“Right you are. You need me, I'm at police headquarters 'til noon, then back here.”

“And I shall check in with the hotel during the day, to ask if any messages have been left me,” Holmes told him, then, “Hammett?”

“Still here.”

“I was thinking of placing an advert in one of the papers, asking for information regarding the delivery of an envelope to your address. That lad might be able to tell us something.”

“Are you asking my opinion?”

“I suppose I am,” Holmes said, rather surprised at the fact.

“Then I'd say not. Later, maybe, but doing it now, you'd risk scaring them off. You'd also be risking their getting to the kid first.”

“You feel they could remove him?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“I'm afraid I agree with you, Hammett. Thank you.” Holmes set the earpiece back on its hook, and pulled back the curtains to let the day in. He leant his shoulder against the window-frame, staring unseeing down at the street, weighing his options—or, rather, weighing his opponent's options. His picture of her was more blank space than anything else, but he did not have the impression that the woman had unlimited resources. Her efforts had been too focussed for that, and her fury at Hammett's refusal indicated that she had rather a lot tied up in him—although her anger could as easily have been due to the waste of time rather than money. However, there was also the fact of her overgenerous payment to Hammett: In Holmes' experience, someone with a great deal of money was less likely to misjudge the cost of a thing, or of a person.

All in all, he thought that the woman's resources could well be somewhat stretched, and she would want that money back. He considered his available stock of Irregulars: Hammett was not only noticeable but known to the woman; Long would stand out anywhere outside Chinatown; the lad Tyson could not be trusted to keep to the shadows—he would want to sail in, guns blazing.

No, there was nothing for it: time to recruit.

Holmes went to the trunks that had been stashed, as he'd insisted, not in the hotel store-room but against the back wall of the bedroom. He unearthed the one he wanted and, sorting through the layers of clothing Oriental and Western, eventually put together a costume that would be unremarkable in the part of town he intended to visit. The lift-man looked at him askance, but said nothing.

His first task was to determine if a surveillance of the Hammett apartment was even a viable proposition—watching the front door of an apartment building was of little use without a detailed description of the quarry. He sought out the delivery alley that ran in back of Hammett's building, and was gratified to find that the fire-escape doors possessed small windows at each level. By the judicious rearrangement of dust-bins and the hook of his walking-stick, he scrambled onto the metal escape and moments later was looking straight down the hall-way at Hammett's door.