Lawrence Block: The Burglar on the Prowl

By now I had a good idea where the story was going, but I let Marty tell it at his own pace. In the course of it our cognac vanished, and our waiter, an aging cherub with glossy black curls and a bulging waistcoat, took away our empty glasses and brought them back replenished. The minutes ticked away, the lunch crowd thinned out, and Marty went on telling me how Marisol ("A lovely name, don't you think, Bernie? It's Spanish, of course, and comes from mar y sol, meaning sea and sun. Her mother's Puerto Rican, her father from one of those charming little countries on the Baltic. Sea and sun indeed!") was indeed abundantly talented, and quite beautiful, with an aura of genuine innocence about her that could break one's heart. He'd seen her in a showcase presentation of Chekhov's The Three Sisters, of which the less said the better, but her performance and her incandescent stage presence drew him as he had not been drawn in years.

And so he'd gone backstage, and took her to lunch the next day to discuss her career, and squired her to a play he felt she simply must see, and, well, you can imagine the rest. A small monthly check, barely a blip on his own financial radar, meant she could quit waitressing and have more time for auditions and classes and, not incidentally, Marty, who took to visiting her Hell's Kitchen apartment at the day's end, for what the French call a cinq à sept, or a little earlier, for what New Yorkers call a nooner.

"She was living in South Brooklyn," he said, "which meant a long subway ride. Now she's a five-minute walk from a few dozen theaters." Her new digs were also a short cab ride from Marty's apartment and an even shorter one from his office, which made the arrangement convenient all around.

He was besotted with her, and she seemed equally impassioned. With the shades drawn in the West 46th Street walk-up, he'd shown her a few refinements her younger lovers had never introduced, and he was pleased to report that the vigor and energy of youth was no match for the art and sophistication of experience.

It was a veritable Eden, that apartment he'd found for her, and all it lacked was a serpent, which soon appeared in the person of that acknowledged shitheel, Crandall Mapes. I'll spare you the details, which is more than Marty did for me; suffice it to say that a sobbing Marisol had told a heartbroken Martin Gilmartin that she couldn't see him anymore, that she would always be grateful to him for his generosity, and not least of all for the gift of himself, but that she had lost her heart to the man with whom she knew she was destined to spend the rest of her life, and possibly all eternity as well.

And that man, Marty was shattered to learn, was the shitheel himself. "She thinks he's going to leave his wife for her," he said. "He has a new girl every six months, Bernie. Once in a while one of them lasts a full year. They all think he's going to leave his wife, and one of these days he will actually leave her, but not the way they think. He'll leave her a rich widow, when a heart attack does what I'd like to do and takes him out of the game for good."

If Marty was unusually bitter, it was explained in part by the fact that Mapes was not an entirely faceless rival. Marty knew the man, and had more than a nodding acquaintance with him. He'd run into him at shows and backers' auditions, and he and Edna had actually been to the Mapes home, a fieldstone mansion in Riverdale. The occasion was a benefit for Everett Quinton's Ridiculous Theater Company, which was looking for a new home after having lost its longtime house on Sheridan Square. "You paid a couple of hundred dollars for dinner and an intimate performance," he recalled, "and then they did what they could to persuade you to write out a check for another thousand or two. Dinner was all right, though the wines were no more than passable, but Quinton's a genius and I'd have made a contribution in any case. And Edna was glad for a look at their house. We all got the grand tour. They didn't show us the basement or the attic, but they did drag us through all the bedrooms, and there was a painting in the master bedroom, a seascape."

"I don't suppose it was a Turner."

He shook his head. "It was just passable," he said, "like the wine. Your basic generic sailing ship. The only thing significant about the painting is that it was tilted."

"That shitheel!"

He raised an eyebrow. "I'm not compulsive about it," he said, "but it bothers me to see a picture hung at an angle. It goes against the order of things. Even so, I'm not ordinarily the type to go around straightening the paintings in other people's houses."

"But this time you did."

"I was the last one to leave the room, Bernie, and something made me stop and return to the painting. You know that line of Coleridge? 'As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.' "

I recognized the line-two lines, actually-as from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," a poem which, unlike most of the other imperishable works we'd had to read in high school English, I'd actually liked. " 'Water, water, everywhere,' " I quoted back, " 'And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink.' "

He nodded approvingly. "Most people think the last line is 'And not a drop to drink.' "

"Most people are wrong," I said, "most of the time, about most things. Was the painted ship silent, upon its painted ocean?"

"It was," said Martin Gilmartin. "But what was behind it spoke volumes."

A wall safe," Carolyn Kaiser said. "He was straightening the picture and he felt something behind it, and it was a wall safe."

"Right."

"And Marty's idea," she said, "and the whole point of inviting you to lunch, was that you could run up to Riverdale, let yourself into Mapes's house, and open the safe."

"I'd like to think it wasn't the whole point of lunch. After all, we're friends. Don't you suppose he figured he'd enjoy my company?"

"Goes without saying, Bern. If I ever join a fancy club I'll invite you for lunch all the time. Right now I'm afraid this is as fancy as it gets."

We were at the Poodle Factory, Carolyn's place of business, just two doors down from my bookstore on East 11th Street between University Place and Broadway. This was a Wednesday, and ordinarily we'd be eating our sandwiches at Barnegat Books, having lunched at her dog grooming salon the day before. But instead I'd joined Marty on Tuesday, and we'd been at the bookstore Monday, so it was her turn to play host and mine to show up with the food. Accordingly I'd picked up a couple of stuffed pitas and two portions of an indeterminate side dish at Two Guys from Kandahar, the latest incarnation of the hole-in-the-wall around the corner on Broadway. The only soft drink they carried was a hideous blue-green thing flavored with pistachio nuts, so I'd stopped next door for a couple of Cokes.

"These are good," she said, "but how authentic do you figure they are? I mean, do they even have pita bread in Afghanistan?"

"Does it matter? I mean, do they have tacos in Beijing? Or cal-zone in Tirana?"

She saw my point. We were, after all, in New York, where half the taco stands are run by Chinese, and most of the pizzerias by Albanians. "You're right," she said. "But getting back to Marty. This is something different for him, isn't it? The jobs he steers you to are usually friends of his who want to be burgled so they can collect the insurance. This Mapes doesn't sound like a friend-"

"Not unless you consider shitheel a term of endearment."

"-and I don't suppose he's going to be in on the burglary. What's in the safe?"

"Cash."

"How does Marty know that? Don't tell me it was open."

"If it had been open," I said, "he could have taken the money himself. Not that he would have, because at the time he didn't have anything against Mapes. He didn't much care for him, he'd always thought of him as a weasel and a fourflusher, but this was long before Marty had met Marisol."