dress. Selma was small there. What Catell remembered about Selma was her fine skin and her wide hips. He saw she still had a fine smooth skin.

“My boy, I congratulate you,” Schumacher said. “That was a fine job you did there.”

“Thanks. You figured a neat setup. No troubles.”

“That’s what I wanted to speak to you about, Tony. We’re not quite through yet. The fact is—”

Tony wasn’t listening. His white face looked worn with sleeplessness and his hands were nervous.

“Lemme have a drink first, Otto. I’m beat.”

“That’s right, lovin’ cup. Let him have a drink first, for chrissakes. You and your business all hours of the day and night. I’ll have one with you, Tony.” Selma smiled at him again.

Schumacher didn’t say anything. Above all, he wanted to keep peace. It was difficult enough to explain things to Tony without Selma acting up.

When the drinks had come, Schumacher cleared his throat and said, “Tony, pay attention. Something slipped up.”

Catell only shifted his eyes. “Nothing slipped. Nobody saw me, nobody followed me, nobody knows I’m here in Detroit. And we got the gold, didn’t we? Selma, want another drink?”

She smiled at him and pushed her glass toward him. Before she leaned back in her seat she touched his sleeve and ran one finger along the back of his hand.

“How about you, Otto? Another drink?” Catell said.

Schumacher shook his head and swirled the brown liquid in his glass. He didn’t like the way things were going.

“Listen, Tony,” he said. “This trouble we got is the kind you wouldn’t know anything about.”

“What trouble? We got the gold and nobody knows it. What more do you want?”

Schumacher leaned forward in his seat and stared at Catell with an exasperated look on his face. “What do I want? I want to sell the stuff, that’s what I want. And the trouble is, I can’t sell it now!”

“What?”

“I said we can’t sell it. That gold is radioactive.”

“What in hell are you talking about?”

“I’m trying to explain. When I staked out the job, I didn’t get the full story. I didn’t know that gold would be radioactive. I just found out.”

Catell understood two things: He understood that Schumacher said he couldn’t sell the gold, and he understood that Schumacher was serious. He could tell by the old man’s face, by his sick-looking eyes, and by the way Schumacher sat hunched forward in his overcoat. Why didn’t the old bastard ever take his overcoat off? What was he trying to pull with his double talk? Catell’s brain was too tired to think straight. All he could do was sit there and hate Schumacher, hate his reasonable ways, his messy-looking mustache, his slut Selma, who kept grinning at him with her big face.

“Catell, are you listening to me?”

“Yeah.” He took his eyes off Selma’s naked arm and forced himself to concentrate. “All right, Schumacher, what’s this crap about radioactive? The stuff is gold, isn’t it?”

“Jesus, Catell, don’t you know what radioactive is? That metal is pure poison!”

Catell held the whisky glass up to his mouth and licked the rim with a slow motion of his tongue. When he looked at Schumacher, his eyes glittered with fatigue. “Otto, are you giving me the runaround?”

Schumacher caught the tone of Catell’s voice and he had a bad moment. Then he talked with a voice that was harsh and hurried.

“I don’t think you understand, Catell. That ingot of metal you got is dangerous. It gives off radiations that can make a man sick, and for all I know, it can kill a man. Now shut up for a minute. When this deal came up, all I knew was that the government was shipping one ingot of gold to the Atomic Research Center of Kelvin University. The gold was going to be there about a week and they were going to do some kind of fancy radiation work on the thing. When, how, why, and so forth—that I didn’t know, except that I had a good idea it wasn’t going to be during the first two days. That’s why I planned the heist for the second day after the gold got there. Well, the setup was good and you came through as expected. The setup was real good. They got their security rules and so on, but the work at that research place isn’t really so secret. They only do limited work and nothing very new. So it doesn’t call for full-dress security. Besides, it’s a university and no Fort Knox. So the whole deal