Easy to get in and look around, yes; but that wouldn’t make it easy to invade the place in the middle of an overcast, moonless, colder than fuck night. Not without making a noise, anyway.

And, too, I was ready for visitors. Oh, nothing elaborate. No alarm system or any of that bullshit. An alarm system isn’t going to do any good if the man who wants to come inside knows what he’s doing. Even a good amateur can get around an alarm. And a professional, a thief, say, or a hit- man like the one downstairs, wouldn’t be stopped by anything but an outrageously elaborate, expensive system with triple backups and the works. I didn’t have the money or the patience for that and of course most of the more effective alarm systems are arranged to trigger a light on a panel at some police station, and I didn’t exactly want to explain to any police why it was I needed an alarm in my house.

But I did have a system. Not an alarm system; nothing more than my own built-in alarm, which comes from those rice-paddy warfare years I suffered through, where you learned to sleep light unless you didn’t care about waking up. The best warning system depends not on electronics, but on devious thinking. You have to be smarter than the guy trying to break in. That comes from Vietnam, too, I guess: the tendency to think of psychological and even guerilla warfare than more conventional, unimaginative means. The layout of my little A-frame cottage is simple: two bedrooms in the rear, one of which is clearly the master bedroom (twice as large as the adjacent spare, and with triple the closet space); a small bathroom next to the master bedroom, across from the laundry room; a big open living room area, with a kitchenette on the left, as you come into the room from the hallway along which are the bedrooms, bath, and laundry rooms; and an open loft dominated by an oversize couch. The couch converts into a double-size bed at night.