I looked both ways and crossed the street-it’s a one-way street, but try telling that to the guys on bicycles delivering Chinese food-and then I looked both ways a second time and mounted the half-flight of steps to the vestibule of her building. I checked the buzzers for one marked MARKOVA and couldn’t find it, but there was only one top-floor buzzer with no name on it, and I decided that had to be hers. (This, incidentally, was faulty reasoning; Carolyn’s buzzer on Arbor Court is still marked ARNOW, the long-vanished tenant of record. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but in New York more people have learned anonymity from Rent Control than ever discovered it in a 12-Step program.)

I leaned on the unmarked buzzer, and either it was hers or it rang in some other empty apartment, because it went unanswered.

The trouble with front doors is that they’re right out there in public view. A tenant, coming or going, can catch you in the act. A passerby can spot you from the street. The longer you spend mucking about with the lock, the more likely it is that this will happen.

On the flip side, the nice thing about front doors is they’re rarely very hard to open. They’re just spring locks-if they used deadbolts an upstairs tenant couldn’t buzz anyone in-and the locks see so much action that they become as loose and as yielding as, well, a very old practitioner of an ancient profession, let us say. This one at least had a protective lip so you couldn’t loid your way in with a credit card or strip of spring steel, but aside from that it had precious little going for it. About the only person it could be expected to keep out was a tenant who had lost his key.

Actually, I told myself, the threshold was not the Rubicon; I could cross it without committing myself. Even if I ran smack into Ilona herself in the hallway, I could explain I’d found the door ajar, or that another tenant had held it for me. The door to her apartment, now that was a different matter.