“To burgle,” I say out loud. “They burgle, he burgles, I burgled.”

“Focus, Starks,” Herk hisses at me from the bedroom. “We’ve only got an hour.”

I try. I peel off the mask and affix it rakishly to the head of a Cupid statue, push my face flush against an air vent, and breathe deeply. It is refreshing but doesn’t do much else. There is nothing incriminating in the living room, the kitchen, or the entryway. His datebook doesn’t reveal any appointments with Azar; there is no suggestive “RB”⁵³ jotted anywhere. I am beginning to succumb to discouragement when I hear from the other room a very upbeat “Bingo!”

“You got something?”

Herk enters the room carrying a cardboard box and wearing, outside of his homeless getup, a matching set of frilly, mauve ladies’ undergarments. He puts the box over his head, like a woman carrying a jug of water from the river, and gives me some grotesque Cuban motion.

“Schermer’s got a girlfriend?” I say, amazed.

“I think Schermer is the girlfriend.”

Herk unshoulders the burlap bag and throws it on the sofa, freeing up his hands, then shakes the box for me, sifting back and forth as if panning for gold, revealing hundreds of lavishly airbrushed tableaux of young boys engaged in erotic contortions with excited adult men. At the bottom of the box is a dildo so enlarged, and so curved, that it cannot possibly have any real-world application. It is the flawless and glossy taupe of Silly Putty, except for the head, which is an alarming, veined violet. Herk puts it to his hip then unsheathes it as if it were a scimitar and drops speedily to one knee in a dramatic, hood-ornament posture.

If we hadn’t been laughing we would have heard the footsteps sooner. As it happens, though, I don’t shush Herk or push him into the kitchen or duck behind the bookcase until Schermer is practically at his door.

“What the fuck?” signals his discovery of the disabled lock.

To convict, I think. They convict, he convicts, I am convicted.

In the reflection of a picture’s glass I can see Schermer stalk- ing down the entryway.⁵⁴ He inserts a hand into the coat closet and it reappears grasping a massive shotgun.

This more or less eliminates all verbs from my head except for “to die,” which presses against my skull with formidable energy.

“Whoever you are,” says Schermer, “I know you know what this sound means.” In the picture I see his hand jerk up and down, making the unmistakable and terrifying sound of a shotgun chambering: chick-CHICK! “This is a Remington 870. At fifty feet an 870 will knock you head over heels. At ten feet it will blow your head clean off. If you want to live, come out now with your hands up.”

From the kitchen Herk is waving at me like mad and making a clasping gesture, up and down, in front of his face. Then I get it: the ski mask. I crane around but Cupid is in the corner twenty feet away. I cast about for a weapon of some sort but outside of coasters and crystal candleholders there is nothing within reach. The footsteps get closer. A drop of sweat falling from my brow to the floor sounds, to me, as loud as a snare drum. It occurs to me that this may be a metaphor of some sort: Otto Starks, betrayed by his conscience.