The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian Read Online Free PDF Page A

leisure.
    But he might notice that it was gone. It might in fact be the first thing he checked upon returning to the apartment, and if it was missing he’d know immediately that he hadn’t misplaced it, that it hadn’t walked off of its own accord.
    I thought of taking a couple of bills, figuring they wouldn’t be missed, but how much is too much? It’s more trouble making such nice distinctions than the cash warranted. Easier to leave the money where it was.
    I hit paydirt in the den.
    There was a bookcase there, but nothing like Onderdonk’s library. Some reference works, a shelf full of stamp catalogs, a few books on guns, and a cheap set of reprint editions of the novels of Zane Grey. Bargain-table stuff at Barnegat Books, forty cents each, three for a buck.
    A glassed-in wall case held two shotguns and a rifle, their stocks elaborately tooled, their barrels agleam with menace. I suppose they were for shooting turkeys but they’d do in a pinch for shooting burglars and I didn’t like the looks of them.
    Over the desk, an Audubon print of an American wild turkey hung in an antiqued frame. The real thing, stuffed and mounted and looking only a little forlorn, stood guard atop the bookcase. I suppose its friend J.C. shot it. First he’d have honked with one of the odd-looking wooden turkey lures he had on display, and then he’d have triggered the shotgun, and now the creature had achieved a sort of taxidermal immortality. Oh, well. People who break into houses, glass or otherwise, probably shouldn’t cast stones. Or aspersions, or whatever.
    In any event, the turkeys and the guns and the books were beside the point. Along the back of the large desk, below the Audubon turkey, ranged a dozen dark green volumes a bit over a foot high and a couple of inches wide. They were Scott Specialty Stamp Albums, and they were just what the burglar ordered. British Asia, British Africa, British Europe, British America, British Oceania. France and French Colonies. Germany, German States and German Colonies. Benelux. South and Central America. Scandinavia. And, in an album which did not match its fellows, the United States.
    I went through one album after another. Appling’s stamps were not affixed to the page with hinges but were encased individually in little plastic mounts designed for the purpose. (Hinging a mint stamp is as economically unsound as discarding a book’s dust jacket.) I could have removed the plastic mounts, and thought about it, but it was faster and simpler and subtler to tear whole pages from the loose-leaf binders, and that’s what I did.
    I know a little about stamps. There’s a lot I don’t know, but I can skim through an album and make good spot decisions as to what to take and what to leave. In the Benelux album, for example—that’s Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, along with Belgian and Dutch colonies—I cleaned out all of the semi-postal issues (all complete, all mint, all readily salable) and most of the good nineteenth-century classics. I left the more highly specialized stuff, parcel post and postage due and such. In the British Empire albums I loaded up on the Victoria, Edward VII and George V issues. I didn’t take very many pages from the Latin American albums, having less knowledge of the material.
    By the time I was done my attaché case was packed solid with album pages and the albums they’d come from were all back in order on the desk top, their bulk not visibly reduced. I don’t suppose I took one page in twenty, but the pages I took were the ones worth taking. I’m sure I missed the odd priceless rarity, and I’m sure I took the bad with the good, even as I do in life itself, but on balance I felt I’d done a first-rate job of winnowing.
    I hadn’t a clue what the lot was worth. One of the U.S. pages included the twenty-four-cent inverted airmail, a bicolor with the plane appearing upside-down, and I forget the most recent auction record for that issue but I know it