Gately's burglary introduction (pp. 57–58)

The burglar's whole expertise is a map of where people hide things — concealment-craft run in reverse. Gately knows the good silver lives in "a stunning hardwood-with-ivory-inlay chest… where over 90% of upscale people's good silver is always hidden" (already "promoted," the trade's term, and stacked by the foyer), just as he knows "90% of people with wall-safes conceal in their master bedroom behind some sort of land- or seascape painting." His genius is anti-concealment, and it disturbs him — it leaves him "in possession of certain overlarge private facts to which no man should be entitled." Defeating hiding is itself a discipline, a kind of surveillance of the domestic interior, and mastering it means knowing strangers' hiding-places better than they know they're predictable.