Strangers

directly to the walk-in closet in the bedroom and removed the false partition at the rear of it. He pulled two bags from the secret, three-foot-deep storage space and took them into the dark living room, not bothering to turn on lights. He piled the bags beside his favorite armchair, which stood by a large window.
        He got a bottle of Becks from the refrigerator, opened it, and returned to the living room. He sat in the darkness for a while, by the window, looking down on the park, where lights reflected off the snow-covered ground and made strange shadows in the bare-limbed trees.
        He was stalling, and he knew it. Finally he switched on the reading lamp beside the chair. He pulled the smallest of the two bags in front of him, opened it, and began to scoop out the contents.
        Jewels. Diamond pendants, diamond necklaces, glittering diamond chokers. A diamond and emerald bracelet. Three diamond and sapphire bracelets. Rings, broaches, barrettes, stickpins, jeweled hat pins.
        These were the proceeds of a heist that he had pulled off single-handedly six weeks ago. It should have been a two-man job, but with extensive and imaginative planning, he had found a way to handle it himself, and it had gone smoothly.
        The only problem was that he had gotten no kick whatsoever from that heist. When a job had been successfully concluded, Jack was usually in a grand mood for days after. From his point of view, these were not simply crimes but also acts of retribution against the straight world, payment for what it had done to him and to Jenny. Until the age of twenty-nine, he had given much to society, to his country, but as a reward he had wound up in a Central American hellhole, in a dictator's prison, where he had been left to rot. And Jenny… He could not bear to think about the condition in which he had found her when, at last, he had escaped and come home. Now, he no longer gave to society but took from it, and with intense pleasure. His greatest satisfaction was breaking the rules, taking what he wanted, getting away with it - until the jewelry heist six weeks ago. At the end of that operation, he had felt no triumph, no sense of retribution. That lack of excitement scared him. It was, after all, what he lived for.
        Sitting in the armchair by the window, he piled the jewelry in his lap, held selected pieces up to the light, and tried once more to gain a feeling of accomplishment and revenge.
        He should have disposed of the jewelry in the days immediately following the burglary. But he was reluctant to part with it until he had squeezed at least a small measure of satisfaction from it.
        Troubled by his continued lack of feeling, he put the jewels back into the sack from which he had taken them.
        The other sack contained his share of the proceeds from the robbery at the fratellanza warehouse five days ago. They had been able to open only one of the two safes, but that had contained over $3,100,000 - more than a million apiece, in untraceable twenties, fifties, and hundreds.
        By now he should have begun to convert the cash into cashier's checks and other negotiable instruments for deposit, by mail, in his Swiss accounts. However, he held on to it because, as with the jewelry, the possession of it had not yet given him a sense of triumph.
        He removed thick stacks of tightly banded currency from the bag and held them, turned them over in his hands. He brought them to his face and smelled them. That singular scent of money was usually exciting in itself - but not this time. But he did not feel triumphant, clever, lawless, or in any way superior to the obedient mice who scurried through society's maze exactly as they were taught. He just felt empty.
        If this change in him had occurred with the warehouse job, he would have attributed it to having stolen from other thieves, rather than from the straight world. But his reaction subsequent to the jewelry heist had been the same, and that victim had been a legitimate business. It was his ennui following the jewelry store action that caused him to move on to another job sooner than he should have. Usually he pulled off one job every three or four months, but only five weeks had elapsed between his most recent operations.
        All right, so maybe the usual thrill eluded him on both these recent jobs because the money was no longer important to him. He had set aside enough to support himself in