You get word in Omaha or Fond du Lac or Jersey City that they need you, and next thing you know you’re busy studying somebody and becoming him. Or maybe creating somebody out of whole cloth. It isn’t pretty work, posing as a criminal. You swim through an ocean of filth before your job is done, and a lot of that filth gets swallowed.

But the job has to be done. Somebody has to do it.

I guess I’m the lucky one.

* * *

This time it was counterfeiting. For the past five or six months there had been a deluge of very classy queer stuff on the East Coast. Nothing but fives and tens, of course—it doesn’t pay to make queer singles, while big bills attract too much attention. These fives and tens were pretty special. The engraving was downright flawless, and only the paper didn’t quite measure up to Uncle Sam’s own standard.

It was a close enough match, though, to fool anybody but an expert. Uncle Sam has a hard enough time keeping the budget balanced without competition from free enterprise. So the treasury men started tightening a net. It took three months to center the operation on Philadelphia. It took another two months to pick up the clue that Mr. Big of the queer-pushers was one Henry Klaus of Philadelphia, a man well known by the Philly authorities but thus far able to stay on the outside of a cell.

Picking up Klaus wouldn’t help much. The way to smash the ring was to nab the engraver, who was obviously a man of great talent. Only Klaus kept him well hidden, evidently. Nobody had a lead.

At this point I got alerted to move into the case. The reasoning was that only an inside operator could get hold of that engraver. I was still trying to dream up a point of entry when we picked up word that Vic Lowney of L.A. was on his way East for a powwow with Klaus. The police had their own system of underworld intelligence—otherwise they’d never do better than parking tickets. They got the word. Lowney was being sent by Charley Hammell to line up a West Coast outlet for the queer stuff.

We got the wheels in motion. A West Coast man briefed me on Lowney. I roasted under a sunlamp to give myself an Angeleno tan. We plucked Lowney off his plane midway to Philly.

And here I was, twenty thousand feet in the air, wearing padded shoulders and a brand-new suntan and the identity of a louse.

* * *

It was getting close to five, Philadelphia time, when the plane started to dip low over the City of Brotherly Love. I fastened my seatbelt and waited for the landing.

It was October, and winter was closing in fast on Pennsylvania. The sky had a dull gray look, and the temperature was in the low fifties.