He looked familiar, but I couldn’t tell you why.

I pulled up a chair, sat down at the desk and got to work. There were three drawers on each side and one in the middle, and I tried the middle one first, and it was open. And, right smack in the middle of it, there sat a calfskin portfolio, tan in color, stamped in gold with an ornamental border and a network of fleurs-de-lis.

Remarkable.

I sat still for a moment, just looking at the thing and listening to the silence. And then the silence was broken by the unmistakable sound of a key in a lock.

If I’d been doing anything-shuffling through drawers, opening closet doors, picking a lock-I’d have missed it, or reacted too late. But I registered it instantly and sprang from the chair as if I’d been waiting for that very sound all my life.

Years ago, before my time and yours, there was a baseball player in the old Negro Leagues named Cool Papa Bell. I gather he was capable of swift and sudden movement; he was frequently compared favorably to greased lightning, and it was said of him that he could turn off the bedroom light and be in bed before the room got dark. I had always thought of that as colorful hyperbole, but now I’m not so sure. Because I shoved the drawer closed, switched off a lamp, switched off another lamp, raced across the room to kill the overhead light, dove into the hall closet, and yanked the door shut, and it seems to me I was holed up there, flattening myself against the coats, before the lights went out.

If not, I came close.

More to the point, I had the closet door shut before the other door was opened. If my intruder hadn’t fumbled a little with the keys, he’d have walked in on me. On the other hand, if he was thin-blooded enough to have worn a topcoat, or anxious enough to have toted an umbrella, he’d be opening the closet door any second now, and then what was I going to do?