The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

by Lawrence Block

  Because there was no alarm system. All there was was a nickel-plated cylinder, attached to nothing at all, mounted in the door like a talisman. You’ve seen those decals on car windows warning of an alarm system? People buy the decals for a dollar, hoping they’ll keep car thieves at bay, and perhaps they do. You’ve seen those signs on houses, BEWARE OF THE DOG, and they haven’t got a dog? A sign’s cheaper than rabies shots and Alpo, and you don’t have to walk it twice a day.

  Why install a burglar alarm at a cost of a thousand dollars or more when you could mount a cylinder for a couple of bucks and get the same protection? Why have a system you’d forget to set half the time, and forget to turn off the other half of the time, when the illusion of a system was every bit as effective?

  My heart filled with admiration for John Charles Appling. It was going to be a pleasure to do business with him.

  I’d been reasonably certain he wasn’t home. He was at the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West-by-God-Virginia, playing golf and taking the sun and attending a tax-deductible convention of the Friends of the American Wild Turkey, a band of conservationists dedicated to improving wilderness conditions to create a more favorable habitat for the birds in question, thereby to increase their numbers to the point where the Friends can hie themselves off to the woods in autumn with shotgun and turkey lure in tow, there to slay the object of their affections. After all, what are friends for?

  I locked the door now, just in case, and I drew my rubber gloves from my attaché case and pulled them on, then took a moment to wipe the surfaces I might have touched while checking the fake alarm cylinder. There still remained the outside of the door, but I’d smudge those prints on the way out. Then I took another moment to lean against the door and let my eyes accustom themselves to the darkness. And—let’s admit it—to Enjoy the Feeling.

  And what a feeling it was! I read once of a woman who spent every free moment at Coney Island, riding the big roller coaster over and over and over. Evidently she got the thrill from that curious pastime that I get whenever I let myself into another person’s place of residence. That charged-up sensation, that fire-in-the-blood, every-cell-alive feeling. I’ve had it ever since I first broke into a neighbor’s house in my early teens, and all the intervening years, all the crimes and all the punishments, have not dulled or dimmed it in the slightest. It’s as much of a thrill as ever.

  I’m not boasting. I take a workman’s pride in my skills but no pride at all in the forces that drive me. God help me, I’m a born thief, the urge to burgle bred in my bones. How could they ever rehabilitate me? Can you teach a fish to leave off swimming, a bird to renounce flight?

  By the time my eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, the thrill of illegal entry had subsided to a less acute sense of profound well-being. Flashlight in hand, I took a quick tour of the apartment. Even if Appling and his wife were sequestered with the rest of the turkeys, there was always the chance that one of the rooms held some relative or friend or servant, sleeping peacefully or cowering in terror or putting in a quiet call to the local precinct. I went quickly in and out of each room and encountered nothing living but the houseplants. Then I returned to the living room and switched on a lamp.

  I had plenty to choose from. The cobra door knocker was the first but hardly the last piece of art nouveau I encountered, and the living room was festooned with enough Tiffany lamps to cause a power failure. Large lamps, small lamps, table lamps, floor lamps—no one could want that much light. But then the collecting mania is by definition irrational and excessive. Appling had thousands upon thousands of postage stamps, and how many letters do you suppose he sent out?

  Tiffany lamps are worth a fortune these days. I recognized some of them—the Dragonfly lamp, the Wisteria lamp—and you can pick up a nice suburban house for what a couple of those would bring at Parke-Bernet. You could also earn a very quick trip to Dannemora trying to walk out of the Charlemagne weighted down with leaded-glass lamps. I went around examining them—the place was as good as a museum—but I left them as I found them, along with any number of other gewgaws and pretties.

  The Applings seemed to have separate bedrooms, and I found jewelry in hers, in a stunning tortoiseshell jewelry box in her top dresser drawer. The box was locked and the key was right there next to it in the drawer. Go figure some people. I unlocked the box with its little key—I could have opened it almost as quickly without the key, but why show off when there’s no one around to ooh and ahh? I was going to leave the jewelry, although it did look awfully nice, but a pair of ruby earrings proved irresistible, and into my pocket they went. Would she miss one pair of earrings out of a whole box full of jewelry? And, if she did, wouldn’t she think she’d misplaced them? What kind of burglar, after all, would take a couple of earrings and leave everything else?

  A cagey one. A burglar whose presence in the Charlemagne that night was a matter of record, and who thus had to avoid stealing anything that would be conspicuous by its absence. I did take the ruby earrings—my profession, after all, can never be 100 percent risk-free—but when I came upon a sheaf of fifty- and hundred-dollar bills in J. C. Appling’s dresser drawer, I left them there.

  Not without effort, let me admit. There wasn’t a fortune there, $2,800 at a rough count, but money is money and you just can’t beat cash. When you steal things you have to fence them, but with cash you just keep it and spend the stuff at leisure.

  But he might notice that it was gone. It might in fact be the first thing he checked upon returning to the apartment, and if it was missing he’d know immediately that he hadn’t misplaced it, that it hadn’t walked off of its own accord.

  I thought of taking a couple of bills, figuring they wouldn’t be missed, but how much is too much? It’s more trouble making such nice distinctions than the cash warranted. Easier to leave the money where it was.

  I hit paydirt in the den.

  There was a bookcase there, but nothing like Onderdonk’s library. Some reference works, a shelf full of stamp catalogs, a few books on guns, and a cheap set of reprint editions of the novels of Zane Grey. Bargain-table stuff at Barnegat Books, forty cents each, three for a buck.

  A glassed-in wall case held two shotguns and a rifle, their stocks elaborately tooled, their barrels agleam with menace. I suppose they were for shooting turkeys but they’d do in a pinch for shooting burglars and I didn’t like the looks of them.

  Over the desk, an Audubon print of an American wild turkey hung in an antiqued frame. The real thing, stuffed and mounted and looking only a little forlorn, stood guard atop the bookcase. I suppose its friend J.C. shot it. First he’d have honked with one of the odd-looking wooden turkey lures he had on display, and then he’d have triggered the shotgun, and now the creature had achieved a sort of taxidermal immortality. Oh, well. People who break into houses, glass or otherwise, probably shouldn’t cast stones. Or aspersions, or whatever.

  In any event, the turkeys and the guns and the books were beside the point. Along the back of the large desk, below the Audubon turkey, ranged a dozen dark green volumes a bit over a foot high and a couple of inches wide. They were Scott Specialty Stamp Albums, and they were just what the burglar ordered. British Asia, British Africa, British Europe, British America, British Oceania. France and French Colonies. Germany, German States and German Colonies. Benelux. South and Central America. Scandinavia. And, in an album which did not match its fellows, the United States.

  I went through one album after another. Appling’s stamps were not affixed to the page with hinges but were encased individually in little plastic mounts designed for the purpose. (Hinging a mint stamp is as economically unsound as discarding a book’s dust jacket.) I could have removed the plastic mounts, and thought about it, but it was faster and simpler and subtler to tear whole pages from the loose-leaf binders, and that’s what I did.

  I know a little about stamps. There’s a lot I don’t know, but I can skim through an album and make good spot decisions as to what to take
and what to leave. In the Benelux album, for example—that’s Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, along with Belgian and Dutch colonies—I cleaned out all of the semi-postal issues (all complete, all mint, all readily salable) and most of the good nineteenth-century classics. I left the more highly specialized stuff, parcel post and postage due and such. In the British Empire albums I loaded up on the Victoria, Edward VII and George V issues. I didn’t take very many pages from the Latin American albums, having less knowledge of the material.

  By the time I was done my attaché case was packed solid with album pages and the albums they’d come from were all back in order on the desk top, their bulk not visibly reduced. I don’t suppose I took one page in twenty, but the pages I took were the ones worth taking. I’m sure I missed the odd priceless rarity, and I’m sure I took the bad with the good, even as I do in life itself, but on balance I felt I’d done a first-rate job of winnowing.

  I hadn’t a clue what the lot was worth. One of the U.S. pages included the twenty-four-cent inverted airmail, a bicolor with the plane appearing upside-down, and I forget the most recent auction record for that issue but I know it ran well into five figures. On the other hand, it would have to be fenced, sold to someone who’d be aware he was buying stolen goods and who’d accordingly expect a bargain. Most of the other material was quite anonymous in comparison, and would bring a much higher proportion of its fair market value.

  So what did I have in my attaché case? A hundred thousand? It wasn’t impossible. And what could I net for it? Thirty, thirty-five thousand?

  A fair ballpark figure. But it was no more than a guess and I might be miles off in either direction. In twenty-four hours’ time I’d know a good deal more. By then all of the stamps would be off their pages and out of their mounts, sorted by sets and tucked into little glassine envelopes, their prices checked in last year’s Scott catalog, which was the most recent copy to have turned up at the store. (I could buy the book new, but somehow it goes against the grain.) Then Appling’s pages and mounts would go down the incinerator, along with any stamps that might have markings rendering them specifically identifiable. In a day’s time, a box of stamps in glassine envelopes, all quite anonymous, would be my only link with the John Charles Appling collection. An indeterminate time after that, but surely not much more than a week, the stamps would have new owners and I’d have money in their stead.

  And it might be months before Appling ever knew they were gone. It was likely that he’d detect their absence the first time he pulled out an album and paged through it, but it was by no means a sure thing. I’d left twenty times as much as I’d taken, in volume if not in value, and he might open a book, turn to a specific page, add a stamp, and never notice that other pages were missing.

  It didn’t really matter. He wouldn’t notice the minute he walked into the house, and when he did notice he couldn’t say when the theft had taken place—it might have occurred before or after his Greenbrier jaunt. His insurance company would pay, or it wouldn’t, and he’d come out ahead or behind or dead even, and who cared? Not I. A batch of pieces of colored paper would have changed ownership, and so would a batch of pieces of green paper, and no one on God’s earth was going to miss a meal as a result of my night’s activities.

  I’m not offering a moral defense of myself, you understand. Burglary is morally reprehensible and I’m aware of the fact. But I wasn’t stealing the pennies off a dead man’s eyes, or the bread from a child’s mouth, or objects of deep sentimental value. I’ll tell you, I love collectors. I can ransack their holdings with such little guilt.

  The state, however, takes a sterner view of things. They draw no distinction between swiping a philatelist’s stamps and lifting a widow’s rent money. However good I get at rationalizing my pursuit, I still have to do what I can to stay out of jail.

  Which meant getting the hell out of there. I turned off lights—there was a Tiffany lamp in the study, too, wouldn’t you know—and I made my way to the apartment’s front door. My stomach growled en route and I thought of checking the fridge and building myself a sandwich, figuring they’d no more miss a little food than a fortune in rare stamps. But Sing Sing and Attica are overflowing with chaps who stopped for a sandwich, and if I just got out of there I could buy myself a whole restaurant.

  I squinted through the peephole, saw no one in the hallway, and put my ear to the door and heard no one in the hallway, either. I unlocked the door, eased it open, saw no one in the hallway, and let myself out. I picked the Poulard lock again, locking it this time so as to spare the manufacturer’s feelings. I did not reset the spurious burglar alarm cylinder, just gave it a wink and went on my way, pausing only to smudge whatever prints I might have left on the outside of the door. Then, attaché case in hand, I crossed to the fire door, opened it, passed through it, and let out a long breath as it swung quietly shut behind me.

  I climbed one flight, stopped long enough to strip off my rubber gloves and stuff them into my jacket pocket. (I didn’t want to open the attaché case and chance spilling stamps all over the goddamn place.) I climbed three more flights of stairs, slipped the lock on the fire door, emerged in the hallway, and rang for the elevator. While it ascended from the lobby I checked my watch.

  Twenty-five minutes to one. It had been close to eleven-thirty when I said good night to Onderdonk, so I’d spent just about an hour in the Appling apartment. It seemed to me that I should have been able to get in and out in half an hour, but I couldn’t have shaved too many minutes off the time I spent going through the albums. I could have stayed out of the bedrooms, perhaps, and I didn’t have to give as much attention as I did to the Tiffany lamps, but what is it they say about all work and no play? I was out of there safely and that was what counted.

  A shame, though, that I couldn’t have made my exit before midnight, when service shifts commonly change at apartment buildings. I’d be seen now by a second elevator operator, a second concierge, a second doorman. Otherwise I’d have been seen by the same set a second time, and which was riskier? Not that it mattered, since I’d already given my name, and—

  The elevator arrived. As I stepped into the car I turned toward Onderdonk’s closed door. “ ’Night now,” I said. “I’ll have those figures for you as soon as I can.”

  The door closed, the car descended. I leaned back against its wood paneling and crossed my legs at the ankle. “Long day,” I said.

  “Just starting for me,” the operator said.

  I tried to forget about the camera overhead. It was like trying to forget that you’ve got your left foot in a bucket of ice water. I couldn’t look at it and I couldn’t suppress the urge to look at it, and I did a lot of elaborate yawning. It was, actually, a rather quick ride, but it certainly didn’t seem that way.

  A brisk nod to the concierge. The doorman held the door for me, then hurried past me to the curb to summon a taxi. One turned up almost immediately. I gave the doorman a buck and told the driver to drop me at Madison and Seventy-second. I paid him, walked a block west to Fifth, and caught another cab back to my place. On the way I balanced the attaché case on my knees and relived some of the hour I’d spent in apartment 11-B. The moment when the Poulard lock, teased and tickled beyond endurance, threw up its tumblers and surrendered. The sight of that inverted airmail stamp, alone on a page, as if it had been waiting for me since the day they misprinted it.

  I tipped the cabby a buck. My own doorman, a glassy-eyed young fellow who worked the midnight-to-eight shift in a permanent muscatel haze, did not rush to open the door of the taxi. I suppose he’d have held the lobby door for me but he didn’t have to. It was propped open. He stayed on his stool, greeting me with a sly conspiratorial smile. I wonder what secret he thought we shared.

  Upstairs I fumbled my own key into my own lock, for a change, and opened the door. The light was on. Considerate of them, I thought, to leave a light for the burglar. Wait a minute, I thought. What was this them stuff? I was the one who’d left the light
on, except I hadn’t, I never did.

  What was going on?

  I put a foot inside, then drew it warily back, as if trying to get the hang of a new dance step. I went on in and turned toward the couch and blinked, and there, blinking back at me like a slightly cockeyed owl, was Carolyn Kaiser.

  “Well, Jesus,” she said, “it’s about time. Where the hell have you been, Bern?”

  I pulled the door shut, turned the bolt. “You picked your way through my Rabson lock,” I said. “I didn’t think you knew how to do that.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Don’t tell me the doorman let you in. He’s not supposed to, and anyway he doesn’t have a key.”

  “I have a key, Bern. You gave me keys to your place. Remember?”

  “Oh, right.”

  “So I stuck the key in the lock and turned it, and damned if the thing didn’t pop open. You ought to try it yourself sometime. Works like a charm.”

  “Carolyn—”

  “Have you got anything to drink? I know you’re supposed to wait until it’s offered, but who’s got the patience?”

  “There’s two bottles of beer in the fridge,” I said. “One’s going to wash down the sandwich I’m about to make, but you’re welcome to the other one.”

  “Dark Mexican beer, right? Dos Equis?”

  “Right.”

  “They’re gone. What else have you got?”

  I thought for a moment. “There’s a little Scotch left.”

  “A single malt? Glen Islay, something like that?”

  “You found it and it’s gone, too.”

  “ ’Fraid so, Bern.”

  “Then we’re fresh out,” I said, “unless you want to knock off the Lavoris. I think it’s about sixty proof.”

  “Child of a dog.”

  “Carolyn—”

  “You know something? I think I’m gonna go back to saying ‘son of a bitch.’ It may be sexist but it’s a lot more satisfying than ‘child of a dog.’ You go around saying ‘child of a dog’ and people don’t even know you’re cursing.”