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“No!” Sherry turned away, stumbling, arms out as though to push open a lot of doors.

But Mayjune said, “I waited, Sherry, until it was too late before I told you.”

“Stomach pumps! Antidotes!”

“Too late. Too late, Sherry. Sit down, dear, be calm. We’ll wait together.”

Sherry turned back, to stare with her zircon eyes at the placid Mayjune. “You did this? You did this for a dog?”

“My only friend, Sherry.”

Sherry dropped into her seat, despair shriveling her features even more. The two women sat gazing at each other.

Boy looked at his watch. Half an hour, eh? Fine. He tiptoed away, found the kitchen and the cold chicken and white wine in the refrigerator. Mayjune had struck him as being a thrifty little gargoyle. She wouldn’t poison everything in the house, just the stuff she meant to feed Sherry.

He would phone the police, of course, once he had collected the photo and was well away from the house, and after he’d called in his story to the Galaxy. In the meantime, snack on the kitchen table at his elbow, women expiring at the other end of the house, he pulled out notebook and pen and began the lead for this week’s story:

“They did it for love.”

Take It Away

“Nice night for a stakeout.”

Well, that startled me, let me tell you. I looked around and saw I was no longer the last person on line. Behind me now was a goofy-looking guy more or less my age (34) and height (6'½") but maybe just a bit thinner than me (190 lbs). He wore eyeglasses with thick black frames and a dark-blue baseball cap turned around backward, with bunches of carroty-red hair sticking out under it on the sides and back.

He was bucktoothed and grinning, and he wore a gold-and-purple high school athletic jacket with the letter X hugely on it in Day-Glo white edged in purple and gold. It was open a bit at the top, to show a bright lime green polo shirt underneath.

His trousers were plain black chinos, which made for a change, and on his feet were a pair of those high tech sneakers complete with inserts and gores and extra straps and triangles of black leather here and there that look as though they were constructed to specifications for NASA. In his left hand he held an X Men comic book folded open to the middle of a story. He was not, in other words, anybody on the crew, or even like anybody on the crew. So what was this about a stakeout? Who was this guy?

Time to employ my interrogation techniques, which meant I should come at him indirectly, not asking who are you but saying “What was that again?”

He blinked happily behind his glasses and pointed with his free hand. “A stakeout,” he said, cheerful as could be.

I looked where he pointed, at the side wall of this Burger Whopper, where it was my turn tonight to get food for the crew, and I saw the poster there advertising this month’s special in all twenty-seven hundred Burger Whoppers all across the United States and Canada, which was for their Special Thick Steak Whopper Sandwich, made with U.S. government-inspected steak guaranteed to be a full quarter-inch thick.

I blinked at this poster, with its glossy color photo of the special Thick Steak Whopper Sandwich, and beside me the goofy guy said, “A steak out, right? A great night to come out and get one of those steak sandwiches and take it home and not worry about cooking or anything like that because, who knows, the electricity could go off at any second.”

Well, that was true. The weather had been miserable the last few days, hovering just around the freezing point, with rain at times and sleet at times, and at the moment, nine-twenty P.M. on a Wednesday — outside the picture windows of the Burger Whopper, there was a thick, misty fog, wet to the touch, kind of streaked and dirty, that looked mostly like an airport hotel’s laundry on the rinse cycle.

Not a good night for a stakeout — not my kind of stakeout. All the guys on the crew had been complaining and griping on our walkie-talkies, sitting in our cars on this endless surveillance, getting nowhere, expecting nothing, except maybe we’d all have the flu when this was finally over.

“See what I mean?” the goofy guy said, and grinned his bucktoothed grin at me again and gestured at that poster like the magician’s girl assistant gesturing at the elephant. See the elephant?

“Right,” I said, and I felt a sudden quick surge of relief. If our operation had been compromised, after all this time and energy and effort, particularly given my own spotty record, I don’t know what I would have done. But at least it wouldn’t have been my fault.

Well, it hadn’t happened, and I wouldn’t have to worry about it. My smile was probably as broad and goofy as the other guy’s when I said, “I see it, I see it. A steak out on a night like this — I get you.”

“I’m living alone since my wife left me,” he explained, probably feeling we were buddies since my smile was as moronic as his. “So mostly I just open a can of soup or something. But weather like this, living alone, the fog out there, everything cold, you just kinda feel like you owe yourself a treat, know what I mean?”

Mostly, I was just astonished that this guy had ever had a wife, though not surprised she’d left him. I’ve never been married myself, never been that fortunate, my life being pretty much tied up with the Bureau, but I could imagine what it must be like to have been married, and then she walks out, and now you’re not married anymore. And what now? It would be like if I screwed up real bad, much worse than usual, and the Bureau dropped me, and I wouldn’t have the Bureau to go to anymore — I’d probably come out on foggy nights for a steak sandwich myself and talk to strangers in the line at the Burger Whopper.

Not that I’m a total screwup — don’t get me wrong. If I were a total screwup, the Bureau would have terminated me (not with prejudice, just the old pink slip) a long time ago; the Bureau doesn’t suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. But it’s true I have made a few errors along the way and had luck turn against me, and so on, which in fact was why I was on this stakeout detail in the first place.

All of us. The whole crew, the whole night shift, seven guys in seven cars blanketing three square blocks in the Meridian Hills section of Indianapolis. Or was it Ravenswood? How do I know, I don’t know anything about Indianapolis. The Burger Whopper was a long drive from the stakeout site — that’s all I know.

And we seven guys, we’d gotten this assignment, with no possibility of glory or advancement, with nothing but boredom and dyspepsia (the Burger Whopper is not my first choice for food) and chills and aches and no doubt the flu before it’s over, because all seven of us had a few little dings and dents in our curricula vitae. Second-raters together, that’s what we had to think about, losing self-esteem by the minute as we each sat alone there in our cars in the darkness, waiting in vain for Francois Figuer to make his move.

Art smuggling: has there ever been a greater potential for boredom? Madonna and Child, Madonna and Child, Madonna and Child. Who cares what wall they hang on, as long as it isn’t mine, those cow-faced Madonnas and fat-kneed Childs? Still, as it turns out, there’s a lively illegal trade in stolen art from Europe, particularly from defenseless churches over there, and that means a whole lot of Madonnas und Kinder entering America rolled up in umbrellas or disguised as Genoa salamis.

And at the center of this vast illegal conspiracy to bore Americans out of their pants was one Francois Figuer, a Parisian who was now a resident of the good old U.S. of A. And he was who we were out to get.