No.

It was six in the morning, and time for my Sunday to start. I put on a singlet and a pair of nylon running shorts. I pulled my socks on, reached for my Sauconys, then set them aside and got an old pair of New Balance 450s from the closet. I never wore them anymore because they were falling apart, but you couldn’t touch them for comfort.

I put a few things in a fanny pack and hooked it around my waist. I found a terry-cloth sweatband and put it on, picked up a blue-and-white checkered hand towel and tucked that into the waistband of my fanny pack. I let myself out of my apartment, locked up after myself, and put my keys in the fanny pack and zipped it shut.

Outside, the sky was just lightening up, which was more than I could say for myself. I started off walking briskly, and that seemed to me as much as ought to be required of anyone. If a man needs to move any faster than that, let him take a cab.

At Seventy-second Street, I forced myself to turn left, toward Riverside Park and the Hudson River. I walked for another twenty or thirty yards, then made myself ease into a slow trot.

You’re doing it, I told myself. You’re running. You fool, you’re running!

Not for very long, however. I trotted for half a block or so, then switched back to my brisk walking pace. By the time I got on the asphalt park path I was trotting again, and fifty yards down the line I was walking.

It’s remarkable the extent to which a healthy and reasonably active young man can allow himself to get out of shape. It’s even more remarkable the way he can hold two irreconcilable ideas in his mind at the same time. As I huffed and puffed my way around the park, I marveled at the fact that I’d once been masochistic enough to put myself through this pointless and hideous ritual every single day. And, even as I was thinking this, a part of my mind was toying with the prospect of getting back into the horrible swing of it. Just an easy two or three miles a day, I was actually telling myself. Three times a week, say. Just enough to work up a sweat, keep the blood moving, tone the old cardiovascular whatsit. What was so bad about that?

Sweat beaded on my brow, gathered under my arms, dampened the front of my singlet. Well, that was the object, wasn’t it? I’d signed on for this farce with the sole intent of working up a visible lather of perspiration, not pushing myself to the brink of coronary catastrophe. I could take it down a notch now, gear down to my old brisk walk, and then in the final stretch—

“Hey, Bernie! What a surprise, huh?”

“Wally,” I said.

“Today’s my weekly long run,” he said. “I figure from here to the Cloisters and back is pretty darn close to a half marathon. And coming back it’s mostly downhill.”

“Piece of cake.”

“You said it. What I’d really like to do, I’d like to do it twice, go for a full twenty-six miles. But then I’d run the risk of peaking too soon.”

“You don’t want to do that.”

“Not with the marathon coming up the first Sunday in November. You think you’ll run it next year, Bernie? You could, you know. Just increase your distance a little bit every week and before you know it twenty-six miles is just a walk in the park. Bernie, you’re walking. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Why’d you suddenly stop running?”

“I’m practicing for the marathon,” I said. “You said it’ll be a walk in the park, and that’s what I’m doing, walking in the park.”

“Pick it up a little,” he urged. “We’ll take a nice easy run up to Eighty-first Street. Then you can walk back home. How does that sound?”

It sounded terrible. “It sounds wonderful,” I assured him, “but I don’t want to peak too soon.”

I guess he saw the wisdom in that. He took off, heading gamely uptown, and I found my way out of the park and retraced my steps to Seventy-second and West End. I was walking now, and not too briskly, either, but the part of the system that controls perspiration was a little late getting the message. The sweat was still pouring out of me, and my shorts and singlet were soaked.

Good.

Maybe, I thought, I could have avoided running altogether. Maybe I could have simply soaked my clothes in the sink before putting them on. Then all I’d have had to do was pour a cup of water over my head and I’d be a perfect study in verisimilitude.

Oh, well.

At West End I turned north, not south, and started jogging again. There’s something about the sight of the finish line that gets the old adrenaline flowing, and I guess I put on a burst of speed at the end without having intended to. When I reached the entrance of 304, my heart was pounding and I was gasping for breath, even as I mopped my face with the blue towel.

I chugged right past the doorman and into the elevator.

Luke Santangelo’s door didn’t present much of a problem. There was just one lock, and I picked my way through it with ease. He’d double-locked it, though, so I wouldn’t have been any more able than Doll to get past it with a credit card.

Inside, I gave the place a quick check to make sure I wasn’t sharing the premises with any other persons, living or dead. This was a simpler process than it had been Thursday night in 9-G. Unlike the Nugents’ Classic Six, 7-B was a less-than-classic one-bedroom apartment. There was only a single bathroom and no one had been so inconsiderate as to lock its door, let alone die in it. When I had established as much I returned to the living room and put on the pair of gloves I’d stowed in my fanny pack.

Then I got down to business.

When I left Luke’s apartment I was wearing a suit. It was the only one in his closet, a three-button charcoal pinstripe with a label indicating it had been bought (or, considering what I knew about Luke, stolen) from Brooks Brothers. We were about the same size, Luke and I, but the pants were a little tight in the seat and waist and the jacket was a little large in the shoulders.

Maybe if I got back to running three times a week, I thought, and did an upper-body workout with free weights on the days I didn’t run—

I found a shirt that fit me, freshly ironed. He’d forgotten to tell them “no starch.” He had half a dozen ties hanging on a nail, and I don’t know where he’d stolen those, or why he’d bothered. I picked the one with red and black stripes.

His shoes were small on my feet, but I hate the way running shoes look with a suit, although it’s a costume with which Wally Hemphill seems perfectly happy. I tried on all three pairs of leather shoes in his closet and settled on the black penny loafers as the most nearly comfortable of the lot, hoping I wouldn’t have to wear them for very long.

His attaché case was under the bed, along with some other luggage. The attaché was the only one that was locked, and the only one that seemed to contain anything. I picked it open and found, to my gratification if not greatly to my surprise, that it was full of baseball cards. I’d thought I might add my sneakers and running gear, but there wasn’t any room.

Before I closed the attaché case, I chose a single baseball card and found a temporary home for it in a pocket of the maroon backpack. I took a quick turn around the apartment, but I did not linger long. I had my picks in a pocket of the suit jacket, where I could get at them easily, and I took off the pliofilm gloves just before I quit the apartment and slipped them into another pocket. I had the attaché case in one hand, and I had a canvas tote bag over one arm. It contained my sneakers and running clothes and fanny pack, and it bore the logo of the Mercurial Wombat, a gift shop in Tucumcari, New Mexico.

There was a tenant in the hallway, a woman waiting for the elevator, but if she looked in my direction all she could have seen was a man locking his door. It wasn’t my door, and I wasn’t using a key, but there was no way for her to know that. Before I’d finished, the elevator came and whisked her away. Then I took a silk hanky from the breast pocket of my suit, wiped my prints from the doorknob, and walked to the end of the corridor, where a door led to a staircase.