The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza (11 page)

The ophthalmologist looked like the best choice, better even than the shrinks. An eye exam doesn’t take long, either. I’d have to make sure he didn’t put drops in my eyes, since that could make lockpicking a far cry from child’s play. And wasn’t I about due to get my eyes looked at? I had never needed glasses, and I hadn’t yet noticed myself holding books at arm’s length, but neither was I getting younger with each passing day, and they say it’s a good idea to get your eyes checked annually so that you can nip glaucoma in the bud, or the pupil or iris, or wherever one nips it, and—

And I made the call and the guy was in the Bahamas until a week from Monday.

So I called Murray Feinsinger’s office, wondering upon what pretext a podiatric appointment might be booked, and a young woman with a Bronx accent (and, I was to learn, with red hair as well) asked me the nature of my problem.

“It’s my feet,” I said.

“You a runner or a dancer?”

Dancers look like dancers. Anybody can look like a runner. All you have to do is sweat and wear funny shoes.

“A runner,” I said, and she gave me an appointment.

Whereupon I went home and changed my Weejuns for my Pumas, all in the interest of verisimilitude, and then I called Carolyn and begged out of our standing lunch date, pleading a doctor’s appointment. She wanted to know what kind of doctor, and I said an ophthalmologist instead of a podiatrist because I’d have been stuck for an answer if she asked what was the matter with my feet. I didn’t yet know I had Morton’s foot with chondromalacia just a hop, skip and a jump away. When she asked what was the matter with my eyes, I muttered something about getting headaches when I did a lot of reading, and that seemed to satisfy her.

I didn’t mention the middle-of-the-night phone call.

At one-fifteen I showed for my appointment with Feinsinger. The doorman called upstairs to make sure I was expected and the elevator operator lingered to check that I entered the right door. Now I was out thirty bucks and my feet felt too narrow while my shoes felt impossibly wide. Maybe I should have gone to the pediatrician instead. I could have lied about my age.

I put my ear to Abel’s door, listened carefully, heard nothing. There was a button recessed in the doorjamb
and I gave it a poke, and a muted bong sounded within the apartment. I heard no other sound in response to the bong, nor did a brisk knock provoke any reaction, so I took a deep breath, drew the tools of my trade from my pocket, and opened the door.

It was at least as easy as it sounds. The police had slapped a sticker on the door forbidding entry to anyone other than authorized police personnel, which I emphatically was not, but they hadn’t taken the trouble to seal the apartment in any meaningful fashion, perhaps because the building’s security was so forbidding. The locksmith who’d knocked off Abel’s police lock (by drilling the cylinder rather than picking it, I noted with some professional disapproval) had left only the door’s original lock as a deterrent to entry. It was a Segal, with both an automatic spring lock that engaged when you closed the door and a deadbolt that you had to turn with a key. The cops had probably had keys—they could have obtained one from the doorman or the super—but the last man out hadn’t bothered to use one, because only the spring lock secured the door, and it was no harder to open than those childproof bottles of aspirin. It would have been faster if I’d had the key, but just barely.

I stepped inside, drew the door shut, turned the little knob to engage the deadbolt. I hesitated in the foyer, trying to figure out what was wrong. Something was bothering me and I couldn’t pin it down.

The hell with it. I moved from the dimness of the foyer into the living room, where light streamed in through the windows. Near the window on the left I saw an outline in chalk, half on the burnished parquet floor and half on the oriental rug. The rug was a Sarouk and it was a nice one and the chalk marks didn’t do anything for it.

Looking at the outline, I could picture his body lying there, one arm outstretched, one leg pointing directly at the chair where I’d been sitting Tuesday night. I didn’t want to look at the chalk marks and I didn’t seem able to keep my eyes away from them. I felt funny. I turned away from them and turned back again, and then I skirted the chalk marks and walked to the window and looked out over the park, out across the river.

And then I realized what had been bothering me in the foyer. It was an absence that I had been faintly aware of, as Sherlock Holmes had remarked on the dog’s not barking in the night.

The thrill was gone. That little boost I always get when I cross a threshold without an invitation, that little up feeling that comes on like coffee in a vein, simply wasn’t there. I had come as a burglar, had managed entry by means of my cleverness and my skills, yet I felt neither triumph nor anticipation.

Because it was my old friend’s place and he had lately died in it, and that took the joy out of the occupation.

I gazed at New Jersey in the distance—which is where it belongs. The sky had darkened in the few minutes since I’d entered the apartment. It looked like rain, which would mean either that the haze around last night’s moon had been an accurate forecaster or that it had not, depending on what it’s supposed to herald.

I felt a little better once I knew what was bothering me. Now I could forget about it and get on with the business of robbing the dead.

Of course that’s not what I was doing. I was merely bent on recovering what was rightfully mine—or wrongfully mine, if you want to be technical about it. By no stretch of the imagination could the coin be considered Abel’s property; he’d had it strictly on consignment, having neither bought nor stolen it from me.

So all I had to do was find it.

I suppose I could have aped the method of the clods who’d preceded us to the Colcannon house. The fastest way to search a place is to let the chips fall where they may, along with everything else. But that would have made it quite obvious that someone had come a-hunting, and what was the point of that? And, even if I hadn’t cared about that, I’m neat by inclination, and particularly indisposed to desecrate the home of a departed friend.

Abel too had been neat. There was a place for every
thing and everything was already in it, and I took care to put it all back where I’d found it.

This made the process difficult beyond description. The proverbial needle in the proverbial haystack would have been a piece of cake in comparison. I started off looking in the obvious places because that’s where people hide things, even the people you’d think would know better. But I found nothing but water and Ty-DBol in his toilet tank and nothing but flour in the flour canister and nothing but air in the hollow towel bars I unbolted from the bathroom wall. I pulled out drawers to see what was taped to their backs or bottoms. I went through the closets and checked suit pockets, thrust my hands inside shoes and boots, looked under rugs.

I could go step by step and fill a dozen pages with an explanation of the search I gave those rooms, but what’s the point? Three things I didn’t find were the philosopher’s stone, the Holy Grail, and the golden fleece. A fourth was the Colcannon V-Nickel.

I did find any number of other interesting articles. I found books in several languages ranging in value to over a thousand dollars. It was no great accomplishment finding them; they constituted Abel Crowe’s personal library and were out in the open on his shelves.

I looked behind each book, and I flipped the pages of each book, and I found nineteenth-century postage stamps from Malta and Cyprus in the pages of Hobbes’s
Leviathan
and five hundred pounds in British
currency tucked into a copy of
Sartor Resartus
by Thomas Carlyle. On a high shelf I found what were probably Sassanian coins tucked behind three leatherbound volumes of the poetry of Byron and Shelley and Keats.

There were two telephones in the bedroom, one on the bedside table, the other across the room on a dresser. That seemed excessive. I checked, and both of them were hooked up to wall plugs, but the one on the dresser didn’t seem to be in working order. So I un-screwed the base plate and discovered that the thing had been gutted, its working parts replaced with a wad of fifties and hundreds. I counted up to $20,000, which brought me close enough to the end of the stock to estimate that it totaled perhaps $23,000 in all. I put the phone back together again, with the money back inside where I’d found it.

That’s enough to give you the idea. I found no end of valuable booty, which is just what you’d expect to find in the home of a civilized and prosperous fence. I found more cash, more stamps, more coins, and a fair amount of jewelry, including the watch and earrings from the Colcannon burglary. (They were in a humidor beneath a layer of cigars. I got excited when I came upon them, thinking the nickel might be nearby, but it wasn’t. I’d never known Abel to smoke a cigar.)

In his kitchen, I helped myself to a piece of dense chocolatey layer cake. I think it was of the sort he called
Schwarzwälder kuchen. Black Forest cake. Except for that and the glass of milk I drank along with it, I took nothing whatsoever from Abel Crowe’s apartment.

I thought of it. Every time I hit something really tempting I tried to talk myself into it, and I just couldn’t manage it. You’d think it would have been easy to rationalize. As far as I knew, Abel had no heirs. If an heir did turn up, he’d probably never see half the swag stashed in that apartment. The library would be sold
en bloc
to a book dealer, who in turn would profit handsomely enough reselling the volumes individually without ever discovering the bonuses that some of them contained. The watch and earrings would wind up the property of the first cigar smoker to wander in, while the $23,000 would stay in the telephone forever. What happens to telephones when somebody dies? Do they go back to the phone company? If they don’t work, does somebody repair them? Whoever repaired this particular one was in for the surprise of his life.

So why didn’t I help myself?

I guess I just plain found out that robbing the dead was not something I was prepared to do. Not the newly dead, anyway. Not a dead friend. All things considered, I’ll be damned if I can think of a single logical argument against robbing the dead. One would think they’d mind it a good deal less than the living. If they can’t take it with them, why should they care where it goes?

And God knows the dead do get robbed. Cops do it all the time. When a derelict dies in a Bowery flophouse, the first thing the officers on the scene do is divvy up whatever cash they find. Admittedly I’ve always set higher standards for myself than those of a policeman, but my standards weren’t all that lofty, were they?

It was hard leaving the cash. When I’ve broken into a home or place of business I invariably take whatever cash presents itself. Even if I’ve entered the place for some other purpose, I still pocket cash automatically, reflexively. I don’t have to think about it. I just do it.

This time I didn’t. Oddly enough, I came close to taking the Piaget watch and the emerald earrings. Not that I found them tempting, but because I thought I might take them with something approaching legitimacy. After all, Carolyn and I had stolen them to begin with.

But we had been paid for them, hadn’t we? So they weren’t ours any longer. They were Abel’s, and they would remain in his apartment.

One of the books I paged through was the copy of Spinoza’s
Ethics
we’d brought him, and when I’d run out of places to search I took it down from its shelf and flipped idly through it. Abel had made shelf space for it on the last night of his life. Perhaps he’d paused first to thumb through it, reading a sentence here, a paragraph there.

“It may easily come to pass,”
I read,
“that a vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance.”

I took the book with me when I left. I don’t know why. It was Abel’s property—a gift is a gift, after all—but I somehow felt entitled to reclaim it.

I guess I just hate to leave a place empty-handed.

I
would have taken the stairs as far as Murray Feinsinger’s floor, on the chance that the same elevator operator was on the job and that his memory was working overtime. But as I neared the elevator an elderly woman slowed me with a nod and a smile. She was wearing a black Persian lamb jacket and held a very small dog in her arms. It might have been a Maltese. Carolyn would have known at a glance.

“You’ll be caught in the rain,” she told me. “Go back and get your raincoat.”

“I’m running late as it is.”

“I have a plastic raincoat,” she said. “Folded, and in my purse at all times.” She patted her shoulder bag. “You’re the Stettiner boy, aren’t you? How’s your mother?”

“Oh, she’s fine.”

“The sore throat’s better?”

“Much better.”

“That’s good to hear,” she said, and scratched the little dog behind the ear. “It must be doing her a world of good to have you home for a few days. You’ll be here how long? The weekend or a little longer?”

“Well, as long as I can.”

“Wonderful,” she said. The elevator arrived, the door opened. I followed her onto it. The same operator was indeed running the car, but there was no recognition in his eyes. “You wouldn’t remember me,” the woman said. “I’m Mrs. Pomerance in 11-J.”

“Of course I remember you, Mrs. Pomerance.”

“And your mother’s feeling better? I’m trying to remember the last time I talked with her. I was so sorry to hear about her brother. Your uncle.”

What about him? “Well,” I said, tightening my grip on Spinoza, “these things happen.”

“His heart, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“Listen, it’s not the worst way. You must have heard about our neighbor? Mr. Crowe in 11-D?”

“Yes, I heard. Just the other day, wasn’t it?”

“The day before yesterday, they say. You’ve heard what they’re saying about him? That he bought from thieves? It was in the papers. Imagine in this building, after the co-op conversion and everything, and one of the residents is a man who buys from thieves.
And then to be struck down and killed in his own apartment.”

“Terrible.”

We had reached the ground floor and walked together through the lobby. Just inside the entrance she stopped to clip a leash to the little dog’s collar, then extracted a folded plastic raincoat from her bag. “I’ll just carry this over my arm,” she said, “so that when it starts raining I won’t have to go looking for it. That Mr. Crowe—it makes a person think. He was always a nice man, he always had time for a kind word on the elevator. If he was a criminal, you would still have to say he was a good neighbor.”

We strolled past the doorman, hesitated beneath the canopy. The little dog was pulling at his leash, anxious to head west toward Riverside Park. I was at least as anxious to head east.

“Well,” I said, “he was a fence.”

“That’s the word. A fence.”

“And you know what they say. Good fences make good neighbors.”

There was no point going downtown. It was already past closing time when I left Abel’s apartment. I got a bus on Broadway, not wanting to get caught in the rain with Spinoza under my arm. The rain was still holding off when I got off at Seventy-second Street and walked home.

Nothing but bills and circulars in my mailbox. I carried them upstairs, threw away the offers from those who wanted to sell me something, filed the demands from those who wished to be paid. Getting and spending we lay waste our powers, I thought, and put Spinoza up there on the shelf alongside of Wordsworth.

I called Carolyn’s apartment. She didn’t answer. I called Narrowback Gallery and Jared answered and told me his mother was out. I called the Poodle Factory and got Carolyn’s machine. I didn’t leave a message.

I hung up the phone and it rang before I could get three steps away from it. I picked it up and said hello. I was about to say hello a second time when it clicked in my ear.

A wrong number. Or my caller of the night before. Or some friend who’d decided at the last moment that she didn’t really want to talk to me tonight after all. Or someone, anyone, who’d merely wanted to establish that I was at home.

Or none of the above.

I got an umbrella, started for the door. The phone rang again. I let myself out, locked up after me. The ringing followed me down the hall.

A block away on Broadway I had a big plate of spaghetti and a large green salad with oil and vinegar. I hadn’t had anything since breakfast aside from the cake and milk at Abel’s apartment, and I was hungry
and angry and lonely and tired, and the first of the four seemed the only one I could do anything about for the moment. Afterward I had a small portion of tortoni, which never turns out to be as interesting a dessert as one would hope, and with it I drank four tiny cups of inky espresso in quick succession, each flavored with just a drop of anisette. By the time I got out of there caffeine was perking through my veins. I was neither hungry nor tired now, and it was hard to remember what I’d been angry about. I was still lonely but I figured I could live with it.

I walked home through the rain, and I couldn’t see the moon to check whether it had a haze around it. When I got back to my building, the usually stolid Armand greeted me by name. He had managed to ignore me when I’d come in earlier, and when I’d left for the restaurant. He and Felix are quite a pair, one more lethargic than the other, while the third doorman, the guy who works midnight to eight, makes it a rule never to appear sober in public. Somebody ought to send the three of them up to Eighty-ninth and Riverside for six weeks of basic training.

As I crossed the lobby, a woman got up from the floral-pattern wing chair. She looked to be around twenty-eight. A mane of loose black curls fell a few inches past her shoulders. Her face was an inverted triangle, tapering past a small mouth to a sharp chin. Her mouth was glossy with scarlet lipstick, her eyes deeply
shadowed, and if her lashes were natural she must have stimulated their growth with heavy doses of chemical fertilizers.

She said, “Mr. Rhodenbarr? I got to see you.”

Well, that explained Armand’s greeting. It was his subtle way of fingering me. I hoped he’d been richly rewarded for this service, because he’d just managed to work his way off my Christmas list.

“Well,” I said.

“It’s kind of important. Would it be okay if we went upstairs? Like to your place?”

She batted her improbable lashes at me. Above them, two narrow curved lines replaced the brows God had given her. If thine eyebrow offend thee, pluck it out.

She looked like a masochist’s dream as interpreted by the fevered pen of an adolescent cartoonist. Spike-heeled black shoes with ankle straps. Black wet-look vinyl pants that fitted like paint. A blood-red blouse of some shiny synthetic fabric, tight and clingy enough to prevent one’s forgetting even momentarily that human beings are mammals.

A rolled red-and-black umbrella. A black wet-look vinyl purse, a perfect match for the pants. Gold teardrop earrings. The emeralds we’d taken from Colcannon and sold to Abel might look splendid dangling from those little lobes, I thought, and wondered if she’d like me to go back and fetch them for her.

“My place,” I said.

“Could we?”

“Why not?”

We ascended in the elevator, and in its confined space I got a full dose of her perfume. There was a lot of musk in it, and some patchouli, and the effect was at once erotic and cheap. I couldn’t dismiss the notion that she wasn’t really wearing perfume, that she had been born smelling like that.

The elevator reached my floor. The door opened. We walked down the narrow hallway and I imagined that all my neighbors were at their doors, eyes pressed to their peepholes, for a glimpse of what the resident burglar had brought home for the night. As we passed Mrs. Hesch’s door, I fancied I could hear her going
tssst-tssst
in reproach.

We hadn’t talked in the elevator and we didn’t talk in the hallway. I felt like showing off by opening my door without a key. I restrained myself and unlocked my several locks in the conventional fashion. Inside, I bustled around switching on lamps and wishing I’d changed the sheets since Denise’s visit. Not that my guest looked likely to object to rolling around in a bed where another woman had lately lain, but—

“How about a drink?” I suggested. “What can I fix you?”

“Nothing.”

“Cup of coffee? Tea, either herb tea or tea tea?”

She shook her head.

“Well, have a seat. Might as well make yourself comfortable. And I don’t think I know your name.”

I don’t think I’ve ever felt less suave but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. She was tacky and obvious and completely irresistible, and I couldn’t recall ever having been so thoroughly turned on in my life. I had to fight the urge to get down on my hands and knees and chew the carpet.

She didn’t sit down, nor did she tell me her name. Her face clouded for an instant, and she lowered her eyes and reached into her purse.

Her hand came out with a gun in it.

“You son of a bitch,” she said. “Stay right where you are, you son of a bitch, or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”