The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) Read online

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said aloud, and took off my sunglasses, shaking my head at my own absentmindedness. Even as I tucked them into my shirt pocket, I could feel my companion relax. Her eyes never left the painting, but her relief was palpable: I wasn’t mad after all, I was merely inattentive, and order had been restored to her universe.

  One thing I’d determined on my earlier visit was the location of the restroom. I went there now, but instead of going in I tried the unmarked door immediately opposite it, which opened onto a flight of descending stairs. I took a few hesitant steps and saw what I’d hoped to see, a labyrinth of tables and boxes and file cabinets.

  I saw, too, a young woman who grasped the situation at once. “You’re looking for the restroom,” she said. “You turned right when you should have turned left.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “How foolish of me.”

  “It happens all the time,” she said. “And it’s our fault for not marking the door. This door, I mean. The restroom door’s already marked. There’s a sign on it that says ‘Restroom.’ ”

  “I guess it should have been obvious,” I said, “but I never saw it. I saw this door, and—”

  “And it’s unmarked, so you thought it was the room you were looking for and we were simply being discreet. We really ought to hang a sign on this door, don’t you think? But what would it say?”

  “Hmm. How about ‘Not the Restroom’?”

  “Or maybe ‘Turn Around’.”

  For God’s sake, she was flirting with me. And, let it be said, I with her. She was a pert and perky blonde with a nice mouth and a pointed chin, and her nerdy eyeglasses gave her the look of a hot librarian—which may well have been part of her job description. There’s nothing wrong with flirting, but there’s a time and a place for it, and this was neither.

  “Well,” I said. “I’d better, uh . . .”

  I turned and fled.

  On our earlier visit I’d had to wait for the restroom, but this time it was conveniently unoccupied. I locked myself in—actually, it was more a matter of locking other people out—and I put a hand in a pocket and drew out my burglar tools.

  And went to work on the window.

  The main floor of the Galtonbrook was five or six steps below street level, and that put the bottom of the bathroom window just about even with the pavement outside. A substantial window guard of stainless steel mesh admitted daylight while blocking everything else. A dozen bolts held it in place, and an intricate web of wires tied it into the building’s alarm system.

  I’d had a good chance to examine it Thursday afternoon, and supplemented my memory with an iPhone snapshot. Now I went right to work.

  First, the burglar alarm. It was unarmed now, of course, and would remain that way until they closed for the night, so I could meddle at will without setting off sirens. All I had to do was disconnect a couple of wires and hook them up differently, so that the window could be opened and closed without raising an electronic hue and cry. That was complicated, and required a knowing hand and a delicate touch, but it wasn’t terribly difficult.

  Next was the mesh window guard. The bolts were solid and well anchored, but they were slotted to accommodate a screwdriver, and I already knew I could turn them. I hadn’t had a screwdriver the first time around, but I had a dime, and it was just the right size. Even with the limited leverage a coin afforded, I’d budged the bolt I tried. Now, with my screwdriver, there was nothing to it.

  Halfway through, I ran into a bolt that was slightly more obdurate than its fellows, and wouldn’t you know that was just the time someone tried the door, found it locked, and knocked sharply on it.

  “I’ll be a few minutes,” I said.

  But not too many of them, as it turned out, because my next effort got the bolt turning, and the rest of them yielded readily enough. I transferred the lot of them to my pocket, freed the window guard, turned the window lock, and braced myself against a window that had very likely not been opened in years.

  I can’t say it was eager to move, but I put all my strength into it, and up it went, though not without giving voice to its feelings. If the noise it made was audible to others, I can only suppose they chalked it up to the same intestinal crisis that was keeping me in the restroom.

  It pained me to close the window after all it had taken to open it, but I did, and this time the resultant sound effects were minimal. I fitted the mesh in place, but instead of replacing any bolts I secured it with a couple of one-inch squares of duct tape, just enough to keep it from falling down. It would yield at once to prying fingers, but whose fingers were likely to pry? It was, my watch assured me, just ten minutes to closing time. The restroom might have another customer before they shooed us all out of the building, and an employee or two might use the facilities before heading for home, but it was long odds against anybody meddling with my little arrangement.

  I took a moment to wipe the surfaces I might have touched. I’d somehow forgotten gloves, but even if I’d remembered them I couldn’t have put them on until I was locked in the bathroom, and they’d have cost me something in the way of dexterity. Easy enough to use a paper towel and wipe up after myself.

  I took a deep breath, let it out in a sigh. It seemed to me I was forgetting something, but I couldn’t figure out what it might be. Burglar tools? Right hand trouser pocket. Window bolts? Left hand trouser pocket, along with my wallet. Sunglasses? Breast pocket. Mets cap? On my head. Parrot shirt? I was wearing it.

  What else? The Spanish-language newspaper? I’d tossed it.

  I unlocked the door. Whoever had knocked had either overcome the urge or found an alternative venue for satisfying it. The place had pretty much emptied out already, with just a few minutes remaining until they locked the doors. I gave the Rembrandt a passing glance, tugged the ball cap down over my forehead, and had my sunglasses on and my head lowered when I cleared the threshold.

  I walked a block at a pace that was deliberately casual, waiting for any of several unwelcome things—a voice raised in alarm, a hand on my elbow, the shrill squeal of a police whistle. I didn’t really expect anything of the sort, but you never do.

  Nothing. And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d forgotten something.

  I walked two and a half blocks before the penny dropped. Hell.

  I’d forgotten to use the bathroom.

  I know, I know. I’d visited two washrooms, first in the bodega and then in the museum, and I’d bought a newspaper I couldn’t read to get into the first and committed a felony in the second, and I’d been too busy in each of them to use either one in the traditional manner. I hadn’t really felt the need, not acutely enough to act on it, and now I did.

  Hell.

  I walked three more blocks and found a bar with an Irish name and a predominantly Latino clientele. A soccer game played silently on the TV. The bartender, a heavy-set fellow with a drooping moustache, didn’t look happy to be there, nor did my presence raise his spirits. I was still wearing the sunglasses, and that may have had something to do with it, because what did he need with a weirdo wearing shades in a dark ginmill?

  Or maybe he was a Yankees fan.

  I didn’t want anything, but I had to buy my passage to the men’s room. I couldn’t have a beer, not with my day’s work only half done, and I somehow knew this was no place to order Perrier. I said I’d have a Coke, and his expression darkened. While he was loading up a glass with ice cubes, I found the room I wanted. Since I had no other chores to distract me, I did what I’d gone there to do.

  I went back to the bar, paid for my Coke, had a sip, set it down and headed for the door.

  “Hey.”

  I turned.

  “Something wrong with it?”

  “I’m trying to quit,” I said, and got the hell out of there.

  I took a different train home, and walked from Broadway and 72nd to my apartment on West End and 70th. I’d bestowed my Mets cap on the young boy on the subway who’d admired it, and
I’d thought about shucking the parrot shirt, but it seemed simpler to wear it home, with the sunglasses resting snugly in its pocket.

  My doorman didn’t give me or my shirt a second glance. I went upstairs, took off the parrot shirt and everything else, and spent a rewarding fifteen minutes under the shower. I emerged with the urge to phone someone—Carolyn, say, or my client. I decided I didn’t want to call either of them in midstream. In a few hours, when my day’s work was done, my calls would be triumphant.

  Unless it all went pear-shaped, in which case I’d use my one phone call on Wally Hemphill, my lawyer.

  Meanwhile, I suppose I could have called a girlfriend. If only I’d had one . . .

  I went into the living room and looked at the painting on the wall, all black verticals and horizontals on a white field, with a few of the resultant rectangles filled in with primary colors. It looks like something Piet Mondrian might have painted, and well it might, because he did. And there it was, worth a duke’s ransom if not a king’s, hanging right there on my wall.

  A few years ago, I was involved in an unusually complicated mess, in the course of which I oversaw the production of several fake Mondrians. When the dust settled, various canvases had migrated to various walls, and one remained unclaimed, so I took it home with me.

  It was the real one.

  For all the good it did me. I mean, it’s not as though I had the option of selling it. The work had no provenance, and I lacked legal title to it.

  On the all-too-rare occasions when I have a woman visitor, she of course assumes the painting’s a copy. A few have asked if I painted it myself; one, more sophisticated than the general run, admired the craquelure. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to create the illusion of age,” she said. “But the colors aren’t quite right, are they, Bernie? Mondrian’s blue isn’t that intense, and the yellow’s got the slightest greenish cast to it.”

  I told her she had a good eye.

  You know what? I think what I like most about my Mondrian is that nobody else knows it’s real. It’s the genuine article masquerading as a fake, and it’s my little secret, and I get to look at it whenever I want.

  Of course most of the time I don’t really see it. That’s true of anything hanging on the wall day in and day out. It becomes the visual equivalent of background noise. But today, after contemplating a Rembrandt of questionable authenticity, I got to look at my Mondrian as if for the first time.

  I stretched out on my bed and closed my eyes. A nap would have been nice, but I was way too restless to drift off. My mind insisted on spinning its wheels, and I wasn’t surprised. I was, after all, like a theatergoer at intermission, still engrossed by what had been happening on stage, with a few minutes to kill until I could return to my seat. The shower may have refreshed me, and Mondrian may have lifted my spirits, but I was in the middle of a burglary and I couldn’t really relax until I’d finished the job.

  Was I hungry? I thought about it and couldn’t decide. The unidentifiable Taiwanese lunch had been as filling as it was delicious, but enough hours had passed since then for me to be ready for an evening meal.

  But I’ve never been a big fan of breaking and entering on a full stomach. A hungry burglar, it seems to me, has a definite advantage.

  Although one can take it too far. On at least one occasion I’ve paused while checking a kitchen for loose cash. (You’d be surprised how many people keep an emergency reserve in a countertop canister, or stuffed into the butter compartment of the fridge.) I managed to convince myself there was a sheaf of hundreds waiting for me in the peanut butter jar, and when I found nothing in that vessel but a supply of Skippy Super Chunky, I went on looking for the bread and the jelly. I took a minute or two to make myself a sandwich and a few minutes more to ingest it, and then I washed my DNA off the butter knife and went back to the business at hand.

  Would they have bread and peanut butter and jelly at the Galtonbrook? It seemed unlikely. I had some in my own kitchen, but was that what I wanted?

  All I wanted, I decided, was for it to be time to get back to work.

  I made a cup of coffee, put the TV on, turned the TV off, drank some of the coffee, and got dressed. I stayed with the khakis and sneakers, but put on a light blue dress shirt with a button-down collar and added a navy blazer. A tie? I considered two, chose the one with diagonal stripes of gold and green, then decided against it. A shirt, a jacket, but no tie. A hardworking chap on his way home after his work had kept him at the office well into the evening. His collar’s open now, and no doubt he’s got his necktie in his jacket pocket, rolled up carefully to avoid wrinkles.

  I finished the coffee.

  Was it, please God, time to go? I decided it was, and I went.

  The Galtonbrook was where I’d left it, which is always a comfort. It looked different at night, all its interior lights switched off, with a few outdoor spots to highlight the gleaming marble façade.

  I walked past the entrance, waited for a car to pass, then traced a path along the building’s western wall. I’d scouted my approach before, and my route would keep me out of range of the security camera.

  I didn’t have a necktie in my pocket, having seen no reason to carry verisimilitude quite so far. I did have, in various pockets, my burglar tools, my little screwdriver, two of the original dozen two-inch bolts, my little roll of duct tape, my pencil-beam flashlight, and a pair of those Pliofilm gloves favored by food handlers and TV cops.

  I was wearing the gloves by the time I reached the bathroom window, and I shielded the flashlight with one gloved hand while I flicked it on long enough to determine that this was indeed the bathroom window, and not some other still-secure window leading somewhere else. Thus reassured, I knelt down and eased it open.

  It made that noise again, and I froze, waiting for the world to respond. When nothing happened, I resumed breathing and returned to the task at hand. The steel mesh panel came loose when I pushed against it, and I got a grip on it and leaned forward far enough to prop it up on the sink top. I climbed in after it, planted my feet on the floor, and stood absolutely still for a full two minutes, listening intently for any sound at all.

  I heard traffic sounds in the distance, and, just as my two minutes were up I heard the footsteps of a man walking his dog. I knew it was a man by his voice, and I knew it was a dog when he said, “Here you go, Sport. Your favorite hydrant.”

  Sport paid his respects, and they walked on. Once again I considered leaving the window open, and once again I decided against it and drew it shut, clenching my teeth against the sound it made. I replaced the mesh panel, supplementing the two squares of duct tape with two of the bolts, just fitting them into their holes and giving them a half-turn each.

  I did all this in the minimal light that filtered in from outside. Then I opened the bathroom door and closed it again from outside, and everything was suddenly as dark as the inside of a cow. A blink of my flashlight let me get my bearings, and I found the door to the basement—it was, of course, directly opposite the bathroom door. I turned the knob and gave a tug, and nothing happened, because some damned fool had evidently locked it.

  Oh, all right. I hunkered down in front of the lock and picked it in less time than it takes to tell about it. I didn’t need my flashlight, and I probably wouldn’t have needed my burglar tools, either, had I been armed with a hairpin or a toothpick.

  I suppose a lock like that could have a purpose. During daytime hours, it might keep an errant visitor from opening the wrong door and pitching headlong down the stairs. But the door had been open earlier, and they’d only locked up when they were done for the day, and who was the lock going to hinder in the middle of the night? A burglar? Lots of luck, honey.

  I used my flashlight to get down the basement stairs, and looked around for windows just in case there were some I didn’t know about. Once I’d established that I was indeed in a windowless crypt, I turned on a couple of overhead lights and gave my flashlight a rest.

  Then I
took a deep breath.

  Ah, what a feeling!

  I’ve been doing this long enough so that it’s a profession, and I like to think my attitude is that of a professional. But no amount of professionalism can drive the sheer joy and excitement out of the enterprise. When, through my own resources and initiative, I find myself on premises where I’ve no right to be, I’m transported by a feeling that’s hard to describe and impossible to justify. I like to think I’ve come a long way from the Ohio town where I grew up, but what I felt in the basement of the Galtonbrook was not all that different from the sensation that took me by surprise when I first broke into a neighbor’s house. Once again, I was thrilled beyond words to be doing this thing that I absolutely knew I should not be doing.

  I can’t rationalize it, any more than I can give it up. It’s pointless to try. I’m a born thief and I love to steal.

  In fact, I love it so much that there’s a powerful temptation to prolong the experience. I wanted to stay where I was, breathing the stale subterranean air, delighting in the way the blood surged in my veins. There was no end of objects to fill the eye and quicken the pulse—suits of armor, statues, paintings, here a samurai sword, there a medieval tapestry. And even more alluring than what I could see was what reposed out of sight, in trunks and boxes and file cabinets.

  It wouldn’t be hard to find something to steal. But that was the last thing I wanted to do. I was on a very special mission, and the only way to make it work was to limit my foraging to one item and one item only.

  And time was of the essence. A burglar’s time, let me tell you, is always of the essence. The less of it you spend in enemy territory, the better your chance of getting home safe.

  Even so, it took me distressingly close to an hour. I knew what I’d come for, but what I didn’t know was where they’d stashed it. It could have taken longer than it did, but I managed to find a pattern to their curious system of organization, and I knew when I’d opened the right file cabinet, and toward the back of the second drawer from the top I found a manila folder with the label ALLB.