The Burglar in the Rye Read online

  I was guided in this matter by my Uncle Hi. A man of unblemished reputation, Hi was on his way home from a business trip when he saw, hanging over the check-in desk at a flight gate, an electrified sign advertising the airline. (It was Braniff, so you know this didn’t happen a week ago. I was in high school at the time. I won’t tell you who was President.)

  Hi’s son, my cousin Sheldon, collected signs and decorated his room with them. I remember one from Planters Peanuts, with old Mr. Peanut leaning against a wall and grinning like something Stephen King would write about. (In West Africa I suppose they call him Mr. Groundnut.) This sign, though, showed a plane and a palm tree, and touted Braniff’s flights to the Caribbean, and Uncle Hi thought it would look great in Shelly’s room.

  So he walked around the corner to his own flight lounge, where he set down his valise, took off his tie and jacket, and rolled up his sleeves.

  Then he went back to the Braniff counter, pocket notebook in hand. There was a line, but he walked right up to the front of it, where a young woman was handling check-ins and issuing boarding passes.

  “This the sign?” he demanded.

  She looked blank or begged his pardon or stammered. Whatever.

  “This here,” he said, pointing. “Is this the sign?”

  “Uh, I guess so.”

  “Yeah,” Hi said. “This is the one.” And he unhooked it from its moorings, with the young woman interrupting her own chores to give him a hand. He tucked it under his arm and went back to where he’d left his jacket and luggage. It was undisturbed, as he’d assumed it would be. (An honest man himself, Hi took honesty for granted in others, and was rarely disappointed.) He stowed the sign in his valise, unrolled his shirtsleeves, tied his tie, put on his suit jacket, and waited for them to call his flight.

  The sign did in fact look splendid in my cousin Shelly’s room, and when he got old enough to redecorate, replacing Mr. Peanut and his friends with Playboy centerfolds, the Braniff sign remained. It sort of fit, Shelly said, because you could just picture those babes under that palm tree, sipping piña coladas and showing off their full-body suntans. You could even imagine them as Braniff stewardesses, offering you your choice of coffee, tea, or milk, and a whole lot more.

  Well, that was years ago. Shelly’s a doctor now, and the sign in his waiting room is all about medical insurance, and no one on earth would ever want to steal it. Uncle Hi’s retired and living in Pompano Beach, Florida, clipping coupons and playing golf and adding stamps to his collection. I never steal a stamp collection without thinking of Hi. He collects British Commonwealth, and now and then over the years I’ll run across something I think he can use, some scarce Victorian provisionals or Edward VII high-values, and I’ll send them along with a note explaining that I found them tucked between the pages of an old volume of Martin Chuzzlewit. If Hi suspects the stamps might have a less wholesome provenance, he’s too much of a gentleman to mention it, and too ardent a collector to send them back.

  I’m the family’s sole black sheep, and I sometimes wonder what went wrong. With upstanding role models on both the Rhodenbarr and the Grimes sides of my family, why did I wind up with a lifelong penchant for skulking and stealing?

  A bad gene in the woodpile, I sometimes think. A chromosome gone haywire. But then I’ll think of my Uncle Hi, and I’ll find myself wondering. Look at his life and you see an honest businessman, ethical and law-abiding. But one afternoon in an airport he’d shown that he had the resourceful imagination of a con artist and the guts of a second-story man. Who’s to say how he might have turned out if circumstances early on had given him a nudge in the wrong direction?

  Oh, I don’t suppose he’d have had my natural talent with locks. That’s a gift. But anyone with a little training can learn all you absolutely need to know about locks and how to get around them.

  If Hi could manipulate a pair of stamp tongs, he could handle lockpicking tools. And Shelly was a surgeon, certainly capable of applying those same skills to the creations of Rabson and Segal and Fichet and Poulard. If they’d taken a hard left turn a while back, any of my relatives could have turned out wrong. And, if they’d taken up burglary, I bet they’d have been damn good at it.

  Instead, they were all leading exemplary lives, and I was getting ready to break into an old lady’s hotel room.

  Go figure.

  Anthea Landau was listed in the Yellow Pages, under Literary Agents. I got an outside line and had her number half-dialed when I caught myself and broke the connection. If I dialed her private line there’d be a record of the call, and did I want that?

  I dialed 7, then 602. I let the phone ring half a dozen times before hanging up.

  Could it be that easy? Could I be that lucky? Was she really out somewhere, having dinner or seeing a play or visiting an old friend?

  It seemed possible. The envelope I’d left for her had disappeared from her mailbox, suggesting that she might have come down and retrieved it. (It was equally possible that Carl or another hotel employee brought her mail to her door, a not unlikely service for a reclusive tenant.)

  Even if she’d gone for the mail herself, that didn’t mean she hadn’t turned around and returned directly to her room. But she hadn’t answered her phone now, and that meant something, didn’t it?

  Maybe it meant she was sound asleep. It was not quite nine o’clock, too early to be bedtime for most of the people I know, but how did I know what hours Anthea Landau kept? Maybe she took naps. Maybe she slept in the early evening and stayed up all night. Older people are typically light sleepers, and might be roused by a ringing telephone, but who could say with assurance that Ms. Landau wasn’t an exception? Maybe she welcomed Morpheus with a cocktail of Smirnoff’s and Seconal, and slept so soundly an earthquake wouldn’t wake her.

  Maybe she was in the bathroom when the phone rang and couldn’t get to it in time. Maybe she was watching TV and never picked up the phone during Seinfeld.

  Maybe I should try her again. I reached for the phone, caught myself in time, put my hand back in my lap before it could get me in trouble. I had called her number once and nobody answered. What was I doing, stalling to get my three nights’ worth out of the hotel? I couldn’t wait for some sort of guarantee that she wasn’t home and that I could get in and out undetected. If I wanted guarantees, I was in the wrong business.

  It was time to get to work.

  CHAPTER

  Four

  The Paddington had a single stairwell, and the fire door giving access to it had a sign on it explaining that it was the reverse of a Roach Motel. Guests could get out, but they couldn’t get back in again, not without walking clear down to the lobby.

  Yeah, right.

  I let myself out and walked up two flights of stairs. At the fifth-floor landing there was a wall-mounted firehose with a massive dull brass nozzle, and I figured they’d picked the right spot for it, because the stairwell reeked of cigarette smoke. Evidently one or more of the hotel employees was in the habit of ducking onto the stairs for a quick smoke, and if there’d been anything flammable on hand, it probably would have long since caught fire. But there was nothing but the metal stairs and the plaster walls, unless you counted the firehose itself, and you never hear of them burning, do you?

  At the sixth floor I put my ear to the door, and when I didn’t hear anything but the beating of my own heart I took out my tools and put them to work. There was really nothing to it. A little strip of spring steel snicked back the spring lock and I stepped out into the sixth-floor hallway, confidence and self-assurance oozing from every other pore, and ran head-on into the appraising gaze of a woman who stood waiting for the elevator.

  “Good evening,” she said.

  “Good evening.”

  Well, it had been, up to then. And in ordinary circumstances the sight of her would have done nothing to detract from it. She was tall and slender, with skin the color of coffee with plenty of cream and sugar. She had a high forehead and a long narrow nose and prominen
t cheekbones and a pointed chin, and her hair was in cornrows, which often looks hokey to me, but which now looked quite perfect. She was wearing what I think you call a bolero jacket over what I’m pretty sure you call a skirt and blouse. The jacket was scarlet and the blouse was canary yellow and the skirt was royal blue, and that sounds as though it should have been garish, but somehow it wasn’t. In fact there was something reassuringly familiar about the color scheme, although I couldn’t think what it was.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she said. “My name is Isis Gauthier.”

  “I’m Peter Jeffries.”

  Shit, I thought. That was the second time I’d got it wrong. I was Jeffrey Peters, not Peter Jeffries. Why couldn’t I remember a simple thing like my own goddam name?

  “I could have sworn,” she said, “that you just now came through the door from the stairs.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes,” she said. I’d seen her in the lobby that afternoon, but I hadn’t looked twice at her. I couldn’t remember what she’d been wearing, but I was sure it was less colorful than what she wore now. And I hadn’t even noticed her eyes then. They were cornflower blue, I noted now, which meant either contact lenses or a genetic anomaly. Either way the effect was startling. She was as striking a woman as I’d seen in years, and I wished to God the elevator would come along and take her the hell out of my life.

  “And those doors lock automatically,” she went on. “You can open them from the hall, but not from the staircase.”

  “Gauthier,” I said, thoughtfully. “That’s French, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “There was a writer, Théophile Gauthier. Mademoiselle de Maupin. That was one of his books. I don’t suppose he’s any relation?”

  “I’m sure he was,” she said, “to someone. But not to me. How did you manage to get in from the stairs, Mr. Jeffries?”

  “I stepped out,” I said, “and before I let the door close I wedged some paper in the lock. That way I could get back in again.”

  “And is the paper still wedged in the lock?”

  “No, I took it out just now, so that the door would function the way it’s supposed to.”

  “That was considerate,” she said, and smiled warmly. Her teeth were gleaming white, her lips full, and did I mention that her voice was pitched low, and a little husky? She was just about perfect, and I couldn’t wait to see the last of her.

  “Why,” she had to ask, “did you want to use the stairs, Mr. Jeffries?”

  “Let’s not be so formal,” I said. “Call me Peter.”

  And you must call me Isis, she was supposed to say. But all she did was repeat the question. At least by then I had an answer for it.

  “I wanted a cigarette,” I said. “My room’s nonsmoking, and I didn’t want to break the rule, so I ducked into the stairwell for a smoke.”

  “That’s what I want,” she said. “A cigarette. Do you have one, Peter?”

  “I just smoked my last one.”

  “Oh, that’s a pity. I suppose you smoke one of those ultra-low-tar brands.”

  Where was she going with this?

  “Because you don’t smell of tobacco smoke at all, you see.”

  Oh.

  “So I don’t think you ducked into the stairwell for a cigarette.” She sniffed the air. “In fact,” she said, “I doubt you’ve had a cigarette in years.”

  “You’ve caught me,” I said, smiling disarmingly.

  She was about as easily disarmed as the Michigan Militia. “Indeed,” she said, “but in what? What were you doing on the stairs, Mr. Jeffries?”

  Damn, I thought. We were back to Mr. Jeffries again, after having so recently reached a first-name basis.

  “I was visiting someone,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “Someone who lives on another floor. I wanted to be discreet, because my friend wouldn’t want it known that I’d paid a visit.”

  “And that’s why you used the stairs.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because if you were to take the elevator…”

  “Carl downstairs might see me on the closed-circuit monitor.”

  “Unlikely,” she said. “And so what if he did?”

  “Or I might run into someone in the elevator,” I said.

  “Instead you ran into me.”

  “So I did.”

  “In the hallway.”

  “Yes.” Waiting for the bloody elevator, I thought, which had evidently stopped running altogether, because where the hell was it?

  “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t say.”

  “Well, that’s good,” she said. “You’re a gentleman, and they’re rare these days. Male or female?”

  “I should think that’s fairly obvious,” I said. “You just called me a gentleman, and I told you my name, so of course I’m a man…Oh, you mean my friend.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “My friend’s a woman,” I said, “and I’m afraid that’s all I’m prepared to tell you about her. Oh, look. Your elevator’s come.”

  “And about time,” she said, making no move to get on it. “Sometimes it takes forever. Is she a permanent resident? Or a transient?”

  “What possible difference can it make to you?”

  “She’d have to be a resident,” she said, “or you’d probably be sharing a room. And she probably lives alone, or the two of you would be meeting in your room, not in hers.”

  “Let me ask you a question,” I said.

  “Actually, you already did. You asked me what possible difference it could make to me whether your friend was a resident or a transient. No difference, I suppose.”

  “Here’s another question,” I said. “What do you do for a living? Because you’d probably make a pretty good private detective if you put your mind to it.”

  “I never thought of that,” she said. “It’s an interesting idea. Good night, Peter.” And she stepped onto the elevator and the doors closed.

  So she never did answer my question, and I still didn’t know what she did for a living, or anything else about her. But at least we were back on a first-name basis.

  No light showed beneath the door of 602.

  All that told me for sure was that the light was out, and I made doubly sure by stooping for a squint through the keyhole. The light was out and the phone had rung unanswered, and what did that mean? Either she was out or she was deep in sleep. Or she’d been in the tub when I phoned earlier, and now she was sitting in the dark, alone with her memories of writers she’d discovered and editors she’d outsmarted.

  Abort the mission, urged an inner voice. Cut your losses and pull the plug. Hoist anchor, haul ass, and escape while there’s still time.

  I listened hard to that still small voice, and what it said made good sense to me. Why not heed what it had to say?

  Why not? Anthea Landau would keep. She wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was her collected correspondence. Why not take the night off?

  Why not? another voice countered. I’ll tell you why not. Because that’s how it starts, with the postponement of a simple act of burglary. The next thing you know, you’ll leave the store unopened on a sunny morning, not wanting to waste the day in a bookstore. Or it’ll rain, and you won’t want to leave the house. Procrastination is the thief of time, and what’s more it’s a dangerous habit, and so is self-indulgence, and if you give either one of them an inch they’ll take an ell, whatever that is, and the next thing you know you’ll be drinking on work nights, and breaking into apartments on an impulse, and looking at five-to-fifteen in a hotel with no room service, and no teddy bears, either.

  Does that sound overstated? Well, that’s a conscience for you. Mine has never maintained a sense of proportion, or learned the art of wearing the world as a loose garment. It’s an uptight conscience, a shrill small voice within, and I’m scared to tell it to shut up.

  I knocked, not too loud, on Anthea Landau’s door.
When it drew no response I knocked again, and when my second knock went unanswered I took a quick look around. No Isis, thank God, and nobody else, either.

  I could have tried my own room key. There’s always some duplication—a hotel with a thousand rooms doesn’t have a thousand different keys—but I didn’t waste seconds trying it. My picks worked, and almost as quickly.

  The door eased open on silent hinges. Within, the room was dark and still. I slipped in, shut the door behind me, and stood for a moment, letting my eyes accustom themselves to the darkness. And I suppose they did just that, but it was hard to tell, because I still couldn’t see a damn thing. Evidently the place had blackout curtains, and evidently she’d drawn them, and evidently the moths hadn’t gotten into them, because the only light I could spot was the narrow line at the bottom of the door.

  I got out my pocket flashlight and played its narrow beam around the room, starting with the door I’d just breached. There was a chain lock, I was pleased to see, and its presence, unfastened, was further suggestion that I was alone. She’d probably have engaged it before turning in, and that would have sent me back to Room 415 for the night. (Not that a chain lock’s much of a barrier. A forceful burglar snaps it with a good shove, or goes through it with a bolt cutter; an artful burglar slips the catch free of its moorings, doing no damage, leaving no trace.)

  I had a pair of Pliofilm gloves in my back pocket, and I put them on now, before I touched a thing. Then I turned the bolt, fastened the chain lock, and took a good look around, or as good a look as I could with a pocket flash. I was in a combined office and living room, with two walls lined with bookcases and a third with filing cabinets. The bookcases ran clear to the ceiling, while over the filing cabinets I saw a few dozen photos and letters in plain black frames.

  So this was where Anthea Landau conducted business. I could see her at the desk, smoking cigarettes (the ashtray was piled high with butts), drinking coffee (Give Me a Break, it said on her twelve-ounce mug), and burning up the telephone lines. And I could picture her in the Queen Anne wing chair, with her feet up on the matching ottoman and the good reading light switched on behind her, turning the pages of manuscripts. Including, I supposed, the early works of Gulliver Fairborn, from his astonishing debut, Nobody’s Baby, to the last of his books she’d represented, A Talent for Sacrifice.