By the time I got away from him, I had learned more than I had to know about the Hotel Paddington, and more than anybody needed to know about Carl Pillsbury. He wished me a good night’s sleep, and I told him I hoped his relief showed up on time, and I scooped up my key and headed for the elevator.

The purple envelope, I had noticed, was no longer in the box for Room 602.

My room was as I’d left it, with the bear on the mantelpiece. I gave him a nod. I wasn’t quite prepared to talk to the creature, but I couldn’t bring myself to cut him altogether.

What did I know about Anthea Landau? Well, I knew she was a literary agent. She’d been one for half a century, and for all of that time she’d occupied a suite at the Paddington, where she’d read manuscripts, conducted her business by mail and telephone, and met the odd client. In recent years she’d become increasingly reclusive, and these days she rarely ventured out. And, because of my little trick with the purple envelope, I knew the number of her suite. If I wanted to find her, the place to look was 602.

But I didn’t want to find her. I wanted to find her room, and I wanted to find it empty.

Some burglars don’t mind if the householder’s at home when they come calling. Indeed, one chap of my acquaintance never went in unless he could assure himself that the residents were home and asleep. That way, he explained, you didn’t have to worry about them coming home and catching you in the act.

We were both the guests of the state when he told me this, so his advice needs to be assessed accordingly. (He was a nice enough fellow, if limited conversationally, but in the main the lads you meet in prison are an oafish and mean-spirited lot, and I was as glad to get away from them as from the institution itself. When I made parole they warned me against associating with known criminals, and I didn’t really need to be told.)

For my own part, I’d much rather pay my visit when there’s nobody home. I suppose you could say I’m solitary by nature. I’ve gone in, by mistake or out of necessity, when the householder was home and asleep, and I have to say I hate all that pussyfooting around. I never make a lot of noise, and I always try to leave a place as neat as I found it, but while I’m there I like to feel at home. How can you do that with someone sleeping in the next room?

But I might not have a choice. From what I’d heard, Anthea Landau didn’t get out much. It was her reputation as a stay-at-home, after all, that had led me to pay over six hundred dollars for a room key. If I’d been likely to find her gone during the day, I’d have been inclined to take my chances with hotel security. It’s not all that hard to slip past a desk clerk during the late morning or early afternoon. There are all sorts of impromptu stratagems to render one invisible, or make one look as though one belongs. I have, on various occasions, posed as a deliveryman, arranged an appointment with another guest, or merely walked in carrying a clipboard and looking official.

The one thing you don’t want is to look furtive. Slink and the world slinks after you, and soon enough the long arm of the law reaches out and takes you by the collar. But if you look as though you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing, why, they’ll hand you the key to the front door and the combination to the safe.

I was guided in this matter by my Uncle Hi. A man of unblemished reputation, Hi was on his way home from a business trip when he saw, hanging over the check-in desk at a flight gate, an electrified sign advertising the airline. (It was Braniff, so you know this didn’t happen a week ago. I was in high school at the time. I won’t tell you who was President.)

Hi’s son, my cousin Sheldon, collected signs and decorated his room with them. I remember one from Planters Peanuts, with old Mr. Peanut leaning against a wall and grinning like something Stephen King would write about. (In West Africa I suppose they call him Mr. Groundnut.) This sign, though, showed a plane and a palm tree, and touted Braniff’s flights to the Caribbean, and Uncle Hi thought it would look great in Shelly’s room.

So he walked around the corner to his own flight lounge, where he set down his valise, took off his tie and jacket, and rolled up his sleeves.

Then he went back to the Braniff counter, pocket notebook in hand. There was a line, but he walked right up to the front of it, where a young woman was handling check-ins and issuing boarding passes.

“This the sign?” he demanded.

She looked blank or begged his pardon or stammered. Whatever.

“This here,” he said, pointing. “Is this the sign?”

“Uh, I guess so.”

“Yeah,” Hi said. “This is the one.” And he unhooked it from its moorings, with the young woman interrupting her own chores to give him a hand. He tucked it under his arm and went back to where he’d left his jacket and luggage. It was undisturbed, as he’d assumed it would be. (An honest man himself, Hi took honesty for granted in others, and was rarely disappointed.) He stowed the sign in his valise, unrolled his shirtsleeves, tied his tie, put on his suit jacket, and waited for them to call his flight.

The sign did in fact look splendid in my cousin Shelly’s room, and when he got old enough to redecorate, replacing Mr. Peanut and his friends with Playboy centerfolds, the Braniff sign remained. It sort of fit, Shelly said, because you could just picture those babes under that palm tree, sipping piña coladas and showing off their full-body suntans. You could even imagine them as Braniff stewardesses, offering you your choice of coffee, tea, or milk, and a whole lot more.

Well, that was years ago. Shelly’s a doctor now, and the sign in his waiting room is all about medical insurance, and no one on earth would ever want to steal it. Uncle Hi’s retired and living in Pompano Beach, Florida, clipping coupons and playing golf and adding stamps to his collection. I never steal a stamp collection without thinking of Hi. He collects British Commonwealth, and now and then over the years I’ll run across something I think he can use, some scarce Victorian provisionals or Edward VII high-values, and I’ll send them along with a note explaining that I found them tucked between the pages of an old volume of Martin Chuzzlewit. If Hi suspects the stamps might have a less wholesome provenance, he’s too much of a gentleman to mention it, and too ardent a collector to send them back.

I’m the family’s sole black sheep, and I sometimes wonder what went wrong. With upstanding role models on both the Rhodenbarr and the Grimes sides of my family, why did I wind up with a lifelong penchant for skulking and stealing?

A bad gene in the woodpile, I sometimes think. A chromosome gone haywire. But then I’ll think of my Uncle Hi, and I’ll find myself wondering. Look at his life and you see an honest businessman, ethical and law-abiding. But one afternoon in an airport he’d shown that he had the resourceful imagination of a con artist and the guts of a second-story man. Who’s to say how he might have turned out if circumstances early on had given him a nudge in the wrong direction?

Oh, I don’t suppose he’d have had my natural talent with locks. That’s a gift. But anyone with a little training can learn all you absolutely need to know about locks and how to get around them.

If Hi could manipulate a pair of stamp tongs, he could handle lockpicking tools. And Shelly was a surgeon, certainly capable of applying those same skills to the creations of Rabson and Segal and Fichet and Poulard. If they’d taken a hard left turn a while back, any of my relatives could have turned out wrong. And, if they’d taken up burglary, I bet they’d have been damn good at it.

Instead, they were all leading exemplary lives, and I was getting ready to break into an old lady’s hotel room.

Go figure.