Ken pushed through the heavy doors on the street level and found himself in the library’s lending room. There were long rows of stacks at the rear, and a charge desk near the entrance presided over by a single librarian. She looked up only briefly as Ken walked past her to the flight of stairs mounting against one wall.
The reading room on the second floor was larger than it had seemed from the street, and entirely occupied by heavy oak tables set parallel to each other down its entire length. But the half-dozen readers—all men—were clustered around the two tables nearest the front, where the light was best. Ken took a newspaper from the periodical rack as he went by, and sat down in one of two adjoining vacant chairs at the front table. He had only to look through the window, over the top of his paper, to see the Tobacco Mart across the square.
A few minutes later Sandy slid quietly into place beside him, shaking his head to indicate that he had seen nothing of interest while he kept guard below.
The three shabbily dressed men who shared their table glanced at them curiously, as if unaccustomed to seeing strange faces in that room, and then returned to their half-dozing perusal of magazines or newspapers.
The minute hand on a large wall clock crept slowly on its way. The big room was warm and quiet, shut off from the traffic noises below. The creaking of Sandy’s chair, as he shifted his weight on the hard seat, sounded loud in the silence.
At the end of half an hour the door of the Tobacco Mart still remained closed. No one had left or entered the shop.
Sandy shrugged, got up to exchange the photographic magazine he had been looking at for another one, and sat down again.
Another old man came in, glared at Ken as if he were occupying his own favorite chair, and settled himself noisily at the second table. His arrival was the only event that broke the peaceful monotony of the second half hour.
Finally Sandy pulled an envelope out of his pocket, and the stub of a pencil, and appeared to be making notes from an article in his magazine. But he held the envelope so that Ken could see what he had written.
“What do you think really goes on over there?” Sandy’s scrawl read. “Is the Tobacco Mart an innocent place of business—or is it not? And if it is why did Watch Crystal behave so mysteriously?”