The office door opened and a swarthy man entered briskly. Lennox saw at once that he was carrying the blue sheets and envelopes of the threatening letters from "Guess Who." They were stained and discolored and had been sprayed with a fixative that made them shine. As Lennox straightened in excitement, Fink spoke.
"Mr. Salerno," he said, "this is Mr. Lennox. He just figured out he's getting these letters."
Salerno grinned. Lennox was about to speak when suddenly he heard what Fink had just said. "Mister Salerno," he repeated. "Mister Lennox. That's the code, isn't it? You're warning him to be careful."
"You see?" Fink said. "It doesn't make any difference if you know. We're protecting ourselves."
"From me?"
"Not necessarily." Fink stood up. "Now don't worry. We'll try to get you off the hook by Sunday." He took Lennox to the door and politely closed it in his face.
Lennox departed, not at all comfortable in his mind, and went home to change. Cooper was there, in slacks and T-shirt, working feverishly at the piano. He had a pencil in his mouth, a sheet of manuscript paper on the music rack, and dozens more scattered around the piano bench. He was working his way painfully through a chord progression while he hummed to himself in the high composer's keen that only dogs can hear.
"Fink's crazy," Lennox thought, and resolutely buried the suspicion in the deepest crevice of his mind.
He tip-toed around the apartment. After he changed, he locked the Siamese upstairs in his office where they couldn't distract Cooper. He made fresh coffee and slid a cup against the left side of the music rack so as not to interfere with Cooper's writing hand. He intercepted the cleaning woman (this day was vacuum cleaner day for the living room) and told her to work upstairs first. Exiled from his own office, he got tools from the kitchen and settled down at the table before the garden windows to repair his gimmick book.
In some primitive cultures it is believed that a man's soul can be contained in an object ... an amulet, a bit of stone or wood, a fetish ... which is carefully concealed by the owner and earnestly sought after by his enemies. Destruction of the object means destruction of the man. Lennox would never admit it, but he felt exactly that way about his gimmick book. That was why he had become so panicky when it was lost and quarreled so unreasonably with Cooper. He spent hours at a time sewing it, mending it with scraps of leather and metal, until it was a patchwork quilt of the original. It never occurred to him that his soul might also be a patchwork of makeshift repairs.