He hesitated.

“It’s on me,” I told him. “I’ll be a big shot for a dime. Come on, let’s have a cup of coffee.”

Now he looked worried. “You don’t want to back out? I’ve got the receipt. It’s all notarized. I gave you a twenty, you gave me a five. We made a deal.”

“It’s a deal, it’s a deal,” I said, shoving him into an empty booth. “It’s a deal, it’s all signed, sealed and delivered. Nobody’s backing out. I just want to buy you a cup of coffee.”

His face cleared up, all the way through that dirt. “No coffee. Soup. I’ll have some mushroom soup.”

“Fine, fine. Soup, coffee, I don’t care. I’ll have coffee.”

I sat there and studied him. He hunched over the soup and dragged it into his mouth, spoonful after spoonful, the living picture of a bum who hadn’t eaten all day. But pure essence of bum, triple-distilled, the label of a fine old firm.

A guy like this should be lying in a doorway trying to say no to a cop’s nightstick, he should be coughing his alcoholic guts out. He shouldn’t be living in a real honest-to-God hotel, or giving me a twenty for a five, or swallowing anything as respectable as mushroom soup.

But it made sense. A TV giveaway show, they want to do this, they hire a damn good actor, the best money can buy, to toss their dough away. A guy who’ll be so good a bum that people’ll just laugh in his face when he tries to give them a deal with a profit.

“You don’t want to buy anything else?” I asked him.

He held the spoon halfway to his mouth and stared at me suspiciously. “Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Like maybe you want to buy a ten for a fifty. Or a twenty for a hundred dollars?”

He thought about it, Eksar did. Then he went back to his soup, shoveling away. “That’s no deal,” he said contemptuously. “What kind of a deal is that?”

“Excuse me for living. I just thought I’d ask. I wasn’t trying to take advantage of you.” I lit a cigarette and waited.