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and used the phone to dial Lublin’s number. There was no answer. He came back to the table and told her.
    “He’ll get home eventually,” she said.
    “I suppose so.”
    After dinner, he called again. There was no answer. They stopped at a drugstore and bought a couple of magazines, and he tried again on the drugstore phone. No answer. They went back to the hotel room. At seven-thirty he tossed a magazine aside and picked up the phone, then cradled it.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you suppose they listen in?”
    “Who?”
    “The hotel operators.”
    “Maybe.”
    “I’ll be back in a minute.”
    He went downstairs and around the corner to the drugstore and tried again. There was no answer. In the hotel room, he kept looking at his watch. He went back to the drugstore again at eight, and called, and a man answered.
    He said, “Mr. Lublin?”
    “Just a minute, I’ll get him.” Then, “Maurie. For you.”
    He hung up and went back to the room. He told her, “Lublin’s home now but he’s not alone. Somebody else answered the phone.”
    ‘Was it—”
    “No, I’m sure it wasn’t. I’d remember their voices.” He thought a moment. “There were noises in the background. They may have been having a party. I don’t know. I think there were a lot of people there. But there’s at least one other man, the one who answered the phone. And he called Lublin by name. If Lublin were the only other person there, he wouldn’t have called him by name, I don’t think.”
    “What do we do now?”
    “I’ll call again in a little while. Sooner or later he’ll be the only one left, and then I’ll go after him.”
    She didn’t say anything for several minutes. Then she said, “Don’t call again tonight.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because he’ll be suspicious. Calling and then hanging up—if it just happens once he’ll shrug it off, but if it happens more than that he’ll get suspicious. We can’t let him be on guard. The best thing for us right now is that nobody even knows about us. Lublin doesn’t know we exist and the two men don’t know we’re looking for them. We can’t afford to let them find out.”
    She was right. “I’ll go there around three in the morning,” he said. “The party’ll be over by then.”
    “No.”
    “Why not, Jill?”
    “He might not live alone.” She sat next to him and held his hands in hers. “Please,” she said. “We don’t know anything about him yet, about the setup there. Let’s wait until tomorrow. We can go there after a call, or if nobody’s home we can go there and break in and wait for him. Either way. Right now he’s there and he has company, and we don’t even know if he lives in a house or an apartment, we don’t know anything. Can’t we wait until morning?”
    “Are you nervous?”
    “Partly. And I’m exhausted, for another thing. A good sleep wouldn’t hurt either of us. Tomorrow—”
    He nodded slowly. She was right, there was no sense wasting their major advantage of surprise. And it wouldn’t hurt to wait another day. They had plenty of time.
    He got the bottle of V.O. from the drawer and lay on the bed with it. She went over and turned on the television set. There was a doctor program on, something about an immigrant who wouldn’t consent to surgery, and they watched it together. He didn’t pay very much attention to it. He stretched out on the bed and sipped the V.O. straight from the bottle, not working hard at it but just sipping as he watched the program. She said she didn’t want anything to drink.
    After that, they watched a cops-and-robbers thing for an hour, then caught the eleven o’clock news. There was nothing important on the news. During the weather report she turned off the television set and suggested that they go to sleep. He was tired without being sleepy. He could feel the exhaustion in his body, the need for sleep, but at the same time he felt entirely awake. But sleep was a good