Like a Thief in the Night: a Bernie Rhodenbarr story

by Lawrence Block

  “Like a Thief in the Night” is a Bernie Rhodenbarr short story that’s probably entirely unknown to most of Bernie’s fans. Not only does it lack the word burglar in the title, but Bernie’s not the story’s viewpoint character. It’s told entirely through the spirited and enterprising young woman whose fate it is to walk in on our lad in mid-job, all in a near-empty office building in the middle of the night. That could be pretty frightening, but hey, it’s Bernie. She’s got nothing to be afraid of, and neither do we.

  The story originated in the late 70s, commissioned by a women’s magazine called Savvy, with a suite of offices in the huge old Port Authority building on Ninth Avenue in Chelsea. A couple of editors decided it was an intimidating location late at night, and thought it would be a good setting for a short story, even though they hadn’t yet run any fiction. One of them knew my work, and they got in touch.

  I wrote the story, and they loved it and paid a decent price for it, but they never seemed to find room for it in an issue of the magazine. They kept scheduling it and changing their minds, and it seems to me they changed editors in the bargain, and after a couple of years of this they went out of business. Which was a pity, because it was an interesting publication, except for the fiction—of which, alas, there wasn’t any. My agent got the story back, and I believe he sent it over to Cosmopolitan, and no end of online sources now assure me that it ran in that magazine’s May 1983 issue.

  And maybe it did. Except I don’t have a copy of the magazine, and don’t think I ever saw one. I’ve seen Cosmo’s May 1983 cover, it’s not hard to find online, and they blurbed eight or nine major pieces on it, and my story is not among them. Well, really, what difference does it make? It either ran there or it didn’t, and it’s been in short story collections of mine since, including my omnibus, Enough Rope. I had to read it closely in order to format the scanned story for ePublication, and I was pleased to find that I like it a lot. I can only hope, Dear Reader, that it works as well for you.

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  LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

  By Lawrence Block

  At 11:30 the television anchorman counseled her to stay tuned for the late show, a vintage Hitchcock film starring Cary Grant. For a moment she was tempted. Then she crossed the room and switched off the set.

  There was a last cup of coffee in the pot. She poured it and stood at the window with it, a tall and slender woman, attractive, dressed in the suit and silk blouse she'd worn that day at the office. A woman who could look at once efficient and elegant, and who stood now sipping black coffee from a bone-china cup and gazing south and west.

  Her apartment was on the twenty-second floor of a building located at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street, and her vista was quite spectacular. A midtown skyscraper blocked her view of the building where Tavistock Corp. did its business, but she fancied she could see right through it with x-ray vision.

  The cleaning crew would be finishing up now, she knew, returning their mops and buckets to the cupboards and changing into street clothes, preparing to go off-shift at midnight. They would leave a couple of lights on in Tavistock's seventeenth floor suite as well as elsewhere throughout the building. And the halls would remain lighted, and here and there in the building someone would be working all night, and—

  She liked Hitchcock movies, especially the early ones, and she was in love with Cary Grant. But she also liked good clothes and bone-china cups and the view from her apartment and the comfortable, well-appointed apartment itself. And so she rinsed the cup in the sink and put on a coat and took the elevator to the lobby, where the florid-faced doorman made a great show of hailing her a cab.

  There would be other nights, and other movies.

  The taxi dropped her in front of an office building in the West Thirties. She pushed through the revolving door and her footsteps on the marble floor sounded impossibly loud to her. The security guard, seated at a small table by the bank of elevators, looked up from his magazine at her approach. She said, "Hello, Eddie," and gave him a quick smile.

  "Hey, how ya doin’,” he said, and she bent to sign herself in as his attention returned to his magazine. In the appropriate spaces she scribbled Elaine Halder, Tavistock, 1704, and, after a glance at her watch, 12:15.

  She got into a waiting elevator and the doors closed without a sound.

  She'd be alone up there, she thought. She'd glanced at the record sheet while signing it, and no one had signed in for Tavistock or any other office on seventeen.

  Well, she wouldn't be long.

  When the elevator doors opened she stepped out and stood for a moment in the corridor, getting her bearings. She took a key from her purse and stared at it for a moment as if it were an artifact from some unfamiliar civilization. Then she turned and began walking the length of the freshly mopped corridor, hearing nothing but the echo of her boisterous footsteps.

  1704. An oak door, a square of frosted glass, unmarked but for the suite number and the name of the company. She took another thoughtful glance at the key before fitting it carefully into the lock.

  It turned easily. She pushed the door inward and stepped inside, letting the door swing shut behind her.

  And gasped.

  There was a man not a dozen yards from her.

  “Hello,” he said.

  He was standing beside a rosewood-topped desk, the center drawer of which was open, and there was a spark in his eyes and a tentative smile on his lips. He was wearing a gray suit patterned in a windowpane check. His shirt collar was buttoned down, his narrow tie neatly knotted. He was or three years older than she, she supposed, and perhaps that many inches taller.

  Her hand was pressed to her breast, as if to still a pounding heart. But her heart wasn't really pounding. She managed a smile. "You startled me," she said. "I didn't know anyone would be here."

  "We're even."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "I wasn't expecting company."

  He had nice white even teeth, she noticed. She was apt to notice teeth. And he had an open and friendly face, which was also something she was inclined to notice, and why was she suddenly thinking of Cary Grant? The movie she hadn't seen, of course, that plus this Hollywood meet-cute opening, with the two of them encountering each other unexpectedly in this silent tomb of an office, and—

  And he was wearing rubber gloves.

  Her face must have registered something because he frowned, puzzled. Then he raised his hands and flexed his fingers. "Oh, these," he said. "Would it help if I spoke of an eczema brought on by exposure to the night air?"

  "There's a lot of that going around."

  "I knew you'd understand."

  "You're a prowler."

  "The word has the nastiest connotations," he objected. "One imagines a lot of lurking in shrubbery. There's no shrubbery here beyond the odd rubber plant and I wouldn't lurk in it if there were."

  "A thief, then."

  "A thief, yes. More specifically, a burglar. I might have stripped the gloves off when you stuck your key in the lock but I'd been so busy listening to your footsteps and hoping they'd lead to another office that I quite forgot I was wearing these things. Not that it would have made much difference. Another minute and you'd have realized that you've never set eyes on me before, and at that point you'd have wondered what I was doing here."

  "What are you doing here?"
r />   "My kid brother needs an operation."

  "I thought that might be it. Surgery for his eczema."

  He nodded. "Without it he'll never play the trumpet again. May I be permitted an observation?"

  "I don't see why not."

  "I observe that you're afraid of me."

  "And here I thought I was doing such a super job of hiding it."

  "You were, but I'm an incredibly perceptive human being. You're afraid I’ll do something violent, that he who is capable of theft is equally capable of mayhem."

  "Are you?"

  "Not even in fantasy. I'm your basic pacifist. When I was a kid my favorite book was Ferdinand the Bull."

  "I remember him. He didn't want to fight. He just wanted to smell the flowers."

  "Can you blame him?" He smiled again, and the adverb that came to her was disarmingly. More like Alan Alda than Cary Grant, she decided. Well, that was all right. There was nothing wrong with Alan Alda.

  "You're afraid of me," she said suddenly.

  “How’d you figure that? A slight quiver in the old upper lip?"

  "No. It just came to me. But why? What could I do to you?"

  "You could call the, uh, cops."

  "I wouldn't do that."

  "And I wouldn't hurt you."

  "I know you wouldn't."

  "Well," he said, and sighed theatrically. "Aren't you glad we got all that out of the way?"

  She was, rather. It was good to know that neither of them had anything to fear from the other. As if in recognition of this change in their relationship she took off her coat and hung it on the pipe rack, where a checked topcoat was already hanging. His, she assumed. How readily he made himself at home!

  She turned to find he was making himself further at home, rummaging deliberately in the drawers of the desk. What cheek, she thought, and felt herself beginning to smile.

  She asked him what he was doing.

  "Foraging," he said, then drew himself up sharply. "This isn't your desk, is it?"

  "No."

  "Thank heaven for that."

  "What were you looking for, anyway?"

  He thought for a moment, then shook his head. "Nope," he said. "You'd think I could come up with a decent story but I can't. I'm looking for something to steal."

  "Nothing specific?"

  "I like to keep an open mind. I didn't come here to cart off the IBM Selectrics. But you'd be surprised how many people leave cash in their desks."

  "And you just take what you find?"

  He hung his head. "I know," he said. "It's a moral failing. You don't have to tell me."

  "Do people really leave cash in an unlocked desk drawer?"

  "Sometimes. And sometimes they lock the drawers, but that doesn't make them all that much harder to open."

  "You can pick locks?"

  "A limited and eccentric talent," he allowed, "but it's all I know."

  "How did you get in here? I suppose you picked the office lock."

  "Hardly a great challenge."

  "But how did you get past Eddie?"

  "Eddie? Oh, you must be talking about the chap in the lobby. He's not quite as formidable as the Berlin Wall, you know. I got here around eight. They tend to be less suspicious at an earlier hour. I scrawled a name on the sheet and walked on by. Then I found an empty office that they'd already finished cleaning and curled up on the couch for a nap."

  "You're kidding."

  "Have I ever lied to you in the past? The cleaning crew leaves at midnight. At about that time I let out of Mr. Higginbotham's office—that's where I've taken to napping, he's a patent attorney with the most comfortable old leather couch. And then I make my rounds."

  She looked at him. "You've come to this building before."

  "I stop by every little once in a while."

  "You make it sound like a vending machine route."

  "There are similarities, aren't there? I never looked at it that way."

  "And then you make your rounds. You break into offices—"

  "I never break anything. Let's say I let myself into offices."

  "And steal money from desks—"

  "Also jewelry, when I run across it. Anything valuable and portable. Sometimes there's a safe. That saves a lot of looking around. You know right away that's where they keep the good stuff."

  "And you can open safes?"

  "Not every safe," he said modestly, "and not every single time, but—" he switched to a Cockney accent “—I has the touch, mum."

  "And then what do you do? Wait until morning to leave?"

  "What for? I'm well-dressed. I look respectable. Besides, security guards are posted to keep unauthorized persons out of a building, not to prevent them from leaving. It might be different if I tried rolling a Xerox machine through the lobby, but I don't steal anything that won't fit in my pockets or my attaché case. And I don't wear my rubber gloves when I saunter past the guard. That wouldn't do."

  "I don't suppose it would. What do I call you?"

  “'That damned burglar,' I suppose. That's what everybody else calls me. But you—" he extended a rubber-covered forefinger "—you may call me Bernie."

  "Bernie the Burglar."

  "And what shall I call you?”

  "Elaine'll do."

  "Elaine," he said. "Elaine, Elaine. Not Elaine Halder, by any chance?"

  "How did you—?"

  "Elaine Halder," he said. "And that explains what brings you to these offices in the middle of the night. You look startled. I can't imagine why. 'You know my methods, Watson.' What's the matter?"

  "Nothing."

  "Don't be frightened, for God's sake. Knowing your name doesn't give me mystical powers over your destiny. I just have a good memory and your name stuck in it." He crooked a thumb at a closed door on the far side of the room. "I've already been in the boss's office. I saw your note on his desk. I'm afraid I’ll have to admit I read it. I'm a snoop. It's a serious character defect, I know."

  "Like larceny."

  "Something along those lines. Let's see now. Elaine Halder leaves the office, having placed on her boss's desk a letter of resignation. Elaine Halder returns in the small hours of the morning. A subtle pattern begins to emerge, my dear."

  “Oh?”

  "Of course. You've had second thoughts and you want to retrieve the letter before himself gets a chance to read it. Not a bad idea, given some of the choice things you had to say about him. Just let me open up for you, all right? I'm the tidy type and I locked up after I was through in there."

  "Did you find anything to steal?"

  "Eighty-five bucks and a pair of gold cuff links." He bent over the lock, probing its innards with a splinter of spring steel. "Nothing to write home about, but every little bit helps. I'm sure you have a key that fits this door—you had to in order to leave the resignation in the first place, didn't you? But how many chances do I get to show off? Not that a lock like this one presents much of a challenge, not to the nimble digits of Bernie the Burglar, and—ah, there we are!"

  “Extraordinary.”

  "It's so seldom I have an audience."

  He stood aside, held the door for her. On the threshold she was struck by the notion that there would be a dead body in the private office. George Tavistock himself, slumped over his desk with the figured hilt of a letter opener protruding from his back.

  But of course there was no such thing. The office was devoid of clutter, let alone corpses, nor was there any sign that it had been lately burglarized.

  A single sheet of paper lay on top of the desk blotter. She walked over, picked it up. Her eyes scanned its half dozen sentences as if she were reading them for the first time, then dropped to the elaborately styled signature, a far cry from the loose scrawl with which she'd signed the register in the lobby.

  She read the note through again, then put it back where it had been.

  "Not changing your mind again?"

  She shook her head. "I never changed it in the first place. That's not w
hy I came back here tonight."

  "You couldn't have dropped in just for the pleasure of my company."

  "I might have, if I'd known you were going to be here. No, I came back because—" She paused, drew a deliberate breath. "You might say I wanted to clean out my desk."

  "Didn't you already do that? Isn't your desk right across there? The one with your name plate on it? Forward of me, I know, but I already had a peek, and the drawers bore a striking resemblance to the cupboard of one Ms. Hubbard."

  "You went through my desk."

  He spread his hands apologetically. "I meant nothing personal," he said. "At the time, I didn't even know you."

  "That's a point."

  "And searching an empty desk isn't that great an invasion of privacy, is it? Nothing to be seen beyond paper clips and rubber bands and the odd felt-tipped pen. So if you’ve come to clean out that lot—”

  "I meant it metaphorically,” she explained. "There are things in this office that belong to me. Projects I worked on that I ought to have copies of to show to prospective employers."

  "And won't Mr. Tavistock see to it that you get copies?"

  She laughed sharply. "You don't know the man," she said.

  "And thank God for that. I couldn't rob someone I knew."

  "He would think I intended to divulge corporate secrets to the competition. The minute he reads my letter of resignation I’ll be persona non grata in this office. I probably won’t even be able to get into the building. I didn't even realize any of this until I'd gotten home tonight, and I didn't really know what to do, and then—"

  "Then you decided to try a little burglary."

  "Hardly that."

  “Oh?”

  "I have a key."

  "And I have a cunning little piece of spring steel, and both perform the signal function of admitting us where we have no right to be."

  "But I work here!"

  "Worked."

  "My resignation hasn't been accepted yet. I'm still an employee."

  "Technically. Still, you've come like a thief in the night. You may have signed in downstairs and let yourself in with a key, and you're not wearing gloves or padding around in crepe-soled shoes, but we're not all that different, you and I, are we?"