"I can not believe it."
"I have asked a dozen."
"They were very busy." The voice was a combination of assertion and inquiry, but my ear warned me of something mocking in it, too.
"They concealed it most successfully, if they were," I retorted.
Big Sam smiled again, and took up the paper. It slipped from his hand and fluttered to the floor.
"Excuse my clumsiness," he said, diving after it.
I sprang around the corner of the desk to assist in recovering it, and dropped to one knee.
"I beg your pardon," I said, catching at the paper that Big Sam was stowing away in his capacious sleeve. "I believe this is the document." And I held it up.
"I think not," said Big Sam, straightening up and looking me blandly in the eye. "I believe this is it." And he handed me another paper with a bewildering maze of Chinese characters straggling across it.
I was puzzled and rose, looking first at the sheets of paper and then at Big Sam. There was a flash of triumph in his eye that made me suspect that neither sheet was mine, after all. I cursed my ill-luck in not knowing something of Chinese writing.