The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) (2 page)

“I’m pretty sure you got the first three words right.”

“The first three words,” she said, “never change.”

The restaurant, on the corner of Broadway and East Eleventh Street, across the street from the Bum Rap, has had the same sign for almost as long as I’ve had the bookshop. But it’s changed owners and ethnicities repeatedly over the years, and each new owner (or pair of owners) has painted over the last word on the sign. Two Guys From Tashkent gave way to Two Guys From Guayaquil, which in turn yielded to Two Guys From Phnom Penh. And so on.

We began to take the closings for granted—it was evidently a hard-luck location—and whenever we started to lose our taste for the current cuisine, we could look forward to whatever would take its place. And, while we rarely went more than a few days without a lunch from Two Guys, there were plenty of alternatives—the deli, the pizza place, the diner.

Then Two Guys From Kandahar threw in the towel, and Two Guys From Taichung opened up shop, and everything changed.

“I’ll be closing early,” I told Carolyn.

“Today’s the day, huh?”

“And tonight’s the night. I thought I might get back downtown in time to meet you at the Bum Rap, but where’s the sense in that?”

“Especially since you’d be drinking Perrier. Bern? You want me to tag along?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure? Because it’d be no problem for me to close early. I’ve got a Borzoi to blow dry, and his owner’s picking him up at three, and even if she runs late I can be out of there by three-thirty. I could keep you company.”

“You were with me on the reconnaissance mission.”

“Casing the joint,” she said with relish. “Nothing to it. Piece of cake.”

“I think it’s better if I solo this time around.”

“I could watch your back.”

“I don’t want to give their security cameras a second look at you. Once is fine but twice is suspicious.”

“I could wear a disguise.”

“No, I’ll be disguised,” I said. “And a key part of my disguise is that this time around I won’t be accompanied by a diminutive woman with a lesbian haircut.”

“I guess diminutive sounds better than short,” she said. “And it’s not exactly a lesbian haircut, but I take your point. So how about if I hang out down the block? No? Okay, Bern, but I’ll have my cell with me. If you need me—”

“I’ll call. But that’s not likely. I’ll just steal the book and go home.”

“Check Amazon first,” she said. “See if it’s on Kindle. Maybe you can save yourself a trip.”

Galtonbrook Hall loomed less than half a mile from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and an ambulance got there in minutes, but they didn’t have to rush. Martin Greer Galton, born March 7, 1881, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, was almost certainly dead by the time he hit the floor.

Now, fifty years later, his house lived on. He’d devoted the first half of his life to making money and the second half to spending it, collecting art and artifacts in great profusion, and building Galtonbrook Hall to house himself for his lifetime and his treasures for all eternity.

That at least was the plan, and he’d funded the enterprise sufficiently to see it carried out. What had been a home was now a museum, open to the public six days a week. Out-of-towners rarely found their way to the Galtonbrook; it didn’t get star treatment in the guidebooks, and it was miles from midtown, miles from the Upper East Side’s Museum Mile. As a result it was rarely crowded.

You had to know about it and you had to have a reason to go there, and if you were in the neighborhood you’d probably wind up at the Cloisters instead. “We’ll go to the Galtonbrook the next time,” you’d tell yourself, but you wouldn’t.

Neither Carolyn nor I had been there until our visit five days earlier, on a Thursday afternoon. We’d stood in front of a portrait of a man in a plumed hat, and its brass label identified it as the work of Rembrandt. The guidebook I’d consulted had its doubts, and repeated an old observation:
Rembrandt painted two hundred portraits, of which three hundred are in Europe and four hundred in the United States of America.

“So it’s a fake,” she said.

“If it is,” I said, “we only know as much because the guidebook told us so. We could go look at the Rembrandts in the Metropolitan, and we’d know they’re genuine, but we’d only know
that
because of where they’re hanging. And we’d have paid twenty-five dollars apiece to look at them, instead of the five dollars they charge here, and we’d have people bumping into us and breathing down our necks.”

“I hate when that happens. This is a beautiful painting, Bernie. You look at the guy’s face and you get a whole sense of the person.”

“You do.”

“He must have been a closet case, don’t you think?”

“Because of the plumed hat?”

“No, just the impression he gives off. Though I don’t know how reliable my gaydar is, especially when we’re a couple of centuries away. But the point is I’m getting a lot out of looking at the painting, so who cares if it’s really by Rembrandt?”

“Well, I don’t,” I said. “Why should I? It’s not as if I was planning on stealing it.”

That was Thursday, and now it was Tuesday, and while it was overcast the rain was supposed to hold off until after midnight. It would rain all day Wednesday, according to the weather guy on Channel Seven, with what they called the exclusive Acu-Weather Forecast, although I’ve never been able to figure out what’s exclusive about something available to everybody with a television set.

Never mind. The Galtonbrook closed on Wednesdays, so I wouldn’t be going then rain or shine. And I liked the idea of paying a visit the day before a closed day. They’d be unlikely to miss what I intended to take. Their Rembrandt, genuine or not, was safe, and so was everything else hanging on a wall or poised on a plinth.

Even so, I didn’t see how a buffer day after my visit could do any harm.

So I’d left my apartment that morning with felonious intentions, and one trouser pocket contained a little ring of small steel implements that the law regards as burglar’s tools, the mere possession of which is a crime. It’s no crime to carry a plastic grocery bag from D’Agostino’s, or for that bag to contain a baseball cap and a sport shirt and a pair of sunglasses, but they had roles to play in the crime I was planning to commit.

It was around three when I brought my bargain table inside, gave Raffles fresh water, and locked up and left. I was carrying the plastic bag again, and of course the burglar’s tools had never left the burglar’s pocket.

Barnegat Books is on East Eleventh Street between University Place and Broadway, and the Galtonbrook is on Fort Washington Avenue, in Washington Heights or Inwood, depending on which realtor is hustling you. The best way to get there is by helicopter, and you could probably land one on the museum’s flat roof, but I took the L train across Fourteenth Street and the A train uptown to 190
th
Street.

That put me three blocks from the museum, and I walked a block in the wrong direction looking for a place to change. Telephone booths worked for Clark Kent, but when’s the last time you saw one? When the counterman in a Dominican bodega said the bathroom was for customers only, I dug out a dollar and helped myself to a copy of
El Diário.
He rolled his eyes—they all learn that the minute their planes touch down at JFK—and pointed to a door along the rear wall.

I’d gone to work that morning wearing pressed khakis and a T-shirt from the Gap, originally black but laundered over the years to an agreeable dark gray. The shirt I’d brought along was Hawaiian in style, although I’d guess that this particular specimen had made the trip from a sweatshop in Bangladesh without getting anywhere near Waikiki. There were parrots on it, and you could almost make out what they were saying.

The bathroom was tiny, but roomier than a phone booth. I put the parrot shirt on over my T-shirt. It wasn’t exactly a disguise, in that anyone who knew me would recognize me right away. “Why, there’s Bernie Rhodenbarr,” such a person would remark. “But what on earth is he doing in that frightful shirt?”

But I hadn’t chosen the shirt in the hope of deluding an acquaintance, and didn’t expect to encounter one in the first place. The parrots were for the benefit of strangers. The shirt would catch the eye, and they’d notice it instead of paying attention to the sartorially-challenged chap who was wearing it.

I put on the sunglasses and the baseball cap—blue, with the Mets logo in orange—and I left the bodega without glancing at the proprietor. If he was rolling his eyes again, I didn’t have to know about it. I was still carrying the D’Ag bag, but all it held now was my
El Diário
, and I’d already gotten my dollar’s worth of use out of it. I headed back the way I’d come, dropping the paper in a trash can en route to the Galtonbrook.

I recognized the woman who took my five dollars, and for a moment I expected her to recognize me.
“Oh, it’s you again. Love your shirt, but what happened to your little friend with the lesbian haircut?”
But all she did was thank me and give me a receipt.

I walked around, pausing for another long look at the putative Rembrandt. The museum was even less crowded than Carolyn and I had found it, but I began to get the feeling that the handful of visitors were taking undue notice of me. The shirt was supposed to draw the eye, but not to hold it. A glance, a shrug, and a glance in another direction—that was what I’d had in mind.

Maybe it wasn’t the shirt. Was I wearing a Mets cap in Yankee territory? Even if I was, that might draw a hostile stare in the street or the schoolyard, but not in this temple of culture.