It was a pleasant enough apartment. There was a spacious sitting room with old-fashioned aluminum and teak-veneer furniture, a polished composition floor, and framed post-neo-surrealist paintings. Adjoining was a carpeted bedroom with a four-foot tri-D screen, a wide closet, and a window opening onto a view of irregular brickwork across a twelve-foot alley.

Behind the flowered wallpaper, there were other facilities, unknown to the present management-installed, during construction, at the insistence of one of the more secret agencies of the now defunct South African Federation. According to the long, chatty briefing papers Felix had tucked into the newspaper, the CBI had inherited the installation from a former tenant, in return for a set of unregistered fingerprints and a getaway stake.

I looked the room over and spotted a spy-eye in a drawer knob, a microphone among the artificial flowers-standard equipment at the Faisal, no doubt. I would have to make my first order of business a thorough examination of everything… as soon as I had a cold shower. I turned to the bedroom-and stopped dead. My right hand made a tentative move toward my gun, and from the shadows a soft voice said, "Uh-uh."

He came through the sitting-room door with a gun in his hand-a middle-sized, neatly dressed man with wispy hair receding from a freckled forehead. He had quick eyes. An inch of clean, white cuff showed at his wrist.

"I was supposed to be gone when you got here," he said quietly. "The boys downstairs slipped up."

"Sure," I said. "They slipped up-and I'm dancing tonight with the Ballet Russe." I looked at the gun. "What was I supposed to do, fall down and cry when I saw that?"