"As Auldin said, I'm not stupid, and I am on the make for my fortune. I knew the only way was to check first and talk later. So I asked seemingly innocuous questions here and there—and I'm wise enough never to ask more than one from any one person. That way I found out a lot. I do know something about the entertainment business and can hold up my end of the performance. But I also know the really big money is in the other things you control."
Yandor did gasp at that. His face grew black and he half-rose and opened his mouth to say something—but Hanlon beat him to it.
"Incidentally," he lowered his voice but still kept it penetrant as he leaned forward confidentially, "there's someone in the next room, listening through that door there, to what we're saying."
At Hanlon's quiet words, Ino Yandor's eyes opened wide, while Ran Auldin barely repressed an exclamation. Neither guessed, of course, that the stranger was looking through the eyes of Yandor's pet roch which, in the course of its investigation of the house for Hanlon's benefit, had come to the open doorway of that adjoining room, and had seen the man kneeling there, his ear pressed against the door-panels, listening intently.
Now Yandor reached into a sort of pigeon-hole in his table-desk and quietly took out a flamegun. Tensing himself, he suddenly swung his chair about and leaped to the door. Flinging it open he found, indeed, another man there, before that other could rise and run.
Grabbing the spy's collar with one surprisingly strong hand, Yandor yanked him to his feet and into the light.
"Ondo!" he exclaimed. "Well now, what in the name of Zappa were you doing?"
The small man cringed. "Pardon, nyer, I was ... was only trying to make sure that no one was attempting to harm you ... and ... and standing by to help you if they were."
"I think he's lying," Hanlon said, knowing from his quick probe into the other's mind that he was. "I'll bet he's a spy for someone."
This last, he knew however, was not correct. Ondo was regularly employed by Yandor as a houseman. But he was one of those intensely curious and inquisitive people who always try to find out everything that goes on in any house they happen to be working in.