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could have said I had some urgent business back at the Department but I told you I was going home for lunch,” said Gonzalez. “I am not a shining example of honesty, Lombardo, but at least I don’t mistrust the whole world.”
     
    Lombardo shrugged. “It’s in my nature, said the scorpion when he stung the poor frog in the middle of the pond.”
     
    The Fat Man shook his head, got in his car, and drove away.

    Lombardo smiled and said, “The fat, lazy bastard has a heart.”
     
    On his way to his rambling wreck of a car, Lombardo saw an old man sweeping the gutter of the parking lot’s sidewalk. Lombardo looked at the pile of rubbish the old man had collected and was about to scoop up with a makeshift scoop cut from an oil can. There were a lot of cigarette butts among the trash—some of them unusual.
     
    “ Señor ,” he said to the old man, “ Buenos días .”
     
    The old man turned—his mouth opened and his eyes widened as if startled that someone would speak to him.
     
    “ The students smoke a lot, eh?” said Lombardo nodding toward the pile of trash that held a large number of cigarette butts. What had attracted Lombardo’s attention were the long, thin cigarette filters with a gold band. He had seen those before, somewhere, although he couldn’t remember exactly where.
     
    The old man smiled and agreed, “Oh, yes, they smoke a lot. That’s all they do when they sit in the cars out here.”
     
    “ And they like to smoke the expensive kind,” said Lombardo while hunkering down to look at the cigarette butts.
     
    The old man shrugged. He probably did not know a cheap cigarette from an expensive one, as these obviously were. “English,” said Lombardo to himself.
     
    “ Pardon me,” he said to the old man as he started to pick some of the cigarette butts up by the tobacco end and putting them into his clean handkerchief.
     
    He asked the old man where the cigarette butts had come from and the old man pointed to a spot in the parking lot a few car spaces away.
     
    He asked him if he swept the parking lot every day. He said he did.
     
    “ Were there a lot of these on the ground yesterday?”
     
    “ No, there were not. I swept the lot clean yesterday morning, too. I sweep it every day. That’s my job.”
     
    Lombardo thanked the old man and went to the place the old man had pointed out. Lombardo stood on the sidewalk and looked down at the space between the two white lines. It was clean, freshly swept, as the old man had said. There was nothing unusual about the spot nor was it any different from the hundreds of other spots in the parking lot, but Lombardo stood staring down at it as if he had seen something.
     
    He turned to look at the Computer Center building—the entrance was plainly visible from the spot. He moved to stand at the place where a driver
might have sat if a car had backed up into the parking space. Then, he looked down: “If the man who had smoked the English cigarettes had been sitting in a car about here,” he whispered, “then he would have thrown down his cigarette butts about there.” Lombardo hunkered down and looked into the loose gravel of the parking lot floor.
     
    Lombardo had only two friends. He met with them occasionally in a bar and sometimes during those long bouts of drinking he talked about his wartime experiences. He said that war had changed how his senses reacted to things. He often said that he had survived the many patrols he had been on because he would come to a spot in the jungle and something, a broken twig, the unusual stillness, the too obvious normalcy, had told him the enemy was there, waiting in ambush.
     
    Now, like a hunting dog that stiffens to point, he stood motionless looking down. He trembled a bit as if a slight chill had cursed through his body. He could feel the danger. His senses told him that someone had been here waiting in ambush.
     
    The wind kicked up and gray clouds rushed overhead. Lombardo put his hands into