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adorned only with large numbers on each landing to mark off the successive floors. The air smelled of raw pelts hanging up to dry.
    The railing was on the left, which made it easier for me to favor my injured left knee. On the sixth-floor landing we stopped for breath; I tried straightening my leg and putting weight on it. There was a watery sensation, but the pain remained local. The insect dealer’s glasses were starting to steam over.
    “Are you sure you know where they went?” I asked.
    “They have an office. A rented one, with just a phone, but an office.”
    “ ‘Shills for hire,’ is that it?”
    “It’s a referral agency for sidewalk vendors. They keep a percentage of the space rental fee.”
    “Then they are racketeers. I knew it. He tried to gloss it over—called himself a ‘sales promoter’ or some damn thing.”
    “They don’t seem to have any direct connections to organized crime, though. If they did, they could never deal with the department store here so openly. Who knows, maybe they pay their dues on the sly.”
    “It wouldn’t surprise me. There was something slimy about them.”
    “Her too?”
    The question was impossible for me to answer in an offhand way. I stopped, pretending my knee hurt. The insect dealer shifted the suitcase to his other hand and looked back at me, a faint smile on his face.
    “Doesn’t she get to you?” he said. “She does to me. She’s too good for him.”
    “He called her his fishing lure.”
    “Did he, now.” He licked his upper lip, then his lower. The suitcase bumped down the stairs in time to his footsteps. “The man’s no fool. You have to give him credit for that.”
    “Do you really think they headed straight for the office at this hour? Maybe we should phone first, to make sure.”
    We passed the fifth floor, then the fourth-floor landing, brushing past a pair of uniformed security guards in an evident hurry—probably on their way up to straighten out the crowd and get the elevators going again. Rain washed against the skylight.
    “If I were you, I wouldn’t even bother doing that,” said the insect dealer. “I’d make straight for the harbor.”
    “Harbor?”
    “Sure. That ticket gets you on board a ship, right? A ship means a harbor.”
    “But my ship isn’t in the water. It’s sort of …” I groped for a way to express it. “It’s in dry dock, you could say.”
    “Well, it’s only a question of time till they find it and get on board.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    “There’s a map on the back of that ticket, isn’t there?”
    “You mean you’ve already looked at it? That was quick.”
    “It’s a habit of mine,” he said. “While I’m in the john, I have to have something to read.”
    “Do you think they could find it with just that map to go on?”
    “A fisherman could. I like deep-sea fishing myself, so I knew where it was the minute I saw it.”
    “Oh … What about him? Does he fish? He did make that crack about fishing by lure… .”
    “That area is full of great fishing spots,” said the insect dealer, giving his hip pocket a slap where the ticket apparently was. “I know my way around there pretty well. Wasn’t there an old fishermen’s inn somewhere near there?”
    I felt a sick embarrassment, as if he’d told me my fly was open. I didn’t want to hear any more. To have the past dragged aboard my ship was the last thing I wanted. When we set sail, I wanted my slate as clean as a newborn baby’s.
    “Oh, sorry, I forgot to give you back your watch.”
    On the second-floor landing, we took a final rest. My knee was almost entirely free of pain now and felt merely a bit stiff—though to keep my companion off his guard it seemed wiser to pretend otherwise. The insect dealer strapped his watch on his wrist, sat down on the eupcaccia suitcase, and stuck a cigarette in his mouth.
    “No smoking.”
    “I’m not going to light it. I only smoke five a day.”
    “See there? You do want to