Unaware of this, Snim lurked outside the bank, watching the tellers’ cages closely. A solid citizen was making a withdrawal at Cage Z. The teller was passing over big chunks of paper cash. This was the fish. Snim hastily removed his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and tucked the pen in his ear.

As the fish came out of the bank, counting his money, Snim slipped behind him, darted up and tapped the man’s shoulder.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said briskly. “I’m from Cage Z. I’m afraid our teller made a mistake and short-counted you. Will you come back for the adjustment please?” Snim waved his sheaf of slips, gracefully swept the money from the fish’s fins and turned to enter the bank. “Right this way, sir,” he called pleasantly. “You have another hundred coming to you.”

As the surprised solid citizen followed him, Snim darted busily across the floor, slipped into the crowd and headed for the side exit. He would be out and away before the fish realized he’d been gutted. It was at this moment that a rough hand grasped Snim’s neck. He was swung around face to face with a Bank Guard. In one chaotic instant, Snim contemplated fight, flight, bribery, pleas, Kingston Hospital, the bitch Chooka Frood and her yellow-headed ghost girl, his pocket-pianino and the man who owned it. Then he collapsed and wept.

The peeper guard flung him to another uniform and shouted: “Take him, boys. I’ve just made myself a mint!”

“Is there a reward for this little guy, Fred?”

“Not for him. For what’s in his head. I’ve got to call the Guild.”

At nearly the same moment late Friday afternoon, Ben Reich and Lincoln Powell received the identical information: “Girl answering to the description of Barbara D’Courtney can be found in Chooka Frood’s Fortune Act, 99 Bastion West Side.”

9

BASTION WEST SIDE, FAMOUS last bulwark in the Siege of New York, was dedicated as a war memorial. Its ten torn acres were to be maintained in perpetuity as a stinging denunciation of the insanity that produced the final war. But the final war, as usual, proved to be the next-to-the-final, and Bastion West Side’s shattered buildings and gutted alleys were patched into a crazy slum by squatters.

Number 99 was an eviscerated ceramics plant. During the war a succession of blazing explosions had burst among the stock of thousands of chemical glazes, fused them, and splashed them into a wild rainbow reproduction of a lunar crater. Great splotches of magenta, violet, bice green, burnt umber, and chrome yellow were burned into the stone walls. Long streams of orange, crimson, and imperial purple had erupted through windows and doors to streak the streets and surrounding ruins with slashing brush strokes. This became the Rainbow House of Chooka Frood.

The top floors had been patched and subdivided into a warren of cells so complicated and confused that only Chooka understood the pattern of the maze, and even Chooka herself was in doubt at times. A man could drift from cell to cell while the floors were being searched, and easily slip through the meshes of the finest dragnet. This unusual complexity netted Chooka large profits each year.