Flint showed up on a Saturday with the specific energy of someone who had been thinking about something for too long and had finally decided to do it.

  Zelig opened the door and read this immediately.

  “No.” He said.

  “I haven’t said anything yet.” Flint said.

  “You have the face.”

  “I don’t have a face.”

  “You have a face you get when you’ve come up with something.” Zelig stepped back and let him in. “It’s the same face you had before the auction and before the Sera incident.”

  Flint sat down and put both hands flat on the table in the manner of someone presenting something reasonable. “This is completely different from both of those.”

  Marie looked up from the other side of the room.

  “Don’t look at me.” Flint said to her. “This involves Zelig.”

  “Everything eventually involves Zelig.” Marie said, and went back to her mending.

  Flint looked at Zelig. “There’s a man in the lower Middling Ring who runs a small import business. Textiles, legitimate, nothing interesting. But he also runs a side operation moving luxury goods for Shining Place clients who don’t want those goods connected to their names.”

  “I know what a discretionary service is.” Zelig said.

  “He has a collection of items right now waiting for pickup. Sitting in his back office. The pickup isn’t until Wednesday.” Flint spread his hands. “Today is Saturday.”

  “What kind of items.”

  “Jewelry mostly. Some decorative pieces. Nothing magical, nothing complicated. In and out in twenty minutes.”

  Zelig looked at him. “This is not a Hollow Hand job.”

  “No.”

  “Ervan doesn’t know about it.”

  “Ervan doesn’t need to know about it.” Flint said. “It’s small. Two people. Clean.”

  Zelig thought about it.

  The math was straightforward. Low risk, moderate return, no complications, no connection to anything currently live. The only variable was Flint going off script, which was always the variable with Flint.

  “You stay on script.” Zelig said.

  Flint put a hand over his heart. “Always.”

  Marie made a small sound from the other side of the room that was not quite a word.

  The import business was on a clean street in the lower Middling Ring, the kind of street where everything was slightly too tidy in the specific way of places that did not want to attract the wrong attention. A narrow building, two floors, with a sign above the door that said Carwell Imports in lettering that had been chosen to be forgettable.

  The plan was simple. Flint goes in as a potential client, talks to whoever is at the front, keeps them occupied. Zelig goes around the side, through the loading entrance which Flint had established was unlocked during business hours, into the back office, takes the collection, leaves.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Simple.

  They stood across the street and looked at it.

  “Twenty minutes.” Zelig said.

  “Fifteen.” Flint said. “I work fast.”

  They split up.

  Zelig found the loading entrance where Flint said it would be and it was unlocked where Flint said it would be and the back office was where Flint said it would be and for approximately four minutes everything was going exactly as planned which should have been the warning.

  The collection was in a wooden box on the desk, not locked, not hidden. He opened it. Jewelry, decorative pieces, exactly what Flint had described. He took the box.

  He was turning to leave when the door from the front room opened and a man walked in carrying two cups of tea.

  They looked at each other.

  The man was holding two cups of tea because he had been making tea for himself and someone else, which meant Flint was in the front room, which meant Flint was supposed to be keeping this man occupied in the front room, which meant something had gone wrong with that specific part of the plan.

  The man looked at the empty desk where the box had been. Looked at Zelig holding the box. Back at the desk.

  Zelig held up one hand in a gesture that was not quite an apology and not quite a greeting but occupied the space between them.

  “Wrong room.” He said.

  The man stared at him.

  From the front room came Flint’s voice, cheerful and completely unaware, finishing a sentence about seasonal import tariffs.

  Zelig put the box under his arm and walked past the man through the door into the front room. Flint was mid conversation with a young woman behind the counter who was apparently not the man who had just walked in on Zelig, which meant there were two people in this building and Flint had been talking to the wrong one.

  Flint saw Zelig. Saw the box. Saw Zelig’s expression.

  His face did a rapid series of small calculations.

  “Wonderful.” Flint said to the woman, warmly, standing up. “I’ll be in touch about the order. My associate and I have another appointment.”

  They left.

  On the street Flint matched Zelig’s pace and said nothing for half a block.

  “There were two of them.” He said.

  “Yes.”

  “I was aware of the one.”

  “Yes.”

  “The second one was not present when I surveyed the building on Thursday.”

  “No.” Zelig said. “He arrived today specifically to make tea.”

  “That’s an unfortunate variable.”

  “It is.” Zelig said. “It’s the kind of variable that a proper survey accounts for.”

  Flint was quiet for a moment. “Did he see your face.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will he report it.”

  Zelig thought about the man standing in the doorway holding two cups of tea with the expression of someone whose day had taken a turn they were still processing. “He’ll think about it for a day and then decide it’s not worth the conversation about why there was a collection of someone else’s jewelry in his employer’s back office.”

  Flint considered this. “So it’s fine.”

  “It’s fine.” Zelig said. “No thanks to you.”

  “I talked to the wrong person.” Flint said. “It happens.”

  “It happens to you specifically.”

  “I contain multitudes.” Flint said. “Some of them are better at surveillance than others.”

  Zelig stopped walking and looked at him.

  Flint looked back with the expression that was not quite an apology and was not quite not an apology, that specific Flint expression that acknowledged fault without performing guilt about it.

  “Fifteen minutes.” Zelig said. “You said fifteen minutes.”

  “It was closer to twelve actually, if you count from when you entered the building.”

  “The man with the tea, Flint.”

  “The man with the tea.” Flint agreed solemnly.

  They stood on the street for a moment.

  Then Zelig started walking again and Flint fell into step beside him and after about a block Flint said “the woman at the counter knew a remarkable amount about seasonal tariff structures for someone who works at a front operation” and Zelig said “you were supposed to be keeping her occupied not learning things from her” and Flint said “I can do both” and Zelig said “clearly not” and Flint laughed and that was more or less that.

  Marie was at the table when they got back.

  She looked at them. At the box under Zelig’s arm. Back at them.

  “Wrong room.” Zelig said, preemptively.

  Marie looked at Flint.

  “There were two of them.” Flint said.

  Marie nodded slowly in the way she nodded when she had decided she did not need the full picture to have an opinion about it. She went back to her mending.

  “Tea?” She said.

  “Please.” Said Flint, sitting down.

  Zelig put the box on the shelf and sat down and Marie made three cups and they sat around the table and Flint told the story with considerably more dramatic detail than it deserved and Marie listened and at the part about the man with the tea she put her cup down and pressed her lips together and Flint said “you can laugh, it’s objectively funny” and Marie said “I’m not laughing” and then she laughed.

  It was a good afternoon.