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Krine spotted a dead bulb before Sam did, his pay would be docked a nickel. On this particular Monday in late June he rolled down the aisle through women’s dresses wearing his rubber-heeled lace-ups and stepping easily so no one could hear his approach. He was uncomfortable about wearing such deceptively quiet shoes, but his job required them. The previous week he’d come upon a man wadding silk scarves into his pants pocket. Sam drifted up behind him like a cloud, inserting four fingers into his collar before the thief knew what was happening. He struggled and tried to run, but Sam pulled him down in the purse section, with a knee in his lower back, just as he’d learned in the army and in childhood scuffles with his cousins.
    It was eleven o’clock and Maurice began playing “Down Among the Sugar Cane” with only the ocarina stop pulled out, a signal to the restaurant crew to gear up for lunch. The store was flush with customers, a hundred or more on the main floor, browsing and listening, from time to time glancing up at the pastel-painted organ pipes and Maurice’s animated backside bouncing on the bench. People were shopping with music in their feet, and the overall motion in the store was that of a dance floor as lips mouthed the song’s words, hands reached out for ties, and fingers tapped shirtfronts in the rhythm of selection. Everyone was convinced by the chandeliers, decorative plaster, and music that they were happy to spend their money.
    Sam enjoyed his clean, snappy clothes and light duties. His wife, a seamstress, worked for a fine upholstery shop uptown, where they rented a cypress shotgun house and comfortably waited for another child to come along. He’d bought himself a decent secondhand Packard piano, and his wife purchased a Singer sewing machine that she could run like a small locomotive when rushed to complete a job. Their lives had found a happy, productive pattern. He now looked up at a store fixture and checked all the bulbs, keeping everything in control, all the nickels in his paycheck. Glancing around the morning-cool store at the pretty counter girls, he tapped a shiny shoe to the fluting pipe organ. He could work this job, he felt, for the rest of his life.
    And then the young couple approached him, their faces worried, confused. “Excuse us,” the man said, “but we can’t find our little girl.” Sam looked at their clothes. The woman showed a nice sense of style that she’d put together on a budget. The man’s suit was sharp, but shiny with wear.
    Sam remembered learning at his internship in Krine’s St. Louis store that it was common for a child to wander away from one parent engaged in the art of buying things, but when two lost track of a young one, something was wrong. Maybe the child had run off, or had fallen asleep in some under-counter bin, or was exploring the elevator machinery in the basement. Or worse.
    He smiled easily at them, but it was a store-bought smile, and he immediately scanned the nearest doors leading to the street. “Where was she the last time you saw her?”
    “It was over in men’s suits,” the man said.
    Sam noticed that he was wearing a carefully ironed shirt, and the thought came to him that the man’s wife loved him.
    She now pointed across the store. “We’ve looked for her for five minutes all over that side. We’ve been in the store a half hour, and honest, she was right around us all that time. She’s only three years old. A little blonde in a blue pinafore. Her name’s Lily.”
    “Has she wandered off before? Does she like to play hide-and-seek?”
    The mother, a blonde herself, her hair in a medium bob, shook her head.
    Sam smiled at her. “Don’t worry. You two cross over to the south side of the store and look there. I’ll recheck men’s suits.” While the parents began to filter through the maze of counters, he walked over toward Lillian Clarksby in cosmetics and asked her to close her register and check the front of the