Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

“No. Why?”

“I just wondered. Do you want to leave first?”

“Not particularly.”

“Oh?”

“It’s my chivalrous nature. Not just the old principle of ladies first, but I’d worry about you forever if I didn’t know you got out safely. How are you going to get out, by the way?”

“I won’t even need my credit card. Oh, you mean how’ll I get out of the building? The same way I got in. I’ll ride down in the elevator, smile sweetly, and let the doorman get me a cab.”

“Where do you live?”

“A cab ride away.”

“So do I, but I think we should take separate cabs. You don’t want to tell me where you live.”

“Not really, no. I don’t think it’s a good idea to tell burglars my home address. You might make off with the family silver.”

“Not since the price drop. It’s barely worth stealing these days. Suppose I wanted to see you again?”

“Just keep opening doors. You never know what you’ll find on the other side.”

“Isn’t that the truth? Could be the lady, could be the tiger.”

“Could be both.”

“Uh-huh. You’ve got sharp claws, incidentally.”

“You didn’t seem to mind.”

“I wasn’t objecting, just commenting. I don’t even know your name.”

“Just think of me as the Dragon Lady.”

“I didn’t notice anything draggin’. My name is Bernie.”

She cocked her head, gave the matter some thought. “Bernie the Burglar. I don’t suppose there’s any harm in your knowing my first name, is there?”

“Besides, you could always make one up.”

“Is that what you just did? But I couldn’t. I never lie.”

“I understand that’s the best policy.”

“That’s what I’ve always heard. My name is Andrea.”

“Andrea. You know what I’d like to do, Andrea? I’d like to throw you right back down on the old Aubusson and have my way with you.”

“My, that doesn’t sound bad at all. If we had world enough and time, but we really don’t. I don’t, anyway. I have to get out of here.”

“It would be nice,” I said, “if there were a way I could get in touch with you.”

“The thing is I’m married.”

“But occasionally indiscreet.”

“Occasionally. But discreetly indiscreet, if you get my drift. Now if you were to tell me how to get in touch with you -”

“Uh.”

“You see? You’re a burglar and you don’t want to run the risk that I’ll get an attack of conscience or catch a bad case of the crazies and go to the police. And I don’t want to run a similar sort of risk. Maybe we should just leave it as is, ships that pass in the night, all that romantic stuff. That way we’re both safe.”

“You could be right. But sometime down the line we might decide the risk’s worth running, and then where would we be? You know what the saddest words of tongue or pen are.”

“‘It might have been.’ You’re witty, but John Greenleaf was Whittier.”

“My God, you read poetry and you’re a smartass and you can verb like a mink. I can’t let you get away altogether. I know.”

“You know what?”

“Buy the Village Voice every week and read the personals in the ‘Village Bulletin Board’ section. Okay?”

“Okay. You do the same.”

“Faithfully. Can a burglar and an adulteress find happiness in today’s world? We’ll just have to see, won’t we? Go ahead, you ring for the elevator.”

“You don’t want to ride down with me?”

“I want to tidy up here a little. And I’ll hang around so that we leave the building a few minutes apart. If I get in any trouble, you don’t want to get hooked into it.”

“Will you get in trouble?”

“Probably not, because I’m not stealing anything.”

“That’s what I was asking, really. I mean, I shouldn’t care if you steal anything, including the carpet we verbed on, but evidently I do. Bernie, would you hold me?”

“Are you scared again?”

“Nope. I just like the way you hold me.”

I put my gloves on and waited with the door a few inches ajar until I saw her ring for the elevator. Then I drew the door shut, turned the bolt, and gave the apartment a very quick look-see, just to make sure there was nothing I should know about in any of the other rooms. I didn’t open a drawer or a closet, just ducked into each room and flicked the lights on long enough to establish that there were no signs of Andrea’s presence. No drawers pulled out and dumped, no tables overturned, no signs that the apartment had been visited by a burglar or a cyclone or any comparable unwelcome phenomenon.

And no dead bodies in the bed or on the floor. Not that one goes around expecting that sort of thing, but I was once caught in the act of burgling the apartment of a man named Flaxford, and Mr. F. himself was dead in another room at the time, a fact which became known to the police before it joined my storehouse of information. So I gave a quick look-see here and there, and if I’d come across the Mondrian, leaning against the wall or perhaps wrapped in brown paper and waiting for the framer, I’d have been roundly delighted.

No such luck, nor did I spend much time looking. I did all of this reconnaissance rather more quickly than it takes to tell about it, as a matter of fact, and when I was out in the hallway the elevator was on its way up.

Was it swarming with boys in blue? Had I, like Samson and Lord Randall and the Bold Deceiver before me, been done in by a woman’s treachery? No point, surely, in sticking around to find out. I ducked through the fire door and waited for the elevator to stop on Sixteen.

But it didn’t. I peeked through the open fire door, and I listened carefully, and the cage went on past Sixteen, stopped, waited, and went on down, passing Sixteen in its descent. I returned to the hallway, picked the tumblers to lock Onderdonk’s door, recalled that Andrea’d said he never double-locked it, picked it again to leave it on the springlock as he was said to have done, sighed heavily at all of this wasted time and effort, stripped off my silly rubber gloves, put them in a pocket, and rang for the elevator.

No cops in the elevator. No cops in the lobby or out on the street. No hassle from the elevator operator, the concierge or the doorman, even when I refused the last-named chap’s offer to hail me a taxi. I said I felt like walking, and I walked three blocks before hailing a cab myself. That way I didn’t have to switch to some other cab a few blocks away. I could just ride straight home, and that’s what I did.

Once there, I would have liked to go straight to bed. But I had J. C. Appling’s stamps to worry about and I was worried. I’d have taken a chance and left the job unfinished, but not after all I’d gone through at the Charlemagne in the past ten hours. I’d had far too many human contacts, enough so that I stood a chance of attracting police attention. I hadn’t done anything in Onderdonk’s apartment, hadn’t stolen anything at all but Appling’s stamps (and those earrings, mustn’t forget those earrings) but I certainly didn’t want those stamps sitting around if someone with a tin shield and a warrant came knocking on my door.

I was up all night with the damned stamps. I swear you never have that problem with cash; you just spend it at leisure. I got all the stamps into glassine envelopes and all of Appling’s album pages into the incinerator, and then I fitted the envelopes into a hidey-hole I probably shouldn’t tell you about, but what the hell. There’s a baseboard electrical outlet that’s a phony, with no BX cable feeding into an aluminum box at its rear. It’s just a plate and a couple of receptacles, mounted to the baseboard with a pair of screws, and if you undo the screws and remove the plate you can reach your hand into an opening about the size of a loaf of bread. (Not the puffy stuff but a nice dense loaf from the health food store.) I keep contraband there until I can unload it, and I also stow burglar tools there. (Not all of them because some of them are innocent enough out of context. You can keep a roll of adhesive tape in the medicine chest and a penlight in the hardware drawer and feel secure about it. Picks and probes and prybars, however, are another story, incriminating in or out of context.)