Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

I got hungry sometime around nine and rummaged around the kitchen. I filled a bowl with Grape-Nuts and added some suspicious milk. It probably would have curdled in a cup of coffee but it was all right in the cereal. Afterward I washed my bowl and spoon and put them where I’d found them. I went back to the living room and took off my shoes and stretched out on the rug with my eyes closed. My mind’s eye gave itself over to a vast expanse of white, and while I was observing its pure perfection-virgin snow, I thought, or the fleeces of a million lambs-while I was thus waxing poetic, black ribbons uncurled and stretched themselves across the white expanse, extending from top to bottom, from left to right, forming a random rectangular grid. Then one of the enclosed spaces of white blushed and reddened, and another spontaneously took on a faint sky tint that deepened all the way to a rich cobalt blue, and another red square began to bleed in on the lower right, and-

By God, my mind was painting me a Mondrian.

I watched as the pattern changed and re-formed itself, working variations on a theme. I’m not sure just what consciousness is and is not, but at one point I was conscious and at another I wasn’t, and then there came a moment when I caught hold of myself and shook myself loose of something. I sat up, looked at my watch.

Seven, eight minutes past twelve.

I took another few minutes making sure I left Appling’s apartment as I’d found it. I’d slept in my rubber gloves and my fingers were damp and clammy. I stripped off the gloves, dried the insides of the fingers, washed and dried my hands, and put them back on again. I straightened this and tidied that, drew the drapes, put back the chair I’d moved. Then I picked up the phone, checked Onderdonk’s number in the book to make sure I got it right, dialed it, and let it ring an even dozen times.

I turned off the one light I’d had on, let myself out, locked the door after me and wiped the knob and the surrounding area and the doorbell. I hurried through the fire door and up four flights to Sixteen, let myself into the hallway, crossed over to Onderdonk’s door and rang his bell. I waited for a moment, just in case, said a fervent if hurried prayer to Saint Dismas, and knocked off a four-tumbler Segal drop-bolt lock in not much more time than I’d spent pouring the milk over the Grape-Nuts.

Darkness within. I slipped inside, drew the door shut, breathed slowly and deeply and let my eyes adjust. I put my ring of picks back in my pocket and fumbled around for my penlight. I already had my gloves on, not having bothered to remove them for the quick run upstairs. I oriented myself in the darkness, or tried to, and I raised my penlight, pointed it to where the fireplace ought to be, and switched it on.

The fireplace was there. Above it was an expanse of white, just what I’d envisioned on Appling’s floor before the black lines insinuated themselves across its length and breadth. But where were the black lines now? Where were the rectangles of blue and red and yellow?

Where, for that matter, was the canvas? Where was the aluminum frame? And why was there nothing above Onderdonk’s fireplace but a blank wall?

I flicked off my light, stood again in darkness. The familiar thrill of burglary took on the added element of panic. Was I, for heaven’s sake, in the wrong apartment? Had I, for the love of God, climbed one too few or one too many flights of stairs? Leona Tremaine was on Nine, and I’d gone up two flights to Eleven, where I’d been a guest of the Applings. From Eleven to Sixteen was four flights, but had I counted flights as I went and included the nonexistent thirteenth?

I flicked the light on. It was likely that all of the apartments in the B line had the same essential layout, and each would have a fireplace in that particular spot. But would other apartments have bookcases flanking the fireplace? And these were familiar shelves, and I could even recognize some of the books. There was the leatherbound Defoe. There were the two volumes, boxed, of Stephen Vincent Benét’s selected prose and selected poetry. And there, faintly discernible in that expanse of white, looking almost like the negative image of an Ad Reinhardt black-on-black canvas, was the slightly lighter rectangle where the Mondrian had lately hung. Time and New York air had darkened the surrounding wall, leaving a ghost image of the painting I’d come to steal.

I lowered the light to the floor, made my way into the room. The picture wasn’t there and the picture should have been there and something didn’t compute. Was I still asleep? Was I dozing on Appling’s floor, and had I merely dreamed the part about waking up and going upstairs? I decided I had, and I gave a mental yank to pull myself out of it, and nothing happened.

Something felt wrong, and I was feeling more than the unexpected absence of the painting. I moved farther into the room and played my light here and there. If anything else was missing, I didn’t notice it. The Arp painting still hung where I’d seen it on my first visit. Other paintings were where I remembered them. I turned and swung the flashlight around, and its beam showed me a bronze head, Cycladic in style, on a black lucite plinth. I remembered the head from before, though I’d paid it little attention then. I continued to move the light around in a slow circle, and I may have heard or sensed an intake of breath, and then the flashlight’s beam was falling full upon a woman’s face.

Not a painting, not a statue. A woman, positioned between me and the door, one small hand held at waist level, the other poised at shoulder height, palm out, as if to ward off something menacing.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “You’re a burglar, you’re going to rape me, you’re going to kill me. Oh, my God.”

Be a dream, I prayed, but it wasn’t and I knew it wasn’t. I was caught in the act, I had a pocket full of burglar’s tools and no right to be where I was, and a search of my apartment would turn up enough stolen stamps to start a branch post office. And she was between me and the door, and even if I got past her she could call downstairs before I could get anywhere near the lobby, and her mouth was ajar and any second now she was going to scream.

All for the sake of some goddamn cat with a clever name and an assertive personality. Six days a week the ASPCA’s busy putting surplus cats to sleep, and I was going to wind up in slam trying to ransom one. I stood there, holding the light in her eyes as if it might hypnotize her, like a deer in a car’s headlights. But she didn’t look hypnotized. She looked terrified, and sooner or later the terror would ease up enough for her to scream, and I thought about that and thought about stone walls.

Stone walls do not a prison make, according to Sir Richard Lovelace, and I’m here to tell you the man was whistling in the dark. Stone walls make a hell of a prison and iron bars make a perfectly adequate cage, and I’ve been there and I don’t ever want to go back.

Just get me out of this and I’ll -

And I’ll what? And I’ll probably do it again, I thought, because I’m evidently incorrigible. But just get me out of it and we’ll see.

“Please,” she said. “Please don’t hurt me.”

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Don’t kill me.”

“Nobody’s going to kill you.”

She was about five-six and slender, with an oval face and eyes a spaniel would have won Best of Breed with. Her hair was dark and shoulder-length, drawn back from a sharp widow’s peak and secured in unbraided pigtails. She was wearing oatmeal jeans and a lime polo shirt with a real alligator on it. Her brown suede slippers looked like something a Hobbit would wear.

“You’re going to hurt me.”