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Passing a news-stand I saw a headline on a paper referring to the proposed MCL—Abraxas merger and remembered that I still had my cellphone powered off. As I walked along, I took it out and checked it for messages. There were two from Van Loon, the first puzzled, the second slightly irritated. I would have to talk to him soon and come up with some pre-emptive excuse for my absence over the coming weeks. I couldn’t just ignore him. After all, I owed the man nearly ten million dollars.

I spent an hour in Barnes & Noble, browsing through college text-books – enormous tomes in fine print, with charts and diagrams and a blizzard of italicized Latin and Greek terminology. Finally, I picked out eight books with titles like Biochemistry & Behaviour, Vol. 1., Principles of Neurology and The Cerebral Cortex, paid for them by credit card and left the store weighed down with two extremely heavy bags in each hand. I got a cab out on Fifth Avenue, just as it was starting to rain. By the time we pulled up at the Celestial, it had turned into a downpour, and in the ten or so seconds it took me to hobble across the plaza to the main entrance of the building, I got soaked. But I didn’t care — I was excited and dying to get up to the apartment so I could make a start on these textbooks.

When I was inside, walking across the lobby, the guy on the desk, Richie, waved over at me.

‘Mr Spinola. Hi. Yeah … I let those guys in.’

‘What?’

‘I let them in. They just left about twenty minutes ago.’

I walked over towards the desk.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Those guys you said were delivering something. They were here.’

I put the bags down, and looked at him.

‘I didn’t say anything to you about any guys delivering … anything. What are you talking about?’

He swallowed and looked nervous all of a sudden.

‘Mr Spinola, you … you called me about an hour ago, you said some guys were coming to deliver something and that I was to give them a key …’

‘I called you?’

‘Yes.’

Water was dripping now from my hair down into the back of my shirt collar.

‘Yes,’ he repeated, as though to reassure himself. ‘The line was bad, you said so yourself, it was your cellphone …’

I picked up the bags and started walking very quickly towards the elevators.

‘Mr Spinola?’

I ignored him.

‘Mr Spinola? Are … are we OK about this?’

I got into an elevator, pressed the button and as the car climbed up to the sixty-eighth floor, I could feel my heart beating so hard that I had to take deep breaths and bang my fist on the side panels of the car a couple of times to steady myself. Then I ran a hand through my hair and shook my head. Drops of water sprayed everywhere.

At sixty-eight, I picked up the two bags and slid out of the car before the elevator door was even fully open. I rushed along the corridor to my apartment, dropped the bags on the floor and fumbled in my jacket pocket for the key. When I got the key out, I had a hard time getting it into the keyhole. I eventually managed to get the door open, but the second I stepped inside the apartment I knew that everything was lost.

I’d known it downstairs in the lobby. I’d known it the second I heard Richie say the words, I let those guys in …

I looked around at the damage. The boxes and wooden crates in the middle of the living-room had been knocked over and smashed open, and everything was strewn about the place. I rushed over and searched through the mess of books and clothes and kitchen implements for the holdall bag where I’d been keeping the envelope with the stash of MDT pills in it. After a while I found the bag – but it was empty. The envelope with the pills in it was gone, as was Vernon’s little black notebook. In the vain hope that the envelope was still around somewhere – that it had maybe just fallen out of the bag — I searched through everything, and then I searched through everything again. But it was no use.

The MDT was gone.

I went over to the window and looked out. It was still raining. Seeing the rain from this high an angle was weird, as though a couple more floors up and you’d be clear of it, looking down through sunshine at grey blankets of cloud.

I turned around and leant back against the window. The room was so large and bright, and there was such a small amount of stuff in it, that the mess in the centre wasn’t even that much of a mess. The room hadn’t been trashed, because there was so little in it to trash – just my few belongings from Tenth Street. They’d done a much better job on Vernon’s place.

I stood there for quite a while – in shock, I suppose – not thinking anything. I glanced over at the open door. The two Barnes & Noble bags were still outside in the hallway, sitting on the floor next to each other, looking as though they were patiently waiting to be carried inside.

Then the phone rang.