“It’s quite a house.”

“Thank you.”

“Was Kim impressed with it?”

“She never saw it. None of ’em ever did. There’s an old German woman comes here once a week to clean. Makes the whole place shine. She’s the only woman’s ever been inside of this house. Since I owned it, anyway, and the architects who used to live here didn’t have much use for women. Here’s the last of the coffee.”

It was awfully good coffee. I’d had too much of it already but it was too good to pass up. When I complimented it earlier he’d told me it was a mixture of Jamaica Blue Mountain and a dark roast Colombian bean. He’d offered me a pound of it, and I’d told him it wouldn’t be much use to me in a hotel room.

I sipped the coffee while he made yet another call to his service. When he hung up I said, “You want to give me the number here? Or is that one secret you want to keep?”

He laughed. “I’m not here that much. It’s easier if you just call the service.”

“All right.”

“And this number wouldn’t do you much. I don’t know it myself. I’d have to look at an old phone bill to make sure I got it right. And if you dialed it, nothing would happen.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because the bells won’t ring. The phones are to make calls out. When I set this place up I got telephone service and I put in extensions so I’d never be far from a phone, but I never gave the number to anybody. Not even my service, not anybody.”

“And?”

“And I was here one night, I think I was playing pool, and the damn phone rang. I like to jumped. It was somebody wanted to know did I want a subscription to the New York Times. Then two days later I got another call and it was a wrong number, and I realized the only calls I was ever going to get were wrong numbers and somebody selling something, and I took a screwdriver and went around and opened up each of the phones, and there’s this little clapper that rings the bell when a current passes through a particular wire, and I just took the little clapper off each of the phones. I dialed the number once from another phone, and you think it rings because there’s no telling the clapper’s gone, but there’s no bell going off in this house.”

“Clever.”