“My God, you read poetry and you’re a smartass and you can verb like a mink. I can’t let you get away altogether. I know.”

“You know what?”

“Buy the Village Voice every week and read the personals in the ‘Village Bulletin Board’ section. Okay?”

“Okay. You do the same.”

“Faithfully. Can a burglar and an adulteress find happiness in today’s world? We’ll just have to see, won’t we? Go ahead, you ring for the elevator.”

“You don’t want to ride down with me?”

“I want to tidy up here a little. And I’ll hang around so that we leave the building a few minutes apart. If I get in any trouble, you don’t want to get hooked into it.”

“Will you get in trouble?”

“Probably not, because I’m not stealing anything.”

“That’s what I was asking, really. I mean, I shouldn’t care if you steal anything, including the carpet we verbed on, but evidently I do. Bernie, would you hold me?”

“Are you scared again?”

“Nope. I just like the way you hold me.”

I put my gloves on and waited with the door a few inches ajar until I saw her ring for the elevator. Then I drew the door shut, turned the bolt, and gave the apartment a very quick look-see, just to make sure there was nothing I should know about in any of the other rooms. I didn’t open a drawer or a closet, just ducked into each room and flicked the lights on long enough to establish that there were no signs of Andrea’s presence. No drawers pulled out and dumped, no tables overturned, no signs that the apartment had been visited by a burglar or a cyclone or any comparable unwelcome phenomenon.

And no dead bodies in the bed or on the floor. Not that one goes around expecting that sort of thing, but I was once caught in the act of burgling the apartment of a man named Flaxford, and Mr. F. himself was dead in another room at the time, a fact which became known to the police before it joined my storehouse of information. So I gave a quick look-see here and there, and if I’d come across the Mondrian, leaning against the wall or perhaps wrapped in brown paper and waiting for the framer, I’d have been roundly delighted.

No such luck, nor did I spend much time looking. I did all of this reconnaissance rather more quickly than it takes to tell about it, as a matter of fact, and when I was out in the hallway the elevator was on its way up.

Was it swarming with boys in blue? Had I, like Samson and Lord Randall and the Bold Deceiver before me, been done in by a woman’s treachery? No point, surely, in sticking around to find out. I ducked through the fire door and waited for the elevator to stop on Sixteen.

But it didn’t. I peeked through the open fire door, and I listened carefully, and the cage went on past Sixteen, stopped, waited, and went on down, passing Sixteen in its descent. I returned to the hallway, picked the tumblers to lock Onderdonk’s door, recalled that Andrea’d said he never double-locked it, picked it again to leave it on the springlock as he was said to have done, sighed heavily at all of this wasted time and effort, stripped off my silly rubber gloves, put them in a pocket, and rang for the elevator.

No cops in the elevator. No cops in the lobby or out on the street. No hassle from the elevator operator, the concierge or the doorman, even when I refused the last-named chap’s offer to hail me a taxi. I said I felt like walking, and I walked three blocks before hailing a cab myself. That way I didn’t have to switch to some other cab a few blocks away. I could just ride straight home, and that’s what I did.

Once there, I would have liked to go straight to bed. But I had J. C. Appling’s stamps to worry about and I was worried. I’d have taken a chance and left the job unfinished, but not after all I’d gone through at the Charlemagne in the past ten hours. I’d had far too many human contacts, enough so that I stood a chance of attracting police attention. I hadn’t done anything in Onderdonk’s apartment, hadn’t stolen anything at all but Appling’s stamps (and those earrings, mustn’t forget those earrings) but I certainly didn’t want those stamps sitting around if someone with a tin shield and a warrant came knocking on my door.

I was up all night with the damned stamps. I swear you never have that problem with cash; you just spend it at leisure. I got all the stamps into glassine envelopes and all of Appling’s album pages into the incinerator, and then I fitted the envelopes into a hidey-hole I probably shouldn’t tell you about, but what the hell. There’s a baseboard electrical outlet that’s a phony, with no BX cable feeding into an aluminum box at its rear. It’s just a plate and a couple of receptacles, mounted to the baseboard with a pair of screws, and if you undo the screws and remove the plate you can reach your hand into an opening about the size of a loaf of bread. (Not the puffy stuff but a nice dense loaf from the health food store.) I keep contraband there until I can unload it, and I also stow burglar tools there. (Not all of them because some of them are innocent enough out of context. You can keep a roll of adhesive tape in the medicine chest and a penlight in the hardware drawer and feel secure about it. Picks and probes and prybars, however, are another story, incriminating in or out of context.)

There’s another hidey-hole, similar in nature, where I keep my mad money. I even have a radio plugged into one of its receptacles, and the radio even works, running on batteries since its dummy cord is plugged into thin air. I’ve got a few thousand dollars there in untraceable fifties and hundreds, and it’ll do to bribe a cop or post a bond or, if things ever get that desperate, pay my way to Costa Rica. And I hope to God it never comes to that because I’d go nuts there. I mean who do I know in Costa Rica? What would I do if I got a craving for a bagel or a slice of pizza?

I never did get to sleep. I showered and shaved and put on clean clothes. I went out and had a bagel (but not a slice of pizza) and a plate of eggs and bacon and a lot of coffee at the Greek place a block from my door. I sipped the coffee and my mind, exhausted and overamped from too many hours awake and too much concentration on itty bitty squares of colored paper, slipped a few hours into the past. I remembered eager hands and smooth skin and a warm mouth, and I wondered if there was any truth mixed in with the lies she’d told me.

There was that sweet magic between us, the physical magic and the mental magic, and I was tired enough to drop my guard and let her in. It would be easy, I thought, to let go a little bit more and fall in love with her.

And it wouldn’t be that dangerous, I decided. Not much worse than hang-gliding blindfolded. Safer on balance than swimming with an open wound in shark-infested waters, or playing catch with a bottle of nitroglycerine, or singing “Rule, Britannia” at Carney’s Emerald Lounge in Woodside.

I paid the check and overtipped, as lovers are wont to do. Then I walked over to Broadway and caught a train heading downtown.