Then he saw the bumper sticker on his car: workers of the world unite! The old couple must have put it there. The words sent a thrill through him. He kneeled, and in the lower right-hand comer of the sticker, he saw the name of a Columbus silkscreen company. Someone there might be able to tell him where the local communist group was meeting.

He looked up the address in the telephone directory and discovered that the silkscreen company wasn’t far. He drove there and watched the store from the car for a few minutes. Then he drove to the phone booth up the block and, using his cable cutters, snipped the wires. He did the same to the other phone booth two blocks away. Then he went back to the store.

The owner, about sixty, with thick glasses and white hair, denied silkscreening the bumper stickers for the Communist party. “It was ordered by a printer in north Columbus,” he said.

Ragen slammed his fist on the counter. “Give address.” The man paused nervously. “Do you have some identification?”

“No!” Ragen said.

“How do I know you’re not from the FBI?”

Ragen grabbed him by the shirt front and pulled him close. “Old man, I vant know vere you send these bumper stickers.” “Why?”

Ragen pulled out his gun. “I am looking for my people and I cannot find them. Give me information or look for the hole in your body.”

The man peered nervously over his glassses. “All right.” He picked up a pencil and wrote down an address.

“I vant to see record to be sure,” Ragen said.

The man pointed to the order book on the desk. “The records are over there, but—but—”

“I know,” Ragen said. “Address of communist customer is not in there.” He pointed the gun at him again. “Open your safe.”

“Are you holding me up?”

“I vant only correct information.”

The man opened the safe, pulled out a sheet of paper and laid it on the counter. Ragen checked it. Satisfied that he had the right address, Ragen jerked the phone cord out of the wall.

“If you vant call them before I get there, use pay telephone two blocks away.”

Ragen walked out to the car. He estimated the printing shop to be about four miles away. He would have enough time to get there before the man could find a pay phone that hadn’t been cut.

The address was a residence with a small sign in the first-floor window: printing. Inside, he noticed that the business was run from the front living room. There was a long desk, a small hand printing press and a mimeograph machine. Ragen was surprised there were no hammer-and-sickle posters around. It looked like a simple operation. But the vibration under his feet told him that printing presses were running in the basement.

The man who came through the door was about forty-five, heavy-set, with a neat Vandyke beard. “I am Karl Bottorf. What can I do for you?”