The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

by Lawrence Block

  “Some world,” he said.

  I finished my run, stretched some, walked on home to my apartment building at the corner of Seventy-first and West End. I stripped and showered and did a little more stretching, and then I stretched out and closed my eyes for a while.

  And got up and looked up two telephone numbers and dialed them in turn. No one answered my first call. My second was answered after two or three rings, and I chatted briefly with the person who answered it. Then I tried the first number again and let it ring an even dozen times. A dozen rings comes to one minute, but when you’re calling it seems longer than that, and when someone else is calling and you let the phone go unanswered, it seems like an hour and a half.

  So far so good.

  I had to decide between the brown suit and the blue suit, and I wound up choosing the blue. I almost always do, and at this rate the brown’ll still be in good shape when its lapels come back into style again. I wore a blue oxford button-down shirt and selected a striped tie which would probably have indicated to an Englishman that I’d been cashiered from a good regiment. To an American it would be no more than a mark of sincerity and fiscal integrity. I got the knot right on the first try and chose to regard that as a favorable omen.

  Navy socks. Scotch-grained black loafers, less comfortable than running shoes but rather more conventional. And comfy enough once I’d slipped in my custom-made orthotic arch supports.

  I took up my attaché case, a slimmer and more stylish affair than my book thief’s, covered with beige Ultrasuede and glowing with burnished brass fittings. I filled its several compartments with the tools of my trade—a pair of rubber gloves with their palms cut out, a ring of cunning steel implements, a roll of adhesive tape, a pencil-beam flashlight, a glass cutter, a flat strip of celluloid and another of spring steel, and, oh, a bit of this and a little of that. Were I to be lawfully seized and searched, the contents of that case would earn me an upstate vacation as a guest of the governor.

  My stomach did a little buck-and-wing at the thought, and I was glad I’d skipped dinner. And yet, even as I was recoiling at the idea of stone walls and iron bars, there was a familiar tingle in my fingertips and a racy edge to the blood in my veins. Lord, let me outgrow such childish responses—but, uh, not yet, if you please.

  I added a lined yellow legal pad to the attaché case and outfitted my inside breast pocket with a couple of pens and pencils and a slim leatherbound notebook. My outside breast pocket already held a hankie, which I took out, refolded, and tucked back into place.

  A phone rang as I walked down the hall to the elevator. It may have been mine. I let it ring. Downstairs, my doorman eyed me with grudging respect. A cab pulled up even as I was lifting a hand to summon it.

  I gave the balding driver an address on Fifth Avenue between Seventy-sixth and Seventy-seventh. He took the Sixty-fifth Street transverse across Central Park, and while he talked about baseball and Arab terrorists I watched other runners stepping out the miles. They were at play while I was on my way to work, and how frivolous their pastime seemed to me now.

  I stopped the cab a half block from my destination, paid and tipped and got out and walked. I crossed Fifth Avenue and mingled with the crowd at the bus stop, letting myself have a good look at the Impregnable Fortress.

  Because that’s what it was. It was a massive, brawny apartment house, built between the wars and looming some twenty-two stories over the park. The Charlemagne, its builder had dubbed it, and its apartments turned up in the Real Estate section of the Sunday Times every once in a while. It had gone co-op some years back, and when its apartments changed hands now they did so for six-figure sums. High six-figure sums.

  From time to time I would read or hear of someone, a coin collector, let us say, and I would file his name away for future reference. And then I would learn that he lived at the Charlemagne and I would drop him from my files, because it was akin to learning that he kept all his holdings in a bank vault. The Charlemagne had a doorman and a concierge and attended elevators with closed-circuit television cameras in them. Other closed-circuit devices monitored the service entrance and the fire escapes and God knows what else, and the concierge had a console at his desk where he could (and did) watch six or eight screens at once. The Charlemagne made a positive fetish of security, and while I could readily understand their attitude, you could hardly expect me to approve.

  A bus came and went, taking with it most of my companions. The light changed from red to green. I hoisted my case full of burglar’s tools and crossed the street.

  The doorman at the Charlemagne made mine look like an usher in a Times Square peep show. He had more gold braid than an Ecuadorian admiral and at least as much self-assurance. He took me in from nose to toes and remained serenely unimpressed.

  “Bernard Rhodenbarr,” I told him. “Mr. Onderdonk is expecting me.”

  Chapter Two

  Of course he didn’t take my word for it. He passed me on to the concierge and stood by in case I should give that gentleman any trouble. The concierge rang Onderdonk on the intercom, confirmed that I was indeed expected, and turned me over to the elevator operator, who piloted me some fifty yards closer to heaven. There was indeed a camera in the elevator, and I tried not to look at it while trying not to look as though I was avoiding it, and I felt about as nonchalant as a girl on her first night as a topless waitress. The elevator was a plush affair, paneled in rosewood and fitted with polished brass, with burgundy carpeting underfoot. Whole families have lived in less comfortable quarters, but all the same I was glad to leave it.

  Which I did on the sixteenth floor, where the operator pointed to a door and hung around until it opened to admit me. It opened just a couple of inches until the chainlock stopped it, but that was far enough for Onderdonk to get a look at me and smile in recognition. “Ah, Mr. Rhodenbarr,” he said, fumbling with the lock. “Good of you to come.” Then he said, “Thank you, Eduardo,” and only then did the elevator door close and the cage descend.

  “I’m clumsy tonight,” Onderdonk said. “There.” And he unhooked the chainlock and drew the door open. “Come right in, Mr. Rhodenbarr. Right this way. Is it as pleasant outside as it was earlier? And tell me what you’ll have to drink. Or I’ve a pot of coffee made, if you’d prefer that.”

  “Coffee would be fine.”

  “Cream and sugar?”

  “Black, no sugar.”

  “Commendable.”

  He was a man in his sixties, with iron gray hair parted carefully on the side and a weathered complexion. He was on the short side and slightly built, and perhaps his military bearing was an attempt to compensate for this. Alternatively, perhaps he’d been in the military. I somehow didn’t think he’d ever served as a doorman, or an Ecuadorian admiral.

  We had our coffee at a marble-topped table in his living room. The carpet was an Aubusson and the furniture was mostly Louis Quinze. The several paintings, all twentieth-century abstracts in uncomplicated aluminum frames, were an effective contrast to the period furnishings. One of them, showing blue and beige amoeboid shapes on a cream field, looked like the work of Hans Arp, while the canvas mounted over the Adam fireplace was unmistakably a Mondrian. I don’t have all that good an eye for paintings, and I can’t always tell Rembrandt from Hals or Picasso from Braque, but Mondrian is Mondrian. A black grid, a white field, a couple of squares of primary colors—the man had a style, all right.

  Bookshelves ran from floor to ceiling on either side of the fireplace, and they accounted for my presence. A couple of days ago, Gordon Kyle Onderdonk had walked in off the street, dropping in at Barnegat Books as casually as someone looking to buy Drums in Our Street or sell Lepidopterae. He’d browsed for a spell, asked two or three reasonable questions, bought a Louis Auchincloss novel, and paused on his way to the door to ask me if I ever appraised libraries.

  “I’m not interested in selling my books,” he said. “At least I don’t think I am, although I’m considering a move to the West Coast and I
suppose I’d dispose of them rather than ship them. But I have things that have accumulated over the years, and perhaps I ought to have a floater policy to cover them in case of fire, and if I ever do want to sell, why, I ought to know whether my library’s worth a few hundred or a few thousand, oughtn’t I?”

  I haven’t done many appraisals, but it’s work I enjoy. You can’t charge all that much, but the hourly return is greater than I get sitting behind the counter at the store, and sometimes the chance to appraise a library turns into the opportunity to purchase it. “Well, if it’s worth a thousand dollars,” a client may say, “what’ll you pay for it?” “I won’t pay a thousand,” I may counter, “so tell me what you’ll take for it.” Ah, the happy game of haggling.

  I spent the next hour and a half with my legal pad and a pen, jotting numbers down and totting them up. I looked at all of the books on the open walnut shelves that flanked the fireplace, and in another room, a sort of study, I examined the contents of a bank of glassed-in mahogany shelves.

  The library was an interesting one. Onderdonk had never specifically collected anything, simply allowing books to accumulate over the years, culling much of the chaff from time to time. There were some sets in leather—a nice Hawthorne, a Defoe, the inevitable Dickens. There were perhaps a dozen Limited Editions Club volumes, which command a nice price, and several dozen Heritage Press books, which retail for only eight or ten dollars but are very easy to turn over. He had some favorite authors in first editions—Evelyn Waugh, J.P. Marquand, John O’Hara, Wallace Stevens. Some Faulkner, some Hemingway, some early Sherwood Anderson. Fair history, including a nice set of Guizot’s France and Oman’s seven-volume history of the Peninsular War. Not much science. No Lepidopterae.

  He had cost himself money. Like so many non-collectors, he’d disposed of the dust jackets of most of his books, unwittingly chucking out the greater portion of their value in the process. There are any number of modern firsts worth, say, a hundred dollars with a dust jacket and ten or fifteen dollars without it. Onderdonk was astonished to learn this. Most people are.

  He brought more coffee as I sat adding up a column of figures, and this time he’d brought along a bottle of Irish Mist. “I like a drop in my coffee,” he said. “Can I offer you some?”

  It sounded yummy, but where would we be without standards? I sipped my coffee black and went on adding numbers. The figure I came up with was somewhere in excess of $5,400, and I read it off to him. “I was probably conservative,” I added. “I’m doing this on the spot, without consulting references, and I shaded things on the low side. You’d be safe rounding that figure off at six thousand.”

  “And what would that figure represent?”

  “Retail prices. Fair market value.”

  “And if you were buying the books as a dealer, presuming of course that this type of material was something you were interested in—”

  “I would be interested,” I allowed. “For this sort of material I could work on fifty percent.”

  “So you could pay three thousand dollars?”

  I shook my head. “I’d be going with the first figure I quoted you,” I said. “I could pay twenty-seven hundred. And that would include removal of the books at my expense, of course.”

  “I see.” He sipped his own coffee, crossed one slim leg over the other. He was wearing well-cut gray flannel slacks and a houndstooth smoking jacket with leather buttons. His shoes might have been of sharkskin. They were certainly elegant, and showed off his small feet. “I wouldn’t care to sell now,” he said, “but if I do move, and it’s a possibility if not a probability, I’ll certainly give your offer consideration.”

  “Books go up and down in value. The price might be higher or lower in a few months or a year.”

  “I understand that. If I decide to dispose of the books the primary consideration would be convenience, not price. I suspect I’d find it simpler to accept your offer than to shop around.”

  I looked over his shoulder at the Mondrian and wondered what it was worth. Ten or twenty or thirty times the fair market value of his library, at a guess. And his apartment was probably worth three or four times as much as the Mondrian, so a thousand dollars more or less for some old books probably wouldn’t weigh too heavily on his mind.

  “I want to thank you,” he said, getting to his feet. “You told me your fee. Did you say two hundred dollars?”

  “That’s right.”

  He drew out a wallet, paused. “I hope you don’t object to cash,” he said.

  “I never object to cash.”

  “Some people don’t like to carry cash. I can understand that; these are perilous times.” He counted out four fifties, handed them to me. I took out my own wallet and gave them a home.

  “If I could use your phone—”

  “Certainly,” he said, and pointed me to the study. I dialed a number I’d dialed earlier, and once again I let it ring a dozen times, but somewhere around the fourth ring I chatted into the mouthpiece, as if someone were on the other end. I don’t know that Onderdonk was even within earshot of me, but if you’re going to do something you might as well do it right, and why call attention to myself by holding a ringing phone to my ear for an unusually long time?

  Caught up in my performance, I suppose I let the phone ring more than a dozen times, but what matter? No one answered it, and I hung up and returned to the living room. “Well, thanks again for the business,” I told him, returning my legal pad to my attaché case. “If you do decide to add a floater to your insurance coverage, I can give you my appraisal in writing if they require it. And I can adjust the figure higher or lower for that purpose, as you prefer.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “And do let me know if you ever decide to get rid of the books.”

  “I certainly will.”

  He led me to the door, opened it for me, walked into the hall with me. The indicator showed the elevator to be on the ground floor. I let my finger hover over the button but avoided pressing it.

  “I don’t want to keep you,” I said to Onderdonk.

  “It’s no trouble,” he said. “But wait, is that my phone? I think it is. I’ll just say goodbye now, Mr. Rhodenbarr.”

  We shook hands quickly and he hurried back inside his apartment. The door drew shut. I counted to ten, darted across the hall, yanked open the fire door and scampered down four flights of stairs.

  Chapter Three

  At the eleventh-floor landing, I paused long enough to catch my breath. This didn’t take long, perhaps because of all those half-hour romps in Riverside Park. Had I known running would be such a help in my career I might have taken it up years ago.

  (How did four flights of stairs get me from Sixteen to Eleven? No thirteenth floor. But you knew that, didn’t you? Of course you did.)

  The fire door was locked from the stairs side. Another security precaution; tenants (and anyone else) could go down and out in case of fire or elevator failure, but they could only leave the stairs at the lobby. They couldn’t get off at another floor.

  Well, that was nice enough in theory, but an inch-wide strip of flexible steel did its work in nothing flat, and then I was easing the door open, making sure that the coast (or at least the hallway) was clear.

  I traversed the hallway to 11-B. No light showed under the door, and when I pressed my ear against it I couldn’t hear a thing, not even the roar of the surf. I didn’t expect to hear anything since I’d just let the phone in 11-B ring twelve or twenty times, but burglary is chancy enough even when you don’t take chances. There was a bell, a flat mother-of-pearl button set flush against the doorjamb, and I rang it and heard it sound within. There was a knocker, an art nouveau affair in the shape of a coiled cobra, but I didn’t want to make noise in the hallway. I didn’t, indeed, want to spend an unnecessary extra second in that hallway, and with that in mind I bent to my task.

  First the burglar alarm. You wouldn’t think one was necessary at the Charlemagne, but then you probabl
y don’t have a houseful of objets d’art and a stamp collection on a par with King Farouk’s, do you? If burglars don’t take unnecessary chances, why should their victims?

  You could tell there was a burglar alarm because there was a keyhole for it, set in the door at about shoulder height, a nickel-plated cylinder perhaps five-eighths of an inch in diameter. What man can lock, man can unlock, and that’s just what I did. There is a handy little homemade key on my ring that fits most locks of that ilk, and with just the littlest bit of filing and fiddling it can make the tumblers tumble, and—oh, but you don’t want to know all this technical stuff, do you? I thought not.

  I turned the key in the lock and hoped that was all you had to do. Alarm systems are cunning devices with no end of fail-safe features built in. Some go off, for example, if you cut the household current. Others get twitchy if you turn the key in other than the prescribed fashion. This one seemed docile, but what if it was one of those silent alarms, ringing nastily away downstairs or in the offices of some home-protection agency?

  Ah, well. The other lock, the one that was keeping the door shut, was a Poulard. According to the manufacturer’s advertisements, no one has ever successfully picked the Poulard lock. I’d walk into his offices and dispute that claim, but where would it get me? The lock mechanism’s a good one, I’ll grant them that, and the key’s complicated and impossible to duplicate, but I have more trouble on average with your basic Rabson. Either I picked the Poulard or I made myself very long and narrow and slithered in through the keyhole, because within three minutes I was inside that apartment.

  I closed the door and played my pencil-beam flashlight over it. If I’d made some grave error knocking off the burglar alarm, and if it was the sort that was ringing in some agency’s office, then I had plenty of time to get away before they came calling. So I examined the cylinder to see how it was wired in and if anything seemed to have gone awry, and after a moment or two of frowning and head-scratching I started to giggle.