THE GAME. FOLLOWING THIS METTI WOULD LEAVE MONEY SCATTERED about the apartment for me to discover. And small expensive items—jade cuff links, coins from foreign countries, figurines of crystal or mineral, so small they could easily be slipped into a pocket.

One- and five-dollar bills. Half-dollars, quarters, dimes and nickels in unexpected places like drawers used to store towels, linens.

Are you tempted, Violet? Go right ahead, dear. Help yourself.

Plenty where this comes from!

And when I’d become accustomed to discovering bills of small denominations, which I always left where I found them, there was a twenty-dollar bill made to look as if it had casually fallen between a bedside table and a bed—and here, on the floor of a closet, amid shoes, a fifty.

A fifty! This was serious money, to me.

Of course, I was not tempted. I would never steal from Dr. Metti even with his tacit permission. But the game excited me.

For the nature of a game is uncertainty. How will it end?

And who will be winner?

A treasure hunt, it was. Except nothing would be moved far from its place of discovery, so that Metti could have no reason to think that it might be missing.

The bills, I would leave in plain view, on a tabletop. Which is where a cleaning-woman would naturally leave something she’d found on the floor in a room.

Articles of clothing to be put in the laundry, with pockets—frequently there would be coins in these pockets, even folded bills. (Since all clients leave items in pockets, I could not determine if this was part of Dr. Metti’s game, or accidental.) Felice had instructed me: check all pockets before putting clothes in the laundry, place items you find in a small basket in the laundry room where the client is sure to see them.

But the bills and other items scattered through the apartment had not been there when Felice and I had cleaned it together.

This is new. This is for my sake. But—no.

By this time I had cleaned for other clients at the Agency, uneventfully—all women. No games. No one remotely like Orlando Metti.

WORKING ALONE IN THE APARTMENT I BECAME APPREHENSIVE, anxious—waiting for the client’s key in the lock. Waiting for him to return.

Obsessively shutting off the vacuum cleaner so that I could hear more clearly if he was at the door—but no. Not yet.

I’d learned: Metti had been divorced eighteen months before. In the rooms of the apartment there were no visible reminders of a past: no photographs of a family.