At last, another team of cops arrived, with special vinyl jackets in dark blue to show they were supercops and not just trash cops like all these other guys and gals, and they had several strange narrow metal tools with which they had at the door.

God, they were slow. Dortmunder was just looking around for a helpful brick when at last the door did pop open and maybe twenty of them came crowding in.

“I gotta call my wife!” Dortmunder yelled, but everybody else was yelling, too, so nobody could hear anybody. But then it turned out there actually was someone in authority, a gruff, potbellied older guy in a different kind of important uniform, like a blue army captain, who roared over everybody else, “That’s enough! Pipe down!”

They piped down, surprisingly enough, all of them except Dortmunder, who, in the sudden silence, once again shouted, “I gotta call my wife!”

The man in charge stood in front of Dortmunder as though he were imitating a slammed door. “Name,” he said.

Name. What was that name? “Austin Humboldt,” Dortmunder said.

“You got identification?”

“Oh, sure.”

Dortmunder pulled out his wallet, nervously dropped it on the floor—he didn’t have to pretend nervousness, not at all—picked it up, and handed it to the boss cop, saying, “Here it is, you look at it, I’m too jumpy, my fingers aren’t working.”

The cop didn’t like handling this wallet, but he took it, opened it up, and then spent a couple minutes looking at several documents the real Austin Humboldt would be reporting stolen six hours from now. Then, handing the wallet back, waiting while Dortmunder dropped it again and picked it up again and returned it to his pocket, he said, “You broke into this building half an hour ago, came in here, got locked in. What were you after?”

Dortmunder gaped at him. “What?”