The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) (4 page)

I went into the living room and looked at the painting on the wall, all black verticals and horizontals on a white field, with a few of the resultant rectangles filled in with primary colors. It looks like something Piet Mondrian might have painted, and well it might, because he did. And there it was, worth a duke’s ransom if not a king’s, hanging right there on my wall.

A few years ago, I was involved in an unusually complicated mess, in the course of which I oversaw the production of several fake Mondrians. When the dust settled, various canvases had migrated to various walls, and one remained unclaimed, so I took it home with me.

It was the real one.

For all the good it did me. I mean, it’s not as though I had the option of selling it. The work had no provenance, and I lacked legal title to it.

On the all-too-rare occasions when I have a woman visitor, she of course assumes the painting’s a copy. A few have asked if I painted it myself; one, more sophisticated than the general run, admired the craquelure. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to create the illusion of age,” she said. “But the colors aren’t quite right, are they, Bernie? Mondrian’s blue isn’t that intense, and the yellow’s got the slightest greenish cast to it.”

I told her she had a good eye.

You know what? I think what I like most about my Mondrian is that nobody else knows it’s real. It’s the genuine article masquerading as a fake, and it’s my little secret, and I get to look at it whenever I want.

Of course most of the time I don’t really see it. That’s true of anything hanging on the wall day in and day out. It becomes the visual equivalent of background noise. But today, after contemplating a Rembrandt of questionable authenticity, I got to look at my Mondrian as if for the first time.

I stretched out on my bed and closed my eyes. A nap would have been nice, but I was way too restless to drift off. My mind insisted on spinning its wheels, and I wasn’t surprised. I was, after all, like a theatergoer at intermission, still engrossed by what had been happening on stage, with a few minutes to kill until I could return to my seat. The shower may have refreshed me, and Mondrian may have lifted my spirits, but I was in the middle of a burglary and I couldn’t really relax until I’d finished the job.

Was I hungry? I thought about it and couldn’t decide. The unidentifiable Taiwanese lunch had been as filling as it was delicious, but enough hours had passed since then for me to be ready for an evening meal.

But I’ve never been a big fan of breaking and entering on a full stomach. A hungry burglar, it seems to me, has a definite advantage.

Although one can take it too far. On at least one occasion I’ve paused while checking a kitchen for loose cash. (You’d be surprised how many people keep an emergency reserve in a countertop canister, or stuffed into the butter compartment of the fridge.) I managed to convince myself there was a sheaf of hundreds waiting for me in the peanut butter jar, and when I found nothing in that vessel but a supply of Skippy Super Chunky, I went on looking for the bread and the jelly. I took a minute or two to make myself a sandwich and a few minutes more to ingest it, and then I washed my DNA off the butter knife and went back to the business at hand.

Would they have bread and peanut butter and jelly at the Galtonbrook? It seemed unlikely. I had some in my own kitchen, but was that what I wanted?

All I wanted, I decided, was for it to be time to get back to work.

I made a cup of coffee, put the TV on, turned the TV off, drank some of the coffee, and got dressed. I stayed with the khakis and sneakers, but put on a light blue dress shirt with a button-down collar and added a navy blazer. A tie? I considered two, chose the one with diagonal stripes of gold and green, then decided against it. A shirt, a jacket, but no tie. A hardworking chap on his way home after his work had kept him at the office well into the evening. His collar’s open now, and no doubt he’s got his necktie in his jacket pocket, rolled up carefully to avoid wrinkles.

I finished the coffee.

Was it, please God, time to go? I decided it was, and I went.

I walked past the entrance, waited for a car to pass, then traced a path along the building’s western wall. I’d scouted my approach before, and my route would keep me out of range of the security camera.

I didn’t have a necktie in my pocket, having seen no reason to carry verisimilitude quite so far. I did have, in various pockets, my burglar tools, my little screwdriver, two of the original dozen two-inch bolts, my little roll of duct tape, my pencil-beam flashlight, and a pair of those Pliofilm gloves favored by food handlers and TV cops.

I was wearing the gloves by the time I reached the bathroom window, and I shielded the flashlight with one gloved hand while I flicked it on long enough to determine that this was indeed the bathroom window, and not some other still-secure window leading somewhere else. Thus reassured, I knelt down and eased it open.

It made that noise again, and I froze, waiting for the world to respond. When nothing happened, I resumed breathing and returned to the task at hand. The steel mesh panel came loose when I pushed against it, and I got a grip on it and leaned forward far enough to prop it up on the sink top. I climbed in after it, planted my feet on the floor, and stood absolutely still for a full two minutes, listening intently for any sound at all.

I heard traffic sounds in the distance, and, just as my two minutes were up I heard the footsteps of a man walking his dog. I knew it was a man by his voice, and I knew it was a dog when he said, “Here you go, Sport. Your favorite hydrant.”

Sport paid his respects, and they walked on. Once again I considered leaving the window open, and once again I decided against it and drew it shut, clenching my teeth against the sound it made. I replaced the mesh panel, supplementing the two squares of duct tape with two of the bolts, just fitting them into their holes and giving them a half-turn each.

I did all this in the minimal light that filtered in from outside. Then I opened the bathroom door and closed it again from outside, and everything was suddenly as dark as the inside of a cow. A blink of my flashlight let me get my bearings, and I found the door to the basement—it was, of course, directly opposite the bathroom door. I turned the knob and gave a tug, and nothing happened, because some damned fool had evidently locked it.

Oh, all right. I hunkered down in front of the lock and picked it in less time than it takes to tell about it. I didn’t need my flashlight, and I probably wouldn’t have needed my burglar tools, either, had I been armed with a hairpin or a toothpick.

I suppose a lock like that could have a purpose. During daytime hours, it might keep an errant visitor from opening the wrong door and pitching headlong down the stairs. But the door had been open earlier, and they’d only locked up when they were done for the day, and who was the lock going to hinder in the middle of the night? A burglar? Lots of luck, honey.

I used my flashlight to get down the basement stairs, and looked around for windows just in case there were some I didn’t know about. Once I’d established that I was indeed in a windowless crypt, I turned on a couple of overhead lights and gave my flashlight a rest.

Then I took a deep breath.

Ah, what a feeling!

I’ve been doing this long enough so that it’s a profession, and I like to think my attitude is that of a professional. But no amount of professionalism can drive the sheer joy and excitement out of the enterprise. When, through my own resources and initiative, I find myself on premises where I’ve no right to be, I’m transported by a feeling that’s hard to describe and impossible to justify. I like to think I’ve come a long way from the Ohio town where I grew up, but what I felt in the basement of the Galtonbrook was not all that different from the sensation that took me by surprise when I first broke into a neighbor’s house. Once again, I was thrilled beyond words to be doing this thing that I absolutely knew I should not be doing.

I can’t rationalize it, any more than I can give it up. It’s pointless to try. I’m a born thief and I love to steal.

In fact, I love it so much that there’s a powerful temptation to prolong the experience. I wanted to stay where I was, breathing the stale subterranean air, delighting in the way the blood surged in my veins. There was no end of objects to fill the eye and quicken the pulse—suits of armor, statues, paintings, here a samurai sword, there a medieval tapestry. And even more alluring than what I could see was what reposed out of sight, in trunks and boxes and file cabinets.

It wouldn’t be hard to find something to steal. But that was the last thing I wanted to do. I was on a very special mission, and the only way to make it work was to limit my foraging to one item and one item only.

And time was of the essence. A burglar’s time, let me tell you, is always of the essence. The less of it you spend in enemy territory, the better your chance of getting home safe.

Even so, it took me distressingly close to an hour. I knew what I’d come for, but what I didn’t know was where they’d stashed it. It could have taken longer than it did, but I managed to find a pattern to their curious system of organization, and I knew when I’d opened the right file cabinet, and toward the back of the second drawer from the top I found a manila folder with the label
ALLB.

I hadn’t been looking for initials, but if I had, those would have been the right ones.
A Life Lived
—yes, that was it, and I drew out the folder and opened it to look at the first of forty-plus pages of unlined bond paper, originally white and now yellowing with age.

The first page, and the others that followed, had been written on in blue-black ink. I’d seen this handwriting before, and while I could no more swear to its authenticity than I could confirm or deny Rembrandt’s responsibility for the portrait of the man in the plumed hat, it certainly looked okay to my untrained eye. And I had little reason to question it; far more scoundrels had tried to imitate Rembrandt’s brush strokes than ever felt called upon to imitate this chap’s penmanship.

Not for the first time, I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. I turned the pages. Each but the first had a number at the bottom, and every number was present, all the way to the number 43 at the bottom of the final page, just below the words
The End
, written with an understandable flourish, and, beneath them, written larger and with much the same spirit,
F. S. F.

Indeed.

I unbuttoned my shirt, slipped the folder inside, and buttoned it up again. I donned the blazer I’d taken off at the beginning of the hunt, turned off the lights that had allowed me to see what I was doing, and let my flashlight guide me up the stairs.

I didn’t really want to take the time to lock the basement door, and would anyone be alarmed to find it open Thursday morning? I worked out all of that in my mind, and then I locked the door anyway.

Just because.