I wanted the four thousand dollars due me upon delivery of the blue box-the thousand I’d received in advance bulged reassuringly in my hip pocket-but I also wanted whatever else might come my way. I was standing in the apartment of a man who did not evidently have to worry about the source of his next meal, and if I got lucky I might very well turn a five-thousand-dollar sure thing into a score big enough to buy my groceries for the next year or so.

Because I no longer like to work any more than I have to. It’s a thrill, no question about it, but the more you work the worse the odds get. Crack enough doors and sooner or later you are going to fall down. Every once in a while you’ll get arrested and a certain number of arrests will stick. Four, five, six jobs a year-that ought to be plenty. I didn’t think so a few years ago when I still had things to prove to myself. Well, you live and you learn, and generally in that order.

I gave those drawers a fast shuffle, down one side and up the other, and I found papers and photograph albums and account ledgers and rings full of keys that probably didn’t fit anything and a booklet half-full of three-cent stamps (remember them?) and one of a pair of fur-lined kid gloves and one of a pair of unlined pigskin gloves and one ear-muff of the sort that your mother made you wear and a perpetual calendar issued in 1949 by the Marine Trust Company of Buffalo, New York, and a Bible, King James version, no larger than a pack of playing cards, and a pack of playing cards, Tally-Ho version, no larger than the Bible, and a lot of envelopes which probably still had letters in them, but who cared, and stacks of canceled checks bearing various dates over the past two decades, held together by desiccated rubber bands, and enough loose paper clips to make a chain that would serve as a jump rope for a child, or perhaps even for an adult, and a postcard from Watkins Glen, and some fountain pens and some ball pens and some felt pens and no end of pencils, all with broken tips, and…