That’s clever of the Rat Burglar, and exactly what I expect of him. What isn’t so swift, however, is that he gives me a good look at his eyes and I see that he is wearing darkly colored contacts that cannot conceal faint flecks of blue.

So, I think, he has blue eyes. That’s a valuable piece of information.

If I live long enough to tell anyone.

Then the Rat Burglar does something strange. He reaches out and presses two fingers to my neck. At first I think he is going to strangle me, but he doesn’t. He is checking on my heart rate. He keeps his fingers there for a long time, maybe thirty seconds, then he nods and gives me an affirmative pat. Next he inserts a dextrous hand inside my pocket and extracts the velvety box. It pops open and suddenly the Rat Burglar has Charlie’s ring out. He slides it on a black-gloved finger and holds it up to the light, rotating it critically, inspecting. With every vestige of strength I have left, I try to lash out at him. It took seven years of subservitude in the colonies before I got the gigs that paid for Charlie’s ring—literally my blood and sweat—and I’ll be damned if I’ll let him take it without a fight. The rupturing feeling in my stomach, however, reduces my offensive to a spastic bucking-bronco number that seems only to amuse the Rat Burglar. He takes his time appraising the ring, then obviously decides it isn’t worth stealing, reinserts it into the box and again into my pocket. From his bag he extracts a roll of something that looks, incredibly, like toilet paper, places it gingerly beside my head, springs up and starts walking away to a hole in the ceiling from which a rope is hanging. Insult to injury, I think: he came in through the air shaft. Another excruciating flare of pain ignites and blackness descends on me in a compressive, seismic wave. This is it. I am going under.

The last thing I think is why is he after the K’plua? It’s only six damn figures.

The last thing I feel is something undignified happening in my pants.

Heaven, or: Last April at the Frick

Pulses are obsessed with dying. Probably dozens of times I have heard locker-room talk about how you lose control of certain bodily functions, but I had hoped that the inglorious trouser activity might occur after you had lost your senses. Apparently not. But I am grateful for one thing: the parts of my life that flash before me are of Charlie.

I met her at the Frick. One of my ex-MacGuffins, a Boucher, was on display and I felt lonely for it one day midweek, so I stopped by. I must have been really entranced because I didn’t hear her behind me. I was only vaguely aware of a headnote of white ginger and tiara flower with some suggestion of petit-grain. I was so engrossed in the Boucher that the odor seemed like an olfactory evocation of the painting itself. My brain just didn’t process it as a separate stimulation. Then I retreated a few steps to get a fuller view of the painting, bumped into something, and realized that the source of the floral odors was a beautiful woman in a white summer dress.