“Good thought,” I said, “but I’m sure they pay by check or wire transfer.”

By the time a valet got around to us, the lady had disappeared through the double doors that opened into the lobby. The Oasis is a four-star, four-diamond resort, and each door was a massive slab of plate glass, five feet wide by fifteen feet high, trimmed in brass. The tough guy had driven off in the Lincoln without tipping anyone.

“Nice car,” the valet said as he opened my door. “Is it an Eldorado?”

“ Seville,” I said. “Eldorados are coupes.”

“Oh, right! I should know that.” He had the blond crew cut and permanent tan of a surfer working through the winter so that he could spend next summer sliding down green waves in the surf between La Jolla and Malibu. “Can I get your name, sir?”

“Peter Blake,” I said, using an alias that I had decided on a few days before.

Some criminals use the same alias over and over, which helps the cops if they get interested while investigating a crime or series of crimes. Once they figure out that Andy Anatello is just another version of Anthony Antonio, the element of disguise is lost, while a false sense of security remains. I never used a fake name more than once. There was a driver’s license, a nonfunctional Visa card, and a couple of miscellaneous ID cards with the Blake name in my wallet. The license and cards had cost me six hundred dollars in the back room of a souvenir shop on the Venice boardwalk, but they would be snippets of plastic in a public trash container when this job was over. Which I expected would be soon. With any luck, we would be back in Venice with the jewels in time to catch Leno’s monologue.

My real name is Robert Rivers. Most people call me Rob, a pleasant irony. I tried going straight once-got clean and sober, worked as a carpenter, got married, had a kid-a beautiful little girl we named Sheila. But it wasn’t me. I drifted back.

Being a criminal was my karma, and I wasn’t complaining. The hours were flexible, the money was good, and freebooting was way more interesting than swinging a hammer or sitting on a numb ass in front of a computer screen eight hours a day.

There were some moral issues, for sure, but I’d dealt with most of them. What I did hurt people sometimes, but so did the actions of most other professions, one way or the other. Bankers with their loan-shark interest rates and foreclosures, lawyers with their sharp practices and subpoenas. The worlds of business and government were packed like a college student’s Volkswagen with crooked connivers who, unlike me, topped their sundae of sins with the pickled cherry of hypocrisy. I knew I was a bad guy, and tried to be as nice about it as I could. They thought they were good, which gave them license to be ruthless as hell.

There was danger, too, of course. The claustrophobic specter of prison, where I had spent a couple of memorable years in my early twenties, was a lurking nightmare. I’d been shot at three times, hit once, and I’d killed one person. To be fair, he deserved it.

Did I ever wake up at 3 a.m. horrified at the texture and trajectory of my existence? Sure. But I don’t think that kind of dark-night-of-the-soul despair is unique to stickup guys. Everyone in contemporary society carries a layer of anxiety under their bullshit and bluster. With some it’s fear of getting fired and losing the house in which they’ve invested their identity. Others are afraid that Barbie will find a fatter wallet or a bigger schlong to suck, or that Ken will take off with an intern who wears a thong over skin as smooth as satin. Old ladies are afraid that a less-deserving size sixteen will be tapped to sing the solo in the church choir, or that the neighbor’s daughter will get married first.

“Are you checking in, Mr. Blake?” the valet asked. Built like a compact welterweight who lacked reach but made up for it with inside punching power, he had the outlaw aura common to dedicated surfers, with hard eyes and a marijuana leaf tattooed on his right forearm.

“No, we’re here for dinner,” I said.

“Call us on a house phone a few minutes before you are ready to leave and we’ll have your Seville waiting.”

“Thanks.” I traded him a ten-dollar bill for a claim check. “Take good care of it.”

“You can count on it, sir,” he said, giving me a little salute. “And thank you, sir.”

It’s so easy to make people happy. If I had given him a dollar, it would have been emotionally neutral, a routine transaction. Two dollars would have given his heart a little lift. A ten-dollar bill, which was nothing to me in pursuit of a quarter million, made him happy. It was just a piece of paper, but it put a spring in his step and made him feel a little bit better about himself, his job, and the human race. If a conflict of any kind broke out between me and another guest, he would be on my side.

“Little prick better be careful or he’ll run out of ‘sirs,’” Reggie said as the kid wheeled the Caddie crisply out of the line of parked cars, squealing the tires just enough to show he knew where the edge of the power was.

A dignified old doorman grasped the brass handle with a white-gloved hand and swung one of the glass slabs open with a whoosh, air-conditioned atmosphere pouring out into the desert afternoon.

“Welcome to the Oasis, gentlemen,” he said in a B-movie baritone.

When I was a kid, most of our family vacations consisted of driving five hundred miles through the summer swelter of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to stay with my grandmother for a week or two in her big boxy frame house by the railroad tracks. On the rare occasion when we went someplace besides a relative’s house, we stayed in the kind of roadside motel where you park in front of your room and the amenities consist of a phone and a shower stall. Even after several years of patronizing them as a crook and customer, doing my part for the GDP by putting stolen money back into circulation, luxury hotels still gave me soul satisfaction, made me feel like I’d accomplished something that my father never did.

Reggie gave a whistle as we entered the marble-floored lobby. Ahead of us, two wide stone staircases curved down around a fountain to a lounge half as big as a football field with scattered groupings of couches and armchairs upholstered in expensive fabrics. Above us, an atrium rose eight stories, ringed at each floor by a continuous balcony, polished maple with vines hanging over. Beyond a three-story glass wall at the far end of the lounge, the turquoise Jell-O of a swimming pool jiggled in the slanting light.

“Pretty fucking fancy,” he said.

Standing at the railing, looking down at chattering groups of vacationers laughing and drinking wine and cocktails in the lounge, I felt a pulse of ecstasy pass through me. The thrill meter had been turned up to three as we followed the Lincoln out Highway 60, powered by thoughts of diamonds, deception, and theft. When we arrived at the sparkling resort, it edged up to five. Now it jumped all the way to ten, banging against the peg, as the whole happiness of the crime descended on me like a blessing, sharpening my eyesight and hearing, bringing adrenal clarity to my mind.

This was what I lived for.

It was a busy Friday afternoon at the peak of the season in one of the nicest hotels in the Coachella Valley. There was wealth all around me-in the expensive shops that lined the upper lobby, in the pockets and on the wrists and fingers of the guests, in the registers behind the front desk, and in the hotel safe-and I had the guts and know-how to take whatever I wanted.

Dressed in Italian walking shoes, brown gabardine slacks, and a finely woven silk shirt-tan with ivory buttons-I blended into the environment so perfectly that I was functionally invisible, which was, of course, my goal. None of the people walking through the lobby, smiling and nodding, could tell by looking at me that I was different from them. Not one of them would have guessed at the gear I had in the black leather bag slung over my right shoulder.