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Rasmussen snatched up his pipe and puffed rapidly. “Well, Wren,” he said around the stem, “you’ll have a chance to pursue the answer to these questions.”
    “Me?”
    “We’ve decided to send you there,” said he. “Isn’t snooping your profession? Obviously if you’ve survived in New York City you know how to lie and cheat and dissemble: spying should be just your meat.”
    I chewed on this remarkable proposal for a moment, then said, “Don’t think I’m not flattered by your offer, Rasmussen, but really, I can’t leave town at the moment. I’ve got to find a new home, and then I have to reconstruct my play. It’s true that I have had some experience as an investigator, but that’s pretty remote from being a spy, if you think about it. A principal difference is that if you do a bad job of private detection, it is not routine to be executed.”
    He failed to acknowledge these sentiments. “Your cover will be this: you’re an American playwright who’s gone to Saint Sebastian because it’s a nice quiet place to hole up and lick your second-act problems.”
    I must say his information was uncannily accurate in assessing my dramaturgical difficulties. How he could have known about them was beyond me. Had I talked aloud in my sleep in the bugged room?
    “Well, if you put it that way, I’ll think it over.” The fact was that with the winding up of the Rothman Deli job I had no employment. Indeed it would not have been easy to name a time when I had ever been overwhelmed with work. “I don’t want to be vulgar,” I said, “but am I naïve in assuming you folks pay some kind of fee to the free-lance?”
    Rasmussen rose suddenly from his camp chair and hurled himself at the rear doors. I tried to follow him, but he opened the right-hand panel, leaped out, and slammed it in my face: furthermore, locked it from outside. After pounding awhile impotently, I went to assault the windowless metal wall that separated the rear compartment from the cab. The engine roared into life and started to move with a vicious lurch. I fell backwards, striking something adamantine with my head.

2
    I WAS SHAKEN AWAKE as the vehicle hit a procession of the profound potholes with which Manhattan streets are pockmarked... except that I was not in the van or on a street anywhere, but rather in an airplane, aloft, and the bumps were caused by faults in the sky!
    It was a commercial craft, and the approaching stewardess was a substantial fairhaired girl who wore a short dress of green jersey. She brought me a little tray which held a cup of café au lait and a plump croissant.
    “Goot morning,” said she. “Wilcom to Sebastiani Royal Airline, Meester Wren!” The bosom of her dress yawned open as she bent with the tray. I stared into her luxurious cleavage as something to do while I collected my wits. She asked, “Vould you like to skveese the breasts?” I should say her smile was more genial than sensual.
    “Uh, no, thank you,” said I, and then, courtesy being my foible even when far from home, I saw fit to add, “Perhaps another time. They look very nice.”
    “Oh yes,” she said with vigor. “Mine body is beautifool.” It would be hard to explain that this statement did not sound like boasting when it was pronounced. My natural taste in females is for a more slender sort of blond, but I must say that this statuesque person put me at ease, or at any rate at a good deal more of it than I could have claimed in her absence.
    “Miss, please don’t think me mad if I ask where we are, where I am. Did you say ‘Sebastiani’? Is that what it would seem, a reference to the little principality of Saint Sebastian?”
    She smiled grandly with the largest of white teeth and an expanse of rosy lips: she was a spectacularly healthy specimen. “Ve vill be landing there soon.”
    I took a sip of the coffee, which proved hot and delicious and thus reassuring. “You may not believe this, but I haven’t any idea of how I got