get it, and get out. Almost as good is when you know what you’re looking for; you go through the place systematically, checking those locations where it’s likely to be, and as soon as you find it you get to go home.
The next best thing—and probably the most enjoyable—is when you’re not looking for anything in particular. Missions of this sort are burglary at its best, and they run the gamut from the meticulously planned suburban break-in, where you time the neighborhood security patrol and run rings around the electronic alarm system, to a completely impulsive crime of opportunity, where you kick the door in and hope for the best. You don’t know what they’ve got or where they put it, but you get to be Goldilocks, sleeping in all the beds and eating all the porridge, and you never know what you’re going to find until you find it.
And, finally, we have the kind of fool’s errand I was on this lovely Sunday. I didn’t know what I wanted or where he’d stashed it, or even if it existed, whatever it might turn out to be. I had to look everywhere, because I didn’t know how big or small it was, or if it had to be kept cold or dry or out of drafts.
And it’s terribly frustrating. If you find something, is that it? Or is there something more waiting to be found? Conversely, if you don’t find anything, do you keep at it until something turns up? Or should you go on home because there’s nothing there?
You know what it’s like? Sex without orgasm. How can you tell when you’re supposed to stop?
So I was almost glad to have CAPHOB to think about while I searched. I wouldn’t call my musing terribly productive, but I came up with some interesting ideas.
1. Suppose CAPHOB was an acronym. Suppose each letter stood for a word. That would be a good way to compress a lot of information into the number of letters you could fit on the side of an attaché case before your life trickled out of you. Just what the letters stood for was hard to say, but the possibilities were extensive, surely. Can Anyone Pinch Hit Or Bunt? Criminal Activity Pays Horribly On Balance. Cancel Anniversary Party—Having Our Baby! None of these struck me as the sort of thing I’d be likely to choose as my last word to the world, but I hadn’t been lying there bleeding, struggling to scribble my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the city.
2. Suppose CAPHOB was upside down. After all, I didn’t know how Hoberman had spent the years since his adventures in Anatruria. Maybe he’d devoted some of them to a career selling life insurance, until jotting things down upside down had become second nature to him. To test the hypothesis, I printed CAPHOB and turned the piece of paper upside down, and I got the same meaningless word upside down and backwards. Then I printed the individual letters upside down, and this worked a little better, because four of the letters were unchanged. What I got looked something like CVdHOB, except the V was really an upside-down A. I suppose I could have taken this a step further and tried to work out what CVDHOB might be an acronym for, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
3. Maybe the most obvious explanation was the real one, and he’d been trying to write his name. This did make a certain kind of sense, actually. There’d been no identification found on his person, which suggested that Candlemas might have taken his wallet from him while he lay dying. Maybe Hoberman had recoiled at the thought of rotting away in an unmarked grave, and wanted to let the world know who he was. When you considered the fact that even now the tag on his toe read “Hugo Candlemas,” his concern didn’t seem so farfetched. It was a damned unsatisfying dying message, pointing not to the killer but to the victim, but what are you going to do, send it back to Hoberman with a rejection slip?
4. Maybe, as Carolyn had suggested earlier, Hoberman was dyslexic. He’d written the right letters but got them in the wrong order. I switched them around without coming up with anything more promising than HOPCAB. It was true, to be sure, that the Boccaccio (say) was only a short hop away by cab, but could that possibly be the urgent information Hoberman wanted