He turned the volume up some more. Steely Dan was electric guitars and keyboard and drums. Humpback songs—some people called them vocalizations, but Jerry thought songs was more descriptive and more accurate—put him in mind of sad trombones grooving with bassoons. They weren’t, of course, but that was what they reminded him of.

In 1970, a couple of months after Jerry got his B.S. at UCLA, pioneering scholar Roger Payne had released an album called Songs of the Humpback Whale. It became one of the most improbable top sellers of all time. One of the tracks was sped up to fourteen times its actual speed, and sounded astonishingly like birdsong.

Jerry appreciated the accelerated version’s different beauty, but he liked the whale sounds better at their true pace. He tried to find patterns in them, and to work out why the humpbacks sang the way they did. Were males courting females, as birds did with their melodies? Were they talking about where the krill was thickest? Or were they just … singing? Nobody knew. Looking for answers, though, was endlessly fascinating—to him, anyhow.

Since he had the headphones on and the volume cranked up, he didn’t hear people coming up the stairs to the second floor—his floor—of the apartment building. He felt the footsteps, though, through his legs and backside. He was too focused on humpback sounds to notice that those footsteps stopped in front of his door.

He didn’t notice the knocks on the door right away, either. But they got louder and more insistent. He glanced at the stereo. When he put on the headphones, he usually remembered to poke the button that took the main speakers out of the loop. But he wasn’t perfect about it. He’d already irked the couple downstairs two or three times. Did they have humpbacks swimming through their ceiling at heart-stopping volume?

As a matter of fact, they didn’t. The knocking kept on anyway. Muttering, Jerry stopped the tape, stood up, went to the door, and opened it.

Three men he’d never seen before stood on the walkway outside his apartment, one in front and two behind. They all wore suits. One of the men in back carried a briefcase. The guy in front was in his fifties, short and burly. He wore his hair in a greased pompadour, as if he’d decided he liked the style in 1946 and never noticed the times had changed.

“You are Jerome Samuel Stieglitz?” he barked.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Jerry answered automatically. “Uh, who are you?” He hoped like hell they weren’t cops—he had a couple of joints stashed in a kitchen drawer.

Instead of answering, the burly man pushed past him and into the apartment’s long, narrow front room. His two buddies followed. As soon as everybody was inside, one of the henchmen closed the door again.

“Who are you people?” Jerry repeated.