“Yes, sir,” Blake said, very weakly.

“Meanwhile, no more of this nonsense about law-abiding, rent-paying tenants. If they leave you alone, you leave them alone. That’s an order, Blake.”

“I understand that, Mr. Jimm.”

He sat for a long while looking at the cradled telephone. Then he rose and walked out to the lobby and into an elevator. There was a peculiar and unaccustomed jauntiness to him, a recklessness to his stride that could be worn only by a man deliberately disobeying a direct order from the reigning head of Wellington Jimm Sons, Inc., Real Estate.

Two hours later he crept back, his shoulders bent, his mouth loose with defeat.

Whenever Blake had been in an elevator full of telephone linemen and furniture movers on their way to the thirteenth floor, there had been no thirteenth floor. But as soon as, a little irritated, they had changed elevators, leaving him behind, so far as he could tell, they had gone right up to their destination. It was obvious. For him there was no thirteenth floor. There probably never would be.

He was still brooding on the injustice of it at five o’clock, when the scrubwomen who were coming on duty bounced their aged joints into his outer office to punch the time clock. “Which one of you,” he asked, coming at them suddenly with an inspiration, “which one of you takes care of the thirteenth floor?”

“I do”

He drew the woman in the bright green, fringed shawl after him into his private office. “When did you start cleaning the thirteenth floor, Mrs. Ritter?”

“Why, the day the new tenants moved in.”

“But before that…” He waited, watching her face anxiously.

She smiled, and several wrinkles changed their course. “Before that, Lord love you, there was no tenants. Not on the thirteenth.”