Plasky was working diligently at the smile. "Your confusion is understandable, soldier." He was reminding Bolan of his lower place in the order of intelligence. "Like I said, financiers are not charity-minded. They rent out their money. It's a simple rental arrangement. If you rent a house or a car, you expect to pay your rent each month and also to return the property- all of the property-when your rental period has expired. Right?"

Bolan merely nodded.

"We rented your father a sum of money. The rental period specified was ninety days. If your father had returned our property at the expiration of that period, and if his rent was all paid up at that time, the debt would have been settled. But he did not. Naturally, in any business arrangement, there are certain penalty agreements to be invoked when one of the parties defaults. So many people fail to understand the financial structure of the business world. Now all your father has managed to do is to barely keep up the rent payments and to pay some of the penalties. He still has all of the property he rented-in this case, our money. We want it back. Are we so unreasonable?"

"Five hundred and fifty bucks is pretty high rent on four hundred bucks, isn't it?" Bolan observed softly.

"You're forgetting the penalties," Plasky shot back. He smiled. "All right, you're an intelligent man, Mr. Bolan. Sure, our interest rates are high. We provide a service at a risk that few financiers would be interested in. Why didn't your father borrow this money from a bank? Huh? You know the answer to that. No bank would have risked a nickel on your father. We did. We risked four hundred dollars on him. Frankly, soldier, your old man was a bad risk. Naturally our interest rates have to take that cruel fact into account And, of course, we don't force anyone to do business with us. We-"

"You keep saying 'we,'" Bolan interrupted. I thought-"