He puffed and mused.

It was a serious matter, obviously. He had had occasion to visit one or another of the three uppermost apartments at Number 99 East often enough, for private accountings or other confidential business connected witli the Importuna Industries conglomerate, but Nino Importuna did not invite his executives to his penthouse after office hours for ordinary business. Or ordinary pleasure, either.

A small tremolo fluttered the smoker’s spine.

Nino had found out.

God had found out.

Judgment Day…

The tall man was tapping his pipe on the parapet, watching the sparks die away and reflecting on his options, when a nasty voice said from the drawing room, “Sir?” making the syllable sound as if it were composed of four letters. He turned with reflexively inquiring brows, covering up by habit. It was Nino’s muttonchopped man, Crump, who had admitted him to the penthouse. Crump was one of the few hallmarked English butlers left on Manhattan Island, and he possessed the sixth sense of his breed. “Mr. Importuna will see you now. Sir. If you will follow me?”

He sauntered after the man, trying to ignore the spiteful flunky back, thinking how much better the mural ceiling, the pastry arabesquework of the walls, the grand marble fireplace, the quatrefoiled cathedral windows suited him than Importuna. But the thought was like the tobacco sparks. True, he had never entirely accommodated himself to the central fact of his existence, which was that he had no talent for making the Importuna kind of money-how many men had?-but he did not allow this failing to hobble his life style. Above all he was a practitioner of the possible.

Crump glided before him to the threshold of the holy of holies, stepped aside, and-between successive blinks, he could have sworn-departed through a solid wall.