“Oh, look,” he said. “Here’s one of my early sermons on the Transfiguration.”

“Focus,” I said. But then I remembered going through the papers just like this after the burglary And that made me remember Jeremiah Beaufort again.

I didn’t altogether stop sorting through the papers, but at the same time I told Carlo everything I had found out about the man who had identified himself to us as Jerry Nolan. Everything. What he was in prison for. How his sentence was commuted. All his slipups. All my suspicions. Then there was one of those little leaps that made the nerve in my neck spark. Some might call it genius. Some might call it my continued failure to make the connection between Beaufort and Carlo.

“Perfesser. Could Jerry have seen the sketch the night he came for dinner?”

Carlo described that moment when they were both in the library and he had shown Jerry the sketch. How Jerry had appeared impressed by it, and said he remembered the case although he was a boy at the time.

Just a boy. I thought:

Beaufort had been the only person other than Carlo to know about the sketch.

Beaufort might know how valuable such a thing could be.

If our home had been the only break-in, and the sketch was stolen, Beaufort would be suspected.

Our house, and the sketch, may have been the true target.

“He’s a criminal, and he’s made some pretty stupid mistakes,” I said after I’d spoken my thoughts aloud.

Carlo’s eyes got that vacant expression they get when he thinks of something that, most of the time, has nothing to do with his current circumstances or whereabouts. “Bonhoeffer,” he said.

“Bon-who-fer?”

Without getting up from the floor, like a boy he scooted on his butt back into the bookshelves and scanned one toward the bottom.

“How do you find anything in—”

He interrupted my question by pulling out a worn tome from the right side of the second-to-the-bottommost shelf, waved it at me like a victory flag, and flipped it open to the back, where he scanned the index, then to a different page. “Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of good than malice,” he read, and kept going. “One may protest against evil; it can be exposed, and, if need be, prevented by use of force.” Here he looked up and nodded at me as if I represented said use of force. Then he looked down at the book again. “Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.” Carlo looked up at me and finished the quote by heart. “For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than a malicious one.”

“What if the person is both stupid and malicious?” I asked.

“Then I believe you’re screwed,” Carlo said mildly.