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  “And you want to do the right thing with it?” he asks, squeezing the pliers.

  With my earlobe ensnared, nodding is out of the question, so I contort my face into an expression that I hope conveys affirmation. Deke nods as if proud of a student who has hazarded an adventurous guess at a difficult problem. The pressure diminishes, the curtains of pain in front of my eyes momentarily pull up, and I am able to breathe.

  “When?”

  “Soon,” I say, committing another faux pas. Apparently this is yet another statement Deke is weary of hearing, and down go the curtains. I’m not sure how much time passes but eventually his vise grip lets up and I am able to gasp for oxygen.

  “When precisely?” Deke asks tonelessly.

  It’s hard to do the computation when my head is so preoccupied routing signals of agony, but I think: today’s Thursday, the Nakamura job starts next Saturday, one-week hold, figure another week for the clowns in payroll...

  “Three weeks!” I blurt. Then as the pliers relax, I unwisely say, “Four absolute max.” Seconds later I am recanting. “Three-threethreethree!” I repeat until Deke releases me and undergoes a facial spasm that might be a smile.

  “Three weeks, then,” he says. Then he repeats the figure I quoted as the floater commission, which, without the influence of pliers, now seems optimistically large. It’s possible I carried a nonexistent one or messed up a decimal. I was never any good at math in school, much less math under duress of torture. “I’ll pencil it in.”

  Then he pockets the pliers, stands up, pats his chest and inhales pleasantly, as if savoring the first flowers of spring, and produces an envelope that he toys with like a bauble.

  “I know I have a reputation,” he says, almost apologetically, turning the envelope over in his hands. “I know people say things. But don’t worry. If you’re late I won’t kill you. I try not to kill clients. It’s bad business.”

  Then he tosses the envelope at me. When he’s gone I pull myself up and open it. The blood pounding in my ear is deafening and my vision is blurring with tears, but even in the shadows of my stoop I can make out the details of the crowded Indian restaurant in the photograph. There are a bunch of those faux gold diva lamps everywhere, pictures of Shah Rukh Khan almost kissing Kajol, innumerable hanging talwars and images of dancing Hindu gods, and, at a distant table in the back, sitting with a big guy in a deep red turban that matches his shirt, nearly out of focus but with a circle drawn clearly around her face with an X cut through it—like crosshairs—is Charlie.

  Auto-Nav

  It turns out that the earlobe is a pretty vascular area. As I inspect myself in the bathroom mirror I can’t help but think about its similarity to the lips; both are filled with tender collagen and, under pressure, both swell prodigiously with blood. What was once a tidy, buttonlike hemisphere attached cheerfully to my ear is now an engorged wad of livid flesh that sags like an obscene tropical blossom. The skin is embrailled with the textured markings of the pliers’ teeth and it is so tortured by the passage of blood that I can see it twitch minutely with every heartbeat.

  Not exactly inconspicuous.

  I can’t conceal this from Charlie with makeup, as I do with the various puncture wounds that I typically incur. I’ve never had an injury like this before, so I’m not sure how to proceed. The only comparable bruising I can think of is a hickey, and even though I recall hearing in grade school that you can “brush them out,” after fifteen agonizing minutes with Charlie’s stout-bristled paddle, I reluctantly conclude that you cannot brush out a devastated earlobe.

  Ruefully, I concede that I may have to ice it, a step I hate to take because it requires a trip to the freezer, which is where Charlie has stockpiled a cache of top tiers of wedding cakes. Apparently it’s a tradition for a newlywed couple to save this part of their wedding cake—the one with the action figures on it—for their one-year anniversary. For some reason, all of Charlie’s friends have entrusted her with the guardianship of these cakes. I’m not sure what it is about them that makes me so sad28—all those soldierly figurines in glossy black and white, leaning in toward each other—but I can hardly stand to look at them. I haven’t told Charlie this—I’m afraid she would think it is dumb; even I think it’s dumb—but lately it’s gotten worse.

  I try to shake it off by popping a couple of tabs of Hemofex, a branded schedule one blood agent to which I’m still pretty new, so it stings. Just like I want it to. Enabled by pill-courage, I plow into the kitchen and force myself to confront the freezer. As if about to dive into dangerous water, I hold my breath, yank open the door, focus hard on not focusing at all on the couples, and grab all the ice I can.

  As I apply the pack to my earlobe I sit on the stool next to Pinky’s dog bed—I haven’t had the heart to throw it out—and flip through the pages of the current Retention Sciences Today. There is a “Where Are They Now?” item on Kong and Frankie Nickels—it’s the two-year anniversary, after all29—and there is a piece on the growing violence of Azar’s men,30 but the cover story, wouldn’t you know it, is none other than Detective Cheryl Nunes. The article makes no mention of Fritzy’s corruption and his many false arrests; it merely says she has been “newly appointed” in the Rat Burglar investigation. The production quality of the magazine is not high, and the light is poor, but Nunes appears to be a wiry woman with startling blue eyes and a complexion like washable glue. She looks cold; she is wearing a shabby trench and hunching up like a hardened frileuse even though the picture is taken indoors. Despite the cloudless sky outside the window she has an antique full-length umbrella hitched over her arm.

  I’m just reading about her tracking down tithers in Graz31 and exterminating a tombaroli racket in Salerno32 when I detect outside my door, on the exhausted strip carpeting, the familiar light, clumsy, rhythmless footfalls. I can almost smell the odor of hot plastic and ink she will have from the photocopier; on her hair will be the burned chemical smell of industrial solvents that the university cleaning crew uses every night; her clothes will have the fuzzy suggestion of polyester and public transportation from riding the bus; there will be the polished leather, the rosemary and mint, the jungle-like perfume of her body. I can hardly wait.

  There is enough time to stash the mag and my pills but I’m not able to jot down anything about pachylax in my journal. I am just able to slip it under the cushions on the sofa before the ringer buzzes. Frantically I check to make sure there aren’t any spare vials or hypos lying around, then I fling open the door and there, leaning against the frame, her black curls tightening in the humidity, is Charlie.

  “Someone call in an order of ta’ l’Armla?” she says, dangling a plastic bag that radiates the scent of vegetables, peppery goat cheese, and eggs. But I also smell something sweet—honey icing and biscuit—and sure enough, from behind her back she produces another bag and makes a suggestive pendulum movement with it in front of her chest. “And if you’re good, I brought some figolli and a video of sailing disasters caught on tape.”

  Charlie is naturally a gesture-maker, a gift-bearer, but she seems to have a nearly paranormal knack for bringing me home cooking whenever I’ve had a bad day. After the Khmer reliefs I got a steaming pot of some kind of spicy fish soup and rice whose name I can never remember but which rhymes with “Gargamel.” When I lost Entemena I discovered on my doorstep a plastic container with a note attached that said Charlie would be stuck in departmental meetings all night but here was “fennek” in a red wine sauce. On the night when the Rat Burglar stole the mediocre Inanna vases she showed up with a book on water safety skills and some kind of pastry things stuffed with dates.

  How does she do it? How does she always seem to know when I need something like a home-cooked Maltese dish whose name I cannot pronounce? Could anyone else intuit this? I doubt it. When I think about how she is always doing these things I am nearly overwhelmed with guilt about the way I have lied to her.

  And—God help me—about how I’ve involved her in this thing wit
h Deke.

  “You’re too good to me,” I say, meaning it more than she knows.

  “Very true. But later,” she says, putting the bags down on the table, “you might be afforded the opportunity to express your gratitude.”

  When she wraps her arms around my neck, and tilts her face up to mine, pursing her lips into the shape of a pink-brown butterfly, prekiss, I amaze her by emitting an agonized shriek.

  “Sorry,” I say, displaying my ear. “I got...hit by a, uh, foul ball.”

  “Ouch,” she says, squinting at it. “It looks awful.”

  “It only hurts when my heart beats.”

  “It’s got some... strange markings on it. What is that?”

  “What’s what?” I say innocently.

  “Those things. Like a pattern.”

  “Oh, that must be the stitches from the baseball.”

  “It doesn’t look like stitches. It looks like some kind of weird cross-hatching. Like diamond-shaped or something.”

  “Oh yeah,” I say, trying to think fast. “It was a, uh, minor league ball.”

  “Hunh. Well, let’s put some ice on it. And get you some Tylenol.”

  For me, trying to treat an injury with an over-the-counter analgesic is like trying to extinguish a forest fire by spitting at it, but I dutifully swallow the pills and do my best to act relieved by it. I make a deeply satisfied, gustatory sound, as if swallowing a particularly refreshing carbonated beverage, and smile with gratitude.

  Charlie bangs around in the kitchen, reheating the dinner while whistling to herself, but she seems to know something else is wrong, and when I decline her offer to practice constrictor knots on the line she brought over she can’t help asking.

  “Yeah,” I confess. “Today I lost a . . . prospect. The team was really counting on this one. And he got away. Thanks to the fucking—” I nearly blow it. By a fraction of a second I choke back the r in Rat Burglar.

  “Yankees?” Charlie says, saving me from myself. “Again the damn Yankees?”

  “Yeah. Fourth fucking time this year.”

  Contemplating my dim and dangerous future provokes from my gullet a pathetic, waterlogged sniffle of grief.

  “Hey,” Charlie says, “it’s O.K. Things will change. I know they will.” Then her expression brightens; she has an idea. She inserts the video of sailing disasters and fast-forwards. “Hey. Look at it this way. No matter how bad it was today, it can’t be as bad as this guy’s day.”

  The screen shows an enormous oceangoing sailboat, maybe seventy feet, clippering along at top speed, making a beeline, in broad daylight, for an immense cargo ship. The voice-over informs us that this is the perilous result of “entrusting your passage to an auto-nav system while entertaining your spouse belowdecks.” Seconds later the ships collide, the smaller one shattering into a million pieces of jagged composite, as a terrified, naked couple leap over the stern while orange life preservers rain down from the deck of the steamer like some kind of life-sized ring-toss game.

  Charlie laughs conspiratorially at this, pointing vigorously at the screen, encouraging me to partake in the jollity—and normally I would; I can’t get enough of this kind of thing—but suddenly the sight of a beautiful sailboat going down, down, down has a very real, very personal, very doomlike aspect.

  When Charlie realizes what a poor choice of cheer-up strategythis is, her face landslides into such an apologetic, helpless expression that I can’t help, finally, laughing. She starts to say something—she was dumb, she didn’t mean it like that, she wants me to crack the last can of Coco Rico—but I pull her down to me.

  Charlie’s fragrance is different today. Underneath are the usual notes, but presiding over everything today is a powerful odor of peony and black cherry, and when her hair falls over my face and I am nearly suffocated in it, I realize this must be a new purchase. Charlie’s inveterate clumsiness extends to indextrous misapplications of perfume, especially new ones whose atomizers she hasn’t mastered. A crop-dusting like this on another woman would flay my odor receptors and induce a terrible headache, but it’s Charlie, and my brain is already awash in pleasure chemicals. The silk of her blouse is slick and slides against my body. Her pelvis begins to surge into mine but something sizzles on the stove and she tries to pull away.

  “But dinner,” she says.

  I don’t let her up.

  “The stove.”

  I renew my grip.

  “It’ll burn.”

  “Put it on auto-nav,” I say.

  She does. Then, standing in my kitchen, facing me with her legs spread apart like a gunslinger, with her eyes all pupil and her heartbeat pulsing hard in her jugular, she looks so fierce it’s hard to tell if she wants to fight me or fuck me. When she unbuttons her blouse, when she hulas out of her skirt, when she thumbs out of her bra and panties, it is tender and intimate, but her face is brazen and reckless, nearly martial, as if issuing me a dare.

  She undergoes the transformation. She has the grace.

  Then, for the third time today, I lose track of my surroundings. I try to blink out of it, but it’s no good. I am totally locked in. When she moves across the room, presses her naked body against me, and puts her warm mouth on mine, my five senses go insensate to everything else—the eerie carless quiet outside my window, the wilted carpet crushed beneath my toes, every object and light source in my visual field—and all I see hear smell touch taste is Charlie.

  Our Greatest Hit Hits Again, or: Who Is the Rat Burglar?

  Afterward, as we lay together on the bed, with the blades of the fan overhead cutting stroboscopic ribbons of shadow into the ceiling, our skin dampening the sheets, Charlie and I stumble into it: our all-time, triple-platinum, greatest-hit argument.

  The Rat Burglar.

  When I get up to go to the bathroom Charlie makes the mistake of turning on the TV and there she is, Doreen Doherty, Patriot News telepromptress and all-around bigmouth, bracketed by an intake pic of the K’plua and the familiar graphic of a whiskery rodent beneath a dramatic floating question mark, recounting in excoriating detail the events of this afternoon. She has everything but my name. She has the location of the facility, the properties of the mask, its value, its owner, the fact that the mysterious thief disabled two security agents. Detective Nunes is not available for comment. Neither is Po-Mo but Doreen quotes a formal statement from him saying that Janus has no formal statement. In the pic, the K’plua’s expression is, if anything, even more hurt and reproving and Doreen’s manner is, if possible, even more smug than usual.

  Without fail, every time the Rat Burglar does a job, Doreen covers it, her pudgy cheeks appling as she blabs away about the haplessness of “J-Mart,” and I can never stop myself from saying something. I know I shouldn’t. There are plenty of reasons why I shouldn’t, among which a) there is no explicable reason why a baseball talent scout should have a beef with the Rat Burglar or Double-D, so b) it therefore unnecessarily raises certain suspicions that could lead to complicated conversations, and c) it is never nice, while in the company of one woman, to call another woman a “slutty, ignorant, obese cretin capable of only the cheapest, most irresponsible, slapdash, jingoistic ‘journalism’ and who has wardrobe people who dress her funny.” Even if it’s true.

  Tonight I resolve to be better. In the bathroom I bunker the space under the door with a rolled-up towel and plug my ears with facecloths but I can still hear Doreen and her guests discussing the Rat Burglar. One voice is the academic. I can tell by her phonation, which is both faucalized and mucusy, with strident accentuation and wet vowels that make it sound as if her voice is mayonnaise squirting out of a plastic packet. Plus she has the full-stop terseness of hauteur, as if she knows the soup du jour and you have absolutely no idea.

  In other words: she is annoying me already.

  The other speaker has an accent that aspires to identify itself as British-American of unspecified but probably aristocratic derivation33 but which succeeds only in designating its speaker as a
rt-world-phony. It belongs, I can tell despite the terry cloth I am forcing deeply into my aural canal, to Arthur Quackenbush, head of Signature, a second-tier auction house from whose employ I have been dropped.

  In other words: he has annoyed me for a long time.

  As have the words that have become Doreen’s catchphrase, which she utters after introducing her guests: “But America, who is the Rat Burglar?”

  Then comes Patriot TV’s familiar machine-gun report and, simultaneously, bullet perforations underscore the Rat Burglar graphic. Canned applause roars over the wire.

  It makes me sick to see how much people love their criminals. It was bad enough when the Gottis got their own reality show, but in the last couple of years the Rat Burglar has eclipsed even that standard of perversity. Although he is reviled by many—the media, the authorities, the entire art world, anyone with two brain cells to rub together—to some he has become a cult hero. Such is his celebrity that those five famous words—“Who is the Rat Burglar?”—have attained a pop-culture ubiquity. In bars, on dates, at the watercooler, they are invoked as if they were a jingle. There are innumerable Web sites devoted to theories of identity. An Elephant 6-like all-girl indie band, the Hard Twenties, has a hit song dedicated to the Rat Burglar called “Steal Me.” And Crimies, a brand of trading card that features infamous mafiosi, gangstas, snitches, hitpersons, muscle, gaffers, talent, et cetera, has the Rat Burglar’s infamous blank-silhouette mug shot valued at three Frankie Nickels or two Jimmy the Hats. I ask you: does that make any kind of sense?

  “Well, Doreen,” Quackenbush informs the telepromptress, “as you know, there has been a tremendous increase in art theft in recent years. It’s not a new phenomenon—the total dollar value of art looted during the Holocaust is put, conservatively, at twenty-five billion—but I think part of the reason for its recent surge in popularity is the media coverage of the record hammer prices we are seeing for various single works. If a thief can rob a bank for, say, a hundred million dollars, he must contend with the logistics of carting away all that cash. Hardly a one-man job. A hundred-million-dollar painting, on the other hand, is a tempting, and portable, prize.34 Traditionally art thieves have been bunglers or, at best, opportunists—the hapless thieves who damaged Munch’s Scream so severely come to mind, as does the Louvre worker Vincenzo Perrugia, who literally walked out the door with the Mona Lisa under his coat. The work of the Rat Burglar, however, is meticulous and precise. It shows an intimate familiarity with security systems of all sorts and, as we saw in Paris two years ago, he has considerable physical prowess.35