I guess we must have." I walked around for a few hours. Around one-thirty it started raining lightly. Almost immediately the umbrella sellers turned up on the streetcorners. You'd have thought they had existed previously in spore form, springing miraculously to life when a drop of water touched them. I didn't buy an umbrella. It wasn't raining hard enough to make it worthwhile. I went into a bookstore and killed some time without buying anything, and when I left the rain still didn't amount to much more than a fine mist. I stopped at my hotel, checked at the desk. No messages, and the only mail was an offer of a credit card. "You have already been approved!" the copy blared. Somehow I doubted this. I went upstairs and called Warren Hoeldtke. I had my notebook at hand, and I gave him a quick rundown on what lines of investigation I'd pursued and what little I'd managed to determine. "I've put in a lot of hours," I said, "but I don't think I'm much closer to her than I was when I started.
