Hautley showed the barkeep the coin glinting in his palm again, then asked who had taken the Meredith Wilsson room for those hours. The barkeep spat into the sawdust-strewn floor, and shrugged with a mountainous heave that set his various bellies and chins bobbling gelatinously.
"Jeez, mac, I dunno who he is. Stranger in town, never sawr him before . . ."
"Can you describe him, my good man?"
"Mmmf," the barkeep mused, dubiously, rubbing one ham-sized hand over his stubbled jowls as if to massage into heightened activity some dormant organ of recollection.
"Yeah, I guess so . . . lessee ... he was a grey-complexioned Orgotyr in flourescent tights slashed wid dead-black pipin' an puckered ruffs. I t'ink!"
"I thought so. And for what reason did he retain the accommodations of your upstairs suite?"
"Said he had a game goin'."
Hautley's mirror-bright eyes flashed like chips' of ice.
"And so he did, my man. The kind of game you hunt with a gun."
Hautley tossed the fellow the coin and returned to search the Meredith Wilsson Room swiftly but efficiently. He had not thought to be so lucky as to actually discover a clue, but the Gods of Chance were with him for a change. Near the shattered window he came across a curious talisman whose nature he could not at the moment recall. It was a bit of odd purple metal, no larger than a humanoid thumbnail, worked into the likeness of a hollow ellipse with a smaller circle contained within it—a symbol seething like an eye. Strange. He could not recall having ever seen its like. He nonetheless slipped it into a pocket for a closer examination at a later time.
Returning to the street by way of the noisy saloon, he reentered Huflerd's flat by means of the electronic key. Even though the former confederate of the Master Burglar of Capitan was defunct, Hautley hoped to find something in his quarters which might reveal the present location of Dugan Motley. Anything would do—an address book perhaps, or an old letter.
The light was burning. As soon as Hautley entered the room, he stopped dead ...
The assassin, whether it was the grey-complexioned Orgotyr in fluorescent tights slashed with dead-black piping and puckered ruffs, or one or another of his compatriots, had been busy while Quicksilver had interrogated the crimson-faced barkeep.
For the flat had been ransacked. It was a shambles; And any clue to Dugan Motley's hiding place that Shpern Hufferd might have had hidden away, must certainly have been discovered during such a thorough search.
Once more the Opposition had scored. Lips tightened grimly, eyes cold as intergalactic space, Hautley vowed silently that this would be their last coup at his expense.
But be was wrong ...
22
THE SHABBY APARTMENT had, quite literally, been turned upside down. Everything had been sifted through, including Hufferd's garbage. The room looked as if a double-barreled cyclone had held a track meet in it for a Boy Scout troop of midget tornadoes. Even the rotting furniture had been tom apart. Hufferd's ragged clothing had been torn up the seams; the grease-flecked, fly-spotted stikfast plastic wallpaper had been ripped off the wails in sheets.
It looked completely hopeless. The enemy would surely not have left any clues to the whereabouts of Dugan Motley laying around for Quicksilver to find, after this kind of a ransacking. Hautley's only hope for locating Dugan Motley, now that Shpern Hufferd slept in Abraham's bosom, lay in finding a due amidst the rubble. So he swiftly but minutely searched the wreckage.
Twenty minutes later he found the clue for which he searched. He was leafing rapidly through the books in Hufferd's small collection, when he noticed that one of the titles was, by a suspicious coincidence, the memoirs of Dugan Motley himself, a colloquial and not-unflavorful tome called Crime Does Not Pay (Much), disseminated by the Brasilia Press, Sol III, Centaurus Sector, Quadrant II. A passing glance at the title page revealed something stamped with smudged red ink above the publisher's address: a series of code-numbers.
107-A-s/M.
He looked at the cryptic inscription thoughtfully. It seemed to be nothing more than one of those public library subject codes so enigmatic to the layman. The only difference was that Hautley Quicksilver was no layman! Among his enormous fund of miscellaneous expertise, was a thorough familiarity with the common subject codes used through the civilized galaxy—the Fenster-Cosgrove Decimal System—and this was not it. The Fenster-Cosgrove code was numerical only, and this included alphabetical symbols.
Quicksilver's lips twisted grimly in a quirk of humor. It would have fooled most searchers—the book itself was certainly battered and thumbed enough to pass for an ex-library copy—and the stamped row of symbols was so ordinary, most people would not have thought twice about them. But Hautley Quicksilver was not "most people," and most people were not Hautley Quicksilver!
It was a clever gambit, hiding a clue to Motley's habitat on the one thing in the whole apartment which had the name of Dugan Motley printed all over it ... but what did the symbols mean? 107-A-s/ M. It was not a phone number, that was obvious: they had sixteen digits. Nor was it a homing system wave length, and certainly not a set of galactographic coordinates. What, then. could it ...
A street address!
Of course! His admiration for old Shpern Huflerd's intelligence multiplying by quantum-jumps, Quicksilver swiftly committed the number to memory. The old purloined letter trick! Leaving the "concealed" information right smack out in the open for anyone to trip over it! He grinned. and looked at the title page again. In full, it read:
CRIME DOES NOT PAY (MUCH)
The Memoirs of
the Master-Burglar
of Capitan
Dugan Motley
107-A-s/M
Brasilia, Sol III
Quadrant II
BRASILIA PRESS / Centaurus Sector, / BRASILIA PRESS
Quadrant II
He widened his smile perceptibly. Once you spotted the trick, it was actually almost impossible to miss the clue! Just letting your eye slide down the center of the page, you saw this:
Dugan Motley
107-A-s/M
Brasilia, Sol III
Centaurus Sector,
Quadrant II.
He pulled out his personal phone and called the public library of Thieves' Haven, asking for the custodian of the planetary directories division. Brasilia turned out to be the capital city of the planet, Sol III, and there was only one street in the alien metropolis which could match the initials "A-s/M"— Avenida san Miguel—so his bunch had proved right, and he was one jump ahead of Grey-Complexion & Company! It seemed obvious they had missed the clue in their search of the flat, for surely they would never have left it intact for Hautley to find, but would have seared the title-page to ash, or carried the book along with them when they left.
He took the slideway back to the spaceport, fully expecting armed interception at every moment of the trip, but the journey, although a trifle tedious, was uninterrupted.
His slim little speedster, the fastest thing in space, was seemingly untampered with, but just to be certain no nasty explosive devices had been planted aboard her, be went over the graceful little craft with great care, and found nothing. Either the forces of Grey-Complexion & Company had not tried, or they had tried to get into the ship but were unable to penetrate the several electronic guardians he bad activated before quitting the craft a half an hour earlier.