Mooney cleared his throat. "Listen, I don't know what you want, but this is my house and—"
"You will help me," the man said positively. "I will pay you. Very well?"
He had a peculiar way of parting his sentences in the middle, but Mooney didn't care about that. He suddenly cared about one thing and that was the word "pay."
"What do you want me to do?"
The angry-eyed man ran his gloved hands across his head and sluiced drops of water onto the scuffed linoleum and the bedding of the cot Mooney had dragged into the kitchen. He said irritably: "I am a wayfarer who needs a. Guide? I will pay you for your assistance."
The question that rose to Mooney's lips was "How much?" but he fought it back. Instead, he asked, "Where do you want to go?"
"One moment." The stranger sat damply on the edge of Mooney's cot and, click-snap, the shiny sort of briefcase opened itself in his hands. He took out a flat round thing like a mirror and looked into it, squeezing it by the edges, and holding it this way and that.
Finally he said: "I must go to Wednesday, the twenty-sixth of December, at—" He tilted the little round thing again. "Brooklyn?" he finished triumphantly.
Mooney said, after a second: "That's a funny way to put it."
"Question?"