“That’s the police,” I said. “You can leave through the back. Or you can kill us all and then let the cops shoot you. Or you can put down your gun and come quietly.”
“Or you can call off your dog and then look at twenty years in Leavenworth for assaulting a federal officer,” the second thug said.
“Yeah, right.” I kept my gun pointed at the man on the floor.
Someone let the cops in. They pounded up the stairs, phones crackling, shouting questions. The woman who sold bar supplies was putting in her furious two cents, Peppy was barking. Mr. Contreras was shouting instructions to the cops. In another instant the room was filled with people in riot helmets and flak jackets. I backed away from the thug on the floor, grabbed Mitch’s leash and managed to haul him off the man’s chest.
For a moment all was confusion: guns, shouted questions, dogs, neighbors, the Soong baby’s howls. The police made me and the two thugs hand over our weapons and then demanded an accounting.
“We’re federal agents—” the second thug began.
“I live here,” I interrupted. “I just got home. My dog sensed an intruder and when the guy on the floor opened the door to shoot us, my dog jumped him and knocked him to the ground. They’re pretending to be federal agents in the hopes you won’t arrest them.”
“We shot because you were attacking—”
“Shut up!” I snapped. “You do not break into people’s homes and shoot them when they return home. Not unless you are drug dealers pretending to be Feds. If you are Feds, you produce credentials, and even then you’d damned well better have a warrant, and even then you don’t break in. You wait for the homeowner to return.”
“Okay,” the police sergeant said. “Let’s take this one at a time. Who is the homeowner?”
“She is,” Mr. Contreras said. “Like she just told you, she just got home—”
“Do you live here, sir?” the squad leader asked.
“On the ground floor, but her and me, we share the dogs, see, and when we got in from their last walk—”
A woman in the unit came over to Mr. Contreras and asked him to join her on my couch. “Let’s let the sarge sort this out, okay, sir?”
The sergeant decided to start with the intruders. “What were you doing here?”
The man who’d been on the floor had joined his partner over by my piano. I saw that they’d opened the back and had been searching in the strings and I felt my blood pressure start to rise.
“What were you looking for in my piano?” I said. “If you’ve damaged the strings, I don’t care if it’s Janet Napolitano or Pablo Escobar you’re working for, you are paying for every dime of repairs—”
“Ma’am,” the sergeant said, “I understand you’re angry, but let’s sit down and talk this through quietly.”
“I want to search the apartment first,” I said. “If they broke down the back door I need to call an emergency service. I also want to see if there’s anyone else lurking in here.”
The sergeant thought that was reasonable; one of his officers escorted me through my four rooms. I took Mitch with me; every time one of the thugs spoke, his hackles rose. I didn’t think Mr. Contreras could hold Mitch if the dog thought they needed another lesson in manners.
The goons had pulled my old trunk out of my hall walk-in closet. They’d tumbled music and papers onto the floor, including Gabriella’s hand-marked score of Don Giovanni. Three or four pages had been torn in their carelessness. I blinked back tears of fury and grief.
In my bedroom they had dismantled my dresser drawers, they’d searched the books on my bedside table. I glanced in the closet. They hadn’t stumbled on the safe behind my hanging shoe holder, that was one mercy.
In the kitchen they’d dumped ten days’ of recycling onto the floor. I looked at the back door. All the locks were in place. They’d come in through the front, with some pretty sophisticated tools.
In the dining room, where I use the built-in china displays as bookshelves, they’d pulled off most of the books and left them open on the table. A number had fallen to the floor. I squatted next to the cupboard where I keep my most precious possession, the red wineglasses my mother brought with her when she fled Italy in 1941.
The glasses were safe; the rest of the wreckage I could deal with. I picked up the books and realized that my work papers were gone.
“All the papers I was working on at my dining room table are missing,” I said. “I can’t tell at a glance if they’ve taken anything else—the chaos is too horrible,” I told the officer.
The officer texted the information to her sergeant. We returned to the living room, where we found that the thugs had produced federal credentials.
The sergeant looked sourly at the two men. “These may be legitimate, but I’m going to call to verify them. You were in here without a warrant and without the homeowner’s knowledge.”