall. You think group therapy might help?”

“I’m sure it would do you a world of good.”

“You knew he was an addict?”

“Yes,” she said. “I knew. It would be most difficult not to know.”

“Where’d he get it?”

“I never inquired.”

“How’d he pay for it?”

“May I have one of your cigarettes? I quit smoking three years ago, but—” If this was a crack in her composure, it was a small one. She sat in the wingbacked chair, the barely tasted drink on a table, her hands folded over the blue purse in her lap. I rose and offered her a. cigarette and lit it for her. She inhaled deeply and then blew the smoke out in a thin stream.

“Silly, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Wanting something like that suddenly, wanting it so bad that — well, never mind.” She inhaled some more smoke and blew it out. “I’m going to tell you about my husband, Mr. St. Ives. I’m going to tell you about him because I don’t want you poking around in my life. There are too many snoops abroad in the land today who seem bent on destroying privacy. I resent it. I wholeheartedly subscribe to the right to be let alone, as someone phrased it several years ago. So after I tell you about my husband, I sincerely hope that you will do just that — let me alone.”

She paused, as if expecting me to assure her that I would take the next plane to El Paso and never come back once she had told me about her husband. I only nodded.

“My husband, before he became addicted, was not only a brilliant artist, he was also — or could have been — one of the nation’s leading museum directors or curators. He studied with Paul Sachs at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard in the early 1940’s. He was very young then, no more than a precocious sixteen or seventeen, and in 1943 he joined the Marines and saw action as a combat artist, I think they called them, at Iwo Jima where he did an unusually good series of water colors which were reproduced in Life and which brought him nationwide attention. After his discharge from the Marines he was offered a post as director of a small but good museum in the Midwest. From there he went to a better position in Chicago and then to New York as head of a private museum. It doesn’t matter to you which one, does it?”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

“We met here in New York at some party. I had wanted to paint, but I wasn’t good enough to be good and I had enough sense to realize it. So I did the next best thing. I turned to museum work. George was extremely helpful. He was painting almost every spare moment that he could find and he was good. Terribly good. Some of his friends who had seen his work begged him to hold an exhibition, but he always refused, claiming that the time wasn’t quite right. When I finished my studies we were married and I was appointed director of a small museum here in New York — largely on George’s recommendation. A few years later the offer came from the Coulter Museum. He turned it down.”

“He?” I said.

“Yes. They wanted George. He recommended me. Strongly. And with a few misgivings on Mr. Spencer’s part, I was hired.”

“Why did he turn it down?”

She shrugged. “He’d decided that he no longer was interested in museum work. He wanted to paint full time. I agreed, of course, and we moved to Washington. The salary was more than adequate and for a while things worked out quite well.”

“Then what?”

“George went into a deep depression. He stopped painting, drank too much, sometimes disappeared for days at a time. Finally, about a year and a half ago, he told me that he was addicted to heroin. I don’t know when it really began; he would never tell me.”

“How big was his habit?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right. How much did it cost him a day?”

“Toward the end it was around two hundred dollars.”

“Where did he get it?”

“He sold his paintings. All of them, one by one. They brought very good prices. As I said, he was brilliant.”

“But he finally ran out of paintings.”

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

“I gave him money.”

“For how long?”

“Several months.”

“Until it ran out?”

“Yes.”

“Then?”

“Then one day he said that he didn’t need any more money. That he’d found a private supply of heroin.”

“When was this?”

“Two months ago, perhaps two and a half months.”

“How many people knew about it?”

“About what?”

“His addiction.”

“Not many. His doctor. A few old friends who’d moved to Washington when Kennedy was elected. Mr. Spencer. I told him; I thought it only fair.”

“What did Spencer say?”

“He was most understanding and sympathetic. He even offered to pay for George’s treatment in a private sanitarium.”

“What happened?”

“George refused.”

“What did Spencer say then?”

“Nothing. He never mentioned it again.”

“And that’s all who knew — a few friends and Spencer?”

“Yes.”

“There was somebody else,” I said.

“Who?”

“The guy who furnished the private supply.”

Frances Wingo left at three-fifteen to catch the four o’clock shuttle back to Washington. At the door, just before she left, she turned and said, “You really do think my husband was somehow connected with the theft of the shield, don’t you?”

“Yes. I thought I’d made that plain.”

“How?”

“How was he connected?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have an idea, but I’m not sure. I don’t really know that I’ll ever be sure.”

“It has something to do with the guard, the one who was killed, hasn’t it?”

“I think so.”

“Will you tell me what your theory is?”

“No, because right now that’s all it is, just a theory.”

“And if it becomes more than a theory?”

“Then I’ll tell you; if you still want to know.”

She looked at me carefully for several seconds. “I assure you, Mr. St. Ives, I will want to know. Very much.”

“All right,” I said.

“And you’ll let me know what happens this evening?”

“Yes.”

“Call me at home,” she said. “I’ll give you my number.”

She gave me her number and I wrote it down. “I would walk you to the elevator,” I said, “but I don’t want to leave the suitcase by itself.”

“That’s quite all right. Good-by, Mr. St. Ives.”

“Good-by.”

I stood in the doorway and watched her walk down the hall, a tall, blonde woman with short-cropped hair, a widow of four weeks who now could cry herself to sleep every night because her husband, brilliant but dead, had been not only a junkie, but probably the accomplice of thieves. There was, I decided, a lot of waste in the world.

I was not as blasé about the suitcase and its contents as I had pretended to be before Frances Wingo. Despite inflation, a quarter of a million dollars was still a fortune to me, an immense one, and I was always amazed that those who used my services could raise such staggering sums so easily. If someone were to kidnap my kindergarten-bound son, I could, thanks to the check from the Coulter Museum, scrape up fifteen thousand, but not a dime more. My son, it seemed, was safe unless his new stepfather turned out to be embarrassingly wealthy which, knowing my ex-wife, was not at all unlikely.

I took the suitcase out of the tub and carried it to the bed. The case wasn’t locked so I opened it and stood there for long moments staring at a quarter of a million dollars in used tens and twenties, all carefully wrapped in brown paper bands which said that each bundle contained five hundred dollars. I didn’t count it. I didn’t even touch it. Winfield Spencer’s Washington bank had already counted it and when it comes to sums like that, banks make no mistakes.

At four o’clock I drove out of the Avis garage in a rented four-door Plymouth, and fought my way to the New Jersey Turnpike which is, in my opinion, the most unlovely strip of superhighway in the nation. It’s also a road that demands grim defensive driving unless you have a very strong death wish, which will be happily fulfilled by either members of the Teamsters Union who like to let their twenty tons of steel nibble at your rear bumper or by the lane jumpers who flit back and forth, oblivious of their rear-view mirrors, ignorant of their directional signals. Most of the vehicles, I noticed, wore New Jersey license plates.

At 5:15 I turned into the third Howard Johnson motel and restaurant which, like the rest of its breed, was all orange and white and dyspeptic-looking. I was handed a key to room 143 in exchange for $16 plus tax, got back in the car, drove past 143, and parked in front of 135. I unlocked the trunk, took out the suitcase, and walked back to 143. There was nothing in the motel room that I hadn’t expected. There was a bed and a dresser and some chairs and a 21-inch television set (black and white) and some lamps and a carpet. Everything was either nailed down or securely fastened so that it couldn’t be carted off at three o’clock in the morning. I looked in the bathroom and saw that it contained the usual equipment fashioned out of bright blue tile. I came out of the bathroom and placed the suitcase in a closet. Then I stretched out on the bed and waited for the phone to ring so that I could give somebody a quarter of a million dollars in exchange for a 68-pound brass shield that was at least 1,000 years old or older, or about as old as I felt.

It had been a long, fretful drive back to Manhattan, made doubly grating by a spectacular five-car pile-up that had killed two persons and slowed three miles of New York-bound traffic to a creep. By the time I drove into the Avis garage I was irritable; by the time I arrived at the Adelphi by cab, toting the fifty-eight pounds of money, I was testy; and when I spotted Lieutenant Kenneth Ogden of vice slumped comfortably in one of the chairs in the lobby, looking as if he had just taken squatter’s rights, I suffered a severe internal implosion which, everything considered, was kept under pretty fair control. I could have stamped my foot.

Ogden slowly got out of his chair when I came in and permitted me another long examination of his false teeth. “No luck, huh?” He seemed happy about it.

“No.”

“Just feeling you out,” he said. “They do that sometimes.”

“I know.”

“It’s in there?” he said, gesturing toward the suitcase.

“It’s in there,” I said.

Ogden licked his lips and I tried to remember where I had last seen that look. It’s an unusual look; really quite rare. The eyes narrow, the lips grow wet and move a little, there’s sometimes a faint smile plus an air of total concentration and an obliviousness to everything but the satiation soon to come. I remembered then: it was a fat man in a cafeteria. He had weighed a little more than three hundred pounds and he had had that same look when he sat down to an assortment of dishes that would have stuffed four persons with ordinary appetites. With the fat man it had been food; with Ogden it was money. With both it was greed.

“What’re you going to do with it?” he said.

“The hotel’s got a safe.”

“I saw it. You could open it with a corkscrew.”

“There’s somebody on duty all night.”

Ogden snorted, his eyes still fixed on the suitcase which was growing heavy. I switched it to my left hand. “Hell, he must be seventy-five and besides, he sleeps all night.”

“Would you like to keep it for me overnight?”

“Well, we could for Christ’s sake at least take it down to the precinct station. It’d be safe there.”

I walked over to the hotel desk. Ogden followed. “You remember the Baxter kidnaping out in Omaha about fifteen years ago?” I said.

He looked at me and a sour, suspicious look crept across his face. “Look, St. Ives—”

“Baxter was kidnaped, you remember, and held for $200,000 ransom.” The room clerk appeared at the desk, an aged, frail man whom I knew only as Charlie.

“Evening, Mr. St. Ives.”

“Hello, Charlie. Any messages.”

He glanced at my box. I could have done it just as easily, but I always asked him because he liked to be asked and at seventy-five there aren’t many things that anyone will ask you for. “Not a thing,” he said.

“Will you put this in the safe?” I said, and swung the suitcase up on the counter. He tried to pick it up with one hand, failed, and barely managed to get it off the counter with two. I watched him unlock the safe and store the suitcase inside. Ogden was right. It looked as if it could be opened with a corkscrew. Or a hairpin. But it was safer than my bathtub. I turned to Ogden, who was also watching and who looked as if all the dreams that he’d ever had in his life were being locked away, out of sight forever.

“So when Baxter was kidnaped,” I said.

“Who?” Ogden said.

“Baxter. The man out in Omaha.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He didn’t seem very interested.

“When Baxter was kidnaped they asked two hundred thousand and the family agreed to pay. They turned the money over to a cop, a lieutenant of detectives, as I recall, who was supposed to make the money drop, pick up some instructions about where he’d find Baxter, and then fetch him back to his hearth and home. Well, this lieutenant dropped off the money okay and he picked up the directions about where he could find Baxter. But he was the ambitious type, so he staked out the money drop until the kidnapers showed up. He tried to take them, and there was a gun fight. According to the lieutenant there were three of them and he killed two. The other one, again according to the lieutenant, got away with the ransom money. About an hour after he was supposed to be there, the lieutenant finally drove up to the deserted farmhouse where Baxter was held. He was about an hour too late. Baxter had choked to death on the gag that the kidnapers had placed in his mouth. At least that’s what the autopsy said.”

Ogden gave me one of his mean looks, the one that he probably used on whores and pimps and the sad-faced, middle-aged men who hung around the toilet at the YMCA. It was a look in which all the lines in the face seem to run downward. “You trying to say something, St. Ives?”

“I’m telling a story.”

“Has it got a point?”

“I think so; it might even have a moral. So there was the Baxter family, out not only $200,000 but minus its breadwinner as well. They never caught the third kidnaper; they never recovered any of the money; and the lieutenant of detectives resigned two months later and retired to Hawaii at age thirty-eight.”

Ogden grunted. “I remember it all right. The cop got a lot of guff about if there really was a third man who took off with the ransom. And there was even some who thought that he might have helped the guy — what’s his name, Baxter — that he might have helped him to choke to death a little. If he was gagged real good, and tied up real good, all the cop would have to do is hold his nose for five minutes or so.”

“But it was convenient, wasn’t it?” I said. “With Baxter dead, no one could ever be sure — except the lieutenant, of course — about whether there really was a third man.”

“You said it had a moral. I don’t see any moral.”

“How about: the wise man resists temptation but for a moment; the dull man for an hour, and the fool forever?” Another none-too-pithy aphorism. Perhaps I could soon start talking in parables.

“Did you make that up?” Ogden said.

“I think so.”

“What is it, some kind of a crack?”

“Not really.”

“That story about the Omaha kidnaping was.”

“All right.”

We had walked over to the elevators and I punched the up button. There was no one else in the lobby except Charlie behind the desk. The night bellhop was hiding somewhere and the cigar counter, out of stamps again, no doubt, had closed promptly at its regular hour of six.

“You going up?” Ogden asked.

“I thought I might; you want to tuck me in?”

“No, I just wanted to make sure you got home safe and sound.”

“And you took part of your day off to do it.”

“That’s right,” he said, “I did. You know what else I did today on my day off?”

“What?”

“I went to a funeral. Frank Spellacy’s. You knew Frank.” It wasn’t a question the way he asked it.

“No. I didn’t know Frank.”

“Funny. I thought you did. I thought you might have written him up in your column. He was a kind of a character, always operating on the edge. Funny how he died.”

“How?”

“Somebody stuck a knife in his throat and he bled to death all over his desk and rug. He had an office in the Nickerson Building over on Park Avenue. He was hustling lots out in the desert somewhere. That’s what he did mostly, but he had a sideline. You know what it was?”

“No,” I said, wishing that the elevator would come so that I could vanish into it.

“He ran a reference bureau. You know, if somebody wanted something done then Frank could put them in touch with who could do it. Or if somebody wanted to check out somebody, and they didn’t want to bother with the Better Business Bureau, why they’d call up Frank and he’d find out for them. A lot of bookies used him.”

“Sounds like a character,” I said, and punched the elevator button again, hard.

“He had a nice funeral. Over in Queens. Lots of friends. And you say you didn’t know him?”

“No. I didn’t know him.”

“That’s funny.”

“What?”

“He knew you. He had a whole file on you, homicide says. A new one.”

“I’m in a funny business. Maybe that’s why he had a file.”

“Maybe. But the homicide boys also found something on his calendar — you know, the appointment book that he kept on his desk.”

“What?”

“Just your name with four o’clock beside it on the day he died. Yesterday. But homicide’s not much interested; old Frank had been long dead by four o’clock as near as the medical report could figure, which, of course, isn’t too accurate.”

I’d had enough. “What do you want, Ogden? Spell it out.”

He glanced around the lobby, leaned toward me, and tapped a manicured forefinger against my lapel. I don’t like to be tapped. “I want in.”

“There’s no room.”

“Make it.”

“Not a chance.”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand’s a lot of money.”

“I don’t like jails.”

“No jails. You make the switch, the money for the shield. The museum’s happy. But you take me along to make another switch. The money into our pockets, an even split, and who’s to squawk?”

“The thieves. They wouldn’t like it at all.”

“Who they gonna complain to?”

“Christ, they could write a letter to the editor and even if it weren’t published, it would be turned over to the cops who’d be swarming around for the next ten years.”

The greed was back on Ogden’s face. His wet lips moved, making little smacking noises, and his eyes squinted at me as if I gave off some blinding but irresistible glow. “The thieves don’t have to be around after it’s over,” he said, running his words together. “That’s the beauty of it. They don’t have to be around to complain.”

I could only stare at him, at the wet lips and the squinted eyes and the hunched, almost supplicating stance. “I believe you’d do it,” I said. “Goddamn, I believe you’d do it.”

He looked around the lobby once more. It was an almost furtive glance. “I’m fifty-three years old, St. Ives, and I want in on this. I’m gonna retire in a couple of years. A hundred and twenty-five grand would make it livable.”

“Get it from your whores, Ogden. Not from me.”

“I’m cutting myself in.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“I’ve got a kicker.”

“I thought you might.”

“You see, St. Ives,” he said in a hoarse whisper after conning the lobby again. “I know who the thieves are.”

It was his exit line and he had been working up to it all evening. He grinned at me with all of those terrible teeth, nodded a couple of times, happily, I thought, turned and strode across the faded lobby, through the door, and out into the summer night.

“The elevator, Mr. St. Ives,” Charlie called from the desk. “It ain’t working.”

It was raining when I awakened at seven the next morning, a hard stinging rain whose drops committed mass suicide against my ninth-floor window where I stood and watched while the water boiled on the two-burner stove for instant coffee. Armed with the coffee and the day’s first cigarette, I picked up the phone and called Eastern Airlines, which answered on the fourteenth ring. All flights to Washington had been canceled. It was raining hard in Washington too. It was probably raining all over the world.

That left the bus or the train. I called the Pennsylvania Central Railroad and the man who answered on the twenty-second ring was indifferent about whether I ever got to Washington, or it may have been that he was preoccupied with what kind of cake his great-great-granddaughter would serve when he got home that night to celebrate his ninety-second birthday. He finally admitted, after some coaxing, that there was a train leaving for Washington at eight that morning and if I were nice, he might even sell me a ticket.

I called down to the desk and got Eddie, the day bellhop. “It’s worth two bucks if you’ve got a cab waiting for me when I get downstairs in ten minutes,” I said.

“Jesus, Mr. St. Ives, I’ll get all wet.”

I sighed. “Three bucks.”

“Okay. Three bucks. By the way, that horse you picked the other day.”

“What about it?”

“It didn’t win.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. You want to get down on something today?”

“No time.”

“You want I should pick one for you?”

“The cab, Eddie.”

I dressed in four minutes, packed a shirt, underwear, socks, and toilet articles into an overnight bag in two minutes, added a fifth of Scotch, waited for the miraculously repaired elevator for a minute, and was in the lobby at the desk asking for the suitcase nine minutes after I had talked to Eddie. I was also unshaved, unwashed, and unhappy.

The bellhop had somehow managed to find a cab. “I got all wet,” he said as I handed him three dollars. It was as close to thank you as he ever got. The cab driver grunted when I told him where I wanted to go, then mumbled to himself all the way to Penn Station. It took fifteen minutes to go the mile which, on a rainy morning in Manhattan, might have broken some kind of speed record. At seven-forty I queued up at the ticket counter behind a woman who wanted to take a train to Cutbank, Montana. She didn’t want to go today, and she didn’t know whether she would leave next week or the week after, because she wasn’t sure when her daughter’s baby was due, but she thought that she’d get all the information now and decide later, after she heard from her daughter. The man behind the counter became interested in her story and they gossiped about babies for a while and then he thumbed through some thick black books which told him whether a train went through Cutbank. After he figured out her route and she wrote it down they chatted some more, this time about the weather. I didn’t think that he was the same man whom I’d talked to over the phone because he wasn’t much over seventy-five.

When the Montana-bound woman finally left, the man behind the counter looked at me suspiciously, as if I wanted to buy a ticket or make him an indecent proposition. I think he would have preferred the proposition.

“Washington, a parlor seat.”

“Don’t know if I got one left,” he said, glancing up at the clock and then over at his rack of tickets. “You’re a little late, you know.”

“It’s all my fault.”

“Parlor car, huh. That costs more’n coach.”

“I know.”

“You still want it?”

“I still want it,” I said, not even yelling.

“Only got one left.”

“I wouldn’t want to run you short.”

“Coach’d only cost you $10.75. Parlor cost you $19.90. That’s a lot of money.”

“I just came into an inheritance.”

“Huh,” he said, and slid the ticket over to me as I handed him a twenty-dollar bill. “Look after the pennies, I say, and the dollars will take care of themselves.”

“You think that up all by yourself?” I said as he slid my dime to me.

“Been saying it all my life.” He looked at the clock again. It was three minutes until eight. “If you hurry,” he said comfortably, “you might still make it.”

I hurried, the fifty-eight-pound suitcase banging against my right knee. There was really no need. The train was ten minutes late in pulling out.

The last train ride I took was the Trans-Europ-Express from Cologne to Paris. The food had been good, the service excellent, the ride fast, and the track smooth. The Pennsylvania Central Railroad offered none of these. I had paid $8.15 extra for the privilege of sitting in a chair that swung 360° so that I’d miss none of the megalopolitan mess that was the eastern seaboard of the United States. There were some factories to look at, some junk yards, several vistas of rather interesting slums, and one cow.

I’m not sure when it was that American railroads went to the bad. Some claim that it started as far back as the twenties, but it was probably just after World War II when they began building super-highways and you could buy a car again and an airplane ride was no longer much of an adventure. It must have been a gradual decline. The coaches and the Pullmans that wore out were junked and not replaced. The crack train became a joke. The help got old and died and nobody much wanted to work for the railroads anymore. Then suddenly, sometime in the mid-sixties, the country awakened to learn that its skies and highways were choked while its rails were empty. At least of passenger service. Between Washington and New York they finally got one new high-speed Metro-liner running, but only once a day, and it was supposed to make the 227-mile trip in two hours and fifty-nine minutes — an hour faster than the Greyhound bus. Someday they may even run it all the way up to Boston.

Meanwhile, in car or bus, you could creep along highways that were built for the traffic of the early fifties or go by planes that stacked up for hours over airports that turned obsolete as soon as they were completed.

Many of the good ones were gone, I thought. The Commodore Vanderbilt and the 20th Century Limited, for instance. Even the Wabash Cannonball. Yet elsewhere in the world trains were still running, most of them on time. You could go from Tokyo to Osaka, 320 miles, in three hours and ten minutes on the New Tokaido Line. The Blue Train still ran luxuriously from Johannesburg to Capetown, and on the Rheingold you could go from Amsterdam to Geneva, 657 miles, in a little more than eleven hours and dictate to a secretary who spoke four languages while you stared out the window at the castles on the Rhine. I doubted that I could even get a decent cup of coffee on the Penn Central.

At one o’clock we pulled into Washington’s rococo Union Station, almost an hour late. It was still raining hard and I had to wait fifteen minutes for a cab. By the time I got to the Madison and into my room, it was a quarter to two. I called down for a large breakfast and then went into the bathroom to get rid of my beard and the grubbiness of the train.

After breakfast, I called Lieutenant Demeter. “Nice of you to check in,” he said. “How’s the bag-man business?”

“They called a fake switch in a motel about halfway across New Jersey to see how well I follow instructions.”

“But they didn’t show.”

“No.”

“Maybe you’d better drop around and tell me about it.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I was supposed to check in here at twelve-thirty, but the planes aren’t flying and I had to take a train so I was late. They’re supposed to call me here.”

“Have you got the money with you?” Demeter said.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Here. In my room.”

Demeter exploded. “For Christ sake, St. Ives, get it into the hotel safe. Maybe it’s different in New York. Maybe the people up there are all beautiful and gentle and fond of flowers, but I wouldn’t walk across the street in this town with more than forty bucks cash in my pocket.” He seemed to turn his head away from the phone. “He’s got the money in his room, for Christ sake.” He must have been talking to Sergeant Fastnaught.

“I’d planned to put it in the safe.”

“Quit planning and do it. Where you staying, the Madison again?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your room number?”

I told him.

“We’ll be there in half an hour.”

The assistant manager of the Madison gave me another room on another floor and looked as if he wished that I would go to another hotel, preferably in another town. After I had told my story to three plain-clothes detectives from the homicide squad who had been summoned by Lieutenant Demeter, I told it again. And then, just to make sure that I’d left nothing out, I told it a third time. When one of the homicide detectives asked for a fourth rendition, I turned to Demeter, who leaned against the door and stared at the body of his former FBI Academy classmate, Lieutenant Kenneth Ogden of the New York Police Department. Fastnaught was at the window looking at the rain.

“The fourth time won’t be any different from the third or the second or the first,” I said.

Demeter didn’t look at me; he kept on staring at the body on the bed. “Just tell it, St. Ives. Just tell what happened.”

So I told the three homicide detectives how Ogden had died on the bed in my room. One of the detectives was a weary fifty, a stocky man with spiky inch-long gray hair that formed a kind of a dull halo around his face. It was the face of a disappointed listener who had grown tired of waiting for punch lines that never came.

“Start with last night this time, Mr. St. Ives,” he said. “When Ogden approached you in your hotel in New York.”

After I told it for the fourth time they removed the body of Ogden on a wheeled stretcher. Technicians and blue coats had been in and out of the room, poking into the medicine cabinet, counting my socks in the bureau, and making themselves generally useful. Somebody took some pictures of Ogden’s body, but no one bothered about fingerprints. The assistant manager had been in and out twice, looking mortified the first time and despondent the second. The third time he showed up while they were wheeling the body out and this time he looked alarmed. “Down the service elevator, please, down the service elevator,” he said, turning to Demeter. “Can’t you tell them to take it down the service elevator?”

“We’re parked out front,” one of the ambulance attendants said.

“The service elevator,” Demeter said, and I thought the assistant manager might kiss his hand.

“It’s awful,” the assistant manager said to no one in particular. “It’s just God-awful.”

“Tell you what you do,” Demeter said.

“Yes, yes,” the assistant manager said. “What? What?” He was very nervous and he ran a thin pale hand through his ample black hair, which looked as if it had been cut by a razor, teased, and sprayed.

“Get him another room,” Demeter said, and jerked a thumb at me.

“He’s going to stay?” and there was shock and disapproval and even a touch of horror in the question. “You’re not taking him with you?”

“No, he’s not coming with us. He likes it here, don’t you, St. Ives?”

“Because it’s so homey,” I said.

The assistant manager shook his head and this time he registered despair. He had an extremely mobile face. “I’ll send a man up with a key,” he said, and left.

Demeter turned to the detective with the spiky gray hair. “You got what you need from St. Ives?” he said.

“Such as it is.”

“I like the part where Ogden wanted in on the $250,000,” Demeter said.

“They’re going to like that up in New York, too,” the homicide detective said. “Oh, they’re going to like it all just real fine. What they’re really going to like though is Ogden’s wanting to zing the thieves after he got the money and the shield. They’re going to eat that right up.” He got up from the chair he’d been sitting in, walked over to me, and stood there for a few moments. “Anything else you’d like to add, Mr. St. Ives?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“We’re going to need a formal statement from you.”

“All right,” I said. “When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“When?”

“Oh, say ten o’clock? Or is that too early for you?”

“That’s fine.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, and turned to Demeter. “You knew Ogden, you say?”

“I knew him,” Demeter said, and his tone was flat and careful.

“Well?”

“We went through the FBI Academy together, back in the fifties.”

“What do you think?”

“Nothing,” Demeter said. “I think absolutely nothing.”

“That’s a big help,” the homicide detective said. “If you get around to thinking something, let me know.” He made a brusque wave with his hand at the other two homicide detectives who were younger and taller and not quite so tired-looking. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go down to the lobby and find out how many eyewitnesses we got.” He turned to Demeter once again. “You know how many we’re going to have?”

“How many?”

“Less than one. Zero.” He moved to the door, opened it, and let the two other detectives through. Then he turned and looked at the bed with its blood-soaked pillows and spread. “God, the paperwork,” he said. “You know something?” he said to Demeter.

“What?”

“A cop should get killed in his own home town.”

Sergeant Fastnaught left his seat at the window and moved over to the door. He leaned against it as though it were the most comfortable spot in the room. An itch seemed to develop between his shoulder blades because he rubbed his back against the molding of the door without shifting his gaze from me. Demeter leaned forward in the chair, his big, tightly curled head thrust forward, his red lips slightly parted as he breathed through his mouth. The cigar burned unnoticed in his right hand.

“What you’d really like me to do is to put the Scotch in my bag and try to go through that door,” I said. “That’s really what you’d like.”

“Get off it, St. Ives,” Fastnaught said.

Demeter looked at him. “Well, now, Sergeant Fastnaught, what do you expect him to think? I’ve just told him that he’s not going to quit and there you are at the door, looking for all the world like you’d like to bust him in the mouth if he tried to go through it. St. Ives has got a point and we ought to respect it. After all the talk about police brutality, what do you expect him to think?”

“Sorry,” Fastnaught said in a voice that was a couple of blocks away from being contrite. “I forgot about the role assigned to us by society. Of course, busting him in the mouth could help us pad out our scrapbooks. Paste in some clippings with headlines like ‘Police Pummel New York Go-Between in Hotel’ or even ‘Cops Clobber New York Man in Posh Hotel.’”

Demeter nodded gravely. “You’ve got a flair, Sergeant Fastnaught. I’d say you’ve got almost a real genius for public relations. Don’t you agree, St. Ives?”

“He’s a wonder,” I said.

“Now then,” Demeter said, leaning back comfortably in the chair and drawing on his cigar. “I was going to tell you why you’re not going to back out, wasn’t I?”

“You did mention that, but maybe I’d better go first. Maybe I’d better tell you why I am going to back out.”

Demeter waved his cigar at me. “The floor is yours.”

“If your mathematics are right, four people have been killed over this shield. The reason that they were killed is that they either knew or had a pretty good idea who stole it. So there’s a very good chance that anybody who’d shove a knife into a New York cop in the lobby of the Madison Hotel would be less than queasy about getting permanently rid of a go-between about three o’clock in the morning on some lonely road in Virginia or Maryland. But even if they come up with a safe switch, one that involves no contact, I’m still the loose end, the one they’d wake up at five o’clock in the morning and start worrying about, wondering if they’d somehow made a slip and that I just might be able to identify them. Now that’s only a slight chance, maybe a ten-to-one shot, but it’s more than I’m willing to take for twenty-five thousand or even fifty thousand. I’m sure you follow me.”

“Perfectly,” Demeter said.

“Then that’s it; I’m out.”

“No,” Demeter said. “You’re not.”

“Don’t push it,” I said.

Demeter got out of his chair and walked over to the window. “Washington’s a funny town,” he said. “It’s not like New York or Chicago or even Philadelphia. When you get right down to it, a handful of congressmen run this town and if anybody’s got a hold on those congressmen, then he’s got a pretty good grip on Washington, too. You follow me, St. Ives?”

“I follow you.”

“You notice how polite the homicide boys were? Not many questions, not much excitement, just kind of a quiet routine even though a cop was killed and an out-of-town cop at that.”

“I noticed.”

“It’ll probably be about two paragraphs back with the leg-sore ads. No more. You see, St. Ives, the word’s come down. They want that shield back without any fuss. Now you’re going to ask where’d it come down from and I can’t answer that because I don’t know, but if I was to guess I’d say it came down from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, drifted up to Capitol Hill, and sort of trickled down to Fastnaught and me. We got the riot act read to us the other day — day before yesterday, wasn’t it, Fastnaught?”

“Day before yesterday,” Fastnaught said.

“They used the carrot and the stick on us. They told about all the nice things that were going to happen to us if we got the shield back and then they told us about all the not-so-nice things that were going to happen if we didn’t. They weren’t bothered that some people were dead because of a hunk of brass. That didn’t worry them one bit. All they want is the shield back and they gave us carte blanche — that’s the right expression, isn’t it? So Fastnaught here speaks up and says, ‘What happens if the go-between gets cold feet and wants to back out?’ Well, they just looked at us for a long time and then one of them said, ‘I trust you’ve heard of harassment, Lieutenant Demeter?’ So I said yes, I’d heard of it. And then they just looked at us some more.”

“Being harassed is better than being dead,” I said.

Demeter turned from the window and shook his head, a little sadly, I thought. “You’re not going to be dead, St. Ives. Not if Fastnaught and I can help it. Let me tell you something. My whole future’s riding on you. Fastnaught’s younger; he could do something else, but I’m past forty-five and that’s too old to start all over again. Now when they say harassment, they mean it. They’ll drag you through courts on income tax. You’ll spend every dime you’ve got on lawyers. And if you go on living in New York — or anyplace else — they’ll send some buttons after you at three o’clock in the morning with a warrant for your arrest for jaywalking or spitting on the sidewalk. Your life won’t be worth living. I don’t say I like the idea, but there’s lots of things in this country I don’t like.”

“It’s just your job,” I said.

“That’s right, St. Ives, it’s just my job and some days I don’t have to like that either.”

It was still raining and for what seemed to be a long time the rain on the window was the only sound in the room. Demeter went back to his chair; Fastnaught maintained his vigilance at the door, and I crossed to the window and stared down at Fifteenth Street and the shiny tops of wet cars. The pressure could have come, as Demeter said, from the White House, from one of those faceless aides who’d been chivvied by someone at State. Or it could have come from a senator or a matched pair of congressmen who owed their re-election to someone, someone who wanted the shield back and not too many questions asked. But the pressure was there all right, strong enough to bend a couple of tough cops and leave a sour taste in their mouths. And the threat of harassment was real, too. I’d seen harassment before, a couple of times, and one had wound up in a sanitarium and the other had fled to Italy, which he didn’t much like but which he liked better than what he’d gone through in New York for eighteen months before his nerves shattered.

I turned from the window and looked at Demeter, who was staring at the floor. “You win,” I said.

“Some prize,” Demeter said to the rug on the floor. “I win a go-between. A brass go-between.”

The phone finally rang at three-thirty. Fastnaught was stretched out on one of the twin beds. Demeter was still in his chair reading a newspaper that I’d sent down for. The voice on the phone was the man again and he still had a mouthful of wet cotton.

“Do you know Washington?” the voice asked.

“No.”

“There’s a golf driving range in the northwest section.” He gave me the address. “Do you have that?”

“Yes.”

“Be there at exactly ten-fifteen tonight. Have the money in a suitcase in the back seat of a four-door sedan. Park your car, but don’t get out of it. At exactly ten-twenty the back door will be opened. Don’t look around. I mean it. Don’t look around. The shield will be put in your back seat. Wait five minutes and then you can do whatever you want to do. Have you got all that?”

“I’ve got it.”

The phone went dead and I hung up. Fastnaught was sitting up on the bed; Demeter had put his paper on the floor. Both of them were looking at me.

“Tonight at ten-fifteen,” I said. Then I told them what the cottony voice had told me.

“Sort of a public place, isn’t it?” Demeter said.

“Not if it’s still raining,” I said.

Fastnaught went to the window and peered out. “It’s stopped,” he said. “Looks like it might clear up.”

Demeter rose and stretched. “Ten-fifteen tonight, huh?” he said. “How’s your golf game, Fastnaught?”

“Lousy.”

“Maybe you’ll get a chance to improve it tonight, but right now we’ve got some work to do.”

“You’re not leaving?” I said.

“Sorry to rush off like this, St. Ives, but we’ve got things to do, people to see, and plans to plot.”

“You’ll be around tonight, I suppose.”

“Just look for the car with the flashing lights and the extra-loud siren,” Fastnaught said.

They moved to the door. “St. Ives hasn’t got a thing to worry about now, has he, Fastnaught?” Demeter said.

“He should be worry-proof,” the Sergeant said.

“Just one item, Lieutenant,” I said.

“What?” Demeter said as he opened the door.

“Try not to screw it up.”

He turned from the door and let his bright black beanlike eyes run from the tips of my cordovan shoes to the top of my head where my hair lay in a neatly trimmed pile that could have been a little thicker, but was nicely touched with gray at the temples. From the expression on Demeter’s face, he could have been measuring me for a casket. A cheap one. “We’ll try not to screw it up, Mr. St. Ives,” he said with something that almost resembled a smile. “We’ll try not to very hard.”

The golf driving range was called Puckett’s and it took up several acres of gradually sloping land on Wisconsin Avenue just this side of the District line. A dozen or so golfers were trying to straighten out their hooks and slices with big tin buckets full of balls that they drove with varying success at markers which told whether they were hitting 100, 150, 200, or 300 yards. There was also a single marker that read 500 yards but nobody seemed to pay it much attention. Giant banks of floodlights provided almost day-bright illumination, and out in the middle of the driving range a gasoline-powered cart covered with a steel-mesh cage shuffled back and forth gobbling up the spent balls like an oversized vacuum cleaner. There were more cars than there were golfers. Some of them probably contained people whose television sets had broken down for the night and who would watch anything, even 45-year-old duffers, as long as it was for free. Some of the cars were empty and some contained lone women who seemed resigned to a fate which had married them off to men who thought that breaking 100 at Chevy Chase ranked in historical significance with the signing of a nuclear-test-ban treaty or dinner for four at the White House.

I parked the Ford five cars down from the white wooden hut that rented the balls and clubs. I sat there, exactly on time at 10:15, with $250,000 worth of neatly wrapped, well-used tens and twenties on the back seat, and watched a man in his sixties top his ball three times in a row, and waited for someone to open the rear door and hand in a brass shield that some thought could save the lives of thousands and which had already cost the lives of four.

At ten-seventeen the lights went out. One moment the big banks of floodlights on top of the tall wooden poles bathed the driving range in a glaring yellowish white. The next moment there was nothing but blackness, made even more impenetrable by the eyes’ inability to adjust. Reaction was slow. It took at least five seconds before the first horn blew. Then another. Somebody on the tee, a man, yelled, “What the hell—” and the rear door of the Ford opened. I forgot the warning and started to twist around and it may have saved my life. Something quite hard landed on the side of my head, just above the vulnerable temple, and I didn’t get to see who delivered the blow in what, I later decided, was a most competent and professional manner. Nor did I have the opportunity to see who made off with a man’s suitcase stuffed with a quarter of a million dollars in neatly wrapped, very negotiable currency.

When I came out of it I was lying on my back on the front seat and the first thing I saw was Demeter’s face upside down above me. I twisted my head quickly and threw up on the floorboards. While I was doing that Demeter kept saying, “Are you all right, are you all right?” and I kept wanting to say, “No, I’m not all right, my head hurts like hell,” but I had to throw up some more instead. Finally I was through and managed to sit up. I felt the sore place on my head and the knot seemed to be not less than an inch high and two inches wide. It wasn’t really that large; it only seemed so to my carefully sensitive touch. It hurt enough to be twice that large.

I leaned back in the seat and looked at Demeter, bending half crouched in the open right-hand door as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to get in.

“Are you all right?” he said again. I noticed that the lights were back on.

“No,” I said. I started to turn around and look in the back seat, but I didn’t because I knew it wouldn’t be any use. “No shield,” I said.

“No,” Demeter said.

“No money either.”

“No. No money.”

“One of them got to the main switch.”

“Probably the woman,” he said.

“And the man slugged me and took the suitcase.”

“That’s right.”

“How long were the lights off?”

“Two minutes, maybe three,” he said.

“And they just drove off.”

“No.”

“Don’t tell me you caught them?”

“If they’d left from here, we would’ve. We had both ends of the street sealed off.”

I touched the bump on my head again. It seemed to have grown another inch. “But they didn’t leave from here.”

“Not exactly,” he said. “From down there,” and he pointed across the driving range to its far edge where the shielded cart that sucked up the golf balls rested a few feet away from the lone sign that read five hundred yards.

“How long was I out?” I said.

“Maybe ten, eleven minutes.”

“How’d they do it?”

“They probably cased the place earlier today and found out where the main switch is. It’s in a metal box outside the shack. Don’t ask me why. Puckett says he locks it when he leaves at night, but he doesn’t lock it while he’s operating. They parked their car over there beyond those trees that are behind the five-hundred-yard marker. Walked over here and sat around watching the golf balls or even hit a few themselves until you arrived. Then she doused the lights, he slugged you, grabbed the money, and ran for the cart. That’s how I figure it anyhow.”

“How’d they find it in the dark?”

“The cart? They had a flashlight. I saw it out there, but I thought it was the guy in the cart. Anyway they slugged him and then drove to the edge of the range, jumped out, and now they’re probably home free counting the money.”

I started to shake my head but decided not to because it might hurt too much. “Clever,” I said. “Where were you and the good Sergeant Fastnaught when the lights went out, if the phrase be permitted?”

“Just four cars down from you,” Demeter said in a glum voice. “Just four lousy cars away.”

“That’ll look good in your report.”

Demeter glared at me. “Don’t ride me, St. Ives.”

“Have you told the museum or Mrs. Wingo?” I think he almost blushed. At least he looked embarrassed.

“No. Not yet.”

I slid over the seat, under the wheel, and started the engine. “Good luck,” I said.

“Where you going?”

“Well, I don’t think I can lose another quarter of a million here tonight so I thought I’d go back to the hotel and order up some ice. Some of it I’ll wrap in a towel and apply to my head. The rest I’ll use to chill what probably will prove to be a large amount of strong drink. I’ll also call Frances Wingo for you and tell her how I managed to spend the museum’s two hundred and fifty thousand bucks.”

“Uh,” Demeter said.

“Any message for her? Something reassuring like several new leads have turned up in the course of the investigation and arrests are momentarily expected? She might like that.”

Demeter slammed the right door. “Go back to the hotel, St. Ives. Go back and get drunk. Roll in the gutter. But just get out of my sight.”

I left.

It was a three-story row house on Corcoran Place, a narrow, one-way street running east. More properly, I suppose, it should have been called a town house because someone had gone to a lot of expense to remodel it. The brick veneer was painted an antique white and the woodwork was trimmed in flat black. One of those stagey-looking gas lamps burned outside. I paid the cab driver, walked up seven steps, and pushed a button. Nothing happened for almost a minute and then a light went on in what I assumed to be the hall. The door opened a crack while an eye peered out at me and then it opened wide. It was the slim, dark Mr. Ulado, looking almost naked in shirt sleeves.

“Come in, Mr. St. Ives,” he said. “I’m sorry I was so long in opening the door, but we’re up on the third floor.”

I went in and found myself in a hall that had a floor of random width pine planking that was polished to high gleam. There were a few paintings on the wall, a couple of pieces of good furniture that someone with money and taste might place in a hall, and some stairs. Mr. Ulado headed for the stairs. I followed him.

“This house,” he said, “belongs to an American friend of Mr. Mbwato’s who sympathizes with our cause. He and his wife are on holiday in Europe this summer and he has let us use his house as our Washington headquarters. It’s a most convenient location, don’t you think?”

I told him that I thought it was fine.

The carpeting on the stairs ran out on the third flight. The remodeling apparently had not risen above the second floor. There was a small landing and a door at the top of the third flight. Mr. Ulado pushed the door open and then stood to one side to let me enter. I went in and found myself in a large room that was illuminated by a single, naked bulb that hung by a cord from a fixture in the ceiling. Underneath the bulb were two straight wooden chairs and in the chairs, their backs to me, were a man and a woman. Their hands were tied to the backs of the chairs with what looked to be clothesline. Mbwato, down to shirt sleeves, stood in front of the man and the woman, staring at them as he rocked back and forth a little on his toes, his hands on his hips. He looked up when I came in.

“Mr. St. Ives, how nice,” he said, and managed to make it sound as if I were the late but honored guest at the Embassy reception. “You made good time.”

“I had an incentive,” I said. “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth.”

“Oh, yes, the money.” He looked around the room vaguely. “It’s over there, I believe,” and he pointed to the left side of the room. The suitcase sat under a window, casually, as if someone who had just come back from a trip had placed it there because he wanted to rest a moment before unpacking.

“Thank you,” I said. It was without doubt the most inadequate phrase I’d ever uttered.

Mbwato waved a huge hand, dismissing my thanks. “Think nothing of it. Come meet our two thieves. My word, but they’re being most uncooperative.”

I walked over to Mbwato, stood at his side, and looked down at the pair. The man was about thirty, I guessed, black-haired with long sideburns. He wore a navy turtleneck shirt with long sleeves, black slacks, and black shoes. He stared up at me with hazel eyes that had an oriental cast to them, made even more pronounced by his high cheekbones. Thin, almost colorless lips made a line underneath a sharply pointed nose. There was nothing in his face that I could see other than a kind of animal awareness that can be found in a hustling shoe clerk or a crafty checker-outer at a supermarket.

The woman, or girl, I suppose, was not much over twenty-two, if that. She wore dark slacks and a turtleneck shirt that matched her friend’s. Her hair was long and straight and either brown or blond, depending on which streak you looked at. Blue eyes, an ordinary nose, and a sullen mouth did nothing to set her off from the run-of-the-mill, the not pretty, not plain girls for whom the word average was invented.

“This,” Mbwato said, indicating the man, “is Jack. And this is Jill. That’s all they’ve told us thus far, but I’m sure they’ll become more cooperative as time passes.”

“How’d you get them?” I said.

Ulado was bending behind the man, making sure that the knots were tight, I suppose. When he was satisfied, he checked the girl’s ropes and then stood behind them, his arms folded over his chest.

“You seldom look behind you, do you, Mr. St. Ives?” Mbwato said.

“No, I suppose I don’t.”

“We’ve kept you under constant surveillance for the past several days — up until today, in fact. One of my associates followed you into the Nickerson Building where the man Spellacy was murdered.”

“He didn’t go up the elevator with me.”

“No, he didn’t. He watched you as you read the building directory. Then he watched what floors the elevator stopped at. You were reading the M’s and the elevator stopped on the sixth and eleventh floors. The only listing for a firm beginning with M on the sixth and eleventh floors was Mesa Verde Estates. When you came down, another of my associates picked you up and the other man rode up to the eleventh floor, popped his head into Mesa Verde Estates, and saw that Mr. Spellacy was quite dead.”

“Just how many associates do you have?” I said.

Mbwato turned on his glow-in-the-dark smile. “Oh, a dozen, I think, here and in New York. Most of them are students.”

“What about them?” I said, indicating the man and the girl.

“Quite by accident, I’m afraid. We were on the train that you took down from New York, in a coach, regrettably. Most uncomfortable. We followed you to the Madison and were waiting in the lobby. At least, Mr. Ulado was. He recognized the New York detective when he came in because he had already called on you at your New York hotel twice. So naturally Mr. Ulado kept his eyes on him. Our young couple here suddenly materialized in the lobby — I suppose we all took the train down from New York — and proceeded to stab Mr. Ogden, I believe his name was. So Mr. Ulado, displaying sound judgment, I should add, followed our young couple, still hoping that they would lead us to the shield. We kept them under observation all day, and followed them this evening. When they parked their car tonight at the far edge of the driving range we simply waited. When they came back, rather hurriedly, carrying the suitcase, we decided it was time to take matters in hand. And here we are.”

“And they’ve said nothing?”

“Not yet,” Mbwato said. “But our methods have been most gentle.” He sighed. “I’m really disturbed that we may be forced to turn to more persuasive means.”

“Such as?”

“Torture, Mr. St. Ives,” he said. “The West African variety, which is, I should add for the benefit of our young friends here, most excruciating. Mr. Ulado is an expert, aren’t you, Mr. Ulado?”

Mr. Ulado smiled faintly and managed to look a little embarrassed.

“Why don’t you just turn them over to the police?” I said.

“The shield, Mr. St. Ives, you forget the shield. We intend to obtain it from wherever it now is.”

I moved over to the man. “Your name’s Jack, right?”

He said nothing, but only stared at me with his hazel eyes that seemed curiously empty, containing no fear or alarm or even regret.

“I think you’d better tell the man where the shield is, Jack.”

He looked at me some more and then, quite conversationally, said, “Fuck you.”

I nodded and moved over to the girl. “The man is really serious,” I said. “About the torture, I mean. You’d better tell him.”

Her blue eyes were empty of thought and probably of emotion, except the lustier ones like rage and hate. She smiled a little, repeated what her friend had said, and then giggled. I had heard that giggle before.

I turned to Mbwato. “They’re all yours. What do you have in mind?”

Mbwato sighed. “It’s really not my field, you know. I suppose we should ask Mr. Ulado. Would you care to describe your methods to our guests, Mr. Ulado?”

“Certainly,” he said, walked over to the window ledge, and picked up a package about twelve inches long. He then walked back and stood before the pair. “Unfortunately, we do not have all the equipment that is normally used in such instances, so we have been forced to improvise. The American drugstore is full of items that are most satisfactory substitutes. This one for instance,” he said, and indicated the box. “It contains what is called a curling iron. Operating on electricity, it becomes extremely hot. And when inserted into a man’s rectum or a woman’s vagina, it should produce considerable pain as I will shortly demonstrate.”

He took the curling iron from its box which he dropped to the floor. The girl stared at him and then, quite suddenly, giggled. The man just looked. Ulado reached up and plugged the curling iron into the double socket that held the light. Holding the iron in his right hand, he turned to Mbwato.

“Which do you think we should begin with, sir?”

Mbwato seemed to give the question serious consideration. “I’m not sure, Mr. Ulado. What do you think, Mr. St. Ives, the gentleman or the lady?”

I shrugged. “The girl, I think.”

“Very well, Mr. Ulado, the young lady.”

Mr. Ulado nodded, spat on his finger, and touched it to the curling iron. The spit sizzled. “If you will just hold this for me, sir, while I prepare the woman.” He handed the curling iron to Mbwato and turned to the girl.

“You’re not going to stick that in me!” she screamed.

“Not if you tell us the whereabouts of the shield,” Mbwato said in a genial voice. “Otherwise,” and he made a slight gesture with the iron.

The girl turned her head toward the man. “I’m going to tell him.”

“Shut up,” the man said. “They’re not going to do anything. They’re just bluffing.” I noticed that there was a sheen of moisture on his forehead.

“Continue, Mr. Ulado,” Mbwato said.

“I will have to remove her slacks first,” he said.

“Get on with it then.”

“It would be better if we had a table.”

“Improvise, man, improvise,” Mbwato said.

“First the slacks,” Ulado said, and approached the girl.

“Get away from me, you black bastard!” she yelled. “Get him away.” She started to sob, deep, harsh sobs that seemed almost like coughs. “We don’t have it,” she screamed, “we don’t have the goddamned shield.”

Mbwato reached up to the light fixture, unplugged the curling iron, glanced at it distastefully, and then looked around for someplace to put it. He decided on the floor.

“Where is the shield?” Mbwato said to the girl, spacing his words carefully.

“We don’t know,” she said, her voice almost a moan, “we haven’t got it.”

“But you stole it from the museum?” Mbwato said.

“Yes, the nigger guard got it out for us. But we haven’t got it. We only had it for a few minutes anyway.”

Mbwato turned to the man. The thin coating of moisture that I’d seen on his forehead had turned into drops of sweat that ran down into his eyes. He tried to blink them dry.

“From the first, Jack,” Mbwato said softly. “From the very first.”

“Fuck you,” Jack said again.

Mbwato’s open palm landed against the man’s cheek with a loud, wet smack. The man’s stiff features seemed to crumple, and I realized that he was crying. “All right,” he said, “all right.” He snuffled some more and turned to look at the girl. “Dumb ones,” he said bitterly. “I always get dumb ones.”

“From the very first,” Mbwato said.

“Spellacy,” the man who claimed that his name was Jack said. “He got me onto it. He knew a guy in Washington who had a real sweet one. Just walk up to a back door and somebody would hand us something worth ten thousand bucks.”

“Ten thousand?” I said.

“That was our cut at first, in the beginning. Spellacy got us in touch with this guy in Washington. Wingo. A real junkie. He told us the deal. He had the guard all set up by then and the four of us met here in Washington. Those two were so junkie that you couldn’t tell how they’d fly. And then Wingo started talking about two hundred and fifty thousand bucks. The ransom. So I called Spellacy and said what kind of a deal is this where my cut is ten grand out of two-fifty. So we talked it over and decided to get rid of Wingo. We just gave him an extra dose one night and let him roll down the side of the road. But then we had a problem. Wingo had been supplying the guard with H and now we had to supply him. Spellacy bought it in New York and we kept him going. The guard, I mean.”

“Where was Wingo getting his stuff?” I said. “From what I hear he needed five hundred bucks a day to keep him, Sackett and Sackett’s wife happy.”

“I don’t know where he got it,” the man said. “I asked him once but he just laughed and said he had a private supply. A very private supply, he said and then laughed some more like he was crazy.”

“Continue, please,” Mbwato said.

“Well, shit, you know the rest. We got the shield and then we got rid of the guard. It was down to a three-way split then, me, Spellacy, and dumbie here. But what’s Spellacy done? Nothing.”

“So you got rid of him,” I said.

“Where is the shield?” Mbwato asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What did you do with it?”

“It was part of the deal, the one that Wingo set up. We got it, drove about six blocks, and put it in the back seat of a car. That’s the last I ever saw of it.”

“The shield of Komporeen,” the girl said, and giggled.

“Whose car?” Mbwato demanded.

“Christ, I don’t know whose car. It was a car that was supposed to be parked at a certain place and was. I just put it in the back seat.”

“I see,” Mbwato said, and sighed. He turned to me. “We seem to have solved a few murders and a theft, Mr. St. Ives. But we are no closer to the shield.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said. “As long as he’s in a talkative mood, I’d like to clear up something. What about Lieutenant Ogden, Jack? How’d he get on to you?”

“Spellacy,” he said dully. “Ogden found out about you being interested in Spellacy and he figured that Spellacy was in on the deal. And if he knew Spellacy was in, he knew I was in. Spellacy and me worked together a lot. And Ogden knew me, too. Christ, he should have. I paid him off enough times because of dumb broads like her.”

“Did he get in touch with you?”

“He tried to; he got the word around that he was looking for me. Ah, to hell with him. He’s dead.” He looked up and smiled at me. “We sure had you on the run though, buster, didn’t we?”

“That’s right,” I said, “you sure did.”

“All on account of some goddamned shield.”

“The shield of Komporeen,” the girl said, and gave us the pleasure of listening to another one of her giggles.

Mbwato and I left Mr. Ulado to look after his two charges while we went downstairs to sample the town-house owner’s Scotch. I carried the suitcase in my right hand. It didn’t seem to weigh as much as it once had and I wondered whether I should count the money, but decided not to because there wasn’t much I could do about it if some were missing — certainly not replace it.

Mbwato mixed two drinks and we sat in the comfortable living room that contained some more pictures, some better than average furniture, and a large number of books. I sat on the couch, Mbwato in the largest chair he could find, which still seemed too small for his bulk.

“So, Mr. St. Ives, what shall I do with our two young friends upstairs?”

“Turn them over to the cops.”

“Do you think they’re sane?”

“The man is, I think. I don’t know about the girl. She seems a little kinky, but maybe it’s like he said, she’s just dumb.”

“Rather coarse, too,” Mr. Mbwato murmured.

“Well, not quite as coarse as a hot curling iron. Tell me something, is Ulado really your torture expert?”

Mbwato chuckled. “Good heavens no, man. Couldn’t you see that he was absolutely petrified? He got the idea from one of your more lurid magazines, I think. Still, it proved quite effective, didn’t it?”

“Suppose they hadn’t talked. Suppose they were stubborn. Would you have used it?”

Mbwato gave me a long, speculative look. “Let me reply in this fashion: would you have tried to stop me?”

I nodded. “I guess so.”

“And you would have succeeded.” He sighed deeply. “The threat was all that was really needed. Their lives have conditioned them to accept quite readily the notion that two black African savages would think nothing of torturing them for hours on end. They have been indoctrinated by their culture to accept this.”

“Too many Tarzan films, huh?” I said.

“I’m not so sure about that. It’s just that if the roles were reversed, neither of them would have had any compunction about using the iron on me or Mr. Ulado. So they quite readily accepted the fact that we would torture them.” He sighed again. “But what to do with them?”

“The cops,” I said.

“Really, Mr. St. Ives.”

“Why not?”

“Could it be done — say — anonymously?”

“Well, you can’t just mail them downtown in a plain wrapper.”

“Could you possibly…”

“Possibly,” I said.

“I would be most grateful.”

“Not as grateful as I am for getting the money back. I haven’t thanked you adequately.”

Mbwato put his drink down on a table and leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees. He studied the carpet. “The money is more important to you than the shield, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so. If I return the money to the museum, then they’re right back where they started. I can bow out and that’s the end of it.”

“And that’s what you intend to do tomorrow?” he said.

“No,” I said, “I don’t intend to do that at all.”

He looked up at me. “What then?”

“I intend to get the shield back.”

His eyes widened. Big as saucers, I thought, like the troll’s who lived under the bridge and had a good thing going until Big Billy Goat Gruff came along.

“You know where it is?”

I took a long time before answering. “Possibly,” I said.

“Probably?” he said.

“Yes.”

“My earlier offer still stands, Mr. St. Ives.”

“Forget it,” I said.

“You have a better one?”

“No.”

Mbwato rose and began to pace the floor in long strides. “You’re being most infuriating with your hints and allusions, Mr. St. Ives. You know that, I suppose.”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He stopped his pacing and stood before me, bending forward slightly, a huge, very black man whose broad, curiously gentle face was a battleground for hope and despair. Despair seemed to be winning. “I do not mind the personal disgrace that will accompany my failure,” he said. “I hope you understand that; I hope you believe it.”

“I believe it,” I said.

“You realize the importance of the shield — not to me personally, but to my country.”

“You’ve told me about it. Twice, in fact. Maybe three times.”

“Then I need not repeat it.”

“No.”

“Now you say you intend to get the shield back.”

“That’s right.”

“How?”

“Don’t you mean where?” I said.

“All right. Where?”

“I don’t know. I’m still just guessing. All I really know is that I’ll need some help.”

“Is that a request?” Mbwato said softly.

I nodded. I was tired. I wanted to go to bed. My head had started to throb again, worse than before. “You can call it that,” I said.

“When will you need it?”

“Tomorrow at the latest.”

“What do you intend to do with the shield, Mr. St. Ives, return it to the museum?”

“I don’t have it yet. I might not ever have it. As I said, I’m only guessing. The only thing that I really know is I’ve been suckered and I’m not quite sure by whom. Maybe by you. Maybe by the museum or my lawyer or even Lieutenant Demeter and his faithful Sergeant Fastnaught. Maybe it’s all been some kind of gigantic conspiracy that everybody’s been in on except me. Or maybe it’s just that I have a slight concussion and it’s done something to my brain. Turned me a little paranoic.” My head was no longer throbbing; it was pounding and the pain hit at the back of my head where it hadn’t been before.

“No more questions, Mr. Mbwato,” I said. “No more questions because I haven’t got the answers. Right now the only thing I want to do is go home and go to bed. But I can’t even do that because I have to call the cops and hand over your two friends upstairs.” I slumped back on the couch, but it only made my head hurt more. “Can you clear out of here?”

“Yes, of course,” Mbwato said.

“Where can I reach you tomorrow?” I wasn’t looking at him; I had my eyes closed, but that didn’t ease the pain either.

“Here,” he said, “at this number.” He produced one of his ivory-colored cards and scribbled a telephone number on it. He handed it to me and I shoved it into my coat pocket.

“What time do you think you may—”

“I don’t know. I told you I don’t know anything. I’m just guessing. Maybe I won’t call at all. Maybe it’ll all blow up in my face. Bang, like that. Or Boom. Or even bang-boom.”

“Are you feeling all right, Mr. St. Ives?” Mbwato said, and there seemed to be genuine solicitation in his voice, or it could have been that he was just worried about the shield and that I might die on him.

“No,” I said. “I’m not feeling all right. Where’s the phone?”

“At your elbow.”

“So it is,” I said, and because it seemed to sound nice, I said it again. “So it is. Another drink might help, Mr. Mbwato. Another touch of your landlord’s excellent Scotch. And as soon as that is done, I suggest that you gather up Mr. Ulado and flee into the night. Just make sure that our two young friends upstairs are securely bound.”

“Yes,” he said, handing me another drink. “I’ll see to it. Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. St. Ives? You don’t seem at all well. I might even say that you look pale, but then I’m no great judge.”

“I’m tiptop,” I said. “Both the tip and the top of my head are about to sail off.”

“I’ll get Mr. Ulado,” he said, and headed for the stairs.

I picked up the phone and dialed Lieutenant Demeter’s number. He answered with his usual “Robbery Squad, Lieutenant Demeter,” but most of the bark and bite were missing.

“How goes the report, Lieutenant?”

“What do you want, St. Ives?”

“A word or two with you. Only a word or two.”

“You drunk?”

“Possibly, possibly. My head is coming off and seems to be sailing around the room.”

“You’re drunk,” he said.

“The two thieves, Lieutenant. I have them bound and gagged. Well, not gagged really, but bound. Yes, bound with strong cord. And the money too. A quarter of a million dollars. I have recovered it. Do you find that interesting?”

There was a silence for a moment and then Demeter said, “Is this a joke, St. Ives?”

“If it were, it wouldn’t be a very good one, would it? No joke. Thieves and money. They’re both here. I thought I’d call before you got too far into your report.”

“Where are you?”

I took another swallow of my drink, a large one. The pain in my head now seemed focused behind my eyes, threatening to push them out of their sockets. I closed them. “In a charming town house on Corcoran Place.”

“The address, goddamnit.”

“Oh, yes.” I gave him the address.

“If this is some kind of a joke—”

“No joke,” I said. “No joke at all.” I hung up.

Mbwato and Ulado came down the stairs and entered the living room. Both now wore coats and ties. Ulado crossed over to me and put some items on the coffee table. “We relieved them of these,” he said. “I thought that they might be evidence — or something like that.” On the coffee table were two switchblade knives, a .38-caliber revolver, and blackjack with a spring handle.

“We’re leaving now, Mr. St. Ives,” Mbwato said. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

I waved my empty glass at him. “Another drink to cut the phlegm.”

Ulado hurried forward and took my glass, looking at Mbwato, who nodded. “You need to sleep, Mr. St. Ives,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “For a couple of years.”

“I’ll be anticipating your call tomorrow,” he said as Ulado handed me the fresh drink.

“Man your phone,” I said. “I shall be calling.”

Mr. Mbwato stood by the door to the hall and stared at me. “I hope, Mr. St. Ives, that you know what you’re doing.”

“I hope so, too, Mr. Mbwato,” I said. “I hope so very much.”

The pain had eased a little by the time that Demeter and Fastnaught arrived. Perhaps the Scotch had helped after all, or it may have been because I had stopped thinking about what I had to do the next day. The thoughts had been more than unpleasant; they had been nasty ones born of apprehension and dread and they had burrowed into my mind like a small, wet furry animal with stainless-steel teeth and claws that scratched and chomped around in my head. The giddiness had gone, too, and when I answered the policelike banging on the door I was as sober and composed as one could hope to be on four very large drinks.

“There’s a bell,” I said when I opened the door, “or don’t you believe in them?”

“He’s drunk,” Demeter said. “You can smell it.”

“Come in, gentlemen. All by yourselves, I see.”

“If this is a joke, St. Ives, we want to enjoy it in private,” Demeter said, and pushed himself past me into the hall. Fastnaught followed, chewing on a stick of gum. His eyes looked more bloodshot than usual.

“You look like hell,” Fastnaught said.

“I’ve got a headache, but it’s better now.”

“All right,” Demeter said. “What’s the story?”

“Jack and Jill are upstairs on the third floor,” I said. “Jack and Jill are the thieves. They’re also the murderers, as nasty a young couple as our stricken society has yet produced.”

Demeter stared at me suspiciously. “Just sitting there waiting for us, huh?”

“They’re all tied up,” I said. “Securely.”

“Okay, let’s check it out, Fastnaught,” Demeter said. He produced a revolver from a shoulder holster and waved it vaguely toward the stairs. Fastnaught also drew his revolver and started up the stairs, still chewing his gum. “You coming, St. Ives?” Demeter said.

“Too far,” I said. “Far too far. And I’ve got a headache.”

I watched them slowly mount the stairs until they were out of sight on the second-floor landing. Then I went back into the living room and poured myself another drink, mentally assigning it curative powers that would have done credit to a dozen or so of the more progressive wonder drugs. I sat on the couch and waited. A few moments later there was a sharp sound as if someone had kicked in a door. Or maybe they had just banged it open against the wall. I took a sip of my drink and waited some more. In a few minutes I could hear them descending the stairs. Fastnaught came in first, his gun still drawn. He was followed by the girl with her hands handcuffed behind her. Then came the man, also handcuffed, and Demeter, still with his revolver in his hand.

“Ah, you caught them, Lieutenant,” I said. “Good work.”

“Shut up,” Demeter said.

Fastnaught turned and waved his gun at two chairs. “Sit down over there,” he said to the girl and the man. They moved over to the two chairs and sat down.

“The suitcase with the money is by that chair,” I said.

“I saw it,” Demeter said, reholstering his gun. “You count it?”

“No. Should I’ve?”

“Didn’t you even look?”

“No.”

“Take a look, Fastnaught.”

Fastnaught bent over the suitcase, turned it on its side, and opened it. The tens and twenties were still there, wrapped in neat brown paper bands.

“Jesus,” Fastnaught said, and I felt that there was pure reverence in his tone.

“All right, close it up,” Demeter said. He turned to me. “Now tell us all about it, St. Ives.”

“I got a call at my hotel, an anonymous tip. He said that the thieves and the money were at this address, all safe and sound. So I caught a cab over, found it to be just like the man on the phone said, and then called you.”

“You lying son of a bitch,” said the man who claimed that his name was Jack. “Two big niggers got us. They talked funny, like Englishmen. They were going to shove a curling iron up my ass if I didn’t tell ’em and he was gonna help.”

“Tell what?” Demeter said.

The man called Jack looked away. “Nothing. I don’t have to tell you nothing. But he’s a lying son of a bitch.”

“Strange,” I said. “They were both extremely talkative a few minutes ago. They were telling me how they had managed to steal the shield and do away with four persons — Sackett, Wingo, Spellacy, and your former classmate, Lieutenant Ogden.”

Demeter slipped his revolver back into its holster, looked around the room, picked out a chair, and eased himself into it slowly. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, found a cigar encased in a metal tube, and went through the ritual of lighting it. When it was well lighted he looked at me with black, beany eyes. “Nothing like a good cigar,” he said.

“That suitcase would buy a lot of them,” I said.

“What do you think, Fastnaught?” Demeter said to the sergeant, who had also tucked away his gun and was now leaning against the mantel of the fireplace, which looked as if it really worked.

“About what?” Fastnaught said.

“Do you think the suitcase would buy a lot of cigars?”

“Plenty,” Fastnaught said.

“Cigars for me, little girls for you, and punchboards for St. Ives here.”

“What about our two friends here, Jack and Jill?” I said.

“I don’t think their names are Jack and Jill really. What’d Ogden tell you just before he died? He said something about ‘Freddie and his whore,’ didn’t he?” Demeter turned to look at the man in handcuffs. “Are you Freddie and his whore, son?” he asked mildly.

Freddie, or Jack, told Demeter to go fuck himself. Fastnaught sighed, left his spot at the mantel, crossed over to the man and struck him twice across the face with an open palm. Fastnaught seemed neither to like nor dislike striking the man. He said nothing after he had done it and a moment later he was back leaning against the mantel, rubbing a corner of it into the spot between his shoulder blades where the itch seemed to persist. The man’s face had crumpled again and I saw that he was crying. He didn’t like being hit.

“I asked you a question, son,” Demeter said. “Is your name Freddie?”

The man sat with his head bowed. He was almost through crying. The girl looked at him blankly and then giggled.

“Fred,” he said.

“Fred what?”

“Fred Simpson.”

“All right, Fred Simpson, what about the girl? She your wife?”

“No.”

“He’s my pimp,” the girl said. “He’s my pretty little pimp. Freddie the pimp.” She giggled again.

“What’s your name, lady?” Demeter said.

“Wanda.”

“Wanda what?”

“Wanda Lou Wesoloski.”

“A Polack,” Freddie said. “A dumb Polack.”

“Tell us about it, Freddie,” Demeter said.

“I want a lawyer. I don’t have to say nothing.”

“That’s right, Freddie, you don’t,” Demeter said, and shifted his gaze to me. “You say that Freddie was talkative a little earlier?”

“Extremely,” I said.

“You sort of just breezed over it before, St. Ives. Why don’t you let us have it again with a little more detail?”

“All right,” I said, and I told them what Freddie had said as Mbwato stood there, looking for some place to put the curling iron. I didn’t mention either Mbwato or Mr. Ulado. For some reason I always thought of the slim, dark young man as Mister Ulado.

When I was through Demeter grunted, looked for some place to dump his ash, and found a tray on a table next to him. “And Freddie here told you all that, huh? You must have been a hell of a good reporter at one time, St. Ives.”

“Just fair,” I said. “People confide in me.”

“He’s a lying bastard,” Freddie said in a dull tone. “There were two niggers. They had a curling iron. He was gonna help them shove it up — ask her. Ask Wanda.”

“What about it, Wanda?”

The girl looked at him blankly. “What?”

“Was there a curling iron and two spades?”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Sure. And the shield of Komporeen.” She giggled again.

Demeter sighed. “Like I said, that suitcase would buy a lot of cigars. How much is a third of two hundred and fifty thousand, Fastnaught?”

“I’ve already figured it out,” Fastnaught said. “It’s $83,333.33.”

“Sounds like a lot of money,” Demeter said. “Sound like enough to you, St. Ives?”

“What happens to your two friends over there?”

“I guess they could try to escape. But like I said, is $83,333.33 enough?”

“Not for me,” I said.

“I didn’t think it would be,” he said. “Not for a New York go-between. When you come right down to it, it’s not even enough for a Washington cop.” He turned to Freddie. “What kind of car did you put the shield in, Freddie?”

“I don’t know what kind of car it—” He stopped quickly. “I don’t have to talk to you,” he said. “I gotta right to get a lawyer.”

Demeter rose. “You’ll need one,” he said. “A good one. On your feet; we’re going to take a little ride. Bring the suitcase, Fastnaught.”

“Don’t you think that should go back to the museum?” I said.

“What’s the matter, St. Ives, you worried that maybe a hundred and twenty-five thousand each might be enough for a couple of cops?”

“I don’t worry about anything,” I said.

“I bet. Let me make something clear. The money is the only evidence we got. Without the money all we got is your song and dance about what these two told you. And that’s hearsay. Now I’m going to call the Wingo woman when we get down to headquarters and tell her that we’ve got the money and two suspects. Are you happy now?”

“I’m happy,” I said.

“Let’s go,” Demeter said.

Fastnaught moved over to the handcuffed couple and jerked his head at the door. I was on my feet and when Freddie drew abreast of me, he stopped. “Whyn’t you tell ’em about the two niggers, man? Why d’you have to be such a lying son of a bitch?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Freddie.”

His face started to crumple and I thought he would cry again. But he didn’t. “You lie, man!” he shouted. “You lie.”

“Oh, shut up, Freddie,” the girl said.

“Let’s go,” Fastnaught said to the pair, and herded them out through the door into the hall.

Demeter paused at the door. “You want a ride, St. Ives?”

“No thanks,” I said.

“You got a date downtown at ten tomorrow, you know.”

“I know.”

He nodded. “You can see homicide first and then drop by my office. I’ll need a statement, too.”

“All right.”

“Tell me something,” he said.

“What?”

“Were you and the two spades really going to shove a hot curling iron up the kid’s kiester?”

“I don’t know anything about a curling iron, Lieutenant. Or two spades.”

He nodded and puffed on his cigar twice. “Tell me something else. Just how big would it have to be for a three-way split? I mean for a big-time New York go-between.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “How big would it have to be for a robbery-squad lieutenant?”

“I don’t know either,” he said. “I don’t really know. I hope to God I never find out.”

The humidity must have been nudging the hundred mark the next morning when I came out of the Metropolitan Police headquarters at 300 Indiana Avenue. Gray, fat clouds moved slowly to the east, taking their time like plump brokers on the way back to the office after a big lunch and a thoughtful speech. It was 11:15 and I was late and there was a tickle in my throat because I had been answering questions for a solid hour and some of my answers had even bordered on the truth.

I hailed a taxi and it deposited me at the entrance of the Coulter Museum at 11:27. At 11:30 Frances Wingo’s young Negro secretary was holding open the door to her employer’s office. There was no smile this time. I decided that she handed out that smile only to the prompt.

At four o’clock that morning, as I lay in a rough nest of twisted sheets, it had all seemed unambiguous, clear-cut, even simple. But as I went through the door into Frances Wingo’s office everything crumbled and what had seemed simple in that awful hour between four and five in the morning, now seemed impossibly far-fetched and complicated.

Frances Wingo and Winfield Spencer were seated at the far end of her office occupying two of the chairs in the cluster of comfortable furniture that was grouped around the fireplace. I noticed that the Klee was gone. In its place was a chilly blaze of electric blue squares by someone I failed to recognize. Frances Wingo wore an off-white dress that was trimmed in black. Spencer wore what seemed to be the same gray suit with vest that I’d seen him in before. His shirt collar was un-frayed this time, but his hair still seemed to have been trimmed with the garden shears. He also had on a different tie, a blue polka dot butterfly bow that clipped neatly on to his collar. It must have cost all of seventy-five cents. They both wore those politely pained, frosty expressions that are adopted by busy persons who have been kept waiting for half an hour by someone who isn’t busy.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said. “I had to give the police two statements and it took longer than I thought it would.”

“While we were waiting,” Frances Wingo said, “I informed Mr. Spencer about the call that I received from Lieutenant Demeter at one o’clock this morning. He told me about apprehending the two suspected thieves and recovering the money. It would seem that you might have let me know that the money was missing when we spoke on the phone last night, Mr. St. Ives.”

“I would have,” I said, “but you hung up in my ear.”

Spencer once again fixed his green gaze on my forehead. “If I understand correctly, the money is safe, the thieves are caught, but the shield is still missing. That is a brief but I hope succinct summary of the current situation, is it not, Mr. St. Ives?”

“It is,” I said.

“Then it would seem that you did what you said you would not do.”

“What?”

“Help catch the thieves.”

“Yes, it does seem that way, doesn’t it?”

Spencer nodded and shifted his gaze to the coffee table that lay between the two of them in their chairs and me on the couch. “We are, of course, deeply disappointed.”

“I’m sure you must be.”

“The shield — not the money, not the thieves — but the shield was the most important thing.”

“Yes,” I said. “It would appear so.”

My head started to throb again, not as bad as the night before, only a dull, deep throb — something like a distant artillery barrage.

“Our problems are further compounded,” Frances Wingo said, “by the impossibility of keeping the theft from the press any longer. After I informed the Jandolaean Embassy this morning, they insisted that the news be released.”

“That’s understandable,” I said. “Who’s going to announce it?”

“I regret that we must,” she said.

“When?”

“This afternoon. I’ve scheduled a press conference. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police will be on hand as will a representative of the Jandolaean Embassy.”

“Isn’t that a little unusual?” I said.

“Yes, but I think you’ll agree that the circumstances are unusual.”

I looked around for an ashtray, but found none. Frances Wingo, once more reading my mind, crossed to her desk and came back with one which she placed on the table before me. I lit a cigarette and ignored the mild look of disapproval that appeared on Spencer’s face. It only made him look a trifle more forbidding than normal.

“As thefts go it was unusual,” I said. “Very unusual. Four people were killed — five if you count the guard’s wife who hanged herself. That made it unusual enough to assure it a biennial spread in True Detective for years to come. But what made it really unusual was that there was never any thought of returning the shield. At least not to the museum.”

Spencer chuckled. I had never even seen him smile so the chuckle caught me off guard. It sounded dry and dusty, as if he used it once or twice a year at most, perhaps at Christmas Eve. “Sorry,” he said, “but I’m just recalling that rather lengthy lecture that you gave us when we first approached you about serving as our intermediary. At that time you went to great pains to disavow your responsibility for either the apprehension of the thieves or the solution of the theft. But it seems that last night you actually turned the two thieves, a man and a woman, I understand, over to the police and now you are displaying a certain amount of deductive reasoning in the most Holmesian manner to explain the motive behind the theft. I’m sorry, Mr. St. Ives, but I find it amusing. Why not play your new role to the hilt and tell us that you have deduced where the shield is?”

I ignored him. It’s not easy to ignore a billion dollars, but I did my best. “The theft was planned by Mrs. Wingo’s late husband,” I said.

“That’s not true,” she said, but there wasn’t much conviction in her voice.

“I think it’s true,” I said. “The police think it’s true and the two thieves know it’s true. They told me so last night. Your husband never intended to return the shield to the museum. He did intend to grab the ransom money though. His share would have kept him in heroin for a while and after that, there was always the chance for blackmail.”

“Whom would he blackmail, Mr. St. Ives?” Spencer said.

“The person that he stole the shield for.”

“And I assume that this unnamed person now has the shield?”

“Yes.”

“Remarkable.”

“Not really.”

“So all we need is the name of the person and we can turn him over to the police.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“And you no doubt know who this person is?”

“I think so,” I said.

“You think so; you’re not sure?”

“Fairly sure.”

“Would you tell us?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll tell you, Mr. Spencer, and then, as chairman of the museum’s executive board, you can determine what steps to take. But Mrs. Wingo was married to the man who planned and engineered the theft. As such she comes under suspicion as either an accomplice or an accessory.”

“That is ridiculous,” she said.

“Not ridiculous,” I said. “Not even farfetched. Your husband had an expensive habit. He had exhausted all funds — both yours and his and this was the only way that he could get more. A lot more. As director of the museum, you were in a position to introduce him, casually I assume, to Sackett, the guard. From there on he handled it all except that you were also in a position to tell him about that one door that wasn’t electrically sealed from the inside. The police say it was an inside job. Perhaps they just haven’t figured out how deeply inside it was.”

She stared at me and there was nothing but contempt and loathing in her gaze. I smiled at her, but it was a feeble smile. “It does hang together, you’ll have to admit.”

“You mentioned that you thought that you know who now has the shield,” Spencer said.

“I also said that I’d tell you, but not Mrs. Wingo. If she is an accomplice, and if I’m right about who has the shield, she could easily tip him off.”

“You don’t believe that she has it, do you?” Spencer said.

“Tucked away in the attic perhaps where she can admire it, even gloat over it, during long winter evenings.” He chuckled again for the second time that year.

“No,” I said. “I don’t believe that.”

“Well, Mr. St. Ives, let’s get it over with. My dear, if you’ll excuse yourself.”

She rose and without looking at me or saying anything walked quickly to the door, opened it, and left. Spencer watched her leave. After the door closed he looked at me and this time his green eyes met mine for the first time and held.

“All right, St. Ives. Who?”

I took a deep breath, but it came out as a croak anyway. “You,” I said. “You’ve got the shield.”

At 4:36 that morning, alone in my hotel room, it had been a much better scene. Spencer had blanched, confounded by the inescapable logic of my accusation. A few drops of perspiration had formed on his upper lip. A tiny vein had started to throb in his temple. Afraid that his hands would develop a telltale tremor, he had thrust them deep into his pockets. Guilt had seeped from every pore and its odor lay heavy in the room. That was at 4:36 A.M. At 11:47 A.M. he did nothing of the kind. For a moment he looked a trifle disappointed, but politely managed to cover that up. His eyes moved away from mine, as if embarrassed. Not for him, but for me.

“I see,” he murmured, and then looked around the room as though he hoped to find something else to talk about, something that would help us both pretend that I wasn’t an utter fool.

It occurred to me then that I would have never made a good cop. There was something lacking. My concept of crime and punishment was skewed. Vengeance was not mine. I was cheerleader for the crooks and a cynic when it came to law and order. And finally, somewhere along the unimproved secondary road that was my life, I had discarded proper veneration for The Job at Hand, a veneration shared in common by all good crooks, cops, and, for that matter, county agents. As a go-between I was an economic grasshopper, a social cipher who in one breath had just accused a billion dollars of being a thief and was about to apologize in the next.

“It all works out,” I said lamely.

“Really,” Spencer said, not at all interested, gazing out the window at the Capitol and frowning slightly as if he thought it could use a new coat of paint.

“First,” the Relentless Inquisitor continued, “you were one of the few persons who knew that George Wingo was an addict. You also knew that he was desperate for money to feed his habit.”

“Mmm,” Spencer said, getting really interested now.

“Second,” I said, “you had enough money to feed it. I don’t know who suggested that he get the guard hooked. I don’t think it matters. At least not to me. But in Wingo you had your engineer and in Sackett your inside man. Through a man named Spellacy in New York Wingo found the thieves. And your go-between.

“Third motive,” I said.

This time Spencer smiled slightly. “Ah, yes, Mr. St. Ives. Motive. I did have one, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Let me guess,” he said. “I suddenly became totally captivated by the shield, by this crude, tawdry piece of brass. I had to possess it at all costs. It was an obsession. That seems to be in keeping with the rest of your rather fanciful ramblings.”

“No,” I said. “It was Eldorado.”

“Ah,” he said. “Eldorado.”

“Eldorado Oil and Gas. It’s one of your companies.”

“Yes.”

“Before the revolution in Jandola broke out it was negotiating for mineral rights. Oil. A lot of it and most of it is under what some call Komporeen. The Library of Congress was most helpful.”

“I see.”

“Now the real villain enters. Your villain anyway. It’s a Dutch-British combine. It was after the oil rights, too, and it offered the Jandolaean government a far better deal. You matched it. The combine topped your offer and the Jandolaeans sat back content to let you fight it out. In the midst of the negotiations, the revolution broke out and because the oil reserves or whatever you call them are in Komporeen, the negotiations for the rights came to a standstill. I am correct so far?”

“In a crude way,” Spencer said.

“For a while it looked as if the Jandolaeans would finish the fight in a week. But it dragged on. The Komporeeneans fought better than was expected. Some help started coming in dribbles from France and Germany. If the Komporeeneans could hold on another two months or so, they might even win independence. Or at least, with recognition from France and Germany, keep the fighting going for years, and if they did, then you would have to negotiate with their government. If they lost, you’d be back where you started, bidding against the Dutch-British combine. You needed an edge. And the shield was it. You knew its importance to both Komporeen and Jandola. You would arrange for its theft, and then at the appropriate time, use it as a bribe to secure the oil reserves from whoever won.”

“And how would I explain that it came into my possession?” Spencer asked.

“Simple,” I said. “You bought it from the thieves, using your own money.”

“I see,” Spencer said again, and stared out the window some more.

“I don’t think you had anything to do with the four deaths,” I said.

“Thank you.”

“They just got greedy and after the deal was set up, they followed it because they didn’t know what else to do. None of them was too imaginative. They stole the shield, dumped it into the back seat of a car, and it was whisked away to you. None of them knew that you were involved. No one but Wingo knew that.”

“But you think that you do?”

“I know you are.”

“And your next move?”

“I could do several things,” I said. “First of all, I could tell the cops. They might laugh at me at the beginning, but they’d check it out. It might take a while, but they’d get around to it and even if they never proved it, it would be a considerable nuisance to you. But that’s just one thing that I might do. The other would be to let the Jandolaean Embassy in on my speculations. That would really tear it for you. You could never use the shield as a bribe then. They’d know you’d stolen it — or had had it stolen.”

Spencer rose from his chair and crossed to the window. He stood there in his 1939 suit and his bowl haircut, a billion dollars on the hoof, and looked out at the Capitol. “How much do you want, St. Ives?” he said.

“Not how much, but what.”

“All right then. What?”

“The shield. I want it today.”

There was perhaps fifteen seconds of silence. I assumed that he was rapidly weighing it all, totting up the costs, figuring the losses, poking at the loopholes. He turned from the window. “What do you intend to do with it?” he said.

“That’s no longer your concern.”

“I can, of course, beat any price.”

“I’m sure.”

“So it’s not price?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t understand it.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t think you would.”

“What assurance do I have that you will continue your silence?”

“None.”

“Yes,” he said. “I did expect that.” He thought some more, for all of five seconds. “Eight o’clock tonight.”

“All right,” I said. “Where?”

“My home in Virginia. It’s not far from Warrenton.” He spent thirty seconds giving me directions. I wrote them down.

“You will come alone, of course?” he said.

“No.”

Spencer didn’t like that. He frowned his frown, pursed his lips, and jutted his chin. “I must be assured some measure of privacy, Mr. St. Ives.”

“Four, maybe five persons have died because of the $250,000 ransom for that shield, Mr. Spencer. According to the financial and oil and gas journals that I went through at the Library of Congress, the oil underneath Komporeen is worth maybe $200 billion or more. I guarantee that the person that I’ll bring with me won’t violate what you call your privacy. He will, however, make me feel a little more secure.”

“He’s not of the police, is he?”

“No, he’s not a cop. He’s just insurance as far as I’m concerned.”

“And you really think you need it — this insurance?”

“Yes,” I said. “I really think I do.”

We only got lost once on the way out of Washington. It’s an easy town to get lost in and we took a wrong turn somewhere around the Lincoln Memorial and wound up heading for Baltimore. Mbwato was navigating with the aid of an Esso map and finally he said, “I think we’re headed the wrong way, old man.”

Haying just seen the BALTIMORE — STRAIGHT AHEAD sign I agreed with him, made what I was sure was an illegal U-turn, and headed back toward the Lincoln Memorial. This time I crossed the Memorial Bridge into Virginia, found the double-laned Washington Memorial Parkway, sped past the entrance to the CIA, and finally picked up 495, the circumferential highway that belts Washington. It was still muggy, the air conditioning in the rented Ford didn’t work, and I was in a foul mood. Getting lost does that to me.

Mbwato, on the other hand, held his large black leather attaché case on his lap, hummed to himself, and admired the countryside. “According to the map,” he said, “we take 495 until we come to Interstate 66, which leads to State 29 and 211. Five miles this side of Warrenton we turn right.”

“In the glove compartment,” I said, “there’s a pint of whisky.”

He opened the glove compartment, looked, and closed it. “So there is,” he said.

“Would you mind kind of taking the cap off and passing it to me? I mean if it’s no bother?”

“Oh, none at all,” he said, got the whisky out, took off the cap, and handed me the bottle. I took a long drink and handed it back to him. “Not that I approve of drinking while driving, you understand,” he said.

“I understand,” I said. “Neither do I.”

“But under certain circumstances, especially when there may be some unpleasantness in the offing, it should be permissible.”

“Even for navigators,” I said.

“That’s what I thought,” he said, and tilted the bottle up.

It gurgled at least three times before he put it back into the glove compartment.

He stared out at the scenery again. There wasn’t much to see. Some fields, some trees, and occasionally the tacky back yards of some plastic houses that people bought because it was all they could afford and the forty-five-minute drive to Washington was a small price to pay for having lily-white neighbors.

“They didn’t get quite this far, as I remember,” Mbwato said.

“Who, the Negroes?”

“What Negroes?”

“Never mind,” I said. “Who didn’t get this far?”

“The Confederacy.”

“About as close as they got was Dranesville,” I said. “They turned north there toward Pennsylvania. Dranesville’s about fifteen miles or so from Washington.”

“I wish I had more time,” he said. “I would so liked to have spent several days studying the battlefields. I’m quite a Civil War buff, you know.”

“I’ve been to Gettysburg,” I said. “I found it all very confusing.”

“Were you ever a soldier, Mr. St. Ives?” he said.

“A long time ago,” I said. “The war was called a police action then and I wasn’t a very good soldier even in that.”

“When I studied your Civil War at Sandhurst, I must confess that I developed a rather sneaking sympathy for the Confederacy. Pity that they didn’t have a more suitable cause.”

“It was the only cause around.”

“Still, I find many parallels between the Confederacy and my own country. Both the South and Komporeen, if my history serves me right, could be described as underdeveloped, largely agricultural, but possessed of a fierce regional pride. And jealous of tradition, too, I suppose.”

“And gracious living,” I said. “A good, unreconstructed Southerner can go on for hours about gracious living. You know, crinoline and fatback. Myths die hard in the South and from what you’ve told me, they die even harder in Komporeen.”

“Yes, I suppose you could call the aura that surrounds the shield a myth. But when you have very little else, myths become important, even vital.”

“When were you at Sandhurst?” I said.

“From ’fifty-five to ’fifty-nine. I think I may have neglected to mention it, but I’m a lieutenant colonel in our army.”

“You neglected to mention it,” I said. “How many generals do you have?”

“None. There is only Colonel Aloko who is now head of state and three other lieutenant colonels.”

“What are you, head of G-2?”

Mbwato looked surprised. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I am. However could you tell?”

I sighed and swung the Ford over into the far right lane and headed up the curving exit that leads to Interstate 66. “I just guessed,” I said.

“Mr. Ulado is my second in command. It’s Captain Ulado really.”

“The getaway expert,” I said. “I hope he’s better at that than he is at torture.”

“Oh, he is,” Mbwato said quickly, as if I’d just lodged a complaint that could turn into a hanging offense or, at least, a general court-martial. “He’s really quite efficient.”

We didn’t say much after that as we rolled through northern Virginia, through the heart of the hunt country. Highway 29 and 211 was just another road, sometimes two lanes, sometimes four lanes, and lined by the usual Stuckey candy stands, billboards, gas stations, motels, and quiet, closed-mouthed houses stuck off by themselves as if their owners didn’t mind living by the side of the road, but to hell with that friend-to-man nonsense.

At a sign that read WARRENTON, 5 MILES, I turned right and Mbwato said, “This person whom we’re to see. Does he have a name?”

“Yes.”

“Can you reveal it?”

“Yes. Winfield Spencer.”

“Ah, I see.”

“Do you?”

“Well, not really. But Mr. Spencer, I believe, is chairman of the Coulter Museum’s executive committee and I seem to recall that one of his firms was interested in securing drilling rights in Komporeen. Am I right?”

“You are.”

“Fascinating. Mr. Spencer has the shield?”

“Yes.”

“And he is simply going to hand it over to you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Really fascinating,” Mbwato said. “Someday you will have to tell me the full story.”

“Someday,” I said. “I will.”

I kept the ford at twenty miles per hour on the way to the gate. We went past the blue jeep and its guard only glanced at us.

“Do you think he’ll give up so easily?” Mbwato said.

“Spencer? I don’t know.”

“At the gate perhaps,” he said.

“What about the gate?”

“They could try to stop us there.”

“He could have stopped us in the house. He’s got enough help around.”

“No,” Mbwato said. “Not in his home. It would be too complicated. I think the gate and if so, one must be prepared.” He took a key from his pocket and fitted it to the lock of his large attaché case. He opened it and I glanced at its contents.

“What in the hell is that?”

“Part of the Virginia contingency plan,” he said. “A sub-machine gun. A Carl Gustaf M45 to be exact, manufactured in Sweden.” He busily snapped things together. “Fires a 9-millimeter parabellum round, six hundred a minute. Thirty-six in the magazine,” he said, clicking one into the breech or whatever it was. I’m sure Mbwato knew.

With its U-shaped metal stock folded over its right side, the Carl Gustaf M45 had a wicked look about it. “Only weighs a little over nine pounds,” Mbwato said, handling the weapon as though it were an extension of his right arm.

“You get caught with a sub-machine gun in this country and you get thirty years,” I said.

“Really? I have one for you.”

“I don’t know anything about them,” I said.

“Oh, it’s not a sub-machine gun. It’s an automatic. Here.”

I had to take my right hand off the wheel to accept his present. It was a surprisingly light automatic. I glanced at it and saw the name Colt engraved on its slide.

“Quite a good piece,” Mbwato said. “It’s the Colt .45 Commander model with the alloy frame. Weighs just 26 ounces. Wonderful stopping power.”

“I don’t quite know how to thank you,” I said, and put the automatic on the seat beside me.

“Just a precaution.”

“Is it loaded?”

“Of course.”

The two guards at the exit to the plantation must have seen us coming because the gate opened as we approached and the one who earlier had examined our identification was outside the stone hut waving us through. Mbwato smiled at him as we went past; the guard didn’t smile back. I pressed the accelerator down and the Ford jumped up to sixty miles an hour which was really too fast for that road.

“Okay,” I said, “where to?”

“When you get to Highway 29 and 211 turn left. What time is it now?”

I looked at my watch. “Eight-twenty.”

“It’s growing dark.”

“Does that fit in with your getaway plan?”

“Perfectly,” he said.

“That’s good, because we’re going to need it.”

“Why?”

“We’ve got two cars behind us.”

“They’re following?”

“That’s right.”

“My word. Can you lose them?”

“No,” I said. “I’d only lose myself.”

Mbwato turned around in the seat. “There seem to be two in each car and they’re wearing hats very much like the guards at Spencer’s. He must have changed his mind.”

“He must have.”

“Is this a fast car?”

“Fairly so.”

“Then I think we should go as fast as possible.”

“That’s what I’m doing. It might help if you told me where we’re going.”

“Bull Run,” Mbwato said, adding dreamily, “‘Look! There stands Jackson like a stone wall. Rally behind the Virginians.’ General Barnard Elliott Bee said that, you know; gave Jackson his nickname.”

“At Bull Run,” I said.

“Manassas really. The first battle of Manassas to be exact. Jackson was an extremely dour man, most reserved.”

“And that’s where we’re going? To Manassas?”

“Not to the town, to the battlefield.”

“It was a big battle,” I said. “What particular spot do you have in mind?”

“Henry Hill.”

“What’s on Henry Hill?”

“It’s where Jackson held. In point of fact, there’s a statue of him there now. Might have been the turn of the battle really. McDowell’s union troops were hopeless, raw recruits mostly. Had McDowell kept the plateau, he might have won. There’s been some debate about that. But it was a great victory for the South. Their first. In fact, it was the first battle of the war.”

“It’s not that I don’t like your lecture, Colonel, but just what are we going to do when we get to Henry Hill? You know, where Jackson was first called Stonewall.”

Mbwato turned in his seat to look out the rear window. “They seem to be gaining, don’t they?”

“I was watching during your lecture.”

“At Henry Hill we rendezvous with Captain Ulado.”

“I take it you chose the spot.”

“Yes. It’s only about twelve air miles from Dulles International.”

“How far by road?”

“We don’t have to worry about that, Mr. St. Ives. Captain Ulado is meeting us with a helicopter.”

I nodded, keeping my surprise to myself, and glanced in the rear-view mirror. The two cars behind us were maintaining their distance. The closer one was approximately a hundred feet behind the Ford. At the junction of Highway 29 and 211 I barely paused and then skidded the car into a left turn. I pressed the gas pedal down hard and when I next looked at the speedometer the needle was bounding off ninety-five.

“This is as fast as it’ll go,” I shouted at Mbwato above the engine and wind noise. He nodded, half turned in the front seat, the muzzle of the sub-machine gun resting on the seat’s back.

Traffic was light and it got even lighter when most of the cars and trucks veered off to the right to take Interstate 66 rather than the slower 29 and 211. The two pursuing cars remained leeched to our rear, neither closer nor farther away. A mile past the cutoff to 66 they made their move. The lead car, a black monster that I thought to be an Oldsmobile, drew up effortlessly alongside us. The second car, another Oldsmobile, took up a position ten feet to the rear of the Ford’s bumper. I was boxed. The car on the left swerved toward me and I had to hit the shoulder to avoid a sideswipe. I got the Ford back on the road. I didn’t have the speed to move ahead. I couldn’t slam on the brakes, so I decided to go after the car on the left, but he dropped back too quickly for me to make my move.

“Don’t try it again,” Mbwato yelled. “Just wait for him to draw alongside.”

He clambered over the seat into the rear, taking the sub-machine gun with him. The lead Oldsmobile pulled up alongside me again and the machine gun went off in my ear.

“What the hell are you doing?” I screamed.

“Shooting at him. I believe I got the bugger.”

I looked in my rear-view mirror. Both cars had dropped back, but not much. The man next to the driver in the lead car was talking over a telephone, probably to the car back of him about how they could head us off at the pass.

“You didn’t hit anything,” I yelled at Mbwato.

“What time is it?” he screamed in my ear. He had to scream because the sub-machine gun had made both my ears ring. I looked at my watch. “Eight-forty.”

“Can’t you go any faster?”

“No. How far?” I yelled.

“Five minutes.”

I concentrated on my driving. Mbwato crawled back into the front seat and produced his map which he studied by the light of the open glove compartment. It was growing dark, not quite dusk yet. I decided that the attempt to wreck us made sense. At least to Spencer. When a car goes out of control at ninety-five, few of its passengers walk away. We could be accidentally killed, his guards could retrieve the shield, even if it were somewhat damaged, and Spencer could go drilling for oil in Komporeen. A car wreck would be simple and safer than a bullet in his well-appointed house. No messy bodies to dispose of. No one to wonder what happened to that itinerant go-between and the spade colonel with the funny name. They just died in a car wreck.

“That stone house ahead,” Mbwato yelled. “Take a right.”

I took a right, barely missing a stone pillar as the car slewed on its mushy springs. An asphalt road led up a hill. “Now where?”

Mbwato studied his map. “Next left; take the next left,” he said.

I took the next left onto an even smaller road, the tires shuddering and squealing in protest. I glanced in the rear-view mirror. There was now only one car following.

The road ended abruptly near a white frame house. “Wrong road,” Mbwato muttered. “Wrong goddamned road. Not your fault though. Mine. Never could read a map.”

The black Oldsmobile had stopped fifty feet behind us, its two occupants wary of Mbwato’s sub-machine gun. “What do we do now?” I said. “Make St. Ives’ last stand?”

“Run for it,” Mbwato said, jerking his door open.

“Where?”

“Up there,” he said, pointing to a hill where I could see the outline of a statue of a man on a horse. “Henry Hill.”

It was three hundred yards away, all uphill. Mbwato opened the rear door and snatched out the shield. He slipped it over his left forearm and waved the sub-machine gun at me. “Make a run for it.”

There was a shot and the sound indicated that it came from near the parked Oldsmobile. The Ford’s rear window cob-webbed around a hole. I snatched up the automatic from the seat and ran around the car. Mbwato stood at the edge of the road and fired two bursts at the Oldsmobile. There was an answering shot. And then another.

“Let’s go,” he said, and started running up gently sloping Henry Hill which boasted not a rock, not a tree, not a bush. I ran after him. I had no place else to go. We were a third of the way up the hill when I heard the helicopter. It came in low, barely skirted a forest of trees to the left and settled gently to the ground near the statue of what I assumed to be a horse and General Thomas Jonathan Jackson, who once had stood like a stone wall and later was carried across a river and into some trees to die at thirty-nine.

There were two more shots. They came from behind us. Mbwato stopped and turned. He held the sixty-eight-pound shield out at his left side and fired the machine gun from his right hip. A long burst. Then a short one. I turned to see a man in a gray uniform fall to his knees and then sprawl forward on the grass. The second man in a gray uniform flopped to his belly. He carried a rifle and he seemed to be taking careful aim from the prone position. He fired once; then twice. Mbwato’s machine gun let off a burst and I turned. He stood there for a moment, a big, black man in a blue silk jacket, an African brass shield on one arm, a Swedish sub-machine gun cradled in the other. He stood there and lifted his face up to the sky and roared a long terrible cry. Then he fell backward onto the grass that sloped gently up to the top of Henry Hill where the helicopter and Stonewall Jackson waited for the black colonel who had a sneaking sympathy for the Confederacy.

I turned to face the man with the rifle. He was up on one knee and I lifted the automatic and squeezed the trigger twice, then three times, then four. It was luck. You shouldn’t hit anything at that distance with an automatic, but the third or the fourth bullet caught him and he dropped the rifle and clutched his stomach and then bent slowly forward to the ground.

I ran to Mbwato who lay face up on the grass. There were two small red stains, about the size of dimes, on his white shirt, just to the right of its buttons. He breathed harshly and his breath bubbled in his throat.

“Take it,” he said.

“Take what?” I said.

“The shield, you fool.”

“How bad?” I said. “How bad is it?”

“The shield, damn it,” he said, and lifted it up, all sixty-eight pounds of it, with his left arm. I tugged it off and put it on the grass.

“Take it to Ulado,” he said. “He’ll know what to do.”

“Okay,” I said.

He looked at me with those curiously gentle dark eyes, the man they called “The Rope,” and then he smiled that come-to-glory smile. “You have been, Mr. St. Ives, most gracious,” he said, and then he died.

I knelt there in the grass beside him just staring, and then there was a shout from the helicopter. I stuffed the automatic into my coat pocket, picked up the shield with both hands, and started toward the helicopter. I couldn’t see anything. The shield was in front of my eyes. I heard a shot. And then there was another and something twanged off the shield, knocking me backward. I dropped the shield. Two men in gray were coming down the hill from the right. Both held rifles and both of them were aimed at me. I pulled the automatic out of my pocket and fired blindly, but the two men continued to advance slowly, one careful pace at a time. They were still fifty feet away when I threw the automatic at them and bent down for the shield. As I straightened, one of them put his rifle to his shoulder and took careful aim. There was a sudden burst of fire from the helicopter and both of the gray-clad men dropped to the grass. I couldn’t tell whether they were hit. I didn’t care. I ran toward the helicopter. It wasn’t much of a run, not carrying sixty-eight pounds of brass uphill. A child could have caught me, a toddler. It was almost dark now and I guided myself by the sound of the helicopter and the light in its plastic-domed nose.

Hands reached out and took the shield from me. “Inside, Mr. St. Ives,” a voice said, and I recognized it as belonging to Mr. Ulado, who lifted the shield into the rear of the four-place machine. When it was stowed away he picked up a sub-machine gun that was the twin of the one that Mbwato had had and in a casual, practiced way loosed another burst at the two men with rifles.

“They must have circled around,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Get in,” Ulado said. “Where’s Mr. Mbwato?”

“He’s dead,” I said. “Halfway up Henry Hill.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Get in.”

I climbed into the back. Ulado got in the seat next to the pilot, a slim young Negro who wore a green velour shirt and a coconut straw hat with a plain black band. “Dulles,” Ulado barked at him, and the young Negro nodded and shot the helicopter up.

Ulado turned around in his seat to face me. “The pilot,” he yelled. “Trained in Vietnam.” I nodded and sank back in the hard canvas seat. It was a short hop, not more than ten minutes, if that. The pilot talked over his radio to the tower and set the copter down not far from the main terminal. Ulado got out and I crawled after him. He reached into the cockpit of the machine and wrestled the shield out.

“Mbwato said you’d know what to do with it,” I said.

Captain Ulado nodded gravely. “I do, Mr. St. Ives. May I thank you for all your help. We say good-by here. I have a plane standing by on the runway.” He put the shield down so that it rested against his left leg and held out his right hand. I shook it.

“You’ll never know how much we appreciate your efforts,” he said, picked up the shield, turned, and walked off into the dark. I started to call after him, to tell him that he’d forgotten his sub-machine gun, but perhaps he didn’t need it any more.

I walked toward the terminal, found my way up to the main lobby, and then located someone who could tell me what I wanted to know. “You have a chartered plane leaving here in a few minutes with a friend of mine on board,” I said. “I think it’s a prop job.”

The man in blue uniform flipped through some cards on the counter. “Yes,” he said. “A Constellation. Chartered by a Mr. Mbwato — I think that’s how you pronounce it.” He turned and looked at the clock on the wall behind him. “It should be departing any moment now.”

“Could you tell me its destination?” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “Rotterdam.”

At eight o’clock the next morning I was lying in a bed in the room at the Madison, staring up at the ceiling, and waiting for someone to come and take me away when the telephone rang. It was a Miss Schulte who said that she worked for Hertz.

“The car that you reported stolen has been found in Silver Spring, Mr. St. Ives. That’s in Maryland. It was undamaged except for the rear window, which apparently has a bullet hole in it.”

“I wonder how that got there?” I said.

She said that she didn’t know but that the insurance would take care of it. Then she asked whether I would like to come down to pay for the rental or would I like her to bill me. I told her to bill me and she said that would be fine.

“And the next time you need a car, Mr. St. Ives, be sure to call Hertz.” I promised that I would and hung up.

I hadn’t reported the car as being either missing or stolen so I assumed that Spencer’s gray-clad private troopers had tidied things up when they got through shooting at me. I also assumed that they had collected the bodies, picked up the spent shell cases, and even policed the area for old cigarette butts before driving the rented Ford to Silver Spring and dumping it there. I wondered what they had done with Mbwato and whether anyone would ever come looking for him, but a billion dollars could hide almost anything, even a dead body as large as that of the colonel from Komporeen who, when alive, may have been the world’s most accomplished liar. I spent a few moments speculating about how much the Dutch-British combine would pay Captain Ulado for the shield in Rotterdam and whether he would spend some of it in Corfu or Acapulco, and if, while spending it, he would ever think about the children with distended bellies who went around eating mud, straw, twigs, and chalk. I felt that if he did think about it, it wouldn’t bother him much, no more than it would have bothered Colonel Mbwato.

I called down for some breakfast and The Washington Post and when they came I read a brief story about how the caretaker at the Manassas National Battlefield Park last night had reported hearing a series of gunshots near the statue of Stonewall Jackson, but after investigating, police said that they had found nothing. I was pouring my third cup of coffee when someone knocked at the door. It was Lieutenant Demeter wearing a green sport shirt and light gray slacks.

“My day off,” he said as he came in the room, looked around with his cop’s eyes, and selected a comfortable chair.

“Coffee?” I said.

“Sure. Black.”

I handed him a cup and then went back to my chair. “Haven’t found it yet,” Demeter said, and sipped at his coffee.

“What?”

“The shield.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t seem much interested, St. Ives.”

“I’m not any more. The Coulter Museum has decided that it no longer needs my services, such as they are.”

Demeter nodded and placed his cup and saucer on a table. “That’s what the Wingo woman told me last night. I gave her a call because I was trying to find you. She was kind of shook up, said that you gave her a rough time — almost accused her of being in on the whole thing.”

“Just talk,” I said.

“That all?”

“That’s all.”

“Uh-huh,” Demeter said. “That’s what I figured. Reason I was calling you yesterday, I wanted to tell you about your two little pals.”

“What pals?”

“The kid and his girl. The thieves.”

“What about them?”

“They got a lawyer.”

“So?”

“Well, he’s not just a lawyer, he’s about the best that money can buy. A whole lot of money.”

“Who?”

“Wilfred Coley.”

“That’s a whole lot of money,” I said.

“So I was wondering who was going to pick up his tab.”

“Ask Coley,” I said.

“He won’t say.”

“You’re asking me?”

“That’s right, St. Ives, I’m asking you.”

“I don’t know,” I lied. It would be Spencer, of course, still tidying things up.

“I think you do,” Demeter said.

“I’m out of it, Lieutenant, all the way out.”

Demeter leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. He looked relaxed, rested, and unhurried. It was his day off and he had no place better to go. “It should be real interesting,” he said.

“What?”

“Watching Coley work on you.”

“Me?”

“At the trial. You’ll be a key witness for the prosecution.”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“He’ll cut you up into little pieces. Little, bitty ones.”

“He’s good, I understand.”

“He’ll turn you inside out and every way but loose. But, of course, you’re smart. You won’t tell him anything but the truth. Just like you’re telling me. Oh, you might leave out a little — like the two spades and their curling iron. You might leave that out.”

“It never happened,” I said.

“Course not. So you might as well leave it out. And then you might leave out about the shield.”

“What about it?”

“That you know where it is.”

“I don’t know where it is.”

“The Wingo woman said that you told her and Spencer that you knew where it was, but that you’d tell only Spencer, Did you?”

“Ask him,” I said. “I don’t know where it is.”

Demeter unclasped his hands from behind his head and waved his right one at me in what he must have hoped was a reassuring gesture. It wasn’t. “Don’t worry about me, St. Ives. By the time this thing goes to trial, that shield will have been almost forgotten. It’s murder now and nobody’s going to be too worried about what happened to a brass shield. Nobody but me anyhow. But I can’t prove anything. I can make some guesses, some pretty good ones, I think, but they’re still just guesses and I’m not even sure that I’d prove anything if I could. You know why?”

“Why?” I said.

“Because you didn’t make anything out of it, did you?”

“No.”

He nodded his head and smiled in a well-satisfied sort of way. “Nobody made anything, did they?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

He smiled again and if the dog in the manger had a smile, it must have been very much like the one that Demeter wore. “That’s what I thought. The hot-shot, big-time, New York City go-between. You had it all there, I bet, right in your hands and you didn’t make a dime, did you? Not a dime.”

“No,” I said.

He nodded again, almost happy now. “Like I said,” Demeter went on, “I think I got most of it figured out. You take the two spades with their limey accents and their curling iron, add somebody with enough money — and enough interest — to hire Coley to defend the kid and his girl, throw in the fact that the Wingo woman’s husband had a hell of a big habit that he had to feed, and somehow it all hangs together. A little loose maybe, but together.”

“I’m glad,” I said.

“I bet. There’re still a couple of pieces missing, of course. But it’s not bad, not bad at all. You want to know what my picture looks like?”

“No,” I said. “Not much. Not at all, in fact.”

He nodded thoughtfully, picked up his cup of coffee, drained it, put it back down, and rose. He moved easily, I noticed, as though he had had a good night’s sleep. He probably didn’t even dream. “Just a couple of more questions, St. Ives. Just a few more off the record, like they say. Only you and me now. Nobody else. Like I said, I can’t prove anything and I’m not sure I want to prove anything, not if I might have to go up against a billion dollars.”

“What questions?” I said.

“What you did there at the end for nothing, it didn’t turn out the way you thought it would, did it?”

“No.”

He moved slowly to the door, his head bent forward as if deep in thought. Then he turned and stared at me once more with his beany black eyes. “But you could have made a buck or two. I mean it was lying around and you could have skimmed some off?”

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”

He paused at the door as if deciding how to phrase the next question and when he said it, he said it slowly and carefully as if counting each word. “Then if it wasn’t for money, why did you go ahead and do it, I mean, a guy like you?”

I looked at him for a while before answering. He seemed to be in no hurry. “Cotton candy and hungry kids, perhaps,” I said. “Or sick kittens and lost puppies.”

Demeter nodded slightly, as if he thought that he might understand, but wasn’t really sure. “Well, I guess that’s an answer,” he said. “As much of one as I should expect.”

“That’s all it is,” I said. “Just an answer.”

I never did think up a better one, not even after Demeter left and I stood there for a long time with my hand on the phone trying to decide whom I should call in Rotterdam. Or whether I should call anyone at all.