“Answer this! Where did Clay go?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me where he goes.”

“Where’s the people who worked in his office?”

“Ran for it when this rumpus started.”

“How long have you worked for Clay?”

“Years.”

Joseph Van Dorn was still holding the telephone and still breathing hard. “How long were you waiting for me?”

“Two days— Mister, you ain’t gonna call the cops, are youse?”

Van Dorn said, “You’ll owe?”

“Sure.”

“Make no mistake. If you give me your marker, I’ll collect.”

“I ain’t a welsher.”

“O.K. I’ll take you at your word. You pick up your boys and leave quietly. Got a man who does bullet wounds?”

“Sure.”

“All right. You owe me.”

“Me, too,” growled Isaac Bell.

“Hear that?” Van Dorn pointed at Bell. “Him, too. Whenever we come to you with a question, you’ll give us a straight answer. Square?”

“Square,” said the gangster. “Want to shake on it?”

“Get out of here!”

•   •   •

THE HUDSON DUSTERS carried their fallen down the back stairs.

Joseph Van Dorn gave Isaac Bell a tight grin. “Heck of a scrap. Thanks, Isaac. Saved my bacon.”

“Who is Clay?”

“Henry Clay. A private detective.” Van Dorn pointed at a brass wall plaque that was smeared with the blood of a gangster Bell had shot. “Henry Clay Investigations Agency.”

“What is he to you?”

“My first apprentice,” said Van Dorn.

Bell glanced around the demolished office. “Turned out to be a disappointment?”

“In spades.”

“How did he know you were coming?”

“Henry Clay is about the most intelligent man I have ever met. I am not surprised he knew I was coming. He has an uncanny ability to see the future.”

“A psychic?”

“Not in any mystical way. But he is so alert—sees much more clearly than ordinary men in the present—that it gives him a leg up on the future. Darned-near clairvoyant.”

Van Dorn looked over the wreckage of what had been a first-class office and shook his head in what seemed to Isaac Bell to be sadness. “So gifted,” he mused. “So intelligent. Henry Clay could have been the best detective in America.”

“I’m not sure how intelligent,” said Bell. “He disguised nothing about his past. He practically handed it to me on a silver platter.”

Van Dorn nodded. “Almost like he wanted to be caught.”

“Or noticed.”

“Yes, that was always his flaw. He was so hungry for applause— But Isaac?” Van Dorn gripped Bell’s arm for emphasis. “Never, ever underestimate him.”

Bell wove through an obstacle course of broken furniture and tried a door marked Private. It was locked. He knelt in front of the knob and applied his picks, then stepped aside abruptly.

“What’s the matter?”

“Too easy.”