car and the men holding the guns.

The gaming room wasn't any fuller, he noticed. He wended his way back
to the bar for a bourbon-and-water and greeted the bartender morosely.
The drink came along and he sipped at it quietly, trying to put things
together in his mind. The talk with Palveri, he felt sure, had
provided an essential clue--maybe _the_ essential clue--to what was
going on. But he couldn't find it.

"Mess," he said quietly. "Everything's in a mess. And so what?"

A voice behind him picked that second to say: "Gezundheit." Malone
didn't turn. Instead he looked at the bar mirror, and one glance at
what was reflected there was enough to freeze him as solid as the core
of Pluto.

Lou was there. Lou Gehrig or whatever her name was, the girl behind
the reception desk of the New York offices of the Psychical Research
Society. That, in itself, didn't bother him. The company of a
beautiful girl while drinking was not something Malone actually hated.
But she knew he was an FBI Agent, and she might pick any second to
blat it out in the face of an astonished bartender. This, Malone told
himself, would not be pleasant. He wondered just how to hush her up
without attracting attention. Knock-out pills in her drink? A hand
over her mouth? A sudden stream of unstoppable words?

He had reached no decision when she sat down on the stool beside him,
turned a bright, cheerful smile in his direction and said: "I've
forgotten your name. Mine's Luba Ardanko."

"Oh," Malone said dully. Even the disclosure of what "Lou" stood for
did nothing to raise his spirits.

"I'm always forgetting things," Lou went on. "I've forgotten just
about everything about you."

Malone breathed a long, inaudible sigh of relief. If more people, he
thought, had the brains not to greet FBI Agents by name, rank and
serial number when meeting them in a strange place, there would be
fewer casualties among the FBI.

He realized that Luba was still smiling at him expectantly. "My name's
Malone," he said. "Kenneth Malone. I'm a cookie manufacturer,
remember?"

"Oh," Luba said delightedly. "Sure! I remember last time I met you you
gave me that lovely box of cookies. Modeled on the Seven Dwarfs."

Occasionally, Malone told himself, things moved a little faster than
he liked. "On the Seven Dwarfs," he said. "Oh, sure."

"And I thought the model of Sneezy was awfully cute," she said. "But
don't let's talk about cookies. Let's talk about Martinis."

Ma