I was willing to believe that they’d look very different if one saw them side by side, but such a simultaneous viewing didn’t appear to be an option, and if someone had told me that the Onderdonk painting had been hustled downtown and stuck up on the Hewlett’s wall, I couldn’t have sworn he was wrong. Onderdonk’s painting was framed, of course, while this canvas was left unframed so as to show how the artist had continued his geometric design around the sides of the canvas. For all I knew Onderdonk’s painting had twice as many colored areas. It might be taller or shorter, wider or narrower. But-

But it still seemed oddly coincidental. Coincidences don’t have to be significant, of course. I’d picked up Carolyn at the Poodle Factory and we’d shared a cab to the Hewlett, and I hadn’t bothered reading our driver’s name on the posted hack license, but suppose I had and suppose it had been Turnquist? Then, when the attendant had greeted the ill-clad artist by name, we might have remarked on the coincidence of having met two Turnquists in half an hour. But so what?

Still-

We circled the room, pausing now and then in front of a painting, including several that left me cold and a Kandinsky I liked a lot. There was an Arp. Onderdonk had an Arp, too, but since we hadn’t been ordered to steal an Arp there was nothing particularly coincidental about it, or nothing remarkable about the coincidence, or-

“ Bern? Should I just plain forget about the cat?”

“How would you go about doing that?”

“Beats me. Do you really think they’ll do anything to Archie if we don’t steal the painting?”

“Why should they?”

“To prove they mean business. Isn’t that what kidnappers do?”

“I don’t know what kidnappers do. I think they kill the victim to prevent being identified, but how’s a Burmese cat going to identify them? But-”