As though in a trance, Vera obeyed the man. She took her purse from her lap and emptied all its belongings onto the table. “See,” she said, “it’s not there.” Tears began sliding down Vera Bundle’s cheeks. This was a catastrophe. All of Vera’s identification was in that wallet: Her metro bus card. Her Sears & Roebuck charge card. Her library card. A blank check. Her American Express card, which she intended to charge most of the expenses of this trip to, and receipts not only from today but from three days prior to her leaving. There were also some supermarket food stamps and coupons and even her lottery ticket, which she probably hadn’t won. But you never know. Maybe she had won a small prize. Most important, there were three hundred dollars in hard-saved cash in her wallet. “Oh, Lord,” she moaned aloud, “what am I to do?”

The man sitting across from Vera said, “Try and be calm. Think. Where could you have left it? Where were you before you came here?”

“I wasn’t anywhere,” she answered, wiping tears away with one hand, putting her possessions back into her purse with the other. “I came straight to this place from my hotel.”

“That’s it! That’s where you left your wallet. In your hotel room,” said the man with as much certainty and cheer as he could muster.

“I know I didn’t leave it in the room. I remember checking my pocketbook to make sure my wallet was in it before I left the hotel. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” wailed Vera Bundle.

“Are you a tourist?” asked the man.

“Yes. I’m from Steubenville. Steubenville’s in Ohio.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I just got here this afternoon.”

“I see.” The man thought for a moment and said, “Where is your hotel?”

“It’s the Baldwin. It’s on Thirty-third Street and Eighth Avenue.”

“That’s not the best neighborhood. Did you walk uptown from there?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember being bumped or jarred on your way here?”

“Bumped or jarred?”

“I’m only asking because I had my wallet picked out of my pocket not too long ago after I was bumped on the street. Were you bumped coming up here tonight?”

“Yes,” said Vera, “as a matter of fact I was. I do remember being bumped. I was bumped by a mean boy while I waited for a traffic light to change. He almost knocked me down.”

“It’s an old trick of pickpockets. They’ll distract you by bumping into you and at the same time they’ll open your purse and take out your wallet, or if you’re a man, slip your wallet out of your pants pocket. Sometimes they carry an overcoat over one arm and they’ll slide whatever they take out of your purse into the hand hidden under the overcoat, or whatever it is they’re carrying.”

“Dry cleaning. The boy had been carrying dry cleaning,” recalled Vera, and remembered her open purse when she met the other lad. The nice one.