To break in, I think. They break in. He breaks in. I broke in.

Oh God. What am I doing?

Herk is already inside. He is singing a tune—AC / DC’s “Big Balls,” I realize—and he turns around, pats me chummily on the genitals, nods me into the room.

And before I know it, I’m in.

Schermer’s apartment has self-important faux-Federal appointments that aspire to create the veneer of aristocracy. The leitmotif is cordovan and dollar green and polished, Endusty surfaces. The bookshelf floating in the middle of the room makes it look like he bought everything ever published by Taschen, just to cover all the bases, and the window treatments look as if they have been lifted from the set of Wall Street. It is a room that wants very badly to have “comma Esquire” after it. Aside from being a reassuring testimony to the axiom that money does not purchase taste, however, it does not immediately offer anything useful.

“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.