And you know what? He was watching a program on a funny little portable TV set that he had on the bureau. Color TV. Only it wasn’t working right. There were no faces, no pictures, nothing but colors chasing around. A big blob of red, a big blob of orange, and a wiggly border of blue and green and black. A voice was talking from it, but all the words were fouled up. “Wah-wah, de-wah, de-wah.”

Just as I came in, he turned it off. “Times Square is a bad neighborhood for TV,” I told him. “Too much interference.”

“Yes,” he said. “Too much interference.” He closed up the set and put it away. I wished I’d seen it when it was working right.

Funny thing, you know? I would have expected a smell of liquor in the room, I would have expected to see a couple of empties in the tin trash basket near the bureau. Not a sign.

The only smell in the room was a smell I couldn’t recognize. I guess it was the smell of Eksar himself, concentrated.

“Hi,” I said, feeling a little uncomfortable because of the way I’d been with him back in the office. So rough I’d been.

He stayed on the bed. “I’ve got the twenty,” he said. “You’ve got the five?”

“Oh, I guess I’ve got the five, all right,” I said, looking in my wallet hard and trying to be funny. He didn’t say a word, didn’t even invite me to sit down. I pulled out a bill. “Okay?”

He leaned forward and stared, as if he could see—in all that dimness—what kind of a bill it was. “Okay,” he said. “But I’ll want a receipt. A notarized receipt.”

Well, what the hell, I thought, a notarized receipt. “Then we’ll have to go down. There’s a druggist on Forty-fifth.”

“Okay,” he said, getting to his feet with a couple of small coughs that came one, two, three, four, right after one another. “The bathroom’s out in the hall. Let me wash up and we’ll go down.”