The man's brown eyes flew open in surprise, and he held them open as a show of innocence. "Why do you say that?"

"Young man, you bring me here yet expect me to believe you an active operative? Do not take me for a fool. You receive an Army disability pension because of your lungs, and you have no doubt supplemented that from time to time with work for the agency, but you are a man who at times is so debilitated you cannot make it from one end of the apartment to the next without stopping to rest. At the moment you are attempting to support your wife and small daughter by writing for popular journals."

The bone-thin fingers slowly resumed their movements, automatically taking a precise pinch of tobacco and arranging it along the centre of the paper without his looking. "You want to tell me how you know all that?"

"Eyes, man: have them, use them. The doll, a woman's magazine on the side-table, two envelopes from the United States Army in a pigeon-hole, the Underwood on the kitchen table, and a pile of ma.n.u.script pages and copies of such literary works as Black Mask. Black Mask. Mr Hammett, I of all people should recognise the signs of a struggling writer." Mr Hammett, I of all people should recognise the signs of a struggling writer."

"The Smart Set Smart Set on the side-table is mine, not my wife's," Hammett a.s.serted, but weakly. "I write for them. But how could you know of my occasional . . . debility?" on the side-table is mine, not my wife's," Hammett a.s.serted, but weakly. "I write for them. But how could you know of my occasional . . . debility?"

"A series of chair-backs have worn marks into the wall-paper where they are occasionally arranged to allow you to walk the thirty feet from chair to bath without falling to the floor," Holmes told him dismissively. "Satisfied?"

Hammett's eyes fell at last to the cigarette his fingers had made. He ran a tongue along the edge, pressed it, and as he lit a match his eyes came back to Holmes'. "You're that Holmes, aren't you? The detective."

"I am, yes."

"I always thought . . ."

"That I was a fictional character?"

"That maybe there'd been some . . . exaggerations."

Holmes laughed aloud. "One of the inadvertent side-effects of Watson's florid writing style coupled with Conan Doyle's name is that Sherlock Holmes tends to be either wildly overestimated, or the other extreme, dismissed entirely as something of a joke. It used to infuriate me-Doyle's a dangerously gullible lunatic-but apart from the blow to my ego, it's actually remarkably convenient."

"You don't say," Hammett responded, clearly taken aback at the idea of the flesh-and-blood man seated in his living-room being considered a piece of fiction. And no doubt wondering how he would feel, were someone to do the same to him.

It was all a bit dizzying.

Fortunately, Holmes had his eye on the ball. "Now, will you tell me who hired you to follow me?"

"Okay. You're right. But it was through the Pinkertons. I used to work for them, and like I said, I still do little jobs for them from time to time, when I feel up to it. I had a bad spell recently, but the rent's due, so when one of my old partners there called and said they needed a couple nights' work I said sure. But after I'd got the job, I began to wonder if he hadn't thought the job stunk and decided to palm it off on me. Here, let me show you."

He went to the table and opened the top drawer, pulling out a thick brown file folder, which he laid on the small table and flipped open, sliding the top piece of paper over to Holmes. On it was printed:

I wish to know all possible details concerning the whereabouts and interests of Mr. S. Holmes and Miss M. Russell, staying at the St Francis Hotel. She owns a house in Pacific Heights. I shall phone you at 8:00 on the morning of Tuesday, 6 May for news.

"That's what I got, that and a 'phone call. Now, it's not unusual to get a case over the 'phone, but I like to meet my clients face-to-face, and the lady didn't seem all that eager to meet with me. Refused, in fact. And paid cash in an envelope delivered by messenger-not a service either, just a kid, a shabby one. The whole set-up made me feel pretty uncomfortable."

"Thinking that perhaps you were being brought into something less than legal?"

"That there was something shady here, and I don't like being played for a chump."

"'Played for a chump'," Holmes repeated to himself as he bent over the note with his pocket magnifying-gla.s.s. "A flavourful sample of the vernacular. Hmm. What can you tell me about your telephone caller?"

"Woman, like I said."

"Woman, or lady?"

"I guess I'd call her a lady, if we set aside the question of whatever it is she's up to. Anyway, she talked like someone who'd been educated. In the South-deep South, that is."

Holmes' head snapped up from the handwritten note. "A Southern woman?" he said sharply. "From what part of the South?"

"That I couldn't say. Not Texas, deeper than that-Alabama, Georgia, maybe the Carolinas, that sort of thing. Slow like mola.s.ses, you know?"

But Holmes was not so easily satisfied. "Did she use any words that struck you as slightly unusual?" he pressed. "What about her vowels-what did her a a's sound like? Did she employ any hidden diphthongs?"

Hammett, however, could be no clearer than he had been; Holmes shook his head and returned to the note, leaving the younger man to feel that he had let down the Pinkerton side rather badly.

"You getting anything out of that?" he asked, sounding a trifle short.

"Very little," Holmes admitted, but before Hammett could make a pointed display of his own impatience, Holmes continued. "Criminals print because it conceals everything about them up to and including their s.e.x. I see very little here, other than the obvious, of course: that she is right-handed, middle-aged, in good health, and educated; that she is probably American-hence the profligate scattering of full-stops-but has spent long enough in Europe that 'six May' rather than 'May six' comes to her pen; that said pen is expensive and probably gold-nibbed but the ink is not her own, as it shows an unfortunate tendency to clump and dry unevenly. The paper itself might reward enquiries from the city's stationers, although the watermark appears neither remarkable nor exclusive. And I should say that, behind its careful formation of the letters, the lady's hand betrays a tendency toward self-centredness such as one sees in the hand of most career criminals."

"The lady's a crook? Well, that sure narrows things down in a town this size."

"I shouldn't hold my breath," Holmes agreed, folding his magnifying-gla.s.s into its pocket and handing back the brief note. "Businessmen and even mere social climbers often display the same traits."

"You don't say?" Hammett mused, holding the note up into the light as if to follow the track of the older man's deductions.

"Graphology is far from an exact science, but it does reward study." Holmes sat back in the chair, took out his pipe and got it going, then fixed his host with a sharp grey eye. "So, Mr Hammett, am I to understand that you wish to terminate your employment with the lady from the South?"

"Not sure how I can do that; I took her money."

"Have you spent it?"

In answer, Hammett opened the file again and took out the envelope that gave it its thickness, handing it to Holmes. "I opened it to see how much there was, and since then it's sat there, untouched."

Holmes opened the flap and ran his thumb slowly up the side of the bills within, taking note of their number and their denomination. His eyebrow arched and he looked at Hammett, who nodded as if in agreement.

"Yeah, way too much money for a couple days' trailing."

"But as, what is the term? 'Hush money'?"

"You can see why I got nervous."

Holmes dropped the envelope back in the file; Hammett flipped the cover shut as if to put the money out of sight. "What I can see," said Holmes, "is that I'm dealing with a man who prefers to choose his employer."

"Mr Holmes, I've got a family. I'm not a whole lot of good to them, the state I'm in, but I'd be a lot less good in prison."

Despite Hammett's explanation, Holmes thought that the threat of gaol was less of a deterrent than the young man's distaste for villainy. As unlike Watson as a person could be physically, nonetheless the two were brothers under the skin-and he had no doubt that, like the externally sensible Watson, Hammett's fictional maunderings would lay a thin coating of hard action over the most romantic of sensibilities.

"Very well, Mr Hammett. How would you like to work for me instead?"

"Turncoating has never had much appeal, Mr Holmes."

"Have you spent any of the lady's money?"

"I told you I hadn't."

"Has she given you a means of getting into contact with her?"

"That note was it. The boy brought it with the money, stuck it in my hand, and left. When I phoned my buddy to ask what the h.e.l.l it all meant, he hadn't a clue, didn't know who it was, just some woman who needed a job done that he couldn't take on right away."

"Then you've done no more than keep the lady's money safe for a few days until you might return it with your regrets. Is that not so?"

Hammett sat in thought, not caring for the situation, torn between the implied but undeclared contract represented by the money in the folder and the undeniable pull of curiosity. And another thing: "You think this has something to do with the person who took a shot at your wife?"

"Pacific Heights is an unlikely venue for a random madman with a gun," Holmes pointed out grimly.

"Yeah, you're right. Okay, Mr Holmes, I'll take your job, so long as it doesn't involve outright betrayal. If it turns out that coming to me is what opens that lady up for a fall, I'm telling you now that I'm going to stand back and take my hands off both sides of it."

"Your rigid sense of ethics, Mr Hammett, will have done you no good in the world of the Pinkertons. But I agree."

The two men shook hands, and Hammett reached for the bottle again to seal the agreement.

"So, where do you want me to start?"

"First, you need to know what might be called 'the full picture,'" Holmes said, rapping his pipe out into the ash-tray and pulling out his pouch. "It would appear to have its beginnings a number of years ago, when my wife's family died on a road south of the city."

Hammett scrabbled through the debris on the table and came up with a note-book and a pen, which he uncapped and shook into life. His cigarette dangled unnoticed from between the fingers of his left hand as he hunched over the note-book on his knee, listening. After a few minutes, however, his occasional notes stopped, and his back slowly straightened against the chair-back, until finally he put up a hand.

"Whoa," he said. "Sounds to me like you're laying pretty much everything out in front of me."

"More or less," Holmes agreed mildly.

"Her father's job, the falling balcony in Egypt-"

"Aden," Holmes corrected.

"Aden. Do you honestly think all that's got anything to do with what's going on here?"

"Do I think so? There is not sufficient evidence one way or the other. But the balcony was a recent and unexplained event, and the possibility of its being linked should not be ignored."

"If you say so. But really, are you sure you want me to know all this?"

"If you do not know the past, how can you know what of the present is of importance?"

"I just mean-"

"You mean that, seeing as our initial meeting was adversarial, I ought not to trust you too wholeheartedly."

"Yeah, I guess I do."

"Mr Hammett, are you trustworthy?"

The thin man opened his mouth to answer, closed it again, and then began to chuckle. "There's no answer I can give to that-'yes' would probably mean 'no,' and 'no' would mean I'm a complete b.o.o.b, and 'I don't know' means you'd be a d.a.m.ned fool to trust me with so much as a b.u.t.ter-knife."

Holmes was smiling in response. "Precisely."

"So what you're saying is, 'It's my look-out, shut up and listen'?"

"Mr Hammett, you have a way with the American vernacular that bodes well for your future as a writer of popular fiction."

"Okay, it is your look-out. So I'll shut up and listen."

And he did, attentively, his dark eyes alive in that gaunt face. His occasional grunt and question told Holmes all he needed to know about the man's brains, and he told Hammett even more than he had originally intended. Very nearly everything.

It was late when they finished, or early. Hammett took out his package of Bull Durham again, glancing over his notes as his fingers sprinkled the tobacco and rolled the paper, every motion precise.

Eventually he nodded. "Yeah, I can see that you need another set of hands here."

"And eyes. In the normal run of events, those would belong to Russell-to my wife. However, of late she has been . . . indisposed."

"Too close to things to see clearly," Hammett suggested.

"It is temporary, I have no doubt. But until she returns to herself, she is . . ." Again Holmes paused, searching for a word that might be accurate without being traitorous; he was unable to find one, and finished the sentence with a sigh and the word "unreliable."

"So what do you want me to do first?"

"Do you know anything about motorcars?"

"They have four wheels and tip over real easy-when I'm driving, anyway. I usually ask a friend to drive me."

"You don't like guns and you don't like motorcars. Are you certain you're American?"

"I've hurt people with both of them, didn't like the feeling."

"Very well, then; ask a friend to drive you."

Holmes reached into his inner pocket and pulled out his long leather note-case, taking from it a slip of paper with some notes in a small, difficult, but precise hand: his handwriting. "This is what I know about the motorcar crash. What we're looking for is evidence of foul play, any evidence at all. The police report is quite clear that it was an accident, so the best we can hope for is a faint discrepancy." He watched to see if Hammett looked puzzled, but the man was nodding.

"Something that smells off."

"Quite. It is, after all this time, highly doubtful that there was enough of the motor to salvage, and even less of a chance the wreckage has anything to tell us, but it is just possible that no-one could decide what to do with the thing, and either left it on the cliffside or pulled it up and hauled it into a corner until its ownership was decided. The convolutions of the American legal system," he added, "occasionally have inadvertent benefits."

"Can't you just ask your wife's lawyer what happened to the car?"

"I'd rather not bring him into it."

"I see. You'd rather pay me to go down on a fool's task and look at a ten-year-old burned-out hulk."

"It is an avenue of enquiry that must be pursued to its end, no matter how soon that end is reached."

Hammett studied the piece of paper for a moment with a faint smile on his expressive mouth, then he picked it up without comment and tucked it away in his note-book. Sure, investigating the car might be a red herring designed for nothing more than getting him out of town for a couple of days, but what of it? There was trust, and there was stupidity, and despite his snooty accent, this Holmes was no jerk.

And the Limey's money couldn't be any dirtier than the pile of bills in the file.