The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (3 page)

A pair of wall racks, one holding cue sticks, the other a locked cabinet that displayed sporting rifles and shotguns. A couple of overstuffed leather chairs. An elaborate bar, the crystal glassware etched with game birds in flight. Enough liquor in one form or another to float a fair-sized cabin cruiser, plus decanters of sherry and port and brandy placed at convenient intervals about the room. A smoker’s stand, mahogany, with a few dozen briar pipes and two cased meerschaums. A cedar cabinet of Havanas. A whole room of brass and wood and leather, and I yearned to nail the door shut and pour myself a stiff Armagnac and stay there forever.

Instead I scanned the bookshelves. They were a jumble, but there was no shortage of dollar value. While they ran heavily to uncut sets of leather-bound memoirs of unremembered hangers-on at pre-Revolutionary Versailles, there were plenty of other items as well, many of which I’d never seen outside of the catalogs of the better book dealers and auction galleries. I happened on a pristine first of Smollet’s rarest novel,
The Adventures of Sir Laurence Greaves,
and there were any number of fine bindings and important first editions and Limited Editions Club issues and private press productions, all arranged in no discernible order and according to no particular plan.

I took one book from the shelves. It was bound in green cloth and not much larger than an ordinary paperback. I opened it and read the flowing inscription on the flyleaf. I paged through it, closed it, and put it back on the shelf.

I left the library as I’d found it.

The stairs were dark. I used my flashlight, went up and down the staircase three times. There was one board that creaked and I made sure I knew which one it was. Fourth from the top.

The others were comfortingly silent.

Twin beds in the master bedroom, each with its own bedside table. His and hers closets. His ran to Brooks Brothers suits and cordovan shoes. I especially liked one navy suit with a muted stripe. It wasn’t that different from the one I was wearing. Her closet was full of dresses and furs, including one Ray’s wife would have salivated over. Good labels in everything. A drawer in the dressing table—French Provincial, white enamel, gold trim—held a lot of jewelry. A cocktail ring caught my eye, a stylish little item with a large marquise-cut ruby surrounded by seed pearls.

There was some cash in the top drawer of one of the bedside tables, a couple hundred dollars in tens and twenties. In the other table I found a bank-book—eighteen hundred dollars in a savings account in the name of Elfrida Grantham Arkwright.

I didn’t take any of these things. I didn’t take the Fabergé eggs from the top of the chest of drawers, or the platinum cuff links and tie bar, or any of the wristwatches, or, indeed, anything at all.

In Jesse Arkwright’s study, all the way at the rear of the house’s second floor, I found a whole batch of bankbooks. Seven of them, secured by a rubber band, shared the upper right drawer of his desk with postage stamps and account ledgers and miscellaneous debris. The savings accounts all had sizable balances and the quick mental total I ran came to a little better than sixty thousand dollars.

I’ll tell you. It gave me pause.

I once knew a fellow who’d been tossing an apartment in Murray Hill, filling a pillowcase with jewelry and silver, when he came across a bankbook with a balance in five figures. Clever lad that he was, he promptly turned his pillowcase inside out and put everything back where he’d found it. He left the premises looking as though he’d never visited them in the first place, taking nothing but that precious bankbook. That way the residents wouldn’t know they’d been burgled, and wouldn’t miss the bankbook, and he could drain their account before they suspected a thing.

Ah, the best-laid plans. He presented himself at the teller’s window the very next morning, withdrawal slip in hand and bankbook at the ready. It was a small withdrawal—he was merely testing the waters—but that particular teller happened to know that particular depositor by sight, and the next thing the chap knew he was doing a medium-long bit in Dannemora, which is when I ran into him.

So much for bankbooks.

So much, too, for a double handful of Krugerrands, those large gold coins the South Africans stamp out for people who want to invest in the yellow metal. I like gold—what’s not to like?—but they were in a drawer with a handgun, and I dislike guns at least as much as I like gold. The ones in the library were for show, at least. This one was here for shooting burglars.

So much for the Krugerrands. So much, too, for a shoulder-height set of glassed-in shelves full of Boehm birds and Art Nouveau vases and glass paperweights. I spotted a Lalique ashtray just like the one on my grandmother’s coffee table, and a positive gem of a Daum Nancy vase, and Baccarat and Millefiori weights galore, and—

It was starting to get to me. I couldn’t look anywhere without seeing ten things I wanted to steal. Every flat surface in that study held bronzes, all of them impressive. Besides the usual bulls and lions and horses, I noticed one of a camel kneeling alongside a Legionnaire. The latter wore a kepi on his head and a pained expression on his face, as if he were sick of jokes about Legionnaire’s Disease.

A couple of stamp albums. One general worldwide collection that didn’t look to be worth much, but the other was a Scott Specialty Album for the Benelux countries, and a quick thumbing didn’t reveal too many blank spaces.

And a coin collection. Lord above, a coin collection! No albums, just a dozen black cardboard boxes two inches square and ten inches long. Each was crammed to capacity with two-by-two coin envelopes. I didn’t have time to check them but I couldn’t resist. I opened one box at random and found it was filled with Barber quarters and halves, all Proofs or Uncirculated specimens. Another box contained superb Large Cents catalogued by Sheldon numbers.

How could I possibly leave them?

I left them. I didn’t take a thing.

I was in one of the guest bedrooms on the second floor, playing my penlight over the walls and admiring a very nice pencil-signed Rouault lithograph, when I heard a car in the driveway. I checked my watch. It was 11:23. I listened as the automatic garage door swung upward, listened as the car’s engine cut out. As the garage door swung down again I quit listening and walked the length of the hall to the staircase leading to the third floor. I was up those stairs and crouching on the third-floor landing by the time Jesse Arkwright’s key hit the slot at the side of the house. First he turned off the burglar alarm, then he opened the door, and I fancied I could hear him refastening half a dozen locks after he and Elfrida had made their entrance.

Muffled conversation, barely audible two floors below me. I moved a rubber-gloved forefinger and wiped perspiration from my forehead. I’d planned on this, of course. I’d even checked the attic stairs earlier to make sure there were no squeakers in the lot.

All the same, I didn’t like it. Burglary’s a tightly wired proposition at best, but I generally get to do my work in precious solitude. If householders come home while I’m on the job, my usual impulse is to depart abruptly.

This time I had to linger.

Two floors below, a teakettle whistled briefly, then sighed as someone removed it from the flame. For an instant I’d mistaken its cry for a police siren. Nerves, I thought, taking deep breaths, beseeching the patron saint of burglars for a dose of serenity.

Maybe I’d been right when I talked to Kirschmann. Maybe I was getting too old for this. Maybe I didn’t have the requisite sang-froid. Maybe—

Crouching was uncomfortable. I got stiffly to my feet. The attic was finished off, its central hallway covered with a length of faded maroon carpeting. I walked clear to the front of the house, where a brass floorlamp equipped with a timer sent out forty watts’ worth of light through a curtained window. A maid’s room, it looked to be, although the household no longer employed live-in servants.

A day bed stretched along one wall. I lay down on top of it pulled a green and gold afghan coverlet over myself, and closed my eyes.

I couldn’t really hear much from where I was. At one point I thought I heard footsteps on the stairs, and then a few moments later I fancied that I could hear the clatter of balls on the pool table in the library. This was probably a case of my imagination filling in the blanks. After an evening at the theater, the Arkwright routine was supposed to be quite predictable. Home around eleven-thirty, a spot of coffee and something sweet in the breakfast nook, and then Elfrida would pop upstairs with a book of crosswords while Jesse ran a rack or two at the pool table, nipped at one of the crystal decanters, read a few pages of one of his leather-bound classics, and then hied his own bulk up the stairs and joined his wife in their chamber.

Would he take a final tour of the downstairs, making sure all the doors were locked? Would he happen to check the sliding bolt on the kitchen door, and would he happen to notice that some clever chap had sawn through it? Was he, even as I thought these grim thoughts, lifting a receiver to summon the local constabulary?

I could have been at the ballet, watching a Russian imitate a gazelle. I could have gone home with Carolyn and eaten Flemish stew and drunk Dutch beer. Or I could have been home in my own little bed.

I stayed where I was and I waited.

At one-thirty I got to my feet. I hadn’t heard a sound within the house for an entire half-hour. I padded silently to the stairs, crossing right over the master bedroom where I hoped my hosts were sleeping soundly. I went down the stairs, treading ever so gingerly on my crepe soles, and I crossed the second-floor hallway and went on down the other stairs to the ground floor. It was no great feat to remember to avoid the fourth step from the top; I’d obsessed on that very subject for the past twenty minutes.

The lights were out once again on the ground floor, except for the indomitable dragonfly lamp in the living room. I didn’t have to use my penlight to find my way to the library, but once I was in that room I played its beam here and there.

Arkwright had paid the room his nightly visit. He’d left a pool cue on top of the table, along with the cue ball and one or two of its fellows. A small brandy snifter stood on a leather-topped table beside one of the big chain. It was empty, but a quick sniff revealed it had recently held cognac—a very good cognac at that, judging from the bouquet.

There was a book next to the snifter,
Sheridan’s Plays,
bound in red leather. Bedtime reading.

I went to the bookshelves. Had Arkwright inspected the little green clothbound volume as part of his nightly ritual? I couldn’t tell, as it was right where I’d found it earlier in the evening. But it was his treasure. He’d probably had a look at it.

I took it from the shelf and just managed to fit it into my jacket pocket. Then I nudged the surrounding volumes so as to fill up the space where it had been.

And left the library.

He had turned off the alarm to enter the house, then reset it once he and Elfrida were inside. All the while, of course, the alarm system continued to guard all of the house but the kitchen door. I now left through that very portal, closing it after me and relocking its three locks by picking them in reverse. I had to leave the chain bolt dangling and I couldn’t do anything about the bolt I’d hacksawed earlier. Nobody’s perfect.

I was very damned close to perfection, though, in the way I restored the alarm system, rewiring it to render the kitchen door once more unbreachable. Every impulse urged me to quit Arkwright’s property while I had the chance, but I spent a few extra minutes, and only an imperceptible scrap of electrical tape hinted that the wires had ever been tampered with.

Professionalism? I call it the relentless pursuit of excellence.

I had almost reached the end of Copperwood Crescent when the police car turned the corner. I managed to furnish a smile and a perfunctory nod without breaking stride. They went along their merry way, and why not? They’d seen only a well-dressed and self-possessed gentleman who looked as though he belonged.

They hadn’t seen any palmless rubber gloves. Those wound up tucked in a pocket before I left the Arkwright driveway.

The Pontiac was where I’d left it. I hooked up my jumper wire and was on my way. In due course I was back on West Seventy-fourth Street. One nice thing about swiping a car from a hydrant is you can generally put it back where you found it. I did just that, pulling in next to the fireplug even as a brindle boxer was lifting a leg against it. I unhooked my jumper wire and got out of the car, careful to push down the lock buttons before I swung the door shut.

The boxer’s equally brindle owner, leash in one hand and wad of paper towel in the other, admonished me that I was risking a ticket or a tow. I couldn’t think of an answer so I walked off without giving him one.

“Crazy,” he told the dog. “They’re all crazy here, Max.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

In my own apartment, nibbling cheese and crunching Triscuits and sipping the special-occasion Scotch, I let go and enjoyed the glow that comes afterward on those too-rare occasions where everything goes like clockwork. All the tension, all the discomfort, all the anxiety—it was all bought and paid for by moments like this.

Earlier, stretched out on that lumpy day bed, I’d been unable to stop thinking of all the treasures the Arkwright house contained. The cash, the jewels, the stamps, the coins, the
objets d’art.
I’d had fantasies of backing a moving van onto the lawn and just stealing every damned thing, from the oriental rugs on the floors to the cut-crystal chandeliers overhead. That, I’d decided, was really the only way to do it. A person who wanted to be selective would have his problems. He wouldn’t know what to steal first.

And what did I have for my troubles?

I picked up the book, taking pains not to dribble Scotch on it, though someone had dribbled one thing or another on it over the years. It certainly didn’t look like such a much, and the leisurely inspection I could give it now was disclosing flaws I hadn’t spotted earlier. There was water damage on the front cover. Some of the pages had been foxed. The past half-century had not been gentle with the little volume, and no bookseller could conscientiously grade it higher than Very Good.