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carrying a cardboard tube wrapped in brown paper in broad daylight.
    My head was clear and I wasn’t in the least bit sleepy. Ordinarily, when the weather was good I would walk the thirty-odd blocks to my apartment, stopping for breakfast at a coffee shop on Second Avenue, before getting into bed and sleeping until two o’clock in the afternoon. But today I knew I couldn’t sleep, had no need of sleep.
    When I opened the door of the one-room apartment, its windows gray in the cold north light, I went to the refrigerator in the kitchenette and took out and opened a bottle of beer. I didn’t bother to take off my overcoat. Then, occasionally taking a sip of beer, I tore the paper from the cardboard tube. Using a knife, I managed to slit the tube down one side. It was stuffed from top to bottom with one-hundred-dollar bills.
    I took the bills out one by one, smoothed them, and arranged them in piles of ten on the kitchen table. When I finished, there were a hundred piles. One hundred thousand dollars. They covered the table.
    I stared silently at the bills spread out on the table. I finished the beer. I wasn’t conscious of feeling any emotion, not fear, or exhilaration, or regret. I looked at my watch. It was just eight forty. The banks wouldn’t open for another twenty minutes.
    I got a small bag from the closet and stacked the money in it. There was no one else who had a key to the apartment, but there was no sense in taking any chances. Carrying the bag, I went downstairs and walked to the avenue. There was a stationery store on the next block and I bought a packet of rubber bands and three thick manila envelopes, the largest in the shop.
    Then I went back to the apartment, locked the door, took off my overcoat and jacket, and methodically slipped the rubber bands around each batch of bills before putting it into one of the manila envelopes. I kept one thousand dollars, which I put in my wallet, for immediate use.
    I sealed the envelopes, grimacing at the taste of the glue as I licked the flaps: Then I took another bottle of beer from the refrigerator, poured the beer into a glass, and sipped at it, sitting in front of the table, in front of the neat pile of thick brown envelopes.
    I had taken the apartment furnished and only the books in the room were mine. And there weren’t many of those. When I finished a book, I usually threw it away. There was never enough heat and when I sat in the one frayed easy chair to read, I usually wore the padded ski jacket that hung on a hook on the back of the front door. This morning, while it was as cold as usual, and even though I was now in my shirt-sleeves, I felt perfectly comfortable.
    I knew that I was going to have to move out. And quit the job. And get out of the city. I had no plan beyond that, but I knew that one day or another somebody was going to appear, looking for one hundred thousand dollars.
    At the bank I had to write out two specimen signatures on separate cards. My hand was absolutely steady. The sealed manila envelopes with the money in them lay on the desk at which I was sitting, facing the young assistant manager who was serving me. He had the bland, sexless face of a seminarian. The conversation between us was short and businesslike. I’d shaved and was neatly dressed. I still had a couple of decent suits left over from the old days, and today I had put on a sober, quiet, gray Glen plaid with a blue oxford shirt and solid blue tie. I wanted to give the impression of being a solid citizen, perhaps not wealthy, certainly not wealthy, but modestly prosperous, a careful, industrious man who might have some bonds and some legal papers that were too valuable to leave lying around the house.
    “Your address, please, Mr. Grimes,” the assistant manager was saying.
    I gave him the address of the St. Augustine. If anybody got as far as the bank in the search for me, which was unlikely in any case, there would be no useful information to be found.
    “Will you be the