“Yes, that’s me. You found it?”

Orelia sounded surprised, then happy, the distant tone gone.

“Si, señora, we have fount your bag. I check and wallet ee-ssa there and credit cards. But scusi, no cash.”

“No, don’t be sorry. Thank you. Grazie.”

“You come now? We close in an hour. We not have dinner service today. Only weekends.”

“Let me think.” Orelia hesitated.

William panicked at her hesitation. The thought of another day or night staked outside her house was not pleasant. He wanted that book and he wanted this over. An idea flipped into his mind.

“Okay, I take home and bring back tom-orrro to keepa safe for you señora.”

William heard a sigh, then a long pause.

“No, no, I’ll come now. Keep it there. Twenty minutes and I will be there.”

Five minutes later, her car pulled through the gothic entrance, which looked so impassable only an hour ago. It took off at a high speed, turned the corner and disappeared. The gates swung closed behind her but that didn’t matter.

Orelia’s absence lowered the risk of discovery while he scaled the gates. Imposing as they might be, he’d sat here long enough to calculate the footholds in the design and had assessed that he could manage. He was no young monkey, but he was a man fighting for his life with a time disadvantage. That would add some pep to his muscles.

The Googled article, which he’d glossed over at first, suggested burglars stole bags not for their contents but for access to their victim’s home. They had the keys and driver’s license from the first part of the scam. Then through the White Pages they found the owner’s address. Next challenge: how to organize for no-one to be home?

Simple. Call from the bar, eatery or business where they’d stolen the bag. Voila! Said burglars welcome to the pleasure of an empty target. They then need only calculate the round-trip travel time for the owner to return to the initial crime scene.

William figured he had forty minutes or so.

After waiting five precious minutes to be certain there’d be no surprise return, he moved to the entrance. He could be a ninja or CIA—watching TV crime shows had taught him a lot—in the way he smoothly side-crouched forward, checking up and down the road for passing cars.

Everything seemed clear for the climb. Now standing before the gates, up close they appeared far taller and more unscalable than they had from his hiding spot.

After several attempts to pull himself up by fitting his foot on an entwined metal vine running across one of the horizontal bars, he managed to somehow succeed. Once there, he found another foothold and scaled it with far less difficulty than he had expected.

Hey, he was getting good at this. If he ever got his life back and rebuilt his career, he might just write a spy story with his new experience. What about a horror tale? A man, his world destroyed through magic. There’s a novel which required no research. Funny how he could joke about the mess of his life. He guessed it stopped him from panicking.