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years of peaceful, married, law-abiding existence, when I never touched another weapon but still couldn’t quite bring myself to go totally unarmed. I’d never had occasion to use it, as the saying goes, in anger. Well, there was always a first time, but that time wasn’t tonight. No weapons except in a clear and deadly emergency, Mac had said.
    I made a face at the dresser mirror. I was just teasing myself. I put the knife in a drawer and temptation behind me. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust my attractive, blue-haired, female compadre , you understand, as much as I’d trust anybody on a job like this. I’d done some checking with official sources while I was supposed to be changing for dinner; and she was the right girl, all right, operating from the right place: an exclusive little shop called Sara’s Modes.
    She had a perfect record in attendance and deportment, and she’d been thoroughly examined by her department for loyalty and right thinking: she was certified pure. The fact that she’d blown my cover within five minutes of my landing was undoubtedly a clumsy accident due to over-eagerness. I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. But a man with my background can’t help having a certain feeling about an assignation that puts him in a lighted phone booth in a deserted park in a foreign city in the middle of the night...
    I had no trouble at all in finding the booth. It shone like a Christmas tree, at the edge of a little open area that ran down to the water to join the concrete promenade along the sea wall. There was grass for the kids to play on and benches for watching parents and nursemaids, but the place was empty now.
    A little farther on, I saw, the sea wall ended and the walk continued along the low shore. I could see parts of the city across the water, and the lights were reflected by the smooth black surface that was broken here and there by an eddy of current—a reminder that this was, after all, a river of sorts, not a stagnant harbor or lake. There’s no tide to speak of on this coast of Sweden, but the fresh waters of Lake Malaren, west of Stockholm, flow through the city by various channels to mingle with the salt waters of the Baltic Sea, to the east.
    So much I’d learned from recent reading. It seemed like a swell place to dispose of a dead body, except that the corpse would probably wash up on one of the multitudinous rocky islands of the well-known Stockholm archipelago to seaward, or be hauled up in some Scandinavian fisherman’s net in an advanced state of decomposition... Sometimes I think I have too much imagination for this kind of work.
    I looked at the brightly lighted telephone booth. There were a number of ways I could have approached it, but only one that fitted the part I was playing. I made a smart left turn and marched up to it. Nothing happened. There was no sign or sound of anybody around. The traffic of the city was a distant murmur through the trees of the park.
    I got inside the booth and, to be doing something, got out my notebook and looked up the number of the man who was arranging the hunting trips that were my excuse for bringing a rifle and a shotgun into the country. It cost me several small coins to discover that in a Swedish pay phone you deposit your money before you pick up the receiver. After I figured this out, and dialed the number, I got a peculiar signal I didn’t recognize. Apparently the phones in this country played different tunes from the ones back home. The hotel switchboard must have shielded me from the shock of making this discovery earlier in the day.
    While I listened, wondering what this un-American instrument would think of next, someone knocked gently on the door of the booth.

7
    I sighed, hung up the phone, turned, took another deep breath, and pushed the door open. Sara Lundgren was standing there. You couldn’t make out the unorthodox color of her hair in the dim light. It just looked soft and bright under her little tweed