The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

by Lawrence Block

  “I suppose so.”

  “Isn’t it interesting that someone just happens to kill a guy and steal a painting from him, and we’re supposed to steal a painting by the same artist in order to get my cat back?”

  “The coincidence struck me, too.”

  “Uh-huh. You get this coffee at the felafel joint?”

  “Yeah. Not very good, is it?”

  “It’s not a question of good or bad. It’s a matter of trying to figure out what they put in it.”

  “Chickpeas.”

  “Really?”

  “Just a guess. They put chickpeas in everything. I must have lived the first twenty-five years of my life without knowing what a chickpea was, and all of a sudden they’re inescapable.”

  “What do you figure caused it?”

  “Probably nuclear testing.”

  “Makes sense. Bern, why tie Onderdonk up and stuff him in the closet? Let’s say they killed him in order to get away with the painting.”

  “Which is crazy, because it didn’t look as though anything else was taken. The other art was worth a fortune but the place didn’t even look as though it had been searched, let alone stripped.”

  “Maybe somebody just needed the Mondrian for a specific purpose.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like ransoming a cat.”

  “Didn’t think of that.”

  “The point is—next time get the coffee at the coffee shop, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “The point is, why tie him up and why put him in the closet? To keep the body from being discovered? Makes no sense, does it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did whatsername, Andrea, did she know he was in the closet?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “She was pretty cool, wasn’t she? She’s in an apartment with a dead guy in the closet and a burglar walks in on her and what does she do? Rolls around on the oriental rug with him.”

  “It was an Aubusson.”

  “My mistake. What do we do now, Bern? Where do we go from here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t tell the police about Andrea.”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t tell them anything. It’s not as if she could give me an alibi. I could try telling them that I was in the Appling apartment while somebody was killing Onderdonk, but where would that get me? Just charged with another burglary, and even if I showed them the stamps I couldn’t prove I hadn’t killed Onderdonk before or after I performed philately on Appling’s collection. Anyway, I don’t know her name or where she lives.”

  “You don’t think her name’s Andrea?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “You could run an ad in the Voice.”

  “I could.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I, oh, I sort of liked her, that’s all.”

  “Well, that’s good. You wouldn’t want to caper on the carpet with someone you hated.”

  “Yeah. The thing is, I sort of thought I might get together with her again. Of course she’s a married woman and there’s no future in that sort of thing, but I thought—”

  “You had romantic feelings.”

  “Well, yeah, Carolyn, I guess I did.”

  “That’s not a bad thing.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Of course not. I have them myself. Alison came over last night. We met for a drink, and then I explained I didn’t want to miss an important phone call so we went back to my place. The phone call I was talking about was about the cat, but it never came, and we just sat around and listened to music and talked.”

  “Did you get lucky?”

  “Bern, I didn’t even try. It was just sort of peaceful and cozy, you know what I mean? You know how standoffish Ubi can be, and he’s especially whacko with Archie gone, but he came over and curled up in her lap. I told her about Archie.”

  “That he was missing?”

  “That he’d been kidnapped. The whole thing. I couldn’t help it, Bernie. I had to talk about it.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Romance,” she said. “It’s what makes the world go round, isn’t it, Bern?”

  “So they say.”

  “You and Andrea, me and Alison.”

  “Andrea’s about five-foot-six,” I said. “Slender, narrow at the waist. Dark hair to her shoulders, and she was wearing it in pigtails when I saw her.”

  “Alison’s slim, too, but she’s not that tall. I’d say five-four. And her hair’s light brown and short, and she doesn’t wear any lipstick or nail polish.”

  “She wouldn’t, not if she’s a political and economic lesbian. Andrea wears nail polish. I can’t remember about the lipstick.”

  “Why are we comparing descriptions of our obsessions, Bern?”

  “I just had this dumb idea and I wanted to make sure it was a dumb idea.”

  “You thought they were the same girl.”

  “I said it was a dumb idea.”

  “You’re just afraid to let yourself have romantic feelings, that’s all. You haven’t been involved with anybody that way in a long time.”

  “I guess.”

  “Years from now,” she said, “when you and Andrea are old and gray, nodding off together before the fire, you’ll look back on these days and laugh quietly together. And neither of you will have to ask the other why you’re laughing, because you’ll just know without a word’s being spoken.”

  “Years from now,” I said, “you and I will be having coffee somewhere, and one of us will puke, and without a word’s being spoken the other’ll immediately think of this conversation.”

  “And this lousy coffee,” said Carolyn.

  Chapter Thirteen

  When I got back to my shop the phone was ringing, but by the time I got inside it had stopped. I thought I’d just pulled the door shut, letting the springlock secure it, but evidently I’d taken the time to lock it with the key because now I had to unlock it with the key, and that gave my caller the extra few seconds needed to hang up before I could reach the phone. I said the things one says at such times, improbable observations on the ancestry, sexual practices and dietary habits of whoever it was, and then I bent down to pick a dollar bill off the floor. A scrap of paper beside it bore a penciled notation that the payment was for three books from the bargain table.

  That happens sometimes. No one has yet been so honest as to include the extra pennies for sales tax, and if that ever happens I may find myself shamed out of crime altogether. I put the dollar in my pocket and settled in behind the counter.

  The phone rang again. I said, “Barnegat Books, good morning,” and a man’s voice, gruff and unfamiliar, said, “I want the painting.”

  “This is a bookstore,” I said.

  “Let’s not play games. You have the Mondrian and I want it. I’ll pay you a fair price.”

  “I’m sure you will,” I said, “because you sound like a fair guy, but there’s something you’re wrong about. I haven’t got what you’re looking for.”

  “Suit yourself. Do yourself a favor, eh? Don’t sell it to anyone else without first offering it to me.”

  “That sounds reasonable,” I said, “but I don’t know how to reach you. I don’t even know who you are.”

  “But I know who you are,” he said. “And I know how to reach you.”

  Had I been threatened? I was pondering the point when the phone clicked in my ear. I hung up and reviewed the conversation, searching for some clue of my caller’s identity. If there was one present, I couldn’t spot it. I guess I got a little bit lost in thought, because a moment or two down the line I looked up to see a woman approaching the counter and I hadn’t even heard the door open to let her into the store.

  She was slender and birdlike, with large brown eyes and short brown hair, and I recognized her at once but couldn’t place her right away. She had a book in one hand, an oversized art book, and she placed the other hand
on my counter and said, “Mr. Rhodenbarr? ‘Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.’”

  I’d heard the voice before. When? Over the phone? No.

  “Ms. Smith of the Third Oregon,” I said. “That’s not Mary Carolyn Davies you’re quoting.”

  “Indeed it’s not. It’s Edna St. Vincent Millay. The line came to mind when I looked at this.”

  She placed the book on the counter. It was a survey volume covering modern art from the Impressionists to the current anarchy, and it was open now to a color plate which showed a geometrical abstract painting. Vertical and horizontal black bands divided an off-white canvas into squares and rectangles, several of which were painted in primary colors.

  “The absolute beauty of pure geometry,” she said. “Or perhaps I mean the pure beauty of absolute geometry. Right angles and primary colors.”

  “Mondrian, isn’t it?”

  “Piet Mondrian. Do you know much about the man and his work, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

  “I know he was Dutch.”

  “Indeed he was. Born in 1872 in Amersfoort. He began, you may recall, as a painter of naturalistic landscapes. As he found his own style, as he grew artistically, his work became increasingly abstract. By 1917 he had joined with Theo van Doesburg and Bart van der Leck and others to found a movement called De Stijl. It was an article of faith for Mondrian that the right angle was everything, that vertical and horizontal lines intersected space in such a way as to make an important philosophical statement.”

  There was more. She gave me the four-dollar lecture, declaiming it as fervently as she’d read about poor Smith a couple of days earlier. “Piet Mondrian held his first exhibition in America in 1926,” she told me. “Fourteen years later he moved here. He’d gone to Britain in 1939 to get away from the war. Then, when the Luftwaffe started bombing London, he came here. New York fascinated him, you know. The grid pattern of the streets, the right angles. That was the beginning of his boogie-woogie period. You look confused.”

  “I didn’t know he was a musician.”

  “He wasn’t. His painting style changed, you see. He was inspired by the traffic in the streets, the elevated railways, the yellow cabs, the red lights, the jazzy pulsebeat of Manhattan. You’re probably familiar with Broadway Boogie Woogie—that’s one of his most famous canvases. It’s in the Museum of Modern Art. There’s also Victory Boogie Woogie and, oh, several others.”

  In several other museums, I thought, where they were welcome to remain.

  “I see,” I said, which is something I very often say when I don’t.

  “He died on February 1, 1944, just six weeks before his seventy-second birthday. I believe he died of pneumonia.”

  “You certainly know a great deal about him.”

  Her hands moved to adjust her hat, which didn’t really need adjusting. Her eyes aimed themselves at a spot just above and to the left of my shoulder. “When I was a little girl,” she said evenly, “we went to my grandmother’s and grandfather’s every Sunday for dinner. I lived with my parents in a house in White Plains, and we came into the city where my grandparents had a huge apartment on Riverside Drive, with enormous windows overlooking the Hudson. Piet Mondrian had stayed at that apartment upon arriving in New York in 1940. A painting of his, a gift to my grandparents, hung over the sideboard in the dining room.”

  “I see.”

  “We always had the same seating arrangement,” she said, and closed her big eyes. “I can picture that dinner table now. My grandfather at one end, my grandmother at the other near the door to the kitchen. My uncle and aunt and my younger cousin on one side of the table, and my mother and father and me on the other. All I had to do was gaze above my cousin’s head and I could look at the Mondrian. I had it to stare at almost every Sunday night for all of my childhood.”

  “I see.”

  “You’d think I’d have tuned it out as children so often do. After all, I’d never met the artist. He died before I was born. Nor was I generally responsive to art as a child. But that painting, it evidently spoke to me in a particular way.” She smiled at a memory. “When I was in art class, I always tried to produce geometrical abstracts. While the other children were drawing horses and trees, I was making black-and-white grids with squares of red and blue and yellow. My teachers didn’t know what to make of it, but I was trying to be another Mondrian.”

  “Actually,” I said tentatively, “his paintings don’t look all that hard to do.”

  “He thought of them first, Mr. Rhodenbarr.”

  “Well, there’s that, of course, but—”

  “And his simplicity is deceptive. His proportions are quite perfect, you see.”

  “I see.”

  “I myself had no artistic talent. I wasn’t even a fair copyist. Nor did I have any true artistic ambitions.” She cocked her head again, probed my eyes with hers. “The painting was to be mine, Mr. Rhodenbarr.”

  “Oh?”

  “My grandfather promised it to me. He was never a wealthy man. He and my grandmother lived comfortably but he never piled up riches. I don’t suppose he had much idea of the value of Mondrian’s painting. He knew its artistic worth, but I doubt he would have guessed the price it would command. He never collected art, you see, and to him this painting was nothing more or less than the valued gift of a treasured friend. He said it would come to me when he died.”

  “And it didn’t?”

  “My grandmother was the first to die. She contracted some sort of viral infection which didn’t respond to antibiotics, and within a month’s time she was dead of kidney failure. My parents tried to get my grandfather to live with them after her death but he insisted on staying where he was. His one concession was to engage a live-in housekeeper. He never really recovered from my grandmother’s death, and within a year he too was dead.”

  “And the painting—”

  “Disappeared.”

  “The housekeeper took it?”

  “That was one theory. My father thought my uncle might have taken it, and I suppose Uncle Billy thought the same of my father. And everyone suspected the housekeeper, and there was some talk of an investigation, but I don’t think anything ever came of it. The family came to some sort of agreement that there’d been a burglary, because there were other things missing, some of the wedding silver, and it was easier to attribute it to some anonymous burglar than for us to make a thing of suspecting each other.”

  “And I suppose the loss was covered by insurance.”

  “Not the painting. My grandfather had never taken out a floater policy on it. I’m sure it never occurred to him. After all, it had cost him nothing, and I’m sure he never thought it might be stolen.”

  “It was never recovered?”

  “No.”

  “I see.”

  “Time passed. My own father died. My mother remarried and moved across the country. Mondrian remained my favorite painter, Mr. Rhodenbarr, and whenever I looked at one of his works in the Modern or the Guggenheim I felt a strong primal response. And I felt a pang, too, for my painting, my Mondrian, the work that had been promised to me.” She straightened up, set her shoulders. “Two years ago,” she said, “there was a Mondrian retrospective at the Vermillion Galleries. Of course I went. I was walking from one painting to another, Mr. Rhodenbarr, and I was breathless as I always am in front of Mondrian’s work, and then I stepped up to one painting and my heart stopped. Because it was my painting.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was shocked. I was stunned. It was my painting and I would have known it anywhere.”

  “Of course you hadn’t seen it in ten years,” I said thoughtfully, “and Mondrian’s paintings do have a certain sameness to them. Not to take away anything from the artist’s genius, but—”

  “It was my painting.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I sat directly across from that painting every Sunday night for years. I stared at it while I stirred my green peas into my mashed potatoes. I—”

  �
�Oh, did you do that, too? You know what else I used to do? I used to make a potato castle and then make a sort of moat of gravy around it, and then I’d have a piece of carrot for a cannon and I’d use the green peas for cannonballs. What I really wanted was some way to catapult them into the brisket, but that was where my mother drew the line. How did your painting get to the Vermillion Galleries?”

  “It was on loan.”

  “From a museum?”

  “From a private collection. Mr. Rhodenbarr, I don’t care how the painting got into the private collection or how it got out of it. I just want the painting. It’s rightfully mine, and at this point I wouldn’t even care if it weren’t rightfully mine. It’s been an overwhelming obsession ever since I saw it at the retrospective. I have to have it.”

  What was it about Mondrian, I wondered, that appealed so strongly to crazy people? The catnapper, the man on the phone, Onderdonk, Onderdonk’s killer, and now this ditsy little lady. And, come to think of it, who was she?

  “Come to think of it,” I said, “who are you?”

  “Haven’t you been listening? My grandfather—”

  “You never told me your name.”

  “Oh, my name,” she said, and hesitated for only a second. “It’s Elspeth. Elspeth Peters.”

  “Lovely name.”

  “Thank you. I—”

  “I suppose you think I stole the painting from your grandfather’s house lo these many years ago. I can understand that, Ms. Peters. You bought a book in my shop and my name stuck in your mind. Then you read something or heard something to the effect that I had a minor criminal career years ago before I became an antiquarian bookman. You made a mental connection, which I suppose is understandable, and—”

  “I don’t think you stole the painting from my grandfather.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Why, did you?”

  “No, but—”

  “Because I suppose it’s possible, although you would have been a fairly young burglar yourself at the time, wouldn’t you? Personally I’ve always thought that my father was right and Uncle Billy took it, but for all I know Uncle Billy was right and my father took it. Whoever took it sold it, and do you know who bought it?”