You didn’t think the stethoscope was just camouflage, did you? If all I’d intended was to look like a doctor, I’d have carried a beat-up old Gladstone bag and pretended I was making a house call. No, I was using the stethoscope for the same reason a doctor does: to get a clue what was going on inside.

If 9-G had been a human being, I’d have closed its eyelids and put a tag on its toe. I couldn’t hear a thing.

But what did that mean? The Nugents could be sleeping. The kung fu master could be sleeping. Even the rottweiler could be sleeping.

Let them lie, I told myself. You don’t have to be here, risking life and liberty in the pursuit of happiness. You can pick up your groceries and go home. You’ll eat the bread and the cereal sooner or later. Who knows, maybe you’ll actually like Count Chocula. And paper towels last forever, they’ve got almost as long a shelf life as Twinkies. So—

I rang the bell.

It was a buzzer, actually, and with the stethoscope’s assistance I heard it clear as…well, clear as a buzzer. I let up on it, listened to the silence, then buzzed again, a little longer this time. And listened to more silence.

That little Jiminy Cricket voice was silent now, too. I was on automatic pilot, doing what I do best. Putting the stethoscope back in my pocket, taking out the little ring of picks and probes, and getting down to business.

It’s a gift. Some guys can hit a curveball. Others can crunch numbers.

I can open locks.

Anybody can learn. I taught Carolyn once, and in a pinch she can open her apartment door without her keys. But for most people, even those who work at it, even the sort who make a precarious living at it, picking a lock is a very laborious process. You pick and pick and pick, almost as if you were trying to nag the lock into submission, and your fingers get clumsy and you get cramps in your hands, and sometimes you say the hell with it and jimmy the thing, or rear back and kick the door in.

Unless you happen to have the touch.

There were two locks on the Nugents’ door. One was a Poulard, and you may have seen their ads, guaranteeing their product as pick-proof. The other was a Rabson; no guarantee, but a solid reliable lock.

I had them both open in under two minutes.

What can I tell you? It’s a gift.

Strictly speaking, I don’t think they should call it breaking and entering. If you’re really good at it, you never actually break anything.

Unless there’s a burglar alarm. Then, the instant you open a door or window that’s wired into the circuit, you break the electrical connection. When this happens there’s generally a high-pitched sort of whine, and you have a certain amount of time—generally forty-five seconds or thereabouts—to find the keypad and punch in the code that tells the system you’ve got every right to be there. After that you get the full treatment with bells and whistles and, sooner or later, a couple of private cops making an armed response.

By then, of course, any burglar in his right mind has gone home.

I took a deep breath, turned the knob, and opened the door.

No alarm.

Well, I couldn’t know that for sure. There’s also such a thing as a silent alarm. Open the door and there’s no warning whine, no sound at all beyond the music of the spheres. There’s a keypad concealed somewhere, but you’ve got no reason to go looking for it, and after forty-five seconds it’s too late, because by that time an alarm has registered in the office of the security firm, and they turn up with guns in their hands while you’re filling a pillowcase with the good sterling.

The thing is, hardly anybody installs a silent alarm these days, except as a supplementary system. What you want a burglar alarm to do is keep burglars out, not give you a shot at catching them once they’re already inside. Most burglars, it pains me to say, are just looking for the easy dollar. They’ve got no calling for the profession. The great majority, once they breach the system and hear the telltale whine, are out of there like a shot. A certain number, including the junkies and crackheads who get in by breaking a window or kicking in a door, will take a few minutes to grab a radio or go through a top dresser drawer. Then they’re gone.

If the only alarm’s a silent one, the burglar doesn’t know it’s there—which, after all, is the point of the thing. So the burglar goes about his business, and if he’s a junkie or even if he’s not, he’ll very likely finish up and go home before the armed-response guys turn up. Even when traffic’s light, it takes a while to answer a call. In rush hour, forget it.

Besides, a silent alarm is a pain in the neck for the householder. Because it’s silent, there’s nothing to remind you that you’re supposed to key in your code. A certain amount of the time you forget, and the rent-a-cops turn up while you’re sitting there switching back and forth between Leno and Letterman. After that happens a few times you stop setting the alarm in the first place.

Groceries in hand, I crossed the threshold and moved into the entering phase of breaking and entering. I nudged the door closed with my hip, cutting off the light from the hallway. It was pitch dark where I was standing, and silent as a tomb.

Lord, what a feeling! A quickening of the pulse, a tingling in the fingertips, a lightness in the chest—but that doesn’t begin to describe what I felt, and always feel in such circumstances. I’d told Carolyn about the excitement, the thrill of it all, but there was more. I felt an abiding sense of satisfaction, as if I was doing what I’d been placed on earth to do. I was a born burglar, and I was aburgling, and whatever had led me to think I could possibly give it all up?

I set down my grocery bags and put on my disposable gloves. I got hold of my tiny flashlight, dropped it, and fumbled around on the floor for it, cursing the darkness. I found it, finally, and switched it on, then got to my feet and followed the straight and narrow beam all around the apartment. Once I’d established that every window was heavily curtained, I turned on a few lights and took another deliberate tour of the premises.

Walking from room to room, I felt like a gentleman farmer riding his fences, master of all he surveyed. But there was method in it. Long ago, in a nice apartment on East Sixty-seventh Street, I had amused myself looting a living room while the apartment’s bona fide occupant was lying dead on the other side of the bedroom door. He had died, it must be said, of natural causes; someone had murdered him. The police, who conveniently turned up while I was still busy with my looting, jumped to the completely unwarranted conclusion that I ought to be listed as the proximate cause of death, and I had a hell of a time getting it all straightened out.

It’s not the sort of thing anybody would want to go through twice, believe me. So I’ve learned to spend my first moments in a burglary checking around for dead bodies, and of course I never find any. They’re like cops and cabs, never there when you’re looking for them.

What I found instead was what realtors call a Classic Six, by no means a scarce item in prewar apartment buildings on the Upper West Side. An entrance foyer, where I’d groped for my flashlight. A living room, a formal dining room, a windowed kitchen. Two good-sized bedrooms, one with twin beds, the other a guest room which evidently doubled as an artist’s studio for Joan Nugent. There was an easel with a half-finished painting of a man in harlequin drag playing the pipes of Pan. Pablo Picasso, eat your heart out.

That’s six rooms right there if you count the foyer, but I don’t think you do, because there was another room off the kitchen. I don’t know what it was supposed to be originally. A pantry, I suppose, or else a maid’s room. Now it was Harlan Nugent’s den. There was a desk with a computer and a fax modem on it, and a bookcase that ran heavily to technothrillers, along with nonfiction along the lines of How You Can Profit from the Coming Ice Age. Above the desk hung a rural landscape which I was able to recognize as the work of Mrs. Nugent.