“There are people to steal anything,” I said. “From anyplace.”

“Some world,” he said.

I finished my run, stretched some, walked on home to my apartment building at the corner of Seventy-first and West End. I stripped and showered and did a little more stretching, and then I stretched out and closed my eyes for a while.

And got up and looked up two telephone numbers and dialed them in turn. No one answered my first call. My second was answered after two or three rings, and I chatted briefly with the person who answered it. Then I tried the first number again and let it ring an even dozen times. A dozen rings comes to one minute, but when you’re calling it seems longer than that, and when someone else is calling and you let the phone go unanswered, it seems like an hour and a half.

So far so good.

I had to decide between the brown suit and the blue suit, and I wound up choosing the blue. I almost always do, and at this rate the brown’ll still be in good shape when its lapels come back into style again. I wore a blue oxford button-down shirt and selected a striped tie which would probably have indicated to an Englishman that I’d been cashiered from a good regiment. To an American it would be no more than a mark of sincerity and fiscal integrity. I got the knot right on the first try and chose to regard that as a favorable omen.

Navy socks. Scotch-grained black loafers, less comfortable than running shoes but rather more conventional. And comfy enough once I’d slipped in my custom-made orthotic arch supports.

I took up my attaché case, a slimmer and more stylish affair than my book thief’s, covered with beige Ultrasuede and glowing with burnished brass fittings. I filled its several compartments with the tools of my trade-a pair of rubber gloves with their palms cut out, a ring of cunning steel implements, a roll of adhesive tape, a pencil-beam flashlight, a glass cutter, a flat strip of celluloid and another of spring steel, and, oh, a bit of this and a little of that. Were I to be lawfully seized and searched, the contents of that case would earn me an upstate vacation as a guest of the governor.