Jerry had the Thomas Brothers, open to the right page, on the front seat beside him. He checked the road atlas when he stopped at a red light. Yes, the address he was looking for should be in the next block of Ocean Boulevard. The light turned green. He got going more slowly than he might have, but before the guy in the pickup behind him could honk.

There it was! The Long Beach apartment building was an older cousin to the ones that had sprouted like toadstools in Hawthorne. Instead of adobe-colored stucco and a Spanish-tile roof, it wore white stucco with blue shingles on top. Maybe it was supposed to seem transplanted from a Greek island.

He found a parking space and, carrying a suitcase he got out of the trunk, walked back to the building. He walked straight inside, too; it didn’t have any kind of security system. His head swung right, then left.

Apartment 127 was to the left. As he’d been told to do, he knocked twice, then once. It made him feel silly, as if he were in a bad spy movie. But evidently genuine spies did stuff like that, too.

The door opened. A man who looked as if he’d been a leatherneck not real long before eyed him with no expression. “Yeah?”

“My name’s Jerry Stieglitz. John sent me.” Jerry felt silly again.

But the tough-looking fellow stood aside. “C’mon in. Set your suitcase down on the couch. We’ll check it out. Then go over to Vic at the table there. He’ll take care of your paperwork.”

“Okay.” Jerry followed instructions one more time.

Another guy who looked as if he could take care of himself started to unlatch the suitcase, then paused. “Anything monogrammed in here? Shirt? Belt? Handkerchiefs, even?”

“Nope. Not my style,” Jerry said.

“Awright. We’ll look it over anyway.” The man opened the lid and started inspecting Jerry’s clothes.

Vic, behind the table, was older than the other two and seemed milder. “Give me your wallet.” Jerry handed it to him. Vic extracted his driver’s license, Mastercard, and Social Security card. Jerry felt a pang. You weren’t really you unless you had the paperwork to prove it. Then Vic pulled a small envelope from what looked like a cash box. “Here you go.”

The envelope had Steinberg written on it in a script a sixth-grade teacher would have envied. Jerry opened it. Inside were a California license with his photo and address but the name Gerard Sheldon Steinberg, a Social Security card with his number and the same name, and a credit card with that name and a number that wasn’t his.

He held up the Mastercard. “Can I really use this?”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Vic said. “Same credit limit as your real one. It’ll work.”

“What if I need to write a check? My ID won’t match.”