The Burglar on the Prowl (9 page)

I
f anybody had been waiting to ambush me, there wouldn’t have been much I could do about it, short of hopping into a time machine and taking a cram course in the martial arts. But there was no one looming behind my door, no one pressed up against my wall. Whoever had broken in had left, and that was all to the good, although it would have been worlds better if they hadn’t come around in the first place.

Unlike the cops who’d dropped in earlier, these sons of bitches (or this son of a bitch, though I tended to think in the plural) had not been to charm school. They’d been through my apartment as if they were a tornado and it was a trailer park. They’d stopped short of outright vandalism, and thus hadn’t smashed or slashed anything, which is to say they’d done their dirty work without malice—but you could say the same thing for the tornado, couldn’t you?

They’d taken my Mondrian off the wall and set it on the floor, but they hadn’t damaged it, nor had they thought to take it away with them. Either they hadn’t recognized it or they’d assumed, as everyone does, that it was a worthless copy.

I didn’t know what they’d come looking for, but I’d bet it was worth a good deal less than the Mondrian, which would probably
bring a couple million dollars at auction, assuming the seller had clear title and a provenance for it. On the underground market, well, who knows what it might bring? I’ve never been tempted to find out, because what could I buy with the money that I’d enjoy as much as the painting?

And I really enjoyed looking at the painting right now, because it was a lot more pleasant to look at than the rest of the apartment.

They’d done quite a job on it. The books were off the shelves, though they’d at least piled them more or less neatly on the floor. The drawers, dresser and desk, had all been pulled out and upended. The clothes were shoved over to one side of the closet, and, at the rear of the closet, damn it to hell, my custom-designed hiding place, impervious to police searches, had been opened and ransacked.

And ruined in the process. I’d had it constructed like one of those cunning wooden boxes they sell at places like the American Craftsmen’s Guild, where you have to push this piece of wood to the left in order to snick this other piece back which enables you to nudge this third piece to the right, at which point the lid pops open. It takes no time at all when you know how it works, but no one’s born with that knowledge, and it’s not that easy to dope it out, especially if, like all my previous visitors, you don’t realize there’s a secret cupboard in front of you.

They’d known what they were looking at, though, and hadn’t wasted time trying to crack the code. Instead they’d applied brute force, and that was the end of my hidey-hole.

They’d left the passports. I guess they weren’t worried that I might skip the country. And they’d left my burglar tools, which, judging from the way they’d forced the door, they wouldn’t have known what to do with. They’d also left the electric shaver with the cracked plastic case, the one I’d picked up in Barbara Creeley’s apartment.

But they took my money. Last night, when I put my tools away for the second and final time, I’d added the $1120 from Barbara Creeley’s icebox to my Get Out of Dodge fund. While I was at it, I
counted the stack of bills, so I’m able to tell you just how much the bastards got from me. The grand total, including the night’s proceeds, had come to precisely $8357. (And yes, that’s an odd sum, because I always make sure I have some small bills in my emergency stash. If you’re running for your life, you don’t want to have to break a hundred-dollar bill at a toll booth.)

Eight thousand bucks and change. They hadn’t come for the money, that was clear, but they found it, and it was money, so they took it. And the hell of it was that I couldn’t really blame them.

After all, I’d have done the same thing myself.

The first thing I did was pick up an armload of books and start reshelving them.

That, granted, was pretty stupid. Anyone drawing up a list of priorities for someone in my particular situation would be apt to put the orderly reshelving of my personal library down toward the bottom of the list, somewhere between making a laundry list and flossing. The books were in short stacks on the floor, where I could walk around without tripping over them. They were in a sense safer there than back on their shelves, in that they were in no danger of falling anywhere.

But I’m a bookseller, spending the greater portion of each workday in a used bookstore, buying books every day from people who would rather have money, and selling them in turn to people who’d rather have books. The books usually go out one or two or three at a time, but they come to me in larger quantities; while occasionally a book scout like Mowgli brings in one or two choice items he’s turned up, I’m more apt to acquire books by the shopping bag or wheelbarrow or truckload. When I buy a whole library, the books go to my back room, where they repose in cartons until I get around to dealing with them, which I generally do a carton at a time, lugging the box out front and putting the individual volumes in their proper places on my shelves.

That’s a task I fit in when I can—and, since an antiquarian bookseller’s workday is rarely conducted at a breakneck pace, there’s generally
plenty of time for it. When things are slow, when there’s nothing else to do, I find some books and set about shelving them.

So that’s what I was doing, and while I did it I tried to figure out what to do next.

First of all, damage control. The feeling of violation aside, what had I lost?

Well, money. Over eight thousand dollars, which is still a tidy sum, even if it’s not what it used to be. (My grandfather Grimes paid eight thousand dollars for the house my mother was born in, while nowadays there are people in Manhattan—rich ones, admittedly—who pay that much every month in rent.) It hurt to lose the money, but that’s the thing about money: it’s always painful to lose it, but it’s never more pain than you can stand.

Because all it takes to replace it is other money. Barbara Anne Creeley couldn’t replace her class ring, but I could replace the eight grand, and when I did the pain I now felt would go away. So I hated to see my Get Out of Dodge fund depleted all the way to zero, but I knew I’d build it up again, one way or another.

Besides the money, all I could see that I’d lost was time, the time it would take me to make my apartment look as it had before my visitors had come. A certain number of hours, plus a certain number of dollars to replace the lock they’d broken and, now that the horse was stolen, add a more serviceable lock that would lessen the likelihood of the same thing happening again. And some more dollars for a cleaning woman, to whisk away the traces of an alien presence. My neighbor Mrs. Hesch had a woman who cleaned for her once a week, and I’d recruited her occasionally in the past, and could do so again. That would have to wait until the books were on the shelves and the drawers back where they belonged, so general tidying came first, but—

Oh, hell. I was forgetting the damage they’d done to my formerly secret compartment. The fellow who built it for me had moved to the West Coast—Washington State, if I remembered correctly—and I had no idea who I could find to do work like that. If I could reach him I could ask him to recommend someone, but I didn’t know what town he’d gone to or if he was still there, and his name
was David Miller, so I could forget about trying a computer search. The thing about computer searches is that they make finding a needle in a haystack as easy as falling off a bicycle. Nothing to it. But finding the right David Miller would be more like trying to find a particular needle in a needle stack. I knew better than to try.

Well, I’d find somebody. There was no rush, because for the time being I didn’t have anything to hide.

I picked up another stack of books, and resumed the task of stowing them on the shelves. As important as putting my place in order, I thought, was dealing with the people who’d done this. Because it was pretty clear that they’d come looking for something, and my eight thousand dollars wasn’t it. It had been worth taking, but it wasn’t worth breaking in for, not to those bastards.

Because they had to be the same gang that broke into the Rogovins the night before.

I mean, who else could it be? No professional burglar for profit would single me out, and no snatch-and-grab junkie opportunist, looking to grab something he could turn into smack or crack, would wend his wobbly way into a doorman building, and—

Ohmigod.

I rushed out into the hall, rang for the elevator, then turned around and darted back into my apartment. My tools were in the ruins of my hidey-hole, where my visitors had left them, and I snatched them up and hurried back to the elevator, which had come and gone while I was getting my tools. Rather than wait for it I took the stairs, hurtling down them, terrified of what I was going to find.

The doorman at 34th and Park had suffocated. It was presumably an accident, tape meant for his mouth covering his nose as well, but maybe someone had decided that an extra piece of tape on the nose would avoid leaving a witness as a loose end. And even if it had been an accident, who was to say they wouldn’t make the same mistake again?

I went to the parcel room, tried the door. It was locked. I put an ear to it and listened, and couldn’t hear a thing but my own heartbeat.

I got out my tools and went to work.

W
hoever they were, I guess they must have stocked up on duct tape when some genius in Washington suggested you could seal your windows with it in the event of a terrorist attack. They’d evidently got to Kmart before the supply ran out, so they had plenty, and they weren’t stingy with it when it came time to immobilize Edgardo, who was unfortunate enough to be on duty when they came calling.

They’d taped his wrists behind his back, and then they’d sat him down in a straight-backed wooden chair and taped each of his ankles to the chair’s front legs. Then they’d wound tape around his middle, fastening him to the back of the chair, and somewhere along the way they’d slapped a piece of tape over his mouth. But they’d left his nose uncovered, thank heavens, and he was still alive.

But that was about as much as you could say for him. He’d made a valiant effort to free himself, rocking to and fro on the chair until he managed to tip it over, but all that did was make his position that much more uncomfortable. He’d wound up more or less on his side, with his feet in the air and his head tilted downward. That way the blood could rush to his head, but it didn’t have to rush, it could take its time, because Edgardo wasn’t going anywhere.

He was so positioned that he could see a patch of floor and not
much else, and when I opened the door he had no way of knowing who it was—someone come to rescue him, or the same guys coming back to finish the job. But it was somebody, so he made as much noise as he could, issuing a string of nasal grunts that were eloquent enough in their own way. If nothing else they let me know he was alive, and I matched his eloquence with a sigh of relief and rolled him over so we could get a look at each other, and so that I could set about getting him loose.

I picked at a corner of the tape covering his mouth, got enough of it free to get a grip on it, and told him to brace himself. “This is going to hurt,” I said, and I was right about that. I gave a yank and got the tape off, and I swear the poor bastard’s eyes popped halfway out of his head, but he didn’t make a sound.

I don’t know how he held it in. He’s short and slim, with a boyish face, and I suppose he grew the mustache to make himself look older. It was a sparse and tentative mustache, and thus had the opposite effect, making him look like somebody who was trying to look older. And now it was all at once considerably sparser and more tentative, because a substantial percentage of it had come off along with the duct tape, and how he kept from screaming in agony is beyond me.

What he did do, when he had the chance, was rattle off a long frenzied speech as fast as he could talk. It was in Spanish, so I didn’t understand a word of it, but I could tell it was heartfelt.

“Easy,” I said. “You’re okay. They’re not coming back. You’ll be all right now, Edgardo.”

“Edgar.”

“I thought your name was Edgardo.”

He shook his head. “No more. Now is Edgar. Is more American.”

“Fair enough. Hold still and I’ll cut you loose.”

There was far too much tape to try ripping it off, and I’d thought I would have to run upstairs for my Swiss Army knife, but I remembered that we were in the parcel room, and of course there was a box-cutter on the desk. It gave me a turn to see it there, as box-cutters don’t seem nearly as innocent as they did a few years ago,
but it was just what the job demanded, and I managed to cut the tape without cutting Edgardo—I’m sorry, make that Edgar—and before too long I had the chair standing up and him sitting in it.

“Now,” I said, “just sit tight, okay?”

“Tight? How I sit tight?”

“It’s an expression,” I said. “
Un idioma
. Never mind. Just stay here, and I’ll get you a glass of water. You want a glass of water?”

“Hokay.”

“I’ll be right back with it. I’ll get the water and I’ll call the cops, and—”

“No!”

“No? Look, Edgar, you could have been killed, and the guys who did this to you already killed three other people, and one of them was a doorman just like you. Of course I’m going to call the police.”

He looked on the point of tears.

“Why not?”

“INS.”

“You want me to call the INS?”

“Ay,
Cristo
! No!”

“Oh,” I said. “You don’t want me to call the INS. And you don’t want me to call the police because you’re afraid they’ll call the INS.” He was nodding enthusiastically, clearly pleased that he’d finally made himself understood by this gringo idiot. “But you’re not illegal, are you? How could you get hired here without a Green Card?”

It took a few minutes, but he got the point across. There were, it turned out, Green Cards and Green Cards. Some of them were issued by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, while others were the product of private enterprise. The latter would serve to placate a prospective employer, but someone from the INS would be able to tell the difference, and one more hardworking and productive New Yorker would be out on his
culo
.

I started to tell him the police had better things to do than run interference for the INS, and that all they’d want from him was whatever he could tell them about the men who’d wrapped him up
like a Christmas present. But halfway through I changed direction, because I wasn’t convinced of the truth of what I was saying.

To paraphrase the song from
My Fair Lady,
when a cop’s not near the suspect he suspects, he suspects the suspect he’s near. A lyric like that’s not ever going to make the charts, but it’s sadly true all the same. Edgar was clearly the victim in this case, but when they couldn’t get anywhere else with what they had, some bright-eyed cop would decide they ought to take a harder look at the doorman, on the chance that he might have been in on it all the time.

And, when his Green Card turned out to be a little gray around the edges, making them even more suspicious of its holder, they’d have no choice but to inform the Immigration and Naturalization bozos, who’d pick up Edgar the minute the cops came to their senses and cleared him. And away he’d go, back to Nicaragua or Colombia or the Dominican Republic, wherever he’d lived back in the good old days when his name was still Edgardo and he earned three dollars a month cutting sugarcane.

“No cops,” I agreed, a little belatedly. “And no INS. Come on upstairs and we’ll get you cleaned up and get a couple of glasses of water into you. And maybe some coffee.
Una copa de café,
eh?”

“A cup of coffee,” he said, helpfully. “
Sí, como no?”

There were two of them, although he only got a look at one, and not a very good look at that. The way they worked it was simple enough. He’d come on duty at ten, and maybe twenty minutes later the first man, taller and heavier than Edgar—a description that fit the greater portion of the adult male population—came up to him, asking for me. He was wearing dark trousers and a zip-front jacket in tan suede, and he had a blue Mets cap pulled down over his forehead. And a shirt, but Edgar didn’t get enough of a look at the shirt to remember it.

He rang my apartment, and when I didn’t answer he reported the fact to my caller, who hefted the briefcase he’d been carrying. He wanted to leave this for Mr. Rhodenbarr, he told Edgar, but it was
important, and he wanted to make sure it was safe. Was there a room for parcels? Something with a lock on the door?

There was, Edgar assured him, and he’d put it there. The man said he wanted him to put it there now, just to be on the safe side, and that he’d make it worth Edgar’s while. He’d accompanied this last phrase by rubbing his thumb across the tips of his index and middle fingers, a gesture that, north or south of the border, meant some money would sweeten the deal.

It struck Edgar as an unusual way to earn a tip, but then America was an unusual country, with ways he hadn’t entirely figured out yet. So he got the parcel room key from the drawer of the lobby desk, and led the man into the corridor beyond the bank of elevators and unlocked the parcel room door.

He’d no sooner accomplished this task than the man reached around and slapped him across the face, which seemed wholly gratuitous but turned out to have a purpose behind it, as he learned when he tried to cry out and discovered that his mouth was taped shut. The man gave him a shove, and he stumbled into the parcel room, and moments later another man came in, and the next thing he knew he was as I’d found him, secured to the chair with his hands taped behind his back. Well, not quite as I’d found him, because the chair was still upright at that point, and remained so until his efforts to escape sent it crashing to the floor a while later.

And that was that.

A team of cops might have found more questions to ask him. At the very least, they’d have asked him the same questions over and over. But they’d have wanted to make sure he wasn’t hiding anything, and I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I was also willing to give him coffee, of which he drank three cups in less time than it took me to drink one, and the use of my bathroom, which seemed only fair after I’d loaded him up with all that coffee.

After a few minutes I heard a little cry of shock and dismay, and a moment later he came out of the bathroom looking absolutely horrorstruck. I wondered if there was another of those damned water-bugs in the bathtub. They come up through the pipes, and they’re
huge and disgusting, but he’d grown up in a tropical country, for God’s sake. He must have seen worse.

Then, shaking, he touched his finger to his upper lip.

“Oh, right,” I said. “I didn’t realize you hadn’t seen it yet. I can’t see any way to save it, Edgar. Let me lend you a razor and you can shave it off.”

He looked questioningly at me, and I mimed the act, scraping away the mustache I didn’t have with the razor I wasn’t holding. He looked crestfallen, and rattled off a burst of rapid-fire Spanish. I don’t know what it meant, but if I had to guess it would have been something along the lines of
But then I will resemble an idiot child and no one will ever take me seriously.

I shook my head firmly. “You’re better off without it,” I insisted. “You can always grow it back, but the first step is to shave it.”

I gave him a fresh disposable razor and a can of shaving cream, and he closed the door, and when he opened it again he looked about seventeen years old, which was only about six months younger than he’d looked before any of this happened.

I told him he looked fine and asked him if there was anything else he could use—an aspirin, a bite to eat, maybe a quick shower—but all he wanted was to get back downstairs and resume his post. He’d been away from it for far too long, he said, and it would be bad if he got reported to the super, who, while married to Edgar’s sister’s husband’s cousin, could only cut him so much slack.

Besides, he said, the lobby was unattended, and that wasn’t safe. Anyone could walk right in. The tenants paid a lot of rent, and they had a right to have him on duty, watching out for their interests.

And off he went, grateful for the coffee, grateful I hadn’t insisted on calling the cops, and eager in spite of all he’d been through to get back to work. You can see why the INS would want to send a guy like that back where he came from.