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particularly, though at times like this he certainly felt it. He was a big but not huge man, lean but deceptively muscular with a slight paunch one of the few visible signs of his middle age. His hair was dark, slightly shaggy, widow’s peaked, graying at the temples; he had had the permanently dour countenance of a western gunfighter and the thick, slightly droopy moustache to go with it; at the same time he had high cheekbones and narrow eyes somehow suggestive of an American Indian. It was as if somewhere in his ancestry there’d been a Cochise and Doc Holliday both.
    He was a professional thief, recently retired but with no pretense of having at last joined the “straight” world. He had been a thief too long to ever think of himself as anything else, and he’d be fooling himself if he tried. He had heard a supposedly true story about a guy named Levitz, who was a very smooth, very successful con man back in the thirties, but who had a complex about being Jewish. One day Levitz was walking down the street with another successful con artist of the era, a hunchback named Lange, and as they went by a synagogue, Levitz said, “Did you know I used to be a Jew?” And Lange said, “Did you know I used to be a hunchback?”
    Nolan knew better than to try and con himself; he was a thief and had no pretensions otherwise. Besides, the money he had invested in the Pier was heist money mostly, and if you’re going to build a new, socially acceptable life for yourself on that kind of money, you’re wise never to forget where the foundation came from.
    Because forgetting who you were—who you are—could be dangerous as hell.
    Take this situation, for instance.
    The man in the pinstripe suit, sitting across the table from Nolan, was the president of a bank: the First National Bank of Port City, Iowa, a town of twenty thousand just forty miles southeast of Iowa City. The man’s name was George Rigley. A little over two years ago, the two men had sat across from each other in a similar manner. At George Rigley’s desk. In George Rigley’s bank.
    Two years and a month or so ago, Nolan, his young friend Jon, and two others had robbed George Rigley’s bank. Nolan, Jon, and a guy named Grossman had posed as examiners to gain after-hours admittance to the bank, and therefore hadn’t had the luxury of wearing masks. And so it was possible, perhaps inevitable that bank president Rigley would recognize Nolan.
    Nolan had considered the possibility, when he chose to live and work in Iowa City just two short years after that robbery, that a problem like George Rigley might crop up. He’d known it was possible for employees of that particular bank to wander into the Pier now and then, and since Nolan had worked extensively in the rural Midwest (where banks were relatively easy pickings, oftentimes not even insured by the FDIC, meaning no FBI), veterans of other Nolan robberies could have possibly turned up as customers at the restaurant and lounge. But he’d been counting on several factors to take care of any such problems—for one thing, the generally lousy memory of most people; people often have trouble recognizing even a familiar face in an unexpected context. And Nolan had been twenty pounds lighter at the time of the robbery, and had been disguised for the occasion: his hair and mustache had been powdered white, and he’d worn tinted glasses. Later, he’d seen the drawings that appeared in the papers, based on the descriptions of the witnesses, and hadn’t recognized himself. So why should any of the witnesses do any better two years later in Iowa City, in an unexpected context?
    It was a total fluke, of course, that Nolan had ended up in Iowa City at all. Or a series of flukes, anyway. His connection to Iowa City had been Planner, an old guy who used an antique shop in town as a front for doing what his name implied: planning jobs for guys the likes of Nolan. Planner had been a middleman, a heist broker—an oldtime heist