"Next."

Dortmunder sighed. He got to his feet, left hand at his side, ringers curled, and he walked through the doorway into a pale green room lit by ceiling fluorescents, where three jaundiced men looked at him with utter cynical disbelief. "All right, John," the one behind the desk said, "come on over here and sit down."

In addition to the desk and its occupant, who was a heavyset plainclothes detective with a stubble of beard on his cheeks and some frizzy black hair around the sides of his head below the bald spot, there was on a wooden chair to the left a skinny younger plainclothes detective dressed for a picnic in jeans and Adidas and a T-shirt with a Budweiser label on it and a blue denim jacket, and on a typist's chair at the right a glum-looking, round-shouldered male stenographer in a black suit, with a little black Stenotype machine on a small wheeled metal desk in front of him. Finally in the room was a black wooden armless chair facing the desk. Like a farm horse entering its stall at the end of a long day, Dortmunder plodded to that chair and sat down.

The older detective looked very tired, but in a hostile, aggressive way, as though it were Dortmunder's fault he was so weary. He shuffled folders on his desk, then looked up. "John Archibald Dortmunder," he said. "You have been asked to come here to give the police any assistance you can in the matter of the theft of the Byzantine Fire. You volunteered to come here and talk to us."

Dortmunder frowned. "I volunteered?"

The detective looked at him as though surprised. "You weren't arrested, John," he said. "Had you been arrested, your rights would have been read to you. Had you been arrested, you would have been permitted your statutory phone call. Had you been arrested, you would have been booked and you would now have the right to have an attorney present during this conversation. You were not arrested. You were asked to cooperate, and you agreed to cooperate."

Dortmunder said, "You mean, for the last three hours out there in that hall, I've been a volunteer? All those guys out there are volunteers?"

"That's right, John."

Dortmunder considered that. He said, "What if I'd changed my mind? Out there. What if I'd decided not to volunteer after all, but just got up and left?"

"Then we would have arrested you, John."

"For what?"

The detective smiled a very thin smile. "We would've thought of something," he said.

"Right," said Dortmunder.

The detective looked down at the papers on his desk. "Two robbery convictions," he commented. "Two terms in prison. Lots of arrests. Recently off parole, with a positive rating from the parole officer which I personally consider a piece of shit." Looking up, he said, "You got the ruby on you, John?"

Dortmunder very nearly said yes, realizing just in time that this was cop humor, and that he wasn't supposed to respond to it at all. Cops don't like it when civilians laugh at their jokes; they only want other cops to laugh, which the one in the Budweiser T-shirt did, with a kind of half-sneeze snort, followed by, "He won't make it that easy for us. Will you, John?"

"No," Dortmunder said.

"Do you know why we picked you up, John?" the older detective asked.

"No," said Dortmunder.

"Because we're picking up known criminals," the older detective said. Then he looked across the desk at Dortmunder, obviously waiting for some sort of response.

"I'm not a known criminal," Dortmunder said.

"You're known to us."

It's terrible to be straight man for the cops, but they all love it so. Dortmunder sighed, then said, "I went straight, after my second fall. I got rehabilitated there in prison."

"Rehabilitated," said the detective, the way a priest might say, "Astrology."

"Yeah," said Dortmunder. "That parole report is right."

"John, John, you were picked up just last year on a TV store burglary charge."

"That was a misunderstanding," Dortmunder said. "I was found not guilty."

"According to this," the detective said, "you had some very high-powered legal help. How'd you afford that, John?"

"He didn't bill me," Dortmunder said. "I was like a charity case."

"You? Why would a hotshot lawyer come defend you for a charity case?"

"He was interested," Dortmunder said, "from a justice point of view."

The detectives looked at one another. The stenographer made delicate little finger pecks at his machine, glancing at Dortmunder from time to time in baleful disbelief and disgust. Dortmunder sat with his hands folded in his lap, his right thumb touching the Byzantine Fire. The older detective said, "Okay, John. You're an honest individual now, you only get mixed up with the law by mistake. Misunderstandings."

"It's my past," Dortmunder said. "It's hard to live down a bad past. Like you guys, right now."

"Tough," said the detective. "I feel very sorry for you."

"Me, too," said Dortmunder.

The younger detective said, "Where do you work, John?"

"I'm between jobs at the moment."

"Between jobs. What are you living on?"

"Savings."

The detectives looked at one another. Simultaneously they sighed. The older one turned his cynical eye back on Dortmunder: "Where were you last night, John?"

"Home," Dortmunder said.

"Really?" The detectives exchanged another look, and then the older one said, "Most of the boys I've talked to were playing poker last night, at each other's houses. Everybody alibis everybody else. It's like a cat's cradle." He laced his fingers, for illustration.

"I was home," Dortmunder said.

"Lots of friends and relatives there?"

"Only the woman I'm living with."

The younger detective said, "Not your wife?"

"I'm not married."

"Isn't that a wedding ring?"

Dortmunder looked down at the gold band on the third finger of his left hand. He resisted the urge to fall on the floor and froth at the mouth. "Yeah," he said. "That's what it is. I used to be married."

"A long time ago," the older detective said, tapping the folder in front of him, "according to this."

Dortmunder did not want to talk about the ring, he really and truly didn't. He didn't want people looking at the ring, thinking about it, having it in their minds. "It's stuck on my finger," he said. His heart in his mouth, he risked tugging at it a little, hoping nobody would catch a wink of ruby-red between his fingers. "That's why it didn't go with my other valuables at the desk," he explained. "It won't come off. I wear it all the time."

The younger detective chuckled. "Those old mistakes again, huh? The past just won't let go, will it, John?"

"No," Dortmunder said. He hid his left hand in his crotch.

The older detective said, "And you were not robbing any jewelry stores last night, is that right, John?"

"That's right," Dortmunder said.

The detective rubbed his eyes, and yawned, and stretched, and shook his head. "Maybe I'm getting tired," he said. "I almost feel like believing you, you know that, John?"

Some straight lines should be left alone, some rhetorical questions should be left unanswered. Dortmunder didn't say a word. He wouldn't say a word if the four of them were to sit in this room together until the end of time, until Hell froze over, until all the rivers ran dry and our love was through. He would sit here, and he would not say a word.

The detective sighed. "Surprise me, John," he said. "Give us some help. Tell us something about the Byzantine Fire."

"It's very valuable," Dortmunder said.

"Thank you, John. We appreciate that."

"You're welcome," Dortmunder said.

"Go home, John."

Dortmunder looked at him in utter astonishment. "Go home?"

The detective pointed at a door in the side wall. "Go, John," he said. "Go and sin no more."

Dortmunder got to his trembling feet, palmed the Byzantine Fire, and went home.