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go, I don’t care. Don’t spoil it for me with your, like, moral qualms.” He rolled his eyes. “What else do you have to do? Anyway, think what Mr. Donnelly made last year—probably about five hundred thousand? You probably live on about ten thousand a year, at this point. Is that social justice? These are troubled times, Hollis: we have to look at the underlying causes. Is it for us to settle questions of right and wrong? Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.”
    He dragged on his cigarette.
    â€œBesides,” he said, exhaling, “it’s not like they’ll press charges or anything if they catch us. They know me.”
    â€œClose that window, would you, Blake?” Hollis said. “It’s fucking freezing in here.”
    A muscle in his chest started to twitch involuntarily, under the bathrobe, and he pulled the lapels around him more tightly.
    He looked up at the white Arctic sky.
    â€œThat’s what we get for trying to save the world,” he said wryly.
    Powdery snow swirled across the white crust.
    â€œHow’re you going to get a key?”
    â€œWe have to sneak in and get it. That’s the catch. There’s one door in the back that they always leave unlocked. It’s their Achilles’ heel. Their tragic flaw. We’ll have to get kind of pumped up for this, Hollis, it’s a punk thing. Sid Vicious, man. Épatez les bourgeois. Ne travaillez jamais. Anyway, aren’t you sick of hanging around this fucking slum? I sure as hell am.”
    Peters turned around and faced the other window, with his hands clasped behind his back. He was broad enough that his shoulders filled the frame, obscuring Hollis’s view. His hair made a wavy silhouette against the light outside.
    â€œWhat do you pay on this place, anyway?” he said, after a while.
    â€œFour twenty-five.”
    â€œThat’s not bad,” said Blake.
    â€œAnyway, what else do you have to do?” Peters turned back around to face them. “You need something to tell your grandkids about, when you’re old and horrible and drooling and nobody loves you anymore. They’ll have a spare set of house keys somewhere—we’ll just take those and then go back tomorrow night when they’re gone. They’ll never catch us. ‘All that which is necessary for life is the rightful property of the people.’ Comme a dit Robespierre.”
    â€œOh, très bon, ” Blake said. “Did you just make that up?”
    â€œYou know, Vanessa Redgrave used to leave the door of her house unlocked when she went out. She said all her stuff was supposed to belong to the people.”
    â€œWhy don’t you just go over to her place?”
    â€œWho’s Vanessa Redgrave?” said Hollis.
    â€œTheir son is doing some kind of internship or something at Hallmark, too,” Peters went on. “As in Hallmark cards. I hear he’s going out with the heiress to the Honeywell fortune, or whatever’s left of it. A real fucking comer, anyway. He and I were playfellows, in our youth.”
    He looked up.
    â€œAnyway, if we’re going it has to be tonight. Don’t you want to get out of your bubble for a change?”
    â€œWe fear change.”
    â€œWhat ever happened to boys in bubbles?” said Hollis. “Aren’t they news anymore? Are you going, Blake?”
    He shook his head.
    â€œI shouldn’t even hang around with you guys. This is the kind of stuff that comes up at confirmation hearings.”
    Hollis went back into the anteroom to finish dressing. He let the robe slip off his shoulders. Looking through a heap of clean clothes on the floor of the closet, he found a white tuxedo shirt with the collar ripped off and a dark red suit jacket. As he put on the jacket, he felt something in the inside pocket and took it out: a piece of onionskin typing paper folded in thirds. There was a block of text on it, typed with a