On Monday morning when I arose it had just stopped raining. My coffee tasted slightly stale, although I had purchased the beans on Saturday, and ground them just before brewing.
So, I knew that this was the day.
From the wall where I displayed my collection of cork removers, I took the one item that was not actually a cork remover. It had hung there, hidden in plain sight, since I took it from the dead drop just over 19 months ago. I placed the item in a small dull green sack, and placed the sack in my left pocket.
Leaving the house and reaching the public sidewalk, I saw by the puddle on my lawn that I was to turn right. The sound of the neighbor's cat indicated another right at the corner.
A pattern of three small stones, a fly buzzing past my left ear, the mass of leaves caught at the storm sewer grate, and a fading contrail in the sky led me straight on through the next four intersections.
The single cumulus cloud to the east led me to my final destination in Quantrell Park across the street.
All meetings took place at the northwest corner of a block. In that northwest corner, sitting alone on a bench with a small duffel on his left, I saw my contact.
You would have mistaken him for a smallish middle aged man in poor condition, with pale sickly skin, weak facial features, and stringy yellow hair. I knew him to be the most successful of the Scharffian agents, the only one for whom the painful three year course of exercise and surgery allowed him to pass unnoticed among humans. Yet even I did not know his name.
Following protocol for clandestine meetings, we transacted our business in silence, without hurry, but wasting no time.
He unzipped the duffel briefly, so that I could see the bundles of $100 bills that filled it loosely, as if it held exercise gear. I had to trust him for the correct count of $200,000, but the Scharffians had never cheated me before.
I reached into my left pocket, and handed him the dull green sack. He glanced inside and said, “But this is not the splartivurant!”
The what?