Deke may still have the title, but it finally feels like it’s mine.

Correction: mine and Charlie’s.

Ours. That’s a big word.

I say it out loud a few times: “Ours.”

But I experience an additional, complicated feeling, too, a feeling that if it weren’t so fresh might be wistfulness but which instead is only pain: it was merely two years ago that I conferred to the East River, not even a half mile south, the last installment of the last remains of Pinkerton. Despite my best efforts, the memory comes to me. The boxes of varying size messengered every day for a week, the incomprehensible contents, the notes whose only message was the scratchy, inexpert drawing of that hat with the knife through it. It starts poisoning the elation of looking at my future, so again I check the Internet and, finally, there it is on the New York Times Web site.

The good news couldn’t be any better if I had written the piece myself.

The report confirms the discovery of the K’plua in Schermer’s apartment and the arrest and charges. The DA affirms that the evidence makes an incontrovertible connection between Schermer and the Rat Burglar, and he is hopeful that very soon the arrest will lead to the apprehension of the Rat Burglar himself. The only pictures on the Times site are of Schermer exiting a cruiser with his hands cuffed at his waist and his head down, but on WhoIsTheRatBurglar.com there are close-up shots that indicate that the cops assuaged their longtime frustration with the thief by engaging in some extracurricular activity on Schermer’s person. The color of his cheeks is a crazy peppermint—an improbable mass of bright red and screaming white—and his face is now a pulpy Rorschach of what had once been an array of features in the usual arrangement. Now they are all debatables, open to conjecture, a critical adventure. “That’s the nose. No, that is. I assume you’re being facetious; that is clearly a nostril....”

They have beaten the Blistex right out of him.

It’s hard to look at, and I can’t help feeling a pinch of sorrow for Schermer.

The only other part of the report that isn’t custom-made for my delectation is, I finally see, the concluding paragraph in which Detective Nunes’s only comment on the Schermer-Rat Burglar connection is “We’re still waiting on forensics.”

Unfavorable, I suppose, but so what. Only yesterday my woes were like the plotlines of a Russian novel and now things are—dare I say it?—going my way.

Perhaps crime committed in the service of justice really does pay.

Again I inhale powerfully and savor the trash-torn riverscape. The water smells of diesel, decomposing organics, and waterlogged plastics; the boatyard has an overwhelming odor of fresh composite, marine oil, and sailcloth, and underneath it all the city summertime morning air—already chewed and spat out by millions of people—is trying and failing to offer something fresh.

But it doesn’t matter. To me it smells fantastic. To me it smells like life.