CHAPTER 2

Then I parked the big shiny black roadster in front of the number on Sullivan Street Maria Maffei had given me I felt that I might never see it alive and happy again-the roadster I mean- for the street was littered with rubbish and full of wild Italian kids yelling and dashing around like black-eyed demons. But I had had the roadster in worse places than that, as for instance the night I chased young Graves, who was in a Pierce coupe with a satchel of emeralds between his knees, from New Milford all over Pike County, up and down a dozen mountains in a foot of mud and the worst rain I ever saw. It was Wolfe's orders that after every little rub the roadster should be fixed up as good as new, and of course that pleased me just as well.

It was just another rooming-house. For some reason or other they're all alike, whether it's a high-hat affair in the Fifties or a brownstone west of Central Park full of honest artist girls or an Italian hangout like this one on Sullivan Street. With, of course, a difference in details like garlic. Maria Maffei took me first to the landlady, a nice fat woman with wet hands and a pushed-in nose and rings on her fingers, and then upstairs to her brother's room. I looked around a little while Maria Maffei went to get the girl who had heard the phone call. It was a good-sized room on the third floor with two windows. The rug was worn and the furniture old and sort of broken, but it was clean and really not a bad room except for the noise from the hoodlums below when I opened the window to see if the roadster was still on its feet. Two large traveling bags were stacked in a corner, one flimsy and old and done for, the other one old too but sturdy and good. Neither was locked. The flimsy one was empty; the good one contained a lot of small tools of different shapes and sizes, some of which had pawnshop tags hanging on them, and some pieces of wood and metal and odds and ends like coil springs.