The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling

by Lawrence Block

  “Have to get up—”

  “Sit back and rest. You’re very tired.”

  God, that was the truth. I gulped air, shook my head furiously in an attempt to shake some of the cobwebs loose. That was a mistake—the motion set off a string of tiny firecrackers somewhere in the back of my skull. Haydn dipped and soared. My eyes closed again, and I strained to get them open and saw her leaning over me, telling me how sleepy I was.

  I kept my eyes open. Even so, my field of vision began to darken along its edges. Then patches of black appeared here and there, and they grew together until it was all black, everywhere, and I gave up and let go and fell all the way down to the bottom.

  I was dreaming something about an earthquake in Turkey, houses crumbling around me, boulders rolling down the sides of mountains. I fought my way out of the dream like an underwater swimmer struggling to reach the water’s surface. The Turkish earthquake was part of the hourly newscast on the radio. The Social Democrats had scored substantial gains in parliamentary elections in Belgium. A Hollywood actor had died of an overdose of sleeping pills. The President was expected to veto something or other.

  A buzzer was sounding nearby, interrupting the monotony of the newscast. I managed to open my eyes. My head ached and my mouth tasted as though I’d fallen asleep sucking the wad of cotton from the vitamin jar. The buzzer buzzed again and I wondered why nobody was answering it.

  I opened my eyes again. Evidently they had closed without my knowing it. The radio announcer was inviting me to subscribe to Back-packer Magazine. I didn’t want to but wasn’t sure I had the strength to refuse. The buzzer was still buzzing. I wished Madeleine Porlock would get up from the Victorian love seat and answer it, or make them stop buzzing, or something.

  The radio switched to music. Something with violins. Soothing. I opened my eyes again. The buzzing had stopped and there was the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs.

  I was still in the tub chair. My left hand lay in my lap like a small dead animal. My right arm was draped over the side of the chair, and there was something in my right hand.

  I opened my eyes again, gave my head a shake. Something loose rattled around inside it. Someone was knocking on the door. I wished the Porlock woman would answer it, but she was in no better shape than I was.

  They banged harder on the door and I opened my eyes again, and this time I managed to straighten up in the chair and kick through to something resembling actual consciousness. I gulped air and blinked rapidly and remembered where I was and what I was doing there.

  I moved my left hand, reached around and felt the small of my back. The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow was gone.

  Well, that figured.

  “Open up in there!”

  Knock, knock, knock, and I felt like the drunken porter in Macbeth. I called out for them to wait a minute and reached to check my hip pocket for the Sikh’s five hundred dollars. I couldn’t reach that pocket with my left hand. And why was I using my left, anyway? Oh, sure. Because there was something heavy in my right hand.

  “Police! Open up in there!”

  More furious pounding on the door. I raised my right hand. There was a gun in it. I stared stupidly at it, then raised it to my face and sniffed its muzzle. I smelled that particular mix of gun oil and gunpowder and burnt odor characteristic of a recently fired weapon.

  I looked at the love seat again, hoping to find it empty, wishing what I’d seen earlier had been a mirage. But Madeleine Porlock was still there, and she hadn’t moved, and I could see now that she wasn’t likely to, not without more help than I could give her.

  She’d been shot in the middle of the forehead, right where the horrid little girl had a little curl, and I had a fairly good idea what gun had done the deed.

  CHAPTER

  Eight

  I got up quickly—too quickly—the blood rushed to my feet, or wherever it goes under such circumstances, and I very nearly fell back down again. But I stayed on my feet and fought to clear my head a little.

  The radio was still playing. I wanted to turn it off but left it alone. The cops had left off knocking on the door and were slamming into it every few seconds. Any moment now the door would give and they’d come stumbling into the room.

  I decided I didn’t want to be there when that happened.

  I was still holding the damned gun. I dropped it, and then I picked it up and wiped my prints off it, and then I dropped it again and made my way past the radio and through a short hallway with a bathroom and closet on one side and a pullman kitchen on the other. At the end of the hallway a door opened into a fair-sized bedroom furnished with a four-poster spool bed and a Pennsylvania Dutch blanket chest. There was a window on the far wall over the bed, and it opened onto a fire escape, and I damn well opened it.

  Fresh air, cold fresh air. I filled both lungs and felt some of the cobwebs leave my brain. I climbed out onto the fire escape and closed the window after me. With it shut I could just barely hear the sounds of police officers caroming off the apartment door.

  Now what?

  I looked down and a wave of vertigo hit me. I thought of all the drug labels with their warnings about driving or operating machinery. If drowsiness occurs, stay off rickety fire escapes.

  I took another look. Below me, the fire escape terminated in a courtyard walled off on all three sides. I might get into the basement, but there was sure to be a cop posted downstairs, most likely a fat one who hadn’t wanted to climb up two flights in the first place.

  So I started up the fire escape, up past the fourth floor and on to the roof. Someone had built a redwood sundeck up there, and there were trees and shrubs in large redwood planters. It was all very lovely, but there was one trouble with it—I couldn’t get off it. The adjoining buildings were both a hundred or more feet taller than the one I was standing on, and the heavy fire door leading back into the building couldn’t be opened without a key. This wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d had my tools along, but who figured I’d need them?

  Back down the fire escape. I paused at the fourth-floor landing, trying to decide if I wanted to take my chances with whoever was posted at ground level. I could always break into the basement and just hide there in the boiler room until the heat died down, but did I really want to do that? For that matter, did I want to scurry past the bedroom window of the Porlock apartment when the police were most likely already in there?

  I took a moment to check the two fourth-floor apartments. The one on the right—4-D, I suppose, directly above the Porlock place—had its shade drawn. I pressed my ear to the windowpane and caught Brady Bunch reruns on the television set. The shade was drawn a few yards to the left at 4-C, but I couldn’t hear anything inside, nor could I see any light around the edges of the window shade.

  Of course the window was locked.

  If I’d had a glass cutter I could have drawn a neat freehand circle on the appropriate pane of glass, reached in and turned the window lock. If I’d had some tape I could have broken any pane I wanted with no more noise than you’d make snapping a dry twig. If I’d had…

  If wishes were horses, burglars would ride. I kicked in a pane of glass and closed my eyes until the tinkling stopped. I put my ear to the opening I’d created and listened for a moment or two, then unlocked the window, raised it, and stepped through it.

  A few minutes later I left that apartment in a more conventional manner than I’d entered it, departing through the door and walking briskly down a flight of stairs. I encountered a couple of uniformed patrolmen on the third floor. The door to 3-D was open now, with other cops making themselves busy inside the apartment, while these two stood in the hall with nothing to do.

  I asked one what the trouble was. He jutted out his chin at me and told me it was just routine. I nodded, reassured, and went down the other two flights and out.

  I wanted to go home. It may or may not be where the heart is but it’s where the burglar’s tools are, and a burglar, like a workman, is only as good as hi
s tools, and I felt naked without mine. I wasn’t sure if the cops had a make on me yet. They’d get one before long, I was fairly sure of that, but I didn’t doubt my ability to get in and out of my apartment before they set about looking for me. I had my tools there, I had cash there, and I would have liked to make a quick pit stop and equip myself for whatever lay ahead.

  Because what lay ahead didn’t look too good from where I sat. Madeleine Porlock had been left with more than the traditional number of holes in her head, and my fingerprints were undoubtedly plastered all over that apartment—on the cup I’d been drinking from, on the glass-topped table, and God knows where else. The same criminal genius that had wrapped my inert fingers around the murder gun would have seen to that.

  The police would have a lot of questions for me, and they wouldn’t even pay attention to my answers. I, on the other hand, had some hard questions of my own.

  Who was Madeleine Porlock? How did she fit into the whole business? Why had she drugged me, and where had her killer come from, and why had he murdered her?

  Whatever had become of Rudyard Whelkin?

  And, finally, how did the Sikh fit into all of this?

  The last question was no more easily answered than the others, but it made me realize I couldn’t go home. By now the Sikh and whoever had sent him would know they’d been hoodwinked, which meant I had to avoid whatever places they might logically expect to find me. The store was out, obviously, and so was the apartment, since anyone with access to a Manhattan phone book can ferret out my address.

  I flagged a cab heading downtown on Second Avenue. The driver was young and Hispanic, with alert eyes. Were those eyes registering me even as he asked my destination?

  “The Village,” I said.

  “What part of it?”

  “Sheridan Square.”

  He nodded shortly and away we went.

  Carolyn Kaiser’s apartment was on Arbor Court, one of those side-goggled Village lanes I can only find if I start out from the right place. Sheridan Square was the wrong place, so I had to walk up to Greenwich Avenue and then west and south until I hit it. I didn’t remember which building was hers, so I went into the vestibules of several until I found her name on a mailbox and rang her bell.

  Nobody home. I’d have called first but I didn’t have her number with me and it was unlisted, and it’s easier to pass a needle through the eye of a camel than to get an unlisted number out of an Information operator. It’s hard enough to get listed numbers. I rang a couple of top-floor bells until someone buzzed me into the building. Carolyn lived on the first floor. I took one look at the locks on her door and turned around and left.

  I checked a couple of hardware stores on Hudson. All closed. There was a locksmith, but could I really ask him to sell me burglar’s tools? I didn’t even try. I went to a drugstore and bought masking tape and paper clips and hairpins and a couple of nail files. At the tobacco counter I added a pipesmoker’s gizmo equipped with different doohickeys for tamping, reaming, probing, and otherwise mistreating a pipe. It looked to be made of pretty decent steel.

  I went back to Carolyn’s building and annoyed the top-floor tenants again and got buzzed in a second time. I went to her door and got busy.

  With my ring of picks and probes, the operation wouldn’t have taken five minutes. With makeshift tools from the drugstore it took closer to ten, during which time two persons entered the building and one left it. If any of them took any notice of me they were too polite to make a scene, and I finished the task at hand and let myself into her place.

  Cozy. Very Village, really. One room about fifteen feet square with a teensy lavatory added on in back, so small that your knees nudged the door when you sat on the potty. The bathtub, a large claw-footed relic, was over in the kitchen area with the sink and stove and fridge; Carolyn had had a plywood cover cut to fit it so that she could use it for chopping up vegetables. The walls were painted blue, a deep rich tone, and the window frames and exposed plumbing were a bright yellow.

  I used the loo, lit a fire under the leftover coffee (with a match, the pilot didn’t work), and let one of the cats check me out. He was a Burmese and nothing intimidated him. His buddy, a wary-eyed Russian Blue, reposed on the double bed, where he tried to blend with the patchwork quilt. I scratched the Burmese behind the ear and he made that bizarre sound they make and rubbed his head against my ankle. I guess I passed inspection.

  The coffee boiled. I poured a cup, took a taste, and got flashes of the mug of doctored coffee Madeleine Porlock had given me. I poured it out, heated some water and made some tea, and fortified the brew with an authoritative slug of California brandy from a bottle I found on the shelf over the sink.

  It was six-thirty when I kept my appointment at Chez Porlock, and I’d bolted from the place during the seven o’clock newscast. I didn’t look at my watch again until I was sitting in Carolyn’s wicker chair with my feet up, the second cup of brandied tea half gone and the Russian Blue purring insanely in my lap. It was then just eighteen minutes after nine.

  I moved the cat long enough to turn Carolyn’s radio to one of the all-news stations, then settled back on the chair again. The cat reclaimed his place and helped me listen to a report on the Turkish earthquake and the presidential veto. There was a disgruntled Albanian holding a couple of people hostage up in Washington Heights, and a reporter on the scene did more than was necessary to put me right in the picture. I stroked the Russian Blue patiently while his Burmese buddy sat on top of a bookcase and made yowling noises.

  It was coming up on eleven o’clock when I heard Carolyn’s key in the lock. By then I’d switched to an FM jazz station and I had both cats on my lap. I stayed where I was while she unlocked the door, and as she opened it I said, “It’s me, Carolyn. Don’t panic.”

  “Why should I panic?” She came in, closed the door, locked up. “Been here long? I was over at the Dutchess and you know what that’s like. Except you probably don’t, because they don’t allow men in there.” She slipped off her jacket, hung it on a doorknob, walked toward the coffeepot, then spun around suddenly and stared at me. “Hey,” she said. “Did we make a date that I forgot?”

  “No.”

  “Randy let you in? I thought she was visiting her goddam aunt in Bath Beach. What was she doing here? Did she go out to Brooklyn afterward or what?”

  “I haven’t seen Randy.”

  “Then how’d you get in, Bernie?”

  “I sort of let myself in.”

  “Yeah, but where’d you get a key?” She frowned at me. Then light dawned. “Oh,” she said, “I get it. Other people need keys. You’re like Casper the Ghost. You walk through walls.”

  “Not exactly.”

  The cats had deserted my lap and were brushing themselves passionately against her ankles, desperate to be fed. She ignored them.

  She said, “Bernie?”

  “The radio.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’ll answer part of your question.”

  She listened, cocked her head. “Sounds like Monk,” she said. “But I don’t know, it’s not as choppy as Monk and he’s doing a lot of things with his left hand.”

  “It’s Jimmy Rowles, but that’s not what I meant. After the record ends, Carolyn.”

  After the record ended we got a quickie commercial for a jazz cruise to the Bahamas, and I had to explain that that wasn’t it either. Then they gave us the eleven o’clock news, and high time, too. The Turkish earthquake, the flaky Albanian, the probable presidential veto, and then the extraordinary news that a convicted burglar, Bernard Rhodenbarr by name, was sought in connection with the murder of one Madeleine Porlock, who had been shot to death in her own apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street.

  The announcer moved on to other matters. Carolyn cut him off in the middle of a sentence, looked at me for a moment, then went over to the kitchen area and fed the cats. “Chicken and kidneys tonight,” she told them. “One of your all-time favorites, guys.”

 
She stood for a moment with her back to me, her little hands on her hips, watching the wee rascals eat. Then she came over and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “I should have known it was Jimmy Rowles,” she said. “I used to catch him at Bradley’s all the time. I haven’t been going there lately because Randy hates jazz, but if we break up, which I think we’re in the process of doing, the hell, I’ll get to the jazz clubs more, so it’s an ill wind, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Madeleine Doorlock? Funny name.”

  “Porlock.”

  “Still unusual. Who was she, Bern?”

  “Beats me. We were strangers until this afternoon.”

  “You kill her?”

  “No.”

  She crossed her legs at the knee, planted an elbow on the upper knee, cupped her hand, rested her chin in it. “All set,” she announced. “You talk and I’ll listen.”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s a long story.”

  CHAPTER

  Nine

  It was a long story, and she listened patiently through the whole thing, leaving the bed only to fetch the brandy bottle. When I finished she cracked the seal on a fresh bottle and poured us each a generous measure. I’d given up diluting mine with tea and she’d never started.

  “Well, here’s to crime,” she said, holding her glass on high. “No wonder you almost spilled your club soda last time I said that. You were all set to go out and commit one. That’s why you weren’t drinking, huh?”

  “I never drink when I work.”

  “I never work when I drink. Same principle. This is all taking me a little time to get used to, Bernie. I really believed you were a guy who used to be a burglar, but now you’d put all of that behind you and you were selling used books. Everything you told that policeman—”

  “It was all true up to a point. I don’t make a profit on the store, or maybe I do. I’m not much of an accountant. I buy and I sell, and I probably come out ahead, even allowing for rent and light bills and the phone and all. If I worked harder at it I could probably make enough to live on that way. If I hustled, and if I shelved paperbacks instead of wholesaling them, and if I read the want ads in AB every week and sent out price quotes all over the place.”