“Yeah.”

He said I could come out, and told me how to get there. I took a taxi. It was a dingy two-story house near the edge of town.

A couple of men loitered in front of a grocer’s on the corner above. Another pair sat on the low wooden steps of the house down at the next corner. None of the four was conspicuously refined in appearance.

When I rang the bell two men opened the door. They weren’t so mild looking either.

I was taken upstairs to a front room where Reno, collarless and in shirtsleeves and vest, sat tilted back in a chair with his feet on the window sill.

He nodded his sallow horse face and said:

“Pull a chair over.”

The men who had brought me up went away, closing the door. I sat down and said: