“No.”
“It’s a nice hotel, very small. I’ll be Miss Carol Bowen.”
“Mrs,” he said.
“Oh, of course. Because you’ll be coming along later.” She stepped forward and put her hand on his arm. “Not much later, will you?”
“I don’t know how long it will take,” he said. “A week, maybe a month.”
“Then we should start saying goodbye now,” she said.
4
It was like an art gallery: blueprints, floor plans, and photos all along the walls. Parker moved slowly from one to the next, an interested patron of the arts.
Gonor had set up this one room of his apartment as a kind of headquarters or war room. He’d stripped it to a table and four chairs under the central light fixture, he’d put the blueprints and other material along the walls, and on the table he’d put pads and pencils. He moved with Parker now, pointing out specific items of interest on the different floor plans.
“The fire escape,” he said at one point, tapping the paper. “On the rear of the building.”
“Can we use it?” Manado and Formutesca were sitting at the table, watching and waiting.
Gonor shook his head. “No. The windows opening on to it are protected by metal gates on the inside.”
Parker nodded and kept looking. A minute later he tapped the blueprint he was looking at and said, “Elevator?”
“Yes.”
“Mm.” Parker moved on. “Basement,” he said. “Any exterior way in?”
“No. There was at one time a coal chute on the left side of the building near the front, but that was removed and the window covered when the building was converted to the museum.”
“Window covered how?”
“With masonry.”
“All right.”
There were photos of the building, front and back. The front showed him nothing he didn’t already know, and the back looked like a prison with its barred windows and black metal door. There were some photos of the interior, various display rooms.
“Those are stock photos,” Gonor said. “We’ve had them on file for some time; they’re to be used in publicity and news releases.”
“They’re out of date?”
Gonor shook his head. “Nothing changes inside the museum,” he said. “It still looks like that today.”
Parker studied the pictures, then nodded and turned away and sat down at the table. Gonor sat at his left, with Formutesca opposite and Manado on the right.
Parker said, “About the elevator. What’s at the top of the shaft?”
Gonor had no idea what he was talking about. “The roof,” he said, surprised.
“There’s got to be the motor housing,” Parker told him. “Or is that in the basement?”
“Oh, I see, yes. Yes, it’s in the basement. But there is some machinery at the top.” He twisted around and pointed to the picture of the rear of the building. “You see that black shape on top of the building there?”
“How do you get into it?”
Gonor frowned, studying the picture from his seat. “I don’t remember. But I’m sure there’s some way.”
“I think the top is hinged,” Formutesca said. “It’s only about three feet by four.”
“Kept locked?”
Gonor said, “Oh, certainly.”
“But you have a key.”
Gonor frowned. “I suppose so. I’m sure we must.”
“What’s the problem?”
“In my desk drawer at the mission,” Gonor said. “I have a yellow envelope marked Museum Keys, with a dozen or more keys inside. Which key is which I have no idea.”
“We’ll have to find out,” Parker said.
Formutesca said, “You can’t get to the roof without going through the fourth floor. They’ll never let us do it.”
“That’s right,” Gonor said. “We could go there, and so long as we stayed in the museum area the Kasempas would leave us alone. In fact, they’d be silent; they’d hide the fact of their existence. But if we went to the fourth floor they wouldn’t be able to hide any more. And they know I am one of those opposed to Colonel Lubudi.”
Parker said, “How far would they go?”
“They would kill us,” Gonor said. “Kill us and bury the bodies in the basement. So the Negro head of the mission
