The Escargo Express in question wasn't the headquarters, three floors in the middle of the Department Store building that gleamed with chrome and crawled with young secretaries with their hair tied back in a bun--it was your basic hole in the wall, carved in the side of a building that must've been impressive before they got around to building all those skyscrapers. Strong knew the guy that ran it, but it was hard to get anything useable out of the parade of temps and teen-agers he hired to man the front desk while he flirted with the secretaries in headquarters.

Strong threw the door open. The only customer was a harried-looking woman in a housecoat, who felt it should be common knowledge that she was wiring money to her "no-good, layabout son."

When she had finished her lecture on the virtue of manual labor to the dizzied-looking fellow at the desk Strong reached for his badge and asked him if there was anything he could remember about the man Agerate spoke about.

"Only what I told Mr. Agerate, Officer."

"Agent."

"Well, yeah, whatever." He chomped hard on his gum, as if to complete the stereotype. "Black hair, I think. You want the copy he filled out? I can get you the copy he fill--"

"Yes, yes."

Behind-the-counter rolled his eyes and crouched down. The sound of papers rustling, a little swearing, and eventually he came up with a slip of paper that appeared to have been crumpled up moments before. "Here ya go, or whatever."

"I don't suppose I'm going to luck out and he paid in Traveler's Cheques?"

"Nope, cash all the way."

"Thanks, you've been a big help. Just crucial."

"No need to get sarcastic about it, Officer."

Strong admired him for his pluck, but it would be very difficult for him to resist calling in a favor and having him arrested when next he got a little tight at an office party. The handwriting looked like it had been written with the wrong hand; the slant was backwards, and the loops came out crooked and shakier than a drunk's alibi.

He was at a dead end; the one lead he had had dried up courtesy an imperceptive cashier. He would have to do some research on this Image, and that magic Agerate had been babbling about. Or, rather...

Strong walked out the door and onto the sidewalk, taking a moment to adjust to the cool night air. He woke the bum sleeping in the phone booth and spoke to the operator.

"I'll put you through in just a moment, sir."

Silence on the line, and then--"Mr. Alden Strong's office, Sofia speaking."

"Sophie? It's me."

"Oh, Boss!" A squeaky voice raced on the other end.

"If you're worried about what I think you're worried about, don't worry, I told your mother you'd been held up at the office by some paperwork and that you very regrettably had to cancel the dinner appointment. You owe me, I made you sound crushed."

"Yeah, thanks." He had had a dinner appointment? "What I need is, well, I've got a bit of an oddball case going on and it's a little bit out of my area of expertise. You know anything about ancient Scaraba, Sophie?"

"Only that I've never been there. College is very overrated."

"Well, they taught you to use a card catalogue, right? Because Fourside Public Library scares heck outta me. I need you to find every book they've got about a guy named En-Nungal. Yeah, that's E-N, and then--yeah, that's right. Pretty good!"

"It's not that overrated."

"Well, keep it as quiet as you can, Sophie, the public can't know about our interest in this for a little while. And neither can headquarters, for that matter."

"It's our little secret."

"That and the dinner appointment. Can you be a dear and have the books for me tomorrow morning? I think the library's still open, I'll call you a cab."

"All right, Boss."

Strong hung up the phone and called two cabs, one to the library and one headed for his apartment. That Sophie had a good head on her shoulders, for a kid.

The cab pulled up and took him the fifteen minutes to his apartment. When he walked in, he made himself a little drink to help him sleep, and was surprised by two things; one was that he was out of bourbon, and the other was a blackjack, which struck him square between the eyes.

Strong found himself on the floor, slowly coming to, which was not altogether unusual; he had a headache, which was also not unusual; what was unusual--relatively, at least--was the blood caked on his forehead like kabuki makeup. He wasn't sure whether the constant knocking he heard was in his head or at the door, but he decided to play it safe and worked himself slowly to his feet.

He opened the door, and a tall, excitable-looking college-aged girl with wavy black hair and a very casual business outfit nearly fell through it. "Sophie! I was just dropping in myself."

"I was worried when you didn't come to the office tod--Boss, what happened? You look awful!"

"I don't know, I guess I took my work home with me. Am I still bleeding anywhere?"

"Not that I can tell, but--"

"Eh, I'll be fine. Did you find much about this guy En-Whatsit?"

She dropped the thick stack of books she had been holding in both hands for effect, and a cloud of dust erupted.

"Nice trick, knocking the door and holding those at the same time."

"And that's just what they'd let me check out. I know you're not a fan of reading anything Dashiell Hammett didn't write, so I took some notes, they're, uh--well, I left them at the office."

"Notes? Above and beyond the call of duty! What do I owe you?"

"Lunch."

"All right, I suppose, but I told you, Sophie, I'm much too--"

"At the Hospital cafeteria. Really, have you seen yourself yet? We're going now."

Exasperated, Strong slapped his hand over his forehead. And then shouted some obscenities. "Maybe you're right."

After he had checked out all right they took the bus to Strong's office, tucked in a nondescript high rise at the edge of downtown. The interior was sparsely decorated; whatever the decorators had in mind was ruined by the foam-green filing cabinets that ran across one wall. Strong's hat was pulled low, to try and conceal the "sissy" bandage job the doctors had done on him; his normally waxed hair was forced out in all directions.

Strong sat at his desk, glasses on, and read the notes, several pages torn out of a legal pad and filled with bubbly handwriting that seemed unhappily cramped by the lines. "Yeah, this is definitely what Agerate was blabbering about. This En-Nungal guy seems like a real snake-oil dealer."

"I don't know, they say that nobody's ever been able to figure out how he did all these things."

"They? College, right?"

"Nah, that movie he was in. With... oh, I forget who. Spencer Tracy, maybe? But it's true, each of those books has a different theory about how he did it, and they all contradict each other. It's crazy."

"Anything interesting pop up about his statue?"

"The, uh, Image or whatever? Yeah, there was a lotta stuff about all the powers and that, but the main thing is that it was discovered way back in like 189x by this expedition to Scaraba. They had it for a while, but one of the backers--this royalty type--he died and the press went bananas about a curse and in the craziness of it all they lost the thing. Stop fiddling with that bandage, the doctor said leave it on until--" She grabbed Strong's hand, forced it from his forehead to his side, and composed herself. "Anyway, I dunno if the Biographical Dictionary is outta date or not, but according to it the guy that led the expedition is still alive. Er, 'Carter Lexington', or something weird like that. I remember my older brother used to love his adventure books."

"Alive?" Strong looked up from the notes. "But he'd have to be, like,"

"96, God willing."

"Well, if he can talk at all he's less feeble-minded than any of my other leads. I don't suppose you know where he lives? If he, well--you know."

"He used to live in Foggyland, which makes sense with the name and the accent and all that, but I think he moved over here to the country, some one-horse town. Onett, I think."

"Well, Sophie," He said, "It looks like I'm off to O--O--how do you pronounce that?"

"Search me. I'll call in your reservation, if they've even got a hotel in that burg. Where should I say you are if headquarters calls?"

"I don't know, family emergency? Come up with something clever, Sophie, whenever I try it another grandmother ends up dying."