And the valuable little items I carry off are, you will note, not the sort of thing anybody needs in order to keep body and soul together. I don’t steal pacemakers or iron lungs. No family is left homeless after a visit of mine. I don’t take the furniture or the TV set (although I have been known to roll up a small rug and take it for a walk). In short, I lift the things you can live without, and which you have very likely insured, like as not for more than they’re worth.

So what? What I do is still rotten and reprehensible, and I know it. I’ve tried to give it up, and I can’t, and deep down inside I don’t want to. Because it’s who I am and what I do.

It’s not the only thing I am or do. I’m also a bookseller, the sole proprietor of Barnegat Books, an antiquarian bookstore on East Eleventh Street, between Broadway and University Place. On my passport, which you’ll find in the back of my sock drawer (which is stupid, because, trust me, that’s the first place a burglar would look), my occupation is listed as bookseller. The passport has my name, Bernard Grimes Rhodenbarr, and my address on West End Avenue, and a photo which can be safely described as unflattering.

There’s a better photo in the other passport, the one in the hidey-hole at the back of the closet. It says my name is William Lee Thompson, that I’m a businessman, and that I live at 504 Phillips Street, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. It looks authentic, and well it might; the passport office issued it, same as the other one. I got it myself, using a birth certificate that was equally authentic, but, alas, not mine.

I’ve never used the Thompson passport. I’ve had it for seven years, and in three more years it will expire, and even if I still haven’t used it I’ll probably renew it when the time comes. It doesn’t bother me that I haven’t had occasion to use it, any more than it would bother a fighter pilot that he hasn’t had occasion to use his parachute. The passport’s there if I need it.