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clutching either bags, parcels, boxes, small crates, or even articles of vertu or connoisseurship frankly unwrapped. Clients evidently – and evidently there was quite a waiting-list. But this was not all. Hard by a farther door stood a heavily-built man in what had much the appearance of the type of sober livery favoured by banking establishments for their messengers and superior attendants: only this man (who was looking suspiciously at Meredith) visibly sported two impressive pistols in holsters on his hips. And hard by him, behind a simple but clearly expensive chromium and ebony desk, sat a young lady at once glamorous and severely secretarial. In front of her were two telephones, as also one of those box-like contrivances into which business magnates bark and snap and growl so impressively in Hollywood films. The young lady was flicking a switch on this instrument now, and evidently proposing to speak into it with the utmost haste. And her eye at the same time was fixed upon Meredith – upon Meredith and his dispatch-case.
     
    Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay…
     
    Dr Johnson and Juvenal had not been so far off it after all.
    To be equal to such a situation as this, Meredith reflected, one has to think quickly. In romantic fiction, the hero invariably manages to do so; his mind – often extremely unnoticeable during other parts of the narrative – rises to the occasion and works like a flash. But unfortunately Meredith’s own thinking, although tolerably reliable, was on the slow side. Could he now successfully bid the machine do double time? The case was sufficiently urgent. For an organization which left Titians and Giottos lying about its outer corridors was evidently Big Business of the most unchallengeable kind, and it was unlikely to pack up its chromium furniture and house telephones and fade away because intruded upon by an unwitting scholar.
    Rather, it would be the scholar who would fade away. The man like a bank messenger would simply draw his pistol – and subsequently disguise the body as a case of bullion and remove it in a taxi. Here – unlike Titian’s Venus – was something that Meredith had not encountered before: the prospect of being (as they say) taken for a ride. Or bumped off. And Meredith shook his head slightly – this because it occurred to him to doubt whether to bump off were any longer contemporary idiom.
    As rapid thinking, this piece of philological curiosity was a bad start. But it had a marked and unexpected effect upon the young lady at the desk. For this abstracted shake of the head of Meredith’s apparently struck her as an authoritative and inhibiting gesture. She abandoned the motion of speaking into her box and looked at Meredith expectantly, as if asking for more. And now Meredith frowned and his mouth set grimly in a thin line. This was because he had once more recalled his custodianship of the Juvenal manuscript, and was confronting the fact that it would in all probability go down river in the same sack as the body – or would conceivably, were its value discovered, go the way of the Horton Venus . Here was a thought very dreadful to Meredith; it added to the fatal affair a sort of second death. And so Meredith frowned and looked grim. And this too had its effect upon the young lady. She blanched. And the man with the revolvers, who had been lounging against the frame of a closed door, straightened himself into a statuesque and formal pose.
    It was the man’s movement that first caught Meredith’s eye. For a moment he judged it ominous, a sort of equivalent of that ‘on your marks’ position that preludes athletic action. And then – and it was decidedly a matter of a flash – Meredith realized the situation. These outer guardians of the establishment were as apprehensive of him as he was of them.
    Did they take him to be a detective-inspector from Scotland Yard, some notable scourge of hi-jackers and Black Marketeers, who would presently put a