“When?”

“I don’t know. My first year at Janus. Azar’s men, mainly. Frankie Nickels hit me with four shots of triphosgene on his last job. I had a sore throat for weeks.”

“So pre-Rat Burglar?” she says, addressing my lapel.

“Yes.”

“How about Kolokol-9 and norisol and oxonone?”

“Kolokol-9 is the latest iteration of Kolokol-1, the psycho-chemical gas used to such poor effect in the Moscow theater siege. Nine is much cleaner. Norisol is another incapacitating agent. Ditto oxonone.”

“Lethal?”

“No. None of them. And all have benign side effects. And before you ask it, yes, I was hit by all of them by the Rat Burglar. And I’m sure you know all about pachylax.”

Nunes’s face reveals nothing.

“So pre-Rat Burglar you were subject to all lethal toxins.”

“Not all . . .”

“Some lethal, some non,” she concedes. “But during that time you had a perfect retention record. Spotless. And then along comes the Rat Burlgar and in about nine months you get rolled three times—excuse me, four—by the same thief, who uses only nonlethal drugs. That’s an awfully considerate brand of thief. How would you account for something like that?”

“The guy’s just getting lucky. He probably guessed that since none of the lethal drugs were working on me, I hadn’t worked as hard on the nonlethals. And he’s right.”

“There is no video footage of the Rat Burlgar. No audio. No hair. Not a flake of dandruff. No DNA whatsoever. No evidence of any sort. Convenient, no?”

“I’ve given you a physical description. And,” I say, “if you read my retention failure report, you’ll see that he has blue eyes.”

Nunes ignores this. “The Rat Burglar has never been stopped. Never caught, never foiled, never left any useful clues. In every other case of attempted burglaries of sites you were working you were able either to facilitate the apprehension of the thief or to make observations—truly remarkable observations—that led to arrest and conviction. But with the Rat Burglar you haven’t been able to provide, well, anything. Why is that?”

I say nothing. With some cops this is enough. This time it isn’t.

“Something else I’ve had a hard time figuring out. The Rat Burglar takes you for a tribal African mask valued at less than half a million dollars when at the same facility, not even two rooms away, another pulse—a less qualified pulse, according to Mr. Polizzi-Molanphy—is sitting on over ten million dollars’ worth of artwork. But instead the Rat Burglar chooses your room, and your mask. How would you explain something like that?”

“Perhaps he has a crack problem. Maybe he’s bad with numbers. Could be he is a genius with door locks but not so bright about the criminal underworld. How the hell should I know?”

“I’m going to have to disagree with you there, Starks. It sounds like an inside job to me.” Nunes’s eyes go small and fierce, bird-bright. “And that makes you the most favorable candidate.”

She’s not wrong. Something smells like shit in Denmark, all right, and it’s me, figuratively and literally, but I do my best not to get it.