far end, behind a counter, I saw Barbara Renfrew seated at an automatic book-keeping machine, her smooth dark head bent over her work. She looked up in a moment, saw me, and smiled in that shy, quiet way she did. It occurred to me that now she was no longer working for me making a pass at her would be permissible under the revised ground rules without a loss of face on both sides, and that I really should, since I’d been accused of it so many times. It was an attractive thought, but I shrugged it off, hardly knowing why. Maybe it was because I didn’t share Jessica’s staunch faith in her accessibility. Clod, I thought. Godwin, you lack scope and vision. . . .
“Good morning, Barney.”
The line ahead of me had disappeared and I was facing Arthur Pressler through the bars of his window. “Good morning,” I said, passing over the cloth bag. He pulled it open and began adding checks on the machine with the precise and economical movements of some super-robot out of the twenty-second century. He was a rather cold-faced man in his early thirties, with sandy hair, rimless glasses, and a no-nonsense set to his mouth. As far as I knew he had no existence outside this cubicle of his, as if he’d been bought from I.B.M. and bolted to the floor, but he could handle money faster than anyone I’d ever seen. He did it almost in a blur, and he was infallible.
I lit a cigarette and watched him now. He finished the checks and tossed them aside, and then tore into the bundle of currency, dropping it into neat and separate bunches of singles, fives, tens, and twenties. Then he did something I’d never seen him do before. He was counting the twenties. The fifth or sixth was one of those new ones Mrs. Nunn had paid me. It dropped, and the next one started to come down on it, and then he broke his rhythm. He paused. With an almost imperceptible shake of his head he picked them all up and started over. He’d lost count. It was odd, I thought; maybe they hadn’t been oiling him properly. He passed me the duplicate of the deposit slip and I went out and down the street to the post-office.
* * *
Business was brisk for Monday. Besides incidental items of tackle we sold one complete rig: fourteen-foot plywood boat, 7-h.p. motor, trailer, and all the incidentals such as a spare gasoline can, kapok seat cushions, and icebox. After the customer had taken delivery and driven off I sent Otis out for a couple of cans of beer to celebrate the deal. I took out my wallet to hand him a dollar, and as I did I noticed I still had that new twenty dollar bill. That was odd. Hadn’t I bought those stamps with it? apparently I’d paid for them with my own money, which I usually tried to keep separate on the other side of the divider. It didn’t matter, though; there was no change involved to foul up the register and the books.
Otis went out. I was transferring the twenty to the other compartment of the wallet when I saw it was the one that had the odd brownish stain at one end, along the edge. I looked at it, and then turned it over. It was on both sides for about half the width of the bill, and extended up along the paper for perhaps an eighth of an inch or less. I wondered idly what it was. It seemed odd there’d be a stain on a bill this fresh from the Federal Reserve vaults, unless they were using taxpayers’ blood for ink now in the printing office.
At four thirty in the afternoon I was up front alone looking for the boat manufacturer’s ad in this month’s Field & Stream when a car pulled in and stopped in front of the window. I saw with a glance at its front license plate it was from Sanport, but when the driver got out he didn’t look much like a potential customer. At least he wasn’t on a fishing trip at the moment. He was dressed in a blue summer-weight suit, white shirt, pale blue tie, and a Panama with a gray band. Salesman, I thought.
He lifted a briefcase out of the seat and came in, a man somewhere around fifty with dark hair that was graying at the temples, composed brown