“What’s it for?”

“Would you just do it?”

Tentatively, she reached for the wig, inspected it as if it might be infested with head lice, and pulled it on. She didn’t have that much hair to tuck under it, and it fit pretty well. Didn’t look cheap, either. I figured Trixie was able to afford the best when it came to this sort of thing. Maybe that was why there was only three hundred thousand, instead of half a million, left over.

“Ooh, you look good,” Merker said. Annette went to check herself in a front hall mirror. She cocked her head from side to side, watched the way the wisps of hair fell across her face.

“So like, what’s this about?” Annette said.

Merker invited her into her own kitchen to sit down and listen to what he needed her to do. First, Annette shoved a Finding Nemo tape into an old VCR, then joined the two of us at the table. Merker had the ID and the key out on the table for demonstration purposes.

“I need you to go into a safety-deposit box,” Merker said.

“Huh?” Annette said.

“You wear the wig, you use this ID, you sign this name, and you’re in. You take everything out of the box, put it in the bag, and you come back out. Simple as that.”

Annette looked at him openmouthed. “Huh?” she said again.

I was starting to have doubts about whether Annette was the best candidate for this operation.

“Listen,” she said, “I’d like to help, but I got no one to watch the kid.”

“Fuck, Annette, I’m going to give you a grand. Hire a fucking babysitter.”

“Who’m I gonna find in the middle of the day? You ever try to find a babysitter like that?” She snapped her fingers. “It’s not easy.”

Merker was thinking. “We could drop the baby off,” he said, and looked at me. “We could leave the baby at your place, with Leo and the fat Yugoslavian chick and the kid. They’re already looking after one kid, they could handle another one.”

“I don’t think she’s Yugoslavian,” I said. I suddenly felt very tired.

“But we could do that. So getting a sitter is no big deal, Ann-”

“Jesus!” she said. “Are you still doing that?” She pointed at Merker, who had slipped his index finger into his nose. “That is the most disgusting habit! You were doing that in Canborough. You haven’t fucking cleared things out in there yet?”

Merker’s nose-picking hand dropped to his side. “Leave me alone,” he said, suddenly an eight-year-old. “So, you’ve got a sitter. You’ll do this thing?”

“Is it illegal?” she asked.

Merker, who had not been one to share his feelings with me up to now, gave me a look, as if to say, You see what I have to deal with?

“What do you think, Annette? You’re going into a fucking bank, pretending to be someone else, and walking out with a bag full of cash, you want to know whether it’s illegal?”

“I was just asking is all. How much cash?”

“Enough. Anyway, it’s sort of partly legal, because the person who has the box says it’s okay for us to do it. She’s given us permission.”

“Written permission?”

“Fuck no, Annette, I don’t have written permission. You think this is the sort of thing people put in writing?”

“Well, why can’t she just do it herself? Why does she need someone else? Did she break a leg or something?”

“Because she can’t, okay?”

Annette shrugged.

“When did you have a baby anyway?” Merker asked.

“Two years ago.”

“You married? This baby got a father?”

“That any business of yours?”

“Sounds like a no,” Merker said, tsk-tsking. “That’s not good, bringing up a baby without a father. I know a little something about that.”

“Yeah, well, he was a son of a bitch and I’m better off without him.”

Merker slid the fake Marilyn Winter ID, which happened to be a driver’s license, toward her. “You see the signature there? When you get into the bank, you have to be able to sign it like that. They’ve already got a signature on file, and they’re going to compare. That’s how they do things.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know if I can do that,” she said.

“Just practice a few times, you’ll be fine. You got some paper and a pen?”

Annette reached over to a table by the phone, found a scratch pad and a pen. Merker was twitching his nose, wanted to touch it, but kept his hands on the table. “Okay,” Annette said, looking at the ID and taking the pen in her left hand.

“Jesus, you’re left-handed?” Merker said.

“Yeah. That some sort of crime?”

Merker looked at me. “What’s Trixie?”

I tried to picture her with a pen in her hand, doing anything. “I’d guess right-handed,” I said.

Merker shook it off. “Doesn’t matter. Long as the signature matches, doesn’t matter which hand it’s written with. Go ahead, try it.”

Annette had already written “Marilyn Winter” three times on the notepad. Even looking at it from where I sat, across the table, the signatures bore no resemblance to the Trixie version.

“Is this a joke?” Merker said, yanking the pad away from her. “This looks like it was written with a fucking stump.”

“It’s hard,” Annette whined.

“Look at your M. It’s all roundy. It’s supposed to be pointy at the tops. Jesus.”

“Let me try again.” She really concentrated this time, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth, and carefully mimicked the original signature, as if she were tracing it.

“Oh, that’s good,” Merker said. “That won’t arouse any suspicion. Taking fifteen minutes to sign your goddamn name.”

“You’re making me nervous,” Annette said. “Maybe if you was paying me two grand instead of one, I’d be motivated to do it better.”

“I could be giving you Donald fucking Trump’s platinum card and you still wouldn’t be able to do it,” Merker said. “Okay, just calm down and try again.”

“It’s just that my fingers are delicate,” Annette said. “It’s hard for me to make them go another way.” In the living room, with the Finding Nemo soundtrack playing in the background, the baby started crying. “Hold on!” Annette snapped.

It was hopeless. We all knew it. Annette kept trying, and Merker kept badgering her, but if anything, her attempts to copy the Marilyn Winter signature were only getting worse. Once, she wrote “White” instead of “Winter.”

“I forgot,” she said.

Merker was sweating. To me, he said, “What are we gonna do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we should get Ludmilla to do it.”

Merker squinted. “Very funny. We might as well go down to the zoo and see if we can fit that wig onto a fucking hippo.” Fed up, he reached across the table and yanked the wig off Annette’s head. He’d caught one of her own hairs, and she yelped. She pushed her chair back angrily and went to get the baby, and Merker’s finger went to his nose. He grabbed Annette’s pen to try to get at something that was buried pretty deep. I couldn’t look.

“This is just fucking fantastic,” Merker said. “She’d of been perfect, too. She’s got the same kind of tits and everything.”

I didn’t feel it was worth pointing out to Merker that the bank officials, unlike him, might not reduce a person’s legitimacy to a bra size, that there might be other criteria.

My cell phone rang. Merker wiped the end of the pen on his sleeve, dropped it onto the table, and eyed me warily as I took the phone out of my jacket. “Who is it?” he asked.

I glanced at the number. “It’s my wife, calling from work.” Sarah did seem to be developing a habit of calling at the most amazing times. Tied up in a barn, held hostage by a homicidal maniac. But it was always nice to hear from her.

“Don’t answer it,” Merker said.

“She’ll just call again,” I said. “I can handle this.”

He shook his head in frustration. He was having a very bad day. “All right, take it.”

“Hello,” I said.

“Hey,” said Sarah. “Where are you? Are you home?”

“Not at the moment,” I said.

“I tried to call home, and I think there’s something wrong with our number. I called and I got this other person. I asked for you and he said there was no one there by that name.”