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my collection and smacked us around. After a chat with a couple uniformed cops, I paid a visit to the hospital for stitches to my scalp, an X-ray, and a sleepless night. The next morning found me at home, playing host to Agent Renard, a plainclothes ECO (Environmental Control Officer) from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. He was a balding and tawny black guy with reading glasses and the disposition of an indifferent schoolmaster. Only by virtue of the fact that I’m a longtime New Yorker, exposed to every conceivable ethnic variety, could I venture to say his clipped, lilting accent was West Indian—Haitian, perhaps.
    Also enjoying my hospitality was a New York City Police Department detective named Walker, who looked on with distaste. I knew him from our local precinct. That is to say, he had been gently harassing me for years, convinced that my entrepreneurial bent with taxidermy was somehow a crooked enterprise. Police have always just seemed to have an innate feeling that I’m up to no good, ever since I was a kid. With my younger brother, Nick, it was even worse, though in his case it was justified. And I did have a great-uncle who was a bank robber. Maybe it’s genetics—I got the felon’s pheromones but not the inclination. Walker had gotten a rotten whiff off me right from our first encounter.
    Angie sat on the couch, hunched glumly over a cup of tea, holding an ice pack to her bruised cheek. I had an ice pack of my own clamped over the back of my head where I’d been gun-whipped. But I was too agitated to sit and paced back and forth in front of Fred. Even though he’s a fairly valuable African piece, I guess the attackers figured he was too cumbersome to grab quickly. I should really have him spring-loaded, so whenever an intruder enters, Fred lurches forward and scares the bejesus out of them. I can still picture those trick-or-treaters running down the dark driveway.
    Renard cast a sleepy eye over my list of missing property, cleared his throat, and read it aloud:
    “Skins: two leopard, five zebra, one tiger, one panther, two lioness, three lion, one grizzly. Rugs: two polar bear, two Kodiak, one lion. Skulls: three ocelot, one tiger, four lion, one cheetah. A pair of carved ivory elephant tusks . . .” He paused to inhale. “. . . And one white crow in a bell jar.
    “Tell me.” Renard closed his eyes, and for a second I thought he’d dozed off. “You have papers for this, and the rest of your collection?” His eyes tweaked open, peering closely at a snipe on the shelf by his elbow.
    Papers?
Put him in a black leather trench coat and he’d be a shoe-in for the Gestapo. Most ECOs use the word
documentation.
    I knew Renard’s predecessor, Pete Durban, a bold character who had once been a lion tamer. No lie. Circuses still need lions tamed, after all. Durban had come to trust that I was on the up-and-up. He’d gone through all my
documentation.
Now I had to break in the new kid, and at a time like this.
    “He’s got paper up the wazoo,” Walker laughed, “if you think that means anything.”
    “Detective Walker is a big fan of ours,” I said, trying to get Agent Renard to look at me. “He’s been over for tea and scones lots of times, you know, just to check up on us, make sure we’re all right.”
    Walker flushed. “Patrolmen seen all kinds of things going in and outta here. Five’ll get you ten this operation isn’t completely kosher, Renard. And what’s it with this character? This Russian? Hey.” Walker snapped his fingers at Otto. “You saw these bandits?”
    Otto was posed in the booth by the window like a Rodin bronze in the clutches of some existential conundrum.
    “But of course. Workink many job. My vife, Luba, not happy, so I vurk. Vhen voman like Cossack, not good go to home, eh? Not lookink.”
    “What’s this guy talking about?” Walker sneered.
    “He was working late, Walker,” I growled. “He was out back smoking a cigarette when it