Rats.

There's always a way in, I told myself. It makes a nice mantra, but even as I ran it through my mind I found myself beginning to doubt the universal verity of it. What if there wasn't always a way in?

But there had to be. It was a big old house, sure to be chock full of crannies and nooks (or, if you insist, nooks and crannies) and window seats and stair cupboards and rooms no one ever went into. That was fine, but they were all on the inside, and on the outside there was nothing but stone, along with two doors and more windows than I troubled to count, all of them wired into an alarm system that I couldn't knock out unless I found a way to create a power failure for the whole neighborhood.

I was trying to figure out just how I might manage that, which comes more under the heading of idle speculation than the exploration of a real possibility, when I opened my eyes and saw something that had been in front of them all along. How had I missed seeing it? The answer, of course, was that I had indeed seen it, but that it had somehow failed to register. I'd seen it and known what it was, but what I hadn't recognized was what itmeant.

It meant I was in like Errol, that's what it meant.

Turning around and walking down the driveway and away from the Mapes house was one of the most difficult things I'd ever done.

Here was the house, an unassailable fortress, and here I was with a perfect way to assail the daylights out of it. And I'd come prepared, my picks and probes at hand, and my hands easily enough encased in the pair of Pliofilm gloves I'd tucked into a pocket. And who was to say I hadn't been the beneficiary of unwitting wisdom when I brought along the gloves and the tools? Maybe I'd somehow been given to know that an opportunity would knock. Now that it had done so, how could I fail to answer?

I hadn't phoned, hadn't established that they were out for the evening, but the house felt empty to me. I read somewhere that a house can actually sound empty, that occupied premises hum inaudibly with the energy of the people within. I don't know about that, but I know I can sometimes sense a human presence. I didn't sense it here, and I had some corroborating evidence from the garage; a peek had shown a fat and happy Lexus SUV parked to one side, with plenty of empty space for a second vehicle alongside it.

God, I was itching to do it, chomping at the bit, salivating like all of Pavlov's dogs rolled into one. My fingertips tingled, and the blood surged in my veins, and it took a measure of self-discipline I hadn't known I possessed to get me out of there.

Not that getting away from the Mapes house cut off the siren's song. There were other houses just like Mapes's, an inner voice reminded me, and every single one of them was sure to have the same happy flaw that would lay it wide open to an enterprising burglar. Why not knock off one of them now? Or even two of them, if time permitted. Why the hell not?

Because a burglary in the neighborhood would put everybody on edge, I told myself, and increase the risk on Friday night. To that the inner voice, resourceful devil that he was, had a persuasive counterargument: a burglary a few doors away, two days before I hit Mapes, would make Friday's burglary look like part of a string, and Mapes an incidental victim rather than a designated burglaree. Thus nobody would think to look for someone with a grudge against the man, turn up Marty, and work backwards from there.

Knock off that house on the corner, the voice murmured, and they won't look twice at Mapes. They'll see a pattern, and they'll stake out the neighborhood, waiting patiently for the burglar to strike a third time. And he won't, and nobody will ever figure it out.

You can't argue with a voice like that. What you can do is keep walking, and that's what I did-head lowered, hands in pockets, shoulders drawn protectively inward. The voice babbled on. Thanks for sharing, I told it, and walked all the way to the subway, and climbed the platform and caught a train home.

The first thing I did was return my windbreaker to the closet. While I was there, I opened up my hidden compartment-easy enough, if you know how-and stowed my burglar's tools and the gloves. I made myself a cup of tea and sat in front of the television set.The West Wing was history, andLaw amp; Order was already in its second half, with prosecutor Jack McCoy pulling a dirty trick in an overzealous try for a conviction. Once upon a time TV cops and DAs were all good guys, and then there was a stretch where some of them were bad guys, and now the medium and the viewers have matured to the point where a character can be both at once.

Something unrelated to the story kept me watching even as it made me lose track of the storyline. There was an extra, one of the dozen folks in the jury box, who looked like a woman I'd had a very brief fling with a couple of years ago. I hadn't laid eyes on her since, and had in fact lost track of her entirely.

And I couldn't tell if it was her or not. She'd done a little acting, although she hadn't gotten very far with it. She'd also done a little writing and a little singing, but what she'd done the most of, and what had kept her in panty hose and eyeliner, was waitressing.Law amp; Order is filmed in New York, not California, which is one reason the supporting actors and bit players on the show look like actual human beings, so it was by no means unlikely for a New York-based singer/writer/actor/waitress to turn up in the show's jury box.

If the camera had stayed on her for any length of time I probably could have said one way or another if it was Francine. But it didn't, and consequently I couldn't. They just gave you a glimpse of the jurors every now and then, and it was enough to assure me each time that yes, there was a definite resemblance, but not enough to let me know for sure. And, because I figured maybe the next view would be conclusive, I kept waiting for a shot of the jury and paying next to no attention to the rest of the story.

And it ended with the jury reaching a decision (they acquitted the bastard, so McCoy's ethical lapse was for naught) while I remained not a whit closer to one of my own. I was hoping someone would demand that the jury be polled, but no, instead they cut to a shot of Sam Waterston and Fred Thompson in their office, with Waterston embittered and Thompson philosophical. Then they rolled the credits at the speed of light, but it didn't matter, because she wouldn't be listed there anyway. Bit players with non-speaking parts don't generally make the crawl.

So I sat around thinking about Francine, not that there was much to think, since we'd only been seeing each other for a couple of weeks, say a month at the outside. If I remembered correctly, the night we finally went to bed together was the last night of the relationship, not because it was a disaster but because we really weren't destined for each other, and we'd both kept it going just long enough to get through the bedchamber door, just to make sure we weren't missing anything. Once our mutual sexual curiosity was quenched, there was really no reason for either of us to hang around.

I tried to figure out just how many years had passed since Francine and I had our moment together, and I decided it was more than three and less than six, and that was the best I could do to narrow it down. And then I found myself working out just how many women had passed in and out of my life since then. I don't remember what number I came up with, but it really didn't matter, because any number, high or low, was going to be depressing. I mean, suppose I'd had thirty girlfriends since Francine. Suppose I'd had two. See what I mean?

What made it even more depressing was that lately I didn't even seem to be playing the game. I wasn't even coming up to bat anymore, let alone taking a good healthy cut at the ball. I hadn't been out on a date since sometime the previous fall, when I chatted up a woman who'd dropped into my bookstore late one afternoon, closed up a few minutes early, took her for a drink and to a movie at the multiplex over on Third Avenue, and then put her in a cab and never saw her again. I had her phone number, and of course she knew how to reach me, but neither of us said "I'll call you" and neither of us did. She'd never walked into my store before, and she never did afterward, either.