Free The Union Club Mysteries by Isaac Asimov Page A

of this and wouldn't tell me how the trick had been turned, but I didn't care. I knew that, as a general rule, the people we fight against are as vulnerable as we are.
    There were five agents at various places and in various forms watching the progress of the pawn or, rather, of the very conspicuous package. They didn't stay close; they couldn't have, or they would have been easily spotted by their white shirts and beautiful gray fedoras in a neighborhood in which neither was ever seen on the inhabitants.
    The pawn walked into a crummy restaurant in this slummish neighborhood. He had to maneuver the package to get it through the door, and Winslow held his breath lest he break it, but he got it into the restaurant in one piece. He stayed there about five minutes—four minutes, twenty-three seconds, Winslow told me, since he had stupidly been watching his watch instead of the restaurant—and then he came out. He didn't have the package with him, or anything that could possibly have held it.
    They expected that. Somehow, though, they expected that it would come out in the hands of someone else, or in some fashion, and it never did. After two hours, Winslow got very uneasy. Could they have frightened off the pick-up by being insufficiently clandestine in their surveillance? They couldn't help that as long as they wore their uniform, but that wouldn't protect them against the chief's wrath.
    Worse yet, could they have allowed the package—six feet long, four inches wide—to be slipped out under their noses somehow? If so, their careers were finished. Finally, Winslow could stand no more. In desperation, he ordered his men into the restaurant, and then came the final blow.
    "It wasn't there," said Winslow desperately. "It wasn't such a damned big place and the package just wasn't there. As soon as I could see that was the situation, I came here. I remembered you lived only a mile away and hoped you might be in." He looked decidedly grateful I was in.
    I said, "I suppose I can trust your agents to find it if it's there. Something six feet long isn't exactly a diamond or a piece of microfilm."
    "It's not there."
    "Could it have been dismembered, taken apart, hidden in parts, or, for that matter, taken out in parts?"
    "No, it would then be broken, useless. It had to be intact.—I'm not telling you what it is, mind you."
    "I'm not asking and you probably don't know yourself. —Did you look over the people in the restaurant?"
    "Certainly. They were the type who were completely uncooperative, who turn sullen and resentful at the least sign of the law. But there's no way something like that could be hidden on anyone's person."
    "By the way," I said, "do you have a search warrant?"
    Winslow reddened a bit. "We have a sort of catchall search warrant for safety violations. Never mind about that."
    I'm sure it wouldn't have held up in court, but in those days such things weren't questioned.
    I said, "Maybe it was taken upstairs."
    "There is no upstairs. It's a crummy little one-story greasy-spoon restaurant, between two tenements."
    "Well then," I said, "there must be an entrance into one of the adjoining tenements, or both."
    "Not a chance. Solid wall, both ways."
    "Cellar?"
    "We looked through it. A junkyard with some food staples. What we wanted wasn't there."
    "Entrances into the adjoining tenements through the cellar?" "No. Damn it, Griswold, give us some credit for brains."
    "Kitchen?"
    "Plenty of cockroaches; nothing of what we wanted."
    "Egress from the kitchen?"
    "There was a door to a back alley, where they put out the garbage—such garbage as they didn't serve—but we had a man there and I assure you he's reliable. People came out long enough to dump garbage and then went back in.—And before you ask, he looked through the garbage cans, something that didn't require much detail work, since an intact six-foot package would—"
    "Stick out like a sore thumb. Rest rooms?"
    "I looked through it carefully myself. Personally. Two