Snyder pointed to a flush door just past the desk. “That’s it, there. The door beyond it is to the kitchen.”
“The bathroom will do,” the thief said. “Come along.”
They walked across the cream carpeting, and Snyder opened the bathroom door. They stepped in and the thief turned on the lights, and a row of chrome spots gleamed down onto a long chrome counter containing two sinks. The entire wall above the sinks was mirrored.
“Lovely,” the thief said, and took a set of handcuffs from his pocket. “Now you put your hands behind your back.”
Fright touched Snyder again, and once more his memory of that other time came back. “You don’t have to tie me up,” he said, his voice rising. He was blinking again, and backing away.
The thief seemed disappointed, as though Snyder had failed to give a useful performance in a simple role. “There’s nothing to it,” he said. “We just need half an hour or so lead time.”
“I don’t want to be tied up!”
The thief sighed. “I don’t have to show you a gun, do I? I thought we had such a good relationship going.”
Snyder watched him mistrustfully. He couldn’t seem to stop blinking. “You aren’t going to blindfold me,” he said.
“I wouldn’t think of it. I’ll put the cuffs on, leave you in here, pull the desk over in front of the door to slow you down a bit, and that’s the end of it. All we want is time enough to get away from here.” The thief patted Snyder’s arm and gave him a confidential smile, half obscured by the mask. “Come on, now,” he said. “Let’s not make trouble for one another.”
Snyder reluctantly turned around, putting his hands behind his back, and felt the chilly metal bands close around his wrists. His shoulders were hunched and his head ducked down, as though he expected to be struck from behind.
He wasn’t. The thief took him by the arms, turned him gently around, and helped him to sit down on the fuzzy- covered toilet seat. “There,” he said. “Comfy? That’s fine. Now, we have a message for you to give to Lozini.”
Snyder frowned up at him. “What?”
“Lozini,” the thief repeated. “Adolf Lozini.”
Snyder shook his head. “I don’t know who you mean,” he said.
“You never heard of Adolf Lozini?”
“Never in my life.”
The thief pondered that for a few seconds, then shrugged and said, “Doesn’t matter, he’ll get the idea. Been pleasant talking to you. Good night.”
Snyder sat hunched on the toilet seat. A thing like this shouldn’t happen to a man, certainly not twice.
The thief paused in the doorway. “I’ll leave the light on,” he said, and waved, and closed the door.
It took Snyder twenty-five minutes to get out of the bathroom and make the phone call.
Nine
Parker sat at the writing table in his hotel room, counting bills. Nine hundred from the New York Room, three hundred from the brewery. The restaurant credit-card slips and brewery checks had all been ripped up and dumped into the river. The restaurant would never recoup, but the brewery would get new payment checks from at least some of its customers—a long and expensive and irritating operation.
The only light in the room was the table lamp at Parker’s elbow. Off to his right the Venetian blinds chittered occasionally in a slight breeze; they were angled upward, to let in air and to show the night-black sky with its thin nail-paring of moon and to block out the street-lit empty expanse of London Avenue. The bed was still made, and two dark-toned zippered jackets were lying on it. Parker counted slowly, separating and smoothing the bills with blunt fingers, organizing them into two equal stacks. His face was expressionless, as though his mind were working on other thoughts behind the mechanical process of counting.
Grofield came out of the bathroom, stretching and yawning and scratching his cheeks. “Wool,” he said. “I don’t know how skiers stand it.”
Parker finished counting the bills. “Four sixty-five each,” he said.
“By God,” Grofield said. “And to think some people say crime doesn’t pay.”
“We’ll do one more tonight,” Parker said.
“We will? What time is it?”
“Quarter to four.”
”Lozini must know by now,” Grofield said. “He’ll have his soldiers out beating the byways.”
“They can’t watch the whole town,” Parker told him. He pulled open the writing-table drawer and took out the notes Grofield had brought back from the library.
“Any ideas?”
“Let’s see.”
Parker got to his feet, and Grofield came over to take his place at the writing table. As he leafed through the notes, Parker went over to the window. He pulled the blind cord, shifting the slats till he could look down through them at the street.
Tyler was a clean town; the breeze gusted through empty gutters. Bright sodium street-lighting glared on the
