Forget everything I said to Ray Kirschmann. True, I was getting older. True, I shrank from the prospect of getting chewed by attack dogs and shot by irate householders and locked by the authorities in some pickproof penitentiary cell. True, true, all of it true, and so what? None of it mattered a whit when I was inside someone else"s dwelling place with all his worldly goods spread out before me like food on a banquet table. By G.o.d, I wasn"t that that old! I wasn"t old! I wasn"t that that scared! scared!
I"m not proud of this. I could spout a lot of bilge about the criminal being the true existential hero of our times, but what for? I don"t buy it myself. I"m not nuts about criminals and one of the worst things about prison was having to a.s.sociate with them. I"d prefer to live as an honest man among honest men, but I haven"t yet found an honest pursuit that lets me feel this way. I wish there were a moral equivalent of larceny, but there isn"t. I"m a born thief and I love it.
I made my way through a butler"s pantry and an enormous brick-floored kitchen, crossing a hallway to the formal living room. The light I"d noted from the street cast a warm glow over the room. It was a noteworthy object in and of itself, a leaded-gla.s.s dragonfly lamp by Tiffany. I"d last seen one in an antique shop on upper Madison Avenue with a $1,500 tag on it, and that was a few years ago.
But I hadn"t come all the way to Queens to steal furniture. I"d come with a very specific purpose, and I didn"t really need to be in the living room at all. I didn"t have to take inventory, but old habits die hard, and I could hardly avoid it.
The lamp made it easy, saving me the trouble of using my flashlight. There was a timer so that it would turn itself off during daylight hours and resume its vigil at dusk, burning bravely until dawn, announcing to pa.s.sers-by that n.o.body was home.
Considerate of them, I thought, to leave a light for the burglar.
The lamp was perched on an ornamental French kneehole desk. Four of the desk"s six drawers were fakes, but one of the others held a Patek Philippe pocket watch with a hunting scene engraved on its case.
I closed the drawer without disturbing the watch.
The dining room was worth a look. A sideboard absolutely loaded with silver, including two complete sets of sterling tableware and a ton of hallmarked Georgian serving pieces. No end of fine porcelain and crystal.
I left everything undisturbed.
The library, also on the ground floor, was a room I would have gladly called my own. It measured perhaps twelve by twenty feet, with a glorious Kerman carpet covering most of the buffed parquet floor. Custom-built bookshelves of limed English oak lined two walls. In the middle of the room, centered beneath a fruited Tiffany shade, stood a tournament-size pool table. At the room"s far end, twin portraits of Arkwright ancestors in gilded oval frames looked down in solemn approbation.
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 gla.s.sware 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 bra.s.s 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, 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. 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 c.o.c.ktail 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 Faberge eggs from the top of the chest of drawers, or the platinum cuff links and tie bar, or any of the wrist.w.a.tches, 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 gla.s.sed-in shelves full of Boehm birds and Art Nouveau vases and gla.s.s 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 alb.u.ms. One general worldwide collection that didn"t look to be worth much, but the other was a Scott Specialty Alb.u.m for the Benelux countries, and a quick thumbing didn"t reveal too many blank s.p.a.ces.
And a coin collection. Lord above, a coin collection! No alb.u.ms, 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.
m.u.f.fled 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 bra.s.s 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 cla.s.sics, 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, Sheridan"s Plays, bound in red leather. Bedtime reading. 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 s.p.a.ce 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. n.o.body"s perfect.
I was very d.a.m.ned 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 sc.r.a.p 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 b.u.t.tons 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. objets d"art. I"d had fantasies of backing a moving van onto the lawn and just stealing every d.a.m.ned 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. I"d had fantasies of backing a moving van onto the lawn and just stealing every d.a.m.ned 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.
I flipped through it, read a stanza here and a stanza there. The author"s meter was unmistakable and he had never lost his dexterity at rhyming, but what I was reading looked like doggerel to me.
For this I"d pa.s.sed up Krugerrands and Barber Proofs, Faberge and Baccarat and Daum Nancy. For this I"d returned the pearl-and-ruby ring to its little velvet case.
Mr. Whelkin would be proud of me.
CHAPTER Four.
I met J. Rudyard Whelkin on a slow midweek morning two weeks prior to my little venture in breaking and entering. The Yankees had just dropped the first two games of the Series, and the night before I"d watched a kid barely old enough to shave strike out Reggie Jackson with the bases loaded. This morning it was damp and drizzly, and it figured. met J. Rudyard Whelkin on a slow midweek morning two weeks prior to my little venture in breaking and entering. The Yankees had just dropped the first two games of the Series, and the night before I"d watched a kid barely old enough to shave strike out Reggie Jackson with the bases loaded. This morning it was damp and drizzly, and it figured.
I hadn"t had any customers yet and I didn"t much care; I was settled in behind the counter with a paperback. I don"t stock paperbacks, and the ones that come in I wholesale to a guy on Third and Sixteenth who deals in nothing else.
Sometimes, though, I read them first. The one I was reading was one of Richard Stark"s books about Parker. Parker"s a professional thief, and every book runs pretty much to form-Parker puts together a string of crooks, he goes someplace like Spartanburg, South Carolina, to buy guns and a truck, he gets a dentist in Yankton Falls to put up front money for the operation, he and his buddies pull the job, and then something goes horribly wrong. If nothing went horribly wrong, all of the books would end around page 70 and by now Parker would own his own island in the Caribbean.
Last time I was inside, everybody was a big fan of Parker"s. My colleagues read everything they could get their hands on about him, even if they had to move their lips to get the job done. I swear there were grizzled cons in that joint who would walk around quoting pa.s.sages at each other, especially parts where Parker maimed someone. One safecracker always quoted the part where Parker settled a score with an unworthy fellow laborer by breaking three important bones and leaving him in a swamp. It was the adjective that did it for him, the idea of deliberately breaking important bones.
I had just reached the part where Parker was putting in an urgent call to Handy McKay at his diner in Presque Isle, Maine, when the little bells above the door tinkled to announce I had company. I moved the paperback out of sight as my visitor approached the counter. After all, antiquarian booksellers have an image to protect. We"re not supposed to read trash.
He was a stout man, florid of face, jowly as a bulldog, with thinning mahogany hair combed straight back over a glossy salmon scalp. He wore a charcoal-brown herringbone tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, a tobacco-brown sweater vest, a tan oxford-cloth shirt with a b.u.t.ton-down collar, a chocolate-brown knit tie. His trousers were fawn cavalry twill, his shoes brown wing tips. He had a long narrow nose, a graying guardsman"s mustache. His eyebrows were untamed tangles of briar; beneath them his eyes (brown, to match his outfit) were keen and cool and just a trifle bloodshot.
He asked if Mr. Litzauer was expected, and I explained about the change in ownership. "Ah," he said. "No wonder he hasn"t been in touch. I"m a collector, you see, and he always lets me know when he runs across an item I might fancy."
"What do you collect?"
"Victorian poets, for the most part, but I follow my taste, you know. I"m partial to artful rhymers. Thomas Hood. Algernon Charles Swinburne. William Mackworth Praed. Kipling, of course, is my keenest enthusiasm."