‘Better to have Sunday expeditions here than no Sunday expeditions at all,’ he said.

‘You could plant an item like that rock-hammer in somebody’s skull,’ I remarked.

‘I have no enemies here,’ he said quietly.

‘No?’ I smiled. ‘Wait awhile.’

‘If there’s trouble, I can handle it without using a rock-hammer.’

‘Maybe you want to try an escape? Going under the wall? Because if you do —’

He laughed politely. When I saw the rock-hammer three weeks later, I understood why.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘if anyone sees you with it, they’ll take it away. If they saw you with a spoon, they’d take it away.’

‘What are you going to do, just sit down here in the yard?’

‘Oh, I believe I can do a lot better than that.’

I nodded. That part of it really wasn’t my business, anyway. A man engages my services to get him something. Whether he can keep it or not after I get it is his business.

‘How much would an item like that go for?’ I asked. I was beginning to enjoy his quiet, low-key style. When you’ve spent ten years in stir, as I had then, you can get awfully tired of the bellowers and the braggarts and the loud-mouths. Yes, I dink it would be fair to say I liked Andy from the first.

‘Eight dollars in any rock-and-gem shop,’ he said, ‘but I realize that in a business like yours you work on a cost-plus basis—’

‘Cost plus ten per cent is my going rate, but I have to go up some on a dangerous item. For something like the gadget you’re talking about, it takes a little more goose-grease to get the wheels turning. Let’s say ten dollars.’

‘Ten it is.’

I looked at him, smiling a little. ‘Have you got ten dollars?’

‘I do,’ he said quietly.

A long time after, I discovered that he had better than five hundred. He had brought it in with him. When they check you in at this hotel, one of the bellhops is obliged to bend you over and take a look up your works — but there are a lot of works, and, not to put too fine a point on it, a man who is really determined can get a fairly large item quite a ways up them — far enough to be out of sight, unless the bellhop you happen to draw is in the mood to pull on a rubber glove and go prospecting.