The kitchen is weirdly stocked with dozens of bags of potato chips,64 but the living room is just a living room, and the bedroom, thank God, is just a bedroom. On the table are three pictures—one, a shot of me and Pinkerton at the Tompkins Square dog run that I didn’t know she had; two, a faded, perfectly square, eighties-era Polaroid of a beautiful woman with her dark hair up in a red kerchief, holding a baby who is clutching at her necklace; and three, a picture of adult-Charlie standing beside a gray-haired man with a manicured beard. There is something donnish yet mischievous about him. Sad, too. He is smiling, but it’s too tight, tympanic—it’s trying hard to cover something. His arm is around Charlie, who is wearing a blue and white dress with sandals. It’s somewhere outdoors and there is a lake and green mountains behind them. Maybe it’s just the vernal scene, but Charlie seems much younger. Maybe it’s the dress, or the fact that her hair is straightened, or—then I get it: her nose. It does not have its boomerang bend. It hasn’t yet been broken. It didn’t happen when she was twelve. She wasn’t riding her bicycle along the wall. She hadn’t been trying to wave at a boy.

Even that was a lie.

Again I lash out at Jagjeet. This time he grabs the punch in his catcher-mitt hand. One freebie, it seems, is all I get.

“Tell me everything,” I say when he releases me. “Start at the beginning.”

“There isn’t time. When Jimmy the Hat wakes up he will come after us, and he’ll think to come here. I needed to show you this so you would believe me, but now we need to go,” he says. “Charlie needs our help right now.”

“She what?”

“She needs our help.”

“In case you didn’t notice, Charlie is the Rat Burglar. And she has taken everything from me. Everything.”

“She’s in trouble.”

“She ruined my career.”

“She needs you.”

“I’ll probably go to jail because of her.”

“She helped keep you out of jail.”

“She tried to fucking paralyze me!”

“No, she didn’t.”

“She lied to me just like Herkimer. Jimmy. Whoever the hell he is.”

“You lied to her, too.”

“Not like this.”

“Otto, we can argue later. But she’s in bad trouble now— right now—and I can’t help her alone.”

“Have you been following this conversation? Charlie ruined my life. Why should I help her?” The words sting; immediately I regret them.

Jagjeet beetles his brow, looks out the window anxiously, then pulls a DVD out of his pocket and inserts it in the player on the dresser.

“What’s this?” I say.

“Security recording. Last night,” he says. “Watch.”