“All right.” He drank the foaming solution, which tasted sharp and cool, set the glass back down and walked to the door.

“Who is it?”

“Open the door!”

The voice was familiar: he knew it well; and yet he could not place it. It wasn’t Shipman, it wasn’t Parkhouse. McDaniel? No.

Wake up!

He shook his head and walked to the door.

He unlocked it.

A short, stubby man was standing in the hall, neither frowning nor smiling. He might have been sixty; he looked sixty, except for the hair, which was black and long and curly. He wore hornrimmed glasses.

Adam grinned in real surprise. “For Christ sake!” he said.

“You keep poor hours,” Max Blake said. “May I come in?”

“What? Well, of course. Of course! I’m sorry. I didn’t—well, I just can’t believe it, that’s all! What in the name of God are you doing here, anyway?”

The stubby man walked inside. He was dressed in a sports coat and gray flannel slacks. His black shoes were highly polished. “On my way to New York,” he said, looking at Adam.

“Sabbatical?”

“No. Hookey.”

Adam shook his head again and laughed. Much of the old nervousness was returning swiftly, and a certain embarrassment which he couldn’t understand at first, and then understood perfectly: it was that he’d never seen Max Blake except in the classroom or at his home, and he was finding it difficult to take the man out of context, to extricate him from those surroundings.

“You’re kind of out of your way though, aren’t you?” he asked, stuffing his shirt into his trousers. “I wish I could offer you a drink—”

Blake did not answer; it was a familiar characteristic. He glared about the room disdainfully, then again back at Adam.

“You’re looking bad,” he said.

“Well, I’ve been working hard.”

“Yes.”

“Did you get my letters?”

Blake’s eyes flicked across the empty gun that lay on the dresser. As was habitual with him, he muttered soft incoherences deep in his throat, and with his right thumb moved the large ruby ring he wore on the fourth finger of his right hand, up and down, up and down. He looked at the bed, then walked to the window and raised the shade and looked outside.