“Wake up!”

I heard the voice from my vague location far down in the depths of unconsciousness. As I breast-stroked toward the surface, it repeated itself.

“Wake up!” It was cheerful.

When I opened my eyes, I saw Namo leaning over me, grinning, showing the black gaps beside his top incisors. He had a snubnose chrome six-shooter in his hand. He was pointing it at me. My gun was in the glove compartment of the rental car, parked beneath some ragged palm tree on a side street somewhere in south Venice Beach. Namo’s little green eyes were sparkling with happiness. He was looking at me the way a sadistic kid looks at a cat he has just trapped, relishing what he will do to it.

Judging by the light pouring in the window, it was midmorning, around nine or nine-thirty. I had been asleep for about six hours. Baba was sitting in the armchair by the window, his ample ass more than filling the space between the splayed arms. He was wearing the blue suit I had seen in his closet, dressed for an appraisal.

“If you return the necklace now, without any difficulty, I give you my word that the police will not be involved and you will not be harmed,” he said in his measured guru voice. Despite the sonorous tone, he looked scared. His face looked thinner than it had been, flesh worn away by worry in the hours since I had last seen him.

“Necklace? What are you talking-”

Namo jabbed the barrel of the gun in my face, striking my cheekbone with an explosive bolt of pain. Instinctively, I started to come up out of the bed but he cocked the hammer and I lay back down.

“Stop it!” Baba said. “There is no need for that. Not yet. I believe Mr. Rivers will be reasonable when he knows the facts.”

“How did you know where to find me?” I said, rubbing my cheek.

“Our nautical friend put me wise.”

“Pete?”

“Yes,” Baba said. “He has been keeping me informed of your activities. When he told me last Saturday that you and your associate had been to the desert on some kind of criminal enterprise at the same time that a pair of thieves attempted to steal the necklace, I instructed him to keep what he might call ‘a weather eye’ on you.”

“I’m in it with ‘em, you asshole!” Pete said, bouncing into the room through the hall door. “You think you are pretty fucking smart, but there’s a lot you don’t know. I’m the one that found-”

“Be quiet,” Baba said, cutting Pete off. “Loose lips sink ships.”

Pete clapped his mouth shut and Baba turned back to me. “I congratulate you on your skill and perseverance. You very nearly got the necklace in the desert, despite my precautions. But you also very nearly came to grief. It was bold of you to quickly regroup and steal it last night from that idiot lawyer’s office. Concentration of that order is a yogic virtue. But then I believe you have studied yoga, haven’t you?”

“How do you know that?” I said, confused again by his insidious ability to pluck information from the atmosphere.

“Our lovely little Mary mentioned it to me. You are acquainted with her, I believe? A slender young woman with blond hair and a fairy’s face? Street tough, but oh so tender underneath? Another prize you hoped to steal from me, perhaps?” Anger crawled up into his voice like a sewer worker emerging from a manhole.

I didn’t say anything.

Baba nodded heavily, as if my silence confirmed his statement. “We will come to her shortly,” he said. “At the moment, I am interested in the necklace. You must return it.”

“I don’t know what kind of shit Pete has been feeding you, but I don’t have the slightest idea what you are talking about. What necklace?”

“Bullshit, motherfucker,” Pete said, doing a perverse hornpipe of fury and glee. “I heard you and your prick of a partner planning a job before you went to the desert. When you came back you were tore up like a couple of sailors who tangled with a barroom full of Marines. When Baba told me someone fought Jimmy Z and tried to steal the diamonds, I knew it was you guys.”

“How did you hear us?” I snapped.

“Through that floor vent,” Pete said.

His room was below mine.

“How he heard is irrelevant,” Baba said. “He did hear, and when I mentioned the attempted robbery to him last Saturday, we put two and two together and he started watching you. He has been helping me with… certain tasks since last summer. He is always most willing to be of assistance if his efforts are recognized in a monetary fashion.” He smiled a mixed smile at Pete and then went on: “I was less confident than he that you were the culprits, but the possibility certainly existed.”

That explained Baba’s laser-like interest in me on the beach on Saturday evening. I tried to think when and where Reggie and I had discussed the burglary and when Pete had been around. They couldn’t have known about the previous night’s plan ahead of time or they would have moved the necklace and tipped off the police.

“So what are you saying? You think me and Reggie tried to steal a diamond necklace in Palm Springs last weekend and that we did steal it last night?”

“I know you did,” Baba said. “And I have to have it back. I need it as collateral for equity in a real estate project I have in hand. My partners in that project are not the most spiritual of men. They have half a million dollars earnest money at stake, which they stand to lose if the deal falls through. The deadline is five o’clock tomorrow afternoon. If we aren’t fully collateralized before then, our option will expire and the project will collapse. My partners have informed me several times this week that if I don’t provide my share of the equity in time, there will be dire consequences.”

His voice trembled a little. Despite his size and spiritual accomplishments, he was scared of the Italians.

“They will certainly kill you if they find out your actions were responsible for scuttling the deal,” he went on. “That is an outcome I could, with regret, accept. But if they lose five hundred thousand dollars, they will also want to kill me, I think. As you might imagine, I am not so easily reconciled to that outcome. So I need the necklace back, and I need it back now. If you refuse to return it voluntarily, I will have to allow Namo and Pete to indulge their lower natures and use pain, and the fear of even greater pain, to compel you. Other people could be harmed as well.”

“What makes you so sure that I stole the jewels?” I said. “Just because Pete suspects me hardly proves…”

“I see everything-here,” Baba said, jabbing a blunt finger into his broad forehead. “And then of course there is this.” He held up the Krugerrand I had left out of the stash. “Some of these gold coins were stolen along with the jewels. This one was on the table beside your bed when we arrived this morning. That is conclusive, I think.”

I had taken the coin back from Oz for safekeeping, but was so tired when I came upstairs I hadn’t bothered to put it away. It would give the cops enough for a search warrant and make it very hard to convince Baba that he was chanting up the wrong chimney.

“I’ve had that for years,” I said and laughed. “Even if some Krugerrands were stolen last night, it doesn’t prove I had anything to do with it. There are millions of Krugers scattered around Los Angeles.”

“Have it your own way, asshole,” Pete said, pulling a leather blackjack out of his back pocket and circling to my right so that he was on one side of the bed and Namo on the other. “I got a cut coming when this deal closes, and you ain’t jewing me out of it.”

“Wait!” Baba said. “The less trouble we have here, the better. If you don’t value your own skin, perhaps you care more about the delicate epidermis of our mutual friend Mary. It would be a shame if her loveliness were to be marred.”

“If you hurt that girl, I’ll kill you,” I said.