At the door, because he wasn’t going to give his magic card away, Herman paused to take a roll of duct tape from inside his tuxedo jacket, tear off a length, and attach it to the edge of the door over the striker to keep it from locking. Spies, political agents, and other amateurs put such tape on a door horizontally, so that it shows on both front and back, and can be noticed by a passing security person. Herman ran the tape vertically, which did the job just as well while remaining invisible when the door was shut.

Having made cottage three ready, Herman marched off and this time made his way around the Battle-Lake along the path illuminated by low-wattage knee-high flower-shaped fixtures. Beyond the lake, he approached a guard standing next to the walkway with his hands clasped behind him, observing the late-night stillness with the satisfied look of a man who likes peace and quiet for their own sake. This guard, however, was not actually a guard at all, but was another associate of John Dortmunder’s, named Ralph Demrovsky; he too wore a uniform copped earlier this evening from Finest Fancy Linen Service.

When Herman approached, Ralph smiled and held his right hand out. Herman took no notice of him, but somehow, as he strode by, the clipboard left his hand and wound up in Ralph’s. And then, as Herman moved on through tree shadows between lighted areas toward the main building, his right hand brushed across the front of his tux jacket, and when next he moved into the light the nametag was gone from there, and he was now merely a handsome black man in a tux, surely a guest of the hotel, though better dressed than most these days. Still, there are always some well-dressed hotel guests in Las Vegas, even in these latter times, people who maintain the standards and joie de vivre of the good old days of mob bosses and Arab sheiks.

Herman entered the hotel not as though he owned it, but as though he were thinking of buying it. He strode past the open coffee shop and the closed boutiques and around the check-in desk, where things were very quiet at the moment, with only one clerk on duty. To get to the elevators, he had to skirt the edge of the slot machine area, and surreptitiously he sniffed a little, to see if he could tell anything about the air, but of course he couldn’t. And from the look of the few people he could see in among the slot machines, it hadn’t started to take effect as yet.

Well, there was plenty of time.

Herman took an elevator to the fourteenth floor, and walked down a hallway chirping with the chatter of many television sets behind many closed doors. He was on his way to Anne Marie’s room. A nice lady, he thought, he being a connoisseur in that area. If Andy Kelp needed a lady, then that was probably the one he needed. However, Herman would keep his opinion to himself. He did not intrude into other people’s love lives unless he had hopes of becoming a participant therein, and neither Andy Kelp nor Anne Marie Carpinaw interested him in that way, which was probably just as well.

Rap-a-de-rap; rap, rap. The agreed-upon signal. The door opened, and it was Anne Marie standing there, giving him a skeptical look. “Room service,” he suggested.

“Come on in,” she said, and he did, and she shut the door behind him, saying, “Took you long enough.”

“Well, you know how it is, ma’am,” he said, playing along. “We get awful busy down there in the kitchen.”

“That’s all well and good,” she said. “But there’s no telling how upset I’d be, if it happened I’d ordered anything.”

“Thank you, ma’am, I’ll tell the manager you said so,” Herman said, grinning at her. Then he turned away to see Dortmunder and Kelp both in chairs over by the window, looking out at the night. Dortmunder was in a guard uniform, Kelp dressed like a bank examiner in black suit, round-lensed black-framed eyeglasses, and navy blue bow tie with white polka dots. Herman could see their backs in the room and their fronts reflected in the window they were looking out. He said, “There’s nothing out there.”

They turned at last to look at him, with glazed eyes, like people who’ve been at the aquarium too long. Dortmunder said, “That’s what I’m hoping for.”

“Nothing out there,” Kelp explained.

“A quiet night,” Herman assured them, and went over to also look out the window.

Fascinating. By night, the hotel grounds became a sketch outline drawing of itself, the little flower-shaped lights becoming dots of amber against the black, defining the paths, drawing a pointillist line around the Battle-Lake, marking off the cottages. The only truly illuminated area was the pool; its underwater lights were kept on all night, creating a strange blue-green bouillon down there, its surface shadowed, its depths cool and crystal clear. Being the only center of light made the pool look much closer than it really was, as though you could open this window here and jump right in.

Herman looked until he realized he was about to become as mesmerized as Dortmunder and Kelp, and then he backed away from it, shook his head, grinned at the other two, and said, “What are you trying to see out there, anyway?”

“Trouble,” Dortmunder said.

Kelp explained, “If anything goes wrong in the caper, we’ll know it from up here.”

“And,” Anne Marie said, “they’ll get out of here.”

“Absolutely,” Kelp assured her.

Dortmunder said, “Red lights coming from out there,” and waved in the general direction of employee parking and Paradise Road, the parallel street behind the Strip.

Kelp showed a walkie-talkie. “Any problem,” he said, “I warn the guys, and John goes to get his ring.”

“And I turn off the light,” Anne Marie said, “and I was asleep in bed here, all by myself, the whole time.”

“Poor you,” Herman said, with a little smile.

She gave him an oh-come-on look.

“Plan two,” Dortmunder explained.

“Plan six or seven, actually,” Kelp said. “And how are you doing, Herman?”

“Just fine,” Herman assured them. “John,” he said, “you got that rich man extremely worried. He’s like a cat on a hot tin pan alley.”

Dortmunder, interested, said, “You got in there all right?”

Herman did his big toothy yassuh-boss smile: “Jess as easy,” he said, “as fallin off a scaffold.” Reverting to his former persona, he said, “I rigged one kitchen window and one bedroom window so they look locked but you just give them a tug. I sussed out the circuit breaker box; it’s in the kitchen, the line goes straight down. There’s no basement under those buildings, just concrete slabs, so the line must go through conduit inside the slab. Give me pen and paper and I’ll do you a drawing of the layout inside there.”

“Good,” Dortmunder said.

The room’s furnishings included a round fake-wood table under a hanging swag lamp—some styles are so good, they never go away—which Dortmunder and Kelp had moved to make it easier for them to see out the window and hit their heads on the lamp. Now, while Kelp turned his chair and pushed it close to that table, Anne Marie produced sheets of hotel stationery and a hotel pen. Herman sat at the table, hit his head on the lamp, stood up, moved the chair, sat at the table, and did a very good schematic drawing of the cottage, using the proper architectural symbols for door, window, closet, and built-in furniture pieces, like toilet and stove.

As he drew, Herman described the look of the place, and as he finished he said, “There’s four uniformed guards inside, four outside, but they’re not from the hotel, they’re imported.”

“Extra security,” Dortmunder commented.

“Extra, yeah, but they don’t know the lay of the land.” Herman put down his pen. “I got cottage three ready,” he said. “Door’s open, one little light in the kitchen so’s you can find your way around.”

“I should go there now,” Dortmunder decided. “You John the Baptist me,” meaning Herman, looking more presentable, should go first, to be sure the coast was clear.