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it proved extremely difficult. From here the lesser roofs were almost a trackless sea, literally, and such a foreshortened one that it was very hard to trace the line ofstreets—a checkerboard viewed from the edge. The job preoccupied him so that he became oblivious of his immediate surroundings. If the little girls had returned now and stared up at him, he probably wouldn’t have noticed them. Yet the silly little problem he’d set himself was so puzzling that more than once he almost gave it up.
    Really, a city’s roofs were a whole dark alien world of their own, unsuspected by the myriad dwellers below, and with their own inhabitants, no doubt, their own ghosts and “paramental entities.”
    But he rose to the challenge and with the help of a couple of familiar watertanks he knew to be on roofs close to his and of a sign BEDFORD HOTEL painted in big black letters high on the side wall of that nearby building, he at last identified his apartment house.
    He was wholly engrossed in his task.
    Yes, mere was the slot, by God! and there was his own window, the second from the top, very tiny but distinct in the sunlight. Lucky he’d spotted it now—the shadow traveling across the wall would soon obscure it.
    And men his hands were suddenly shaking so mat he’d dropped his binoculars. Only his strap kept them from crashing on the rocks.
    A pale brown shape had leaned out of his window and waved at him.
    What was going through his head was a couple of lines from that bit of silly folk doggerel which begins:
     
    Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief.
    Taffy came to my house and stole a piece of beef.
     
    But it was the ending that was repeating itself in his head:
     
    I went to Taffy’s house, Taffy wasn’t home.
    Taffy went to my house and stole a marrowbone.
     
    Now for God’s sake don’t get so excited, he told himself, taking hold of the dangling binoculars and raising them again. And stop breathing so hard—you haven’t been running.
    He was some time locating his building and the slot again—damn the dark sea of roofs!—but when he did, there was the shape again in his window. Pale brown, like old bones—now don’t get morbid! It could be the drapes, he told himself, half blown out of his window by the wind—he’d left it open. There were freakish winds among high buildings. His drapes were green, of course, but their lining was a nondescript hue like this. And the figure wasn’t waving to him now—its dancing was mat of the binoculars—but rather regarding him thoughtfully as if saying, “You chose to visit my place, Mr. Westen, so I decided to make use of that opportunity to have a quiet look at yours.” Quit it! he told himself. The last thing we need now is a writer’s imagination.
    He lowered his binoculars to give his heartbeat a chance to settle down and to work his cramped fingers. Suddenly anger filled him. In his fantasizing he’d lost sight of the plain fact that someone was mucking about in his room! But who? Dorotea Luque had a master key, of course, but she was never a bit sneaky, nor her grave brother Fernando, who did the janitor work and had hardly any English at all but played a remarkably strong game of chess. Franz had given his own duplicate key to Gun a week ago—a matter of a parcel to be delivered when he was out—and hadn’t got it back. Which meant that either Gun or Saul—or Cal, for that matter—might have itnow. Cal had a big old faded bathrobe she sometimes mucked around in—
    But no, it was ridiculous to suspect any of them. But what about what he’d overheard from Saul on the stairs?—the ‘e-stealer’ Dorotea Luque had been worried about. That made more sense. Face up to it, he told himself: while he was gadding about out here, satisfying obscure aesthetic curiosities, some sneak-thief, probably on hard drugs, had somehow got into his apartment and was ripping him off.
    He took up the binoculars again in a hard fury and found his apartment at once, but