What did she know about “Seven for a secret”? She gave me an inscrutable Syrian stare. I even started her off with “One for sorrow, two for mirth.” She remained a sphinx.
When we’d changed planes, were kiting along at ten thousand over the Alleghenys, I did get one scrap of information. I wanted to know who might have been hunting her through Little Syria down on Washington Street.
She didn’t know. Couldn’t conjecture.
After she thought about it awhile, she said, “That Scotsman in the advertising agency. Jeff MacGregory. He was asking me, week or so ago, if I’d ever eaten in the Syrian restaurants. I told him once in a while I went there to get some shish kibbab or mehche with rice. He said perhaps he would see me there sometime.”
That was all. She didn’t elaborate. I didn’t comment. She went to sleep, or pretended to. I tried not to think of all the various kinds of trouble I could be in when we got to Manhattan.
There are always a brace of plain-clothes men on eagle-eye duty at the LaGuardia ramps; I thought we might be picked up on orders from Hacklin, as we came in. But nobody paid any attention to us. I was content not to have any loud huzzahs or dancing in the streets.
It was half past one when we climbed into a cab and headed for the city, nearly two when I left Nikky in the taxi with the meter clicking, while I descended to the broiling basement of the Finnish Baths.
Pud registered tremendous relief. “Am I glad you come back! I been havin’ one hell of a time with that tizzy you dump in my lap.”
“You have to tie him down with wet sheets?”
“Nah. No violence, whatsoever. It’s only this here is a healtherie,” Pud said, “not a nut house.”