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joint on Second Avenue in the Seventies, and unless you own a piece of it and want to inspect the register receipts there’s really only one reason to go there. I had gone for that very reason, but that evening the selection of the accessible young ladies was as dazzling as the dinner menu on a lifeboat. I’d decided to move on as soon as my wineglass was empty when a voice at my elbow spoke my last name softly.
    There was something faintly familiar about the voice. I turned, and there was the man I’ve described, his eyes just failing to meet my own. My first thought was that no, he was not a cop, and for this fact I was grateful. My second thought was that his face, like his voice, was familiar. My third thought was that I didn’t know him. I don’t recall my fourth thought, though it’s possible I had one.
    “Want to talk to you,” he said. “Something you’ll be interested in.”
    “We can talk here,” I said. “Do I know you?”
    “No. I guess we can talk here at that. Not much of a crowd, is there? I guess they do better on weekends.”
    “Generally,” I said, and because it was that sort of a place, “Do you come here often?”
    “First time.”
    “Interesting. I don’t come here too often myself. Maybe once or twice a month. But it’s interesting that we should run into each other here, especially since you seem to know me and I don’t seem to know you. There’s something familiar about you, and yet—”
    “I followed you.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “We coulda talked in your neighborhood, one of those joints on Seventy-second where you hang out, but I figure the man’s gotta live there. You follow me? Why shit where the man eats, that’s the question I ask myself.”
    “Ah,” I said, as if that cleared things up.
    Which it emphatically did not. You doubtless understand, having come into all this in roundabout fashion, but I had not the slightest idea what this man wanted. Then the bartender materialized before us and I learned that what my companion wanted was a tall Scotch and soda, and after that drink had been brought and my own wineglass replenished I learned what else he wanted.
    “I want you to get something for me,” he said.
    “I don’t understand.”
    “See, I know who you are, Rhodenbarr.”
    “So it would seem. At least you know my name, and I don’t know yours, and—”
    “I know how you make your money. Not to beat against the bush, Rhodenbarr, but what you are is a burglar.”
    I glanced nervously around the room. His voice had been pitched low and the conversational level in the bar was high, but his tone had about it the quality of a stage whisper and I checked to see if our conversation had caught anyone’s interest. Apparently it had not.
    I said, “Of course I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “I suggest you cut the shit.”
    “Oh,” I said, and took a sip of wine. “All right. Consider it cut.”
    “There’s this thing I want you to steal for me. It’s in a certain apartment and I’ll be able to tell you when you can get in. The building’s got security, meaning a doorman around the clock, but there’s no alarm system or nothing. Just the doorman.”
    “That’s easy,” I said, responding automatically. Then I gave my shoulders a shake-shake-shake. “You seem to know things about me,” I said.
    “Like what you do for a living.”
    “Yes, just that sort of thing. You should also know that I work alone.”
    “I didn’t figure to go in there with you, kid.”
    “And that I find my own jobs.”
    He frowned. “What I’m doing is handing you a piece of cake, Rhodenbarr. I’m talking about youwork an hour and you pick up five thousand dollars. That’s not bad for an hour’s work.”
    “Not bad at all.”
    “You do that forty hours a week, just go and figure the money you’d make.”
    “Two hundred thousand a week,” I said promptly.
    “Whatever the hell it comes to.”
    “That’s what it comes to, all right. Annually,