We got back to the druggist for notarization, and, honest, I’ve never seen a man look more disgusted in my life. “Business is good, huh?” he said. “You two are sure hotting it up.”

“Listen, you,” I told him. “You just notarize.” I showed the receipt to Eksar. “This the way you want it?”

He studied it, coughing. “Whatever equity you own or have a right to sell. All right. And put in, you know, in your capacity as sales agent, your professional capacity.”

I changed the receipt and signed it. The druggist notarized.

Eksar brought that lump of money out of his pants pocket. He counted out fifty-four crisp new fifties and laid them on the glass counter. Then he picked up the receipt, folded it and put it away. He started for the door.

I grabbed the money up and went with him. “Anything else?”

“Nothing else,” he said. “It’s all over. We made our deal.”

“I know, but we might find something else, another item.”

“There’s nothing else to find. We made our deal.” And his voice told me he really meant it. It didn’t have a trace of the tell-me-more whine that you’ve got to hear before there’s business.

I came to a stop and watched him push out through the revolving door. He went right out into the street and turned left and kept moving, all fast, as if he was in a hell of a hurry.

There was no more business. Okay. I had thirty-two hundred and thirty dollars in my wallet that I’d made in one morning.

But how good had I really been? I mean, what was the top figure in the show’s budget? How close had I come to it?

I had a contact who maybe could find out—Morris Burlap.

Morris Burlap is in business like me, only he’s a theatrical agent, sharp, real sharp. Instead of selling a load of used copper wire, say, or an option on a corner lot in Brooklyn, he sells talent. He sells a bunch of dancers to a hotel in the mountains, a piano player to a bar, a disc jockey or a comic to late-night radio. The reason he’s called Morris Burlap is because of these heavy Harris tweed suits he wears winter and summer, every day in the year. They reinforce the image, he says.