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closed from the inside.Then I stood absolutely still, breathing openmouthed, back in fruit-bat mode, listening.
    I heard the guy in back call another question but couldn’t make out the words, except for “Morrie,” which made sense, since the actual name of the Slugger was Morrie, or perhaps Maury, depending on whether it was short for Morris or Maurice, and my guess would be Morris, because—
    Stop it. Not germane. Listen.
    Nothing. Goddamn marble floors, can’t hear anyone who’s smart enough to slide his feet over them. The whole USC marching band could be sliding down the hall, heavily armed and wearing taps, and I wouldn’t hear them. I hate marble floors. Then, over the silent marching band, I heard a sound that I attributed to a shoe on wood and then a squeak, which I identified as the fifth stair down—it had creaked beneath my weight when I came up. Then another foot on wood and then another, getting softer, not louder. Going away.
    Mr. Back Stairs wasn’t so brave without Morrie or Maury to tag team with. Moving as quickly as I could without making noise, I slid the window the rest of the way open. Then I pried up the little V-shaped metal piece at the bottom of the screen, the one that snapped down over the post set into the windowsill to lock the screen in place, and, holding on to the V with my left hand, I used the straight razor in my right to make a cut about two inches inch long in the mesh, exactly where the screen met its wooden frame. It would be invisible unless someone pushed out on the screen.
    It was time to listen again, but the Slugger was making it hard for me to hear anything by screaming at the entire neighborhood as a way of expressing wrath over whoever had battered his gates, since that person had seemingly fled the scene. I personally knew and had used every single word in the Slugger’s stream of invective but had never heard them grouped in so many short strings of such force and elegance. It had a rare kind of public-restroom eloquence to it .
    Then I heard the second man’s voice, and it came through the open window, which meant he’d gone outside. This was the best news I’d had in some time. For half a second, I thought about running down those back stairs and out the door, but once I was on ground level, the only way off the lot was through the large space where the gates had been and where the Slugger was now. Instead I stuck with Plan B. I pushed the window all the way up and then angled the screen, which hung from hinges at its upper corners, away from the building. I climbed out onto the windowsill, holding the screen open above me, and found myself looking down at a drop of about eighteen feet to a flagstone path that ran beside the house. Chez Slugger was a relatively recent build, in a style that in the late 1990s was referred to as an “Iranian teardown,”meaning that a very nice house of standard size for the neighborhood—say, 12,000 square feet—had been bulldozed and replaced by a self-conscious, oversize architectural boil that could barely be shoehorned onto the lot, stopping only about eighteen inches from the property lines on the left and right. It also lowered the tone of the entire block.
    The original house had been surrounded by a serious wall, still standing and fourteen feet high, into which the now apparently destroyed gates had been set. The wall was about a foot wide, and the thickness of its ivy cover—the kind of verdant overachievement that British universities put on postcards—testified to the age of the house that had been knocked down; it had probably been built in the 1940s. As close as the wall was, if I jumped from the window and missed it, I would be falling past the ghost of a stately home that had undoubtedly housed several generations of interesting people, none of whom would be around to sympathize when I hit the flagstone.
    I was crouched on the windowsill, putting a