Slavoj Zizek, following up remarks made by Lacan in his 'Seminar on "The Purloined Letter" ', has noted that one of the differences between classical detection and the hardboiled/noir variety is that in the former the detective accepts money for his services, while in the latter he does not. 30 It is Al Roberts (in Detour), however, who supplies the most revealing reason for the noir protagonist's inability to deal with symbolic currency. Reluctant to accept a ten-dollar tip for his piano-playing, he spits out his definition of money: 'a piece of paper crawling with germs'. What happens, I have tried to argue, is this: the neutral, dead system of symbolic community and exchange that had supported the classical world has given way in film noir to a world that crawls with private enjoyment and thus rots the old networks of communication. Something similar happens to numbers. Where formerly the counting of people, statistics, had estab-lished a network of relations that protected - and protected us from - private enjoyment, film noir allows us to witness the spoiling of this network that takes place when privacy comes to the surface. Seen from Keyes's perspective, statistics enable the discovery of new facts; from Neffs perspective they threaten annihilation since, to him, they represent the existence of other people. And in the noir world, this is the greatest horror.