Striker averted his head, grasped the other’s scrawny shoulder encouragingly. “Good luck, brother—and God forgive me for doing this, if I don’t see you again.” He swung out of the cab, opened a newspaper in front of his face, and narrowly watched over the top of it until the thin but well-dressed figure had alighted and carried the two bags up the steps and into a doorway from which he might never emerge alive.

He sauntered up to the desk a few minutes later himself, from the other direction, the coffee shop entrance. Maxon was still blotting the ink on the signature.

Striker read, Harry Kramer, New York City—913.

He went up to his room at his usual time, but only to get out his gun. Then he came down to the lobby again. Maxon was the only one in sight. Striker stepped in behind the desk, made his way back to the telephone switchboard, which was screened from sight by the tiers of mailboxes. He sat down before the switchboard and shot his cuffs, like a wireless operator on a ship at sea waiting for an SOS. The St. Anselm didn’t employ a night operator. The desk clerk attended to the calls himself after twelve.

“What’s the idea?” Maxon wanted to know.

Striker wasn’t confiding in anyone this time. “Can’t sleep,” he said noncommittally. “Why should you object if I give you a hand down here?”

Kramer was to knock the receiver off the hook at the first sign of danger, or even anything that he didn’t understand or like the looks of. There was no other way to work it than this, roundabout as it was. Striker was convinced that if he lurked about the ninth floor corridor within sight or earshot of the room, he would simply be banishing the danger, postponing it. He didn’t want that. He wanted to know what it was. If he waited in his own room he would be even more cut off. The danger signal would have to be relayed up to him from down here. The last three times had shown him how ineffective that was.

A desultory call or two came through the first hour he was at the board, mostly requests for morning calls. He meticulously jotted them down for the day operator. Nothing from 913.

About two o’clock Maxon finally started to catch on. “You going to work it all night?”

“Yeh,” said Striker shortly. “Don’t talk to me. Don’t let on I’m behind here at all.”

At two thirty-five there were footsteps in the lobby, a peculiar sobbing sound like an automobile tire deflating, and a whiff of sandalwood traveled back to Striker after the car had gone up. He called Maxon guardedly back to him.

“The Youngs?”

“Yeah, they just came in.”

“Was that their dog whining?”

“Yeah. I guess it hadda see another dog about a man.”