Tom Fairchild is a freelance graphic artist two years into an eight-year probation for burglary. It wasn’t really his fault, but one more screw-up, he’ll be spending the rest of his sentence in prison.
         Tom has just been assigned a new probation officer. Bad luck, getting George Weems. They had a twenty-year history, going back to Tom’s first arrest, age twelve, busted for shoplifting.
         After a long wait, Tom’s number is called.

The Weasel’s office was decorated in gray steel file cabinets and brown carpet, all the warmth of a strip mall insurance office. Weems had cranked up the seat of his chair to put him eye-to-eye with his clients. If he stood more than five-four, it was on the days he wore lifts in his shoes. He had light brown skin and eyes a weird shade of gray. A receding hairline and large front teeth made his narrow face even more rodentlike. He knitted his claws together on the wood-grain Formica surface of his desk. “Mr. Fairchild, it seems that fate rejoins us.”
         “It seems so.”
         “I’m gonna tell you first off that whatever your deal was with Ms. Smith, you don’t have it with me.”
         “We had no deals. If Keesha asked me to do something, I did it.”
“I’ve reviewed your file.” A slight nod indicated the thick folder on the desk. “There’s been a lot of slip-sliding on your part. Example: Alcoholics Anonymous. Have you been attending meetings regularly?”
         “Not anymore. I don’t have a problem with alcohol. Ms. Smith wrote that in the file.”
         “I don’t care what she wrote in the file. The judge ordered you to attend AA.”
         “It was a total waste of time. I’m not an alcoholic.”
         “Denial, Mr. Fairchild. Denial. It’s how you got here, and it’s what’s gonna keep you here until you own up to it.” He let the silence hang there while Tom looked at him across the desk. “You’ve been flaunting the terms of your probation. I could write you up right now.”
         The heat in Tom’s neck was making him sweat. He smiled. “You want me back in AA? Fine.” After which he would go out and have a beer. A psychologist in the distant past had written “alcohol abuse” in his file, and it had dogged him ever since.
         “Before you leave, pick up the paperwork.” Weems clicked his black ball-point pen a few times, then began filling out the monthly report. “Have you made your payment to the court this month?”
         “I just mailed a money order,” Tom said.
         “Uh-huh. The check is in the mail. Your payment is due the first of the month, and today is February the second.” Click-click-click. “It appears to me like you’re consistently late on your payments.”
         “Not always. Not by more than a day or two.”
         “We have a pattern here, Mr. Fairchild. What it is, is a lack of respect for the court. You need to accept your responsibility to pay restitution to the victim.”
         “The so-called victim is the one who ought to be sitting here. He padded the damages by about five grand.”
         “That is not my concern. The judge ordered you to pay, and my job is to make sure you do.” Slowly Weems turned the pages in the file. “The last financial affidavit is from six months ago. Fill out a new one before you leave. I want to know the sources of your income, and how you spend it.”
         “Fine.”
         “Do you own a vehicle?”
         “I own a motorcycle.”
         “Do you carry liability insurance?”
         “Yes.”
         “You still earn about two thousand a month?”
         “More or less. It varies.”
         “Do you believe you’re working up to the level of your ability, Mr. Fairchild?”
         Tom tapped the toes of his sneakers together to let off some energy. “I’m building my business. It takes time.”
         Weems clicked his pen. “And what is your business?”
         “I’m a freelance graphic designer. It’s in there. I also work for my sister in her map shop.”
         “Catch as catch can. Are you registered with our job placement service?”
         “I have a job.”
         “Register anyway, and make sure I receive proof that you’ve done so.”
         “Fine.”
         Weems tapped his finger on the page. “Is your rent still eight hundred a month?”
         “Yes, it is.”
         “That’s a lot of money.”
         “Not in this market,” Tom said.
         “You live alone?”
         “Yes.”
         “A lot of my single probationers rent a room to save money.”
         “My place isn’t big enough for a roommate,” Tom said.
         “No, you find a room to rent,” Weems said. “Why can’t you do that?”
         Tom stared at him. Explaining anything to Weems was like talking to a dish of potato salad. Tom lived in a garage apartment ten minutes from Rose’s shop. He kept his tools and his bike in the garage, and the owner let him work on his sailboat in the backyard.
         He said, “I like the neighborhood.”
         Lifting the cover with his pen, Weems let it fall shut.
         “Here’s what we’re going to do, Mr. Fairchild. Heretofore, you’ve skated by on the minimum of effort. No longer. You will pay your two hundred and sixty dollars and nineteen cents on the first of every month, and not a day later. If the first falls on a weekend, you will pay by the preceding Friday. You will attend regular AA meetings, and you will sign up for a course in anger management.”
         “Anger management?”
         “Did I not speak clearly enough for you?”
         “Wait a minute.” Tom held up his hands. “When I was released from jail, Keesha said I should take that course, and I did. The certificate’s in the file. Take a look.”
         “You might have taken the course, but it doesn’t seem to have done you much good. I want you to take it again.”
         “I don’t have the money right now.”
         “That’s not my concern. Within a week I want you enrolled in anger management, and on Friday morning, this Friday, I’m going to check the registry of the court to see if your monthly payment arrived. You said you mailed it today? You weren’t lying to your probation officer, were you?”
         “This is ridiculous.”
         The Weasel’s eyes glittered. “You are this close, Mr. Fairchild, to being violated.”
         Tom shifted his gaze toward the ceiling and smiled.
         “Is something funny?”
         “No, Mr. Weems. There’s nothing funny at all.”
         The Weasel’s quiet voice stopped him at the door. “Mr. Fairchild. You might have charmed your way past some people, but not me. We’re going to get you straightened out, one way or another.”
         Clamping his teeth on a reply, Tom went to the main office to fill out the forms.
         Half an hour later, he pushed through the glass door of the probation office and thudded down four flights of concrete stairs to the emergency exit, which he opened by kicking the push bar.
         He put on his sunglasses and unlocked his bike. Looking up, he calculated which window belonged to George Weems. He pushed his bike under it, swung a leg over the saddle, and jumped on the starter. He gave it some gas. The scream of the 600-cc engine bounced off the building next door, and smoke poured from the exhaust.

Double-glazed windows muffled the traffic noise. The porch roof and dense banyan trees down the middle of the street blotted out the buildings on the other side. Tom could walk into The Compass Rose, with its dark pine floors, its walls hung with antique maps in gold or mahogany frames, and one of his sister’s classical CDs playing softly on the stereo, and time would roll backward to when he’d sat under the display table with his crayons and a coloring book. He could almost—not quite—forget about wanting to break the Weasel’s jaw.
         The building had once been their grandfather Fairchild’s house, built in the Twenties. The shop was on the ground floor; Rose and the girls lived in the converted apartment upstairs. It was rare to have more than a few customers a day. There were better markets for antique maps than Miami, but their grandfather had founded the shop, and he’d left it to Rose because she loved maps. They were all she knew.
         Coming in through the work room a little while ago, Tom had found his sister in the front, pulling maps for the Miami Map Fair International, an annual event at the historical museum downtown. Rose always rented a booth and somehow sold enough to survive.
         “Rose, I hate like hell to ask you, but I’m about three hundred dollars short of what I need. If you could lend me the money, I’ll have it back to you by Friday. If I don’t mail the money order today, Weems will be on my ass for sure. He’s looking for an excuse to write me up.”
         The crease between her brows deepened. “Oh, no. Tom, I’m sorry, I just paid some bills, and I don’t have— Wait. Yes, I do.” She went around to her desk and shuffled through envelopes in the outgoing mail. She pulled one out. “This can wait a few days.”
         “What’s that, the bank? No, I’m not going to let you—”
         “It’s all right. Really it is . . . as long as you’re sure you can get the money back into my account by the end of the week.”
         He nodded. “I’m sure. Absolutely.”
         “Good.” She smiled at him. “Problem solved.”
         Tom could see himself in her green eyes and sandy blond hair. A pretty woman, but worry had sketched lines on her face. She was thirty-eight, the sensible older sister. The rock; the one who had put a $75,000 mortgage on the building to pay for a lawyer who could get her younger brother a year in county plus probation, instead of eight to ten in a state penitentiary. Tom sometimes wondered if he should have saved her the trouble. If he could go back to the moment the cops put the handcuffs on, would he even let her pay his bail? Rose had already given or lent him so much he’d lost track. He had tried to pay it back, but his bike blew a tire, or a tooth had to be filled, or the landlord wanted a security deposit. That Rose still trusted him made him want to scream at her: You fool, don’t do it!
         He unhappily watched her write out a check. When she gave it to him, he said, “I swear to have the money on Friday. I’d go back to prison before I’d take bread out of the kids’ mouths.”
         “Oh, don’t be so dramatic. It’s fine.” Her eyes searched his. “And you’re fine, too, Tom. Don’t forget that. I know it’s hard for you right now, but just put your head down and plow through it. My advice about Mr. Weems? Ignore him. He can’t hurt you unless you do something wrong, and you won’t. You won’t.”
         Tom managed to fake a reassuring smile. Rose had no idea. There were fifty ways of falling off the straight and narrow. Keesha Smith had been a God-sent piece of luck. He was afraid it had just run out.
         He snapped his fingers. “Hey, I almost forgot. I want to show you something.”
         The work room was at the back of the house, converted years ago from a kitchen and enclosed porch. Coming in, Tom had tossed his jacket and a brown mailing envelope on the table he used for framing maps and prints. He opened the envelope and slid something halfway out.
         “I’m going to let you see this,” he told Rose, “but just look. Don’t pick it up.”
         On the carpeted surface of the table he set a small map about ten inches by seven and turned on a gooseneck lamp. Then he crossed his arms and waited. Rose bent over the map, studying it intently, twirling the end of her dark blond pony tail.
         She was looking at the Gulf of Mexico, Florida, and Cuba, surrounded by a narrow border of ochre. Tattered corners. A small stain near the top. Pale pink land; rivers meandering through; settlements as small red forts; tiny script for the place names. The ocean was shaded with thousands of black dots, denser at the shores. A cartouche contained the words La Florida, and underneath that, Hieron.Chiavez, Antwerp 1584. Off the Atlantic coast sailed an inch-long wooden caravel with banners flying, sails puffed out, the bow dipping into a wave.
         “What do you think?”
         “Oh, my God.”
         “You like it?”
         “Ha. What a question. I’ve got goose bumps!” She slowly straightened and looked at him. “Where’d you get this?”
         “Not so fast,” he said. “Can you name the cartographer?”
         “Hieronimo Chiavez. It’s on the cartouche.”
         “And the publisher?”
         Her eyes shifted back to the map. “Oh, my God. It can’t be an Ortelius. Can it?”
         “Maybe. Maybe not. You tell me.”
         “Tom, where did you get this?” She gave him a little punch on the shoulder. “Where?”
         “Turn it over.”
         “Oh, for heaven’s sake. You!”
         On the reverse was the shop’s logo, a pink and green compass rose, with directions, the phone number, website. And in old-fashioned script, her name: Rose Ervin, Proprietress. Tom said, “You wanted something to give out at the map fair next weekend.”
         She reached for a magnifying glass and held the map to the light. “Ahhhh. Cotton rag paper, the right color and weight, more or less, but . . . there it is. A watermark from Eaton. Busted!”
         “Yeah, but it took you a while,” he countered.
         “Where did you find this particular Ortelius to copy? I’ve never seen it anywhere.”
         “I made it up. I combined three others I saw in the catalogues and put them together on Photoshop. You could say it’s an original Fairchild. I can take the disk to the printer this afternoon. How many should we get? Five hundred?”
         “None.” Rose laid the map on the table. “We can’t use this.”
         “Why not?”
         “Because . . . it looks so real.”
         “It’s supposed to. That’s the fun of it,” Tom said.
         “Tell me how much fun it’s going to be when somebody buys a framed one and starts complaining they were ripped off. I can’t afford that risk.”
         “Oh, I see. People will think you conspired with your brother, the convicted felon, the ex-con. Are you sure you want me at your booth at the Map Fair?”
         Her face colored. “Stop it, Tom. I wasn’t thinking of you.”
         “Of course not.” Hands knitted on top of his head, Tom crossed to the back door and stared out at the enclosed back yard, the shade trees and cracked concrete where Rose parked her old minivan; at his battered motorcycle chained to the porch railing. He saw the next six years stretching ahead of him like a hike across the arctic.
         “I was thinking of Eddie.” Rose came to stand beside him. When Tom looked at her, she dropped her eyes.
         “First time you’ve mentioned his name in about a century,” he said.
         She shrugged. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
         Eddie Ferraro, their former neighbor two doors down; ex-Marine, Chicago Cubs fan, fisherman, a pressman at Kopy King. He’d fallen hard for Rose, and her daughters liked him so much that Rose started thinking she might have a future with Eddie. He moved in and quickly learned the antique map and print business. And then, to help Rose through a lean season, sold some phony botanicals and bird prints that he himself had forged. Rose managed to buy them all back, but there were whispers about her integrity. Eddie promised he’d never do it again, but Rose threw him out. A week later the Treasury Department arrested Eddie Ferraro on an old warrant for counterfeiting. He posted bail and skipped to Italy. That had been four years ago. Eddie had sent letters to Rose, but as far as Tom knew, she’d never answered them.
         She put an arm around Tom’s waist. “It’s a good map.” She laughed. “It’s scary-good. We’ll order a thousand. But you have to put our logo on the front. And your name. People should know who the artist is.” She gave him a squeeze. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”

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