The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) (23 page)

That, of course, was why Mr. Smith had sent me to steal it in the first place. Access to the Wattrous apartment, itself easily gained, could give me access to the far more formidable fortress uptown.

And I’d have had a hell of a time without it. Many of Manhattan’s wealthiest citizens are essentially immune to burglary simply because the buildings they inhabit are impregnable. Edwin Leopold lived in such a building, and if he hadn’t sent down word earlier that I was expected, I’d have been sent speedily on my way.

A liveried doorman, built like a tight end, was stationed out in front. I gave my name, along with Leopold’s, and he passed me on to the concierge, a slightly smaller man in a similar uniform, the jacket cut to cloak but not entirely conceal the bulge of a shoulder holster.

Or maybe he was just glad to see me. He looked me over—my suit, my muted necktie, the briefcase I was carrying. I gave my name, and he nodded in recognition, checked a list to confirm his memory, and then called upstairs on the chance that Mr. Leopold might have changed his mind, and no longer welcomed my company.

“Mr. Lederer,” he announced, and listened. “Very good, sir,” he said, and gave me a smile, though not a terribly warm one. “The front elevator,” he said.

I’d noted a camera mounted above the building’s entrance, and another above and behind the concierge’s desk. From where that gentleman sat, he could monitor a bank of a dozen screens, which suggested that there were at least that many closed-circuit cameras busily recording the activity in all of the building’s public spaces.

I spotted one in the elevator, along with its operator, an older fellow with a bulldog jaw and, yes, a maroon uniform with gold piping, a match to those I’d seen on the concierge and the doorman. He whisked me two hundred feet closer to heaven and dropped me at a hallway some ten feet square. There were paintings on both side walls, rural landscapes in matching frames, while opposite the elevator was the door to the Leopold penthouse.

Behind me, the elevator operator held his position, and I knew he wouldn’t budge until my host let me in. I transferred my briefcase to my left hand and knocked with my right, and a male voice asked my name.

“Philip Lederer,” I said, and locks began to turn.

Several of them. Two cylinders showed on the outside of the door, but there was also a massive sliding bolt, and a Fox lock at least as sturdy as the one I’d encountered on Tenth Street.

The locks were a surprise. As a general rule, the easier it is to get into a building, the harder the residents make it to get into their apartments. The Wattrous apartment, swaddled by Rabson and Poulard and Fox, was a perfect example. Anyone armed with a butter knife could get past the downstairs door, so the brownstone’s tenants hung industrial-strength locks on their doors.

But here on Fifth Avenue, with a gun-toting concierge and a doorman who could double as the Rock of Gibraltar, you’d expect a more casual attitude toward locks. If no one could get into the building in the first place, why put oneself to the trouble of carrying all those keys and turning all those locks?

My heart would have plummeted at the sight of all those locks, especially once he’d let me in only to relock every one of those contrivances. You can’t be too paranoid, Mrs. Hesch had advised me, but she’d never met Edwin Leopold.

So the locks would have lowered my spirits, but they were already somewhere below sea level, and I was just glad I had the book with me, and that we’d already set a price for it. Because that thousand dollars was all the money I’d ever see for my efforts.

He didn’t need all those locks. He didn’t need a single one of them. He could have fastened his door with a piece of string, or left it open altogether. It didn’t matter.

It wasn’t Fort Knox, but it might as well have been. There was no way I’d be getting anything out of that building.

Edwin Leopold had a firm handshake, and treated me to it after we’d introduced ourselves. The handshake came as a surprise, but then so did everything else about the man’s appearance. All I knew about him was that he had a passion for old silver and an extreme disinclination to leave his apartment, and the mental picture I’d formed was of a pale little slug of a man, possibly corpulent, possibly chair-bound, looking as if he’d crawled out of a cartoon by Charles Addams.

He was my height but looked taller, perhaps because his posture was better than mine—and indeed better than just about anyone’s. His shoulders were broader and his waist trimmer. His made-to-measure suit was understated, but the functional buttons on its cuffs were a custom touch that Mr. Smith would have appreciated.

And his skin, firm and unlined, boasted a deep coppery tan. I supposed he could have obtained it on a terrace, but the terrace would have had to be in Miami. It was only June, and it would take all of a New York summer to turn him that color.

“I hope you’ll excuse this silliness with the locks,” he said, after capping the performance by arming his Kaltenborn alarm system. He took my arm and led me to a small table set for two, holding a thermos of coffee and a plate of cookies. “But if I fail to lock every last one, and set the alarm even though I’m sitting this close to the door, I assure you I’ll be able to think of nothing else. Are you phobic, Mr. Lederer?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Still, I wouldn’t say I’m fearless. There are certainly things that make me uncomfortable.”

“There’s a difference between discomfort and paralysis. If you were phobic, you’d realize it. Do you know the word
agora
?”

“From crossword puzzles. I think it means market.”

“In the sense of the Greek marketplace of old, which would have been an open public area where merchants laid out their goods. Thus agoraphobia, which is literally a fear of open spaces. Have one of these cookies, Mr. Lederer. They’re from the Hungarian bakery on Second Avenue.”

“Delicious.”

My seat gave me a good view of the glassed-in triple cabinet off to my right. It reached to within a few inches of the ten-foot ceiling, and light glinted off the silver objects on its shelves. A quick glance didn’t show me any spoons, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there to be seen.

“I call them,” he said of the bakery, “and they’re good enough to deliver. New York is remarkably considerate of the agoraphobic. One can have virtually anything brought to one’s home.”

“How long—”

“Have I been like this? I’m sixty-two years old, Mr. Lederer.”

“You look younger.”

“Do I? I try to stay in shape. I ran five miles this morning. A normal man would have gone across the street and done his running in the park. I used a treadmill. I’m assured my cardiovascular system can’t tell the difference.”

He’d had one room converted to a gym, with other machinery to keep the treadmill company, along with an assortment of free weights. And he’d had a sauna installed—it didn’t take much space, or use that much electricity. And a sunlamp, which accounted for the tan.

“All of this,” he said, “to accommodate a deplorable neurotic condition. You asked how long I’ve suffered from it. When I was thirty years old, I was a world traveler, even an explorer. I camped out in the Taklamakan desert in western China. Have you been there?”

Curiously enough, I hadn’t.

“A miserable place. This vast expanse, and it looked as though someone had set out to pave it and ran out of tar. And there I was, sleeping under the stars, all alone in the middle of nowhere. And quite comfortable, if you can believe it.”

“What happened?”

“I honestly don’t know. All I can say is that something happened. I had a trip planned to Italy, a region of that country that was the closest thing to a second home to me. I woke up one morning and realized I didn’t want to go. I canceled the trip, and I’ve never been out of New York since.”

“I see.”

“Do you? Because I don’t. This is the apartment I grew up in, it was my parents’, and my mother was still living then. I moved back in with her, and went on living here after her death. At first I was comfortable anywhere in the city, but gradually my world grew smaller. I learned to stay in the immediate neighborhood. The day came when I crossed the avenue, intending to sit for a few minutes in the park, and instead I turned around and came right back. I never crossed Fifth Avenue again.”

He poured himself some more coffee. “I was seeing a psychiatrist,” he said, “but then I could no longer go to his office, and he felt he’d be enabling my phobia if he came to me, so that was the end of that. Not that he’d been doing me any good. I wondered, though, where it would all end. There was a period of a month or so when I couldn’t leave the building, but was still able to go downstairs for my mail.”

“And then you couldn’t?”

“They were good enough to bring it to me. And now of course Miss Miller goes down for it. I don’t leave the apartment. I don’t even step out into the hall, and when I do open the door, well, you’ve seen how quick I am to lock everything up again.”

His eyes held mine. “One expert holds that the agoraphobe is an unindicted co-conspirator, that I could force myself to face my fears rather than accommodate them. That sounds good, doesn’t it? All I can say is it’s as useful as telling a depressive to cheer up. I’m just grateful my condition seems to have stabilized. I have the run of the entire apartment.”

“That’s something.”

“It is, because I’ve read of men and women who become incapable of leaving the bedroom, and eventually of leaving the bed. I don’t know what I would do if that happened to me.” He smiled. “I make it a point,” he said, “to pay a daily visit to every room in the apartment. Like an animal, staking out its territory. Thus far I haven’t felt the need to mark the perimeters with urine.”

“That’s probably just as well.”

“Yes, I’d say so.” He’d been leaning forward, and now he straightened up. “And now,” he said, “you surely would welcome a change of subject. And I do believe you’ve brought me a book. Do you suppose I could have a look at it?”

He glanced at it, nodded in appreciation, and turned the page.

The two dozen pages of plates got most of his attention. He studied them, frowned at them, smiled upon them, and even talked to them, mumbling about this piece or that one.

“He did think the world of Revere,” he said, “as who does not? But he doesn’t give short shrift to my favorite, either.”

I had a hunch I knew who that would be.

“A man named Myers,” he said. “I doubt you’ve even heard of him.”

Whereupon he told me everything I’d already learned about Myer Myers, and a bit more besides. I did a good job of appearing interested, and I didn’t need to show too much enthusiasm to make him happy.

He told me, for example, that Myers had formed a partnership in 1756 with one Benjamin Halsted, and that the two were the first to devise a joint monogram as a hallmark for their wares. Other silversmiths who joined as partners used their individual marks, but Myers and Halsted linked their initials with an ampersand, and their mark was “H & M” in a rectangle.

“I’ll show you,” he said, and took me to the glassed-in cabinet that had caught my eye earlier. Its various sections were fitted with locks, simple affairs one can pick with a hairpin, but he didn’t need a hairpin, having the appropriate one-size-fits-all key in his pocket. He used it to unfasten a mullioned cabinet door, picked up a six-inch bowl by its edges, and turned it to show me the hallmark. And there it was, all right, stamped into the bowl’s underside: a rectangle three-eights of an inch across, with an ampersand joining the team’s initials.

“Their innovation,” he said reverently, as if Halsted and Myers had invented the wheel.

“And the initials caught on,” I found myself saying. “They came into use again years later for the trains running underneath the Hudson River.”