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looking official.
    The one thing you don’t want is to look furtive. Slink and the world slinks after you, and soon enough the long arm of the law reaches out and takes you by thecollar. But if you look as though you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing, why, they’ll hand you the key to the front door and the combination to the safe.
    I was guided in this matter by my Uncle Hi. A man of unblemished reputation, Hi was on his way home from a business trip when he saw, hanging over the check-in desk at a flight gate, an electrified sign advertising the airline. (It was Braniff, so you know this didn’t happen a week ago. I was in high school at the time. I won’t tell you who was President.)
    Hi’s son, my cousin Sheldon, collected signs and decorated his room with them. I remember one from Planters Peanuts, with old Mr. Peanut leaning against a wall and grinning like something Stephen King would write about. (In West Africa I suppose they call him Mr. Groundnut.) This sign, though, showed a plane and a palm tree, and touted Braniff’s flights to the Caribbean, and Uncle Hi thought it would look great in Shelly’s room.
    So he walked around the corner to his own flight lounge, where he set down his valise, took off his tie and jacket, and rolled up his sleeves.
    Then he went back to the Braniff counter, pocket notebook in hand. There was a line, but he walked right up to the front of it, where a young woman was handling check-ins and issuing boarding passes.
    “This the sign?” he demanded.
    She looked blank or begged his pardon or stammered. Whatever.
    “This here,” he said, pointing. “Is this the sign?”
    “Uh, I guess so.”
    “Yeah,” Hi said. “This is the one.” And he unhooked it from its moorings, with the young woman interrupting her own chores to give him a hand. He tucked itunder his arm and went back to where he’d left his jacket and luggage. It was undisturbed, as he’d assumed it would be. (An honest man himself, Hi took honesty for granted in others, and was rarely disappointed.) He stowed the sign in his valise, unrolled his shirtsleeves, tied his tie, put on his suit jacket, and waited for them to call his flight.
    The sign did in fact look splendid in my cousin Shelly’s room, and when he got old enough to redecorate, replacing Mr. Peanut and his friends with Playboy centerfolds, the Braniff sign remained. It sort of fit, Shelly said, because you could just picture those babes under that palm tree, sipping piña coladas and showing off their full-body suntans. You could even imagine them as Braniff stewardesses, offering you your choice of coffee, tea, or milk, and a whole lot more.
    Well, that was years ago. Shelly’s a doctor now, and the sign in his waiting room is all about medical insurance, and no one on earth would ever want to steal it. Uncle Hi’s retired and living in Pompano Beach, Florida, clipping coupons and playing golf and adding stamps to his collection. I never steal a stamp collection without thinking of Hi. He collects British Commonwealth, and now and then over the years I’ll run across something I think he can use, some scarce Victorian provisionals or Edward VII high-values, and I’ll send them along with a note explaining that I found them tucked between the pages of an old volume of Martin Chuzzlewit. If Hi suspects the stamps might have a less wholesome provenance, he’s too much of a gentleman to mention it, and too ardent a collector to send them back.
    I’m the family’s sole black sheep, and I sometimes wonder what went wrong. With upstanding role models on both the Rhodenbarr and the Grimes sides of myfamily, why did I wind up with a lifelong penchant for skulking and stealing?
    A bad gene in the woodpile, I sometimes think. A chromosome gone haywire. But then I’ll think of my Uncle Hi, and I’ll find myself wondering. Look at his life and you see an honest businessman, ethical and law-abiding. But one afternoon in an airport he’d