"I know," Brimstine admitted, seeming for once at a loss for easy words.
"Do you know yet what happened?" Billig pressed.
Brimstine shrugged. "I think Barnes is nuts."
"That's your explanation for everything!" Billig roared softly. "If something happens this time, do you suppose I'll be happy because you tell me the coppers arresting me are nuts? Where is the FBL man?"
"You really should try and relax, I tell you, Mr. Billig," Moe Brimstine suggested, recovering himself. "Distract yourself somehow. Like with Dora here." And ignoring Billig's third, "Pfui," Brimstine looked at her critically. "Fix your mouth, dear," he said.
With a graceful obedience that nevertheless managed to be contemptuous the violet blonde beauty slid from the table and came straight toward Phil, who decided that now at last they'd have to stop pretending he wasn't there.
"Get that slinky walk, Mr. Billig," Moe Brimstine was urging. "What a gorgeous babe, eh?"
She tossed her head, stopped six feet short of Phil, took out a lipstick, looked straight ahead of her, and very carefully made up her lips. At the same time something cold and sucking closed on the fingers of Phil's left hand. He instinctively flipped it, and a tiny pink octopus sailed through the air toward the girl and flattened itself against something in the air about two feet short of her.
Phil watched it clinging there and felt his mind swell to bursting, as if he'd had another shot of Tan Jet lemonade. Then he got up, walked cautiously forward, and felt.
There was an invisible flat surface, extending as far as he could reach, between himself and the other half of the room. He realized he was on the viewing side of a one-way mirror bisecting the room. Dora, standing so close he could otherwise have touched her, turned, and as she did so, her skirt brushed the other side of the surface. He saw it was at least two inches from the side to which the octopus still clung. A mirror would hardly be that thick. It must consist of two panes probably with the space between them evacuated. For as he realized with a new surprise, he must not be hearing their voices directly, but a miked and transmitted version of them, which in turn must be binaural, so that they would be heard in depth and the proper direction.