Lawrence Block: The Burglar on the Prowl

Over the years, a vast number of one-family brownstones have been chopped up for multiple occupancy, some of them converted into rooming houses, with a couple dozen individual tenants. These conversions have themselves occasionally been reconverted in the process of neighborhood gentrification, turned into three-family dwellings or even all the way back into single-family houses.

Murray Hill was a neighborhood that had never declined significantly, and as far as I knew none of its brownstones had ever had more than one apartment to a floor. Many were still one-family dwellings. A few had commercial tenants on the lower floors, with residential apartments above. Some were private clubs-I'd already stumbled on one of those-and a few were entirely commercial, but the greater portion had people living in them, and looked to be better targets of opportunity than the apartment buildings, which almost all had doormen or security cameras or both.

Although the uniform might lead you to think otherwise, the average New York doorman is a less formidable bulwark of security than the Beefeaters posted at the Tower of London. Under the right circumstances, I'm more than willing to try to flimflam a doorman. But these were by no means the right circumstances. I didn't know the names of any of the tenants, didn't have a particular apartment targeted, and knew I'd be a lot better off with a brownstone.

So I walked around trying to decide which one to hit.

I must have wandered around for a good half hour, and it may have been closer to forty-five minutes. That's a lot of time to devote to an essentially random choice, almost on a par with feeling every last ticket stub before drawing one out of a hat. There's a limited amount you can learn about a house by strolling past it, and all I can think is that I may have been trying to outlast the impulse, to walk and walk and walk until the compulsion to burgle left me and I could go home and get some sleep.

No such luck. I stopped abruptly in front of a brownstone (with a façade of actual brown stone, as it happens) on East 36th between Lexington and Third. There was a travel agent on the ground floor, while the parlor floor was occupied by a gallery dealing in tribal art; the window was lit, and most of what I saw was Oceanic, along with a handful of African pieces, including a Benin bronze leopard and a mask that looked Dogon to my admittedly untrained eye.

The gallery figured to have some sort of security system, but I'd have passed it up even if the door had been wide open. You couldn't walk down the street with your arms full of primitive tribal artifacts. That'll draw attention, even in New York. And, even if you got away with it, where would you sell the stuff?

I mounted the steps, checked out the nameplates next to the three doorbells. (The basement travel agency had its own entrance a half-flight down from street level.)Ladislas Szabo Gallery, read the bottommost nameplate. The one above it said J. Feldmaus, while the top one said simply Creeley.

Creeley or Feldmaus, Feldmaus or Creeley. I'd have to decide, but I didn't have to decide yet. First I had to get into the building.

There was a double set of doors, one leading into the vestibule, the other leading from that little antechamber into the building's interior. Both sported locks, but neither put one in mind of the Gordian knot. I studied the first one, stroked the cylinder with the tip of my forefinger, and wouldn't have been overly surprised if that had been enough to make it pop open. But it wasn't, so I took out my ring of tools and glanced over my shoulder before I got down to business.

And saw a police cruiser from the local precinct, just moseying along, keeping an unblinking eye on things.

And, if they were looking my way, what could they see? Just a harmless-looking fellow, respectably turned out in khakis and a blazer, fitting his key in the lock with no more difficulty than you'd expect after a round or two (or three or four) at the gin joint around the corner. The lock was a sweetie, I could have opened it with a toothpick, and it surrendered in no time at all, and only when I was within the vestibule did I take another look at the street. The police car was nowhere to be seen.

Comforting, though, to know they're on the job.

I took a moment to put on my Pliofilm gloves-now that would have caught a cop's eye, a man putting on clear plastic gloves before unlocking his own front door-and then I opened the inner door with not much more difficulty than I'd had with its outer cousin. I closed it quietly and stood there with no more light than filtered in from the street, stood there listening to the house.

It was, as far as I could tell, as still as a tomb.

I climbed a flight of stairs and stopped in front of the door of the Feldmaus apartment. The name, a new one on me, was German, and I knew just about enough of that language to translate it asfield mouse. Creeley is Irish, I think, or possibly Scots-Irish, and I've no idea what it means. A creel is the woven basket a fisherman keeps his catch in, but I can't see how that could enter into the equation.

Creeley or Feldmaus? Feldmaus or Creeley?

All things being equal, one's best advised to take the apartment on the lower floor. One less floor to climb up, and, more to the point, one less floor to descend from on the way out. No light showed beneath the Feldmaus door. I listened for a long moment at that door, heard nothing whatsoever, took a breath, and rang the Feldmaus bell.

And once again heard nothing, nothing but the bell itself, but waited, waited patiently, and was just about to ring again when, yes, I heard footsteps, and then the sort of grunt you utter when you bump into something, probably because you're stumbling around in the dark. The footsteps stopped, then resumed.

Was the top-floor tenant male or female? I didn't know, and slurred my way accordingly. "Mis' Creeley?" I called through the door.

The footsteps stopped again, and the silence was eloquent. Then a male voice, thickened with sleep and irritation, said, "Up a flight."

"I say, terribly sorry." For some reason I was affecting an English accent.

"Fucking idiot," Feldmaus said, but the words didn't have much force to them. I headed for the stairs, and heard his footsteps heading back to bed.

A flight up, I went through the same routine at Creeley's door. I determined that no light showed below it or through the keyhole, then put my finger on the buzzer and buzzed away. When I heard Creeley's approaching footsteps, I knew just what I would do. I'd say "Mister Feldmaus?" and I wouldn't have to fudge the first word, because I'd established that Feldmaus was a man. (There might be a Mrs. Feldmaus as well, for all I knew, but that was neither here nor there.)

Then Creeley, Ms. or Mr., would tell me Feldmaus was a flight below, and I'd excuse myself, using the same English accent that had served me so well thus far. And then I'd go downstairs, not one flight but two, and then I'd go out of the building and, please God, catch the first cab I saw and go home.

But I didn't hear any footsteps.

I rang again, and got the same non-response. I put my ear to the door and listened to the silence.

There were three locks on the door. I unlocked all three of them, or at least I thought I did, but the one in the middle was unlocked to begin with, so picking it only served to lock it, as I found out when I went to open the door. I picked it again, retracting the bolt I'd unwittingly extended, and now the door opened.

And in I went.

What a feeling!

I don't know that I can possibly convey what it felt like. I can tell you that my senses were keener than normal, that the blood sang in my veins, that there was a tingling in the tips of my fingers, but the more precisely I record such phenomena the more pathological the whole thing sounds. What I'm hard put to get across is the sheer exhilaration that possessed me, combined with an all-encompassing sense of well-being, and even of appropriateness. I was, it seemed to me, precisely where I ought to be, doing precisely what I was supposed to do.