"That's right," I said, seeing no point in denying the obvious to a close observer. This girl hardly looked the part of a close observer, though.
She turned on her stool to look at me. "And you've been badly burned," she continued. "They did a good job on you, but my best friend was burned when she was fifteen, and I can always tell."
The bartender returned with my drink. "I'm looking for Hawk," I said to him as he took the bill I placed on the bar.
"He comes and goes," the man said, and went to the cash register with my money.
So at least there was a Hawk, genus unknown.
"Do you have any speed?" the girl on the next stool asked me.
I took another look at her. New York permits eighteen-year-old drinkers, but this girl didn't look eighteen. Glancing down, I could see her feet under the soiled hem of her orange sari. They were bare and dirty. Her small features had an almost angelic expression, but I could see dirt smudges on her face, too. "No," I said.
"Too bad. I'd like to get high."
There was no particular inflection in the childish voice. A half-empty beer glass reposed on the bar, but she didn't sound drunk. She didn't sound sober, either. I haven't had much contact with marijuana, but the dilated eyes and dreamy-sounding voice had me thinking marijuana. "What's your name?" I asked.
"Chryssie," she said gravely. "C-H-R-Y-S-S-I-E. Short for Chrysanthemum."
"I see. You're a flower child?"
She smiled, a sweet, untroubled smile. "Nobody ever corrupted a flower, did they?"
"You've been corrupted?"
The dilated eyes removed themselves from the introspective examination of her beer glass and fastened upon me. "I corrupt."
"Now that I find hard to believe."
But the blonde girl's gaze had withdrawn itself to her glass again. She said nothing. I tried a few more questions, but she seemed to have stepped into a private room, closed the door, and turned the key. I let it go and resumed my examination of the other occupants of the smoke-hazed room.
Finally I glanced at my watch. It was getting close to the time Erikson had set for my appearance at his office. I drained my Jim Beam and set down my glass. Swiveling on my bar stool before sliding from it, I became aware that the blonde was back in the land of the living. She was watching my face. "So long," she said.
"So long?" I echoed.
"You're leaving, aren't you?"
"That's right." She gave me another of her otherworldly smiles. "So long, Chryssie."
I went out to the street and hailed a cab.
4
Five-o-five Fifth Avenue wasn't one of the newer buildings in the area. I studied the wall directory in the rundown lobby. Employment agencies dominated the second and third floors, after which the emphasis shifted to publishing companies. I recognized none of the names.
The slow-moving self-service elevator took me to the sixteenth floor. I emerged into a dimly lighted corridor with frosted glass doors stretching away in precisioned monotony on either side. Following Erikson's instructions, I passed doors lettered Magazine Bureau, Inc., M & M Publications, Inc., before I came to Intercontinental Plastics Company.
I knocked and waited. Erikson opened the door and stood aside to let me enter. We walked through a tiny office, large enough to contain a desk and a switchboard, into an inner office four times as large but hardly the lap of luxury. There was linoleum instead of carpeting on the floor, and there were no draperies over the Venetian blinds. A metal desk was piled elbow-deep with carelessly strewn papers. Funeral-home-type chairs lined two sides of the room. A topographic map of the world covered most of one wall space, a fair-sized painting of Emmett Kelley in clown costume another, and a detailed chart whose composition and purpose I couldn't fathom a third.
"You cut it fine," Erikson said as he closed the door between the two offices. "I'm expecting them."
"What's with the plastics company label when everyone else is in the publishing game?" I asked.
"I didn't want people trooping in and out of here trying to exchange shop talk." Erikson crossed the office to the clown picture and pressed its upper right corner. The section of the wall on which the picture rested pivoted at right angles as a hidden door opened, disclosing another small room beyond it. The joining was so cunningly fashioned as to be invisible except to the closest inspection.
I followed Erikson into a narrow room lined with shelves of equipment and benches loaded with gadgetry. It seemed almost an electronic arsenal with miniature recorders, cameras, microphones, and other exotic devices for eavesdropping, recording, and monitoring. I saw some more practical hardware items as well, including weapons camouflaged as fountain pens, cigarette lighters, and wallets.
I sat down on a padded stool that Erikson indicated. I was facing a benchlike counter on which three shoe-box-sized television monitors confronted me. "I want to explain how these operate first," Erikson said, "then if we have time you can tell me what you found at the Alhambra. I don't want-"
"I can cover that in one sentence," I interposed. "There's a Hawk who comes and goes, but who's to say if it's the right one?"
"At least it's not a complete dead end. Be sure you get a good look at my visitors."
"You don't think Israelis did the hijacking?" I said in surprise.
"No, but these types really get around. Look at them carefully in these TV screens. Each screen is connected to separate, wide-angle lenses in the office. Two-way mirrors are passe in today's intelligence work, and any observant agent would spot an observation window or peephole the moment he entered a room. Television has replaced the direct-view system."
He flipped a switch, and suddenly I was looking at sharp details of the tiny outer office. Erikson hit another switch and his paper-strewn desk and the office space around it floated into view on a second screen. He pointed to one of the recorders. "This is set to monitor as well as record, and it's already running. You'll be able to hear everything that takes place. I have it running because some of these sharp intelligence men now carry a meter which shows an added electrical impulse inside a room. A buzzer will sound in here when anyone enters the outer office."
I waved a hand at some of the items on the benches. "I recognize the snooperscopes on that shelf, but what's some of the rest of this junk?"
"We keep two laboratories busy turning out this 'junk' as you call it," Erikson said. "The majority of which isn't for public sale." He pointed to a bench piled high with gadgets. "Those are bumper beepers that operate from a triple-antenna switch."
"Bumper beepers?"
"Magnetized boxes attached to the underside of cars so that beeps from the box permit a following car with a receiver to trail them. The better ones have a range up to three miles, with an audio-homing device that makes the pings louder as the distance lessens. Those big discs next to the beepers are parabolic reflectors for gathering up sound waves and channeling them to a receiver. Next to those are suction-cup wall listeners. Some have their own transistor amplifiers."
"Whatever happened to freedom of speech and all the rest of that jazz?"
"That's not a concern of ours in the areas in which we work."
I pointed to several microphones with extremely long snouts, almost like rifle barrels. "What about those?"
"Two-directional long-range mikes. Aim one of those at a fly on the roof of a barn three hundred yards away and you can hear the shingles crackling under his feet. Now let's see you operate the monitors."