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

it, and let out a long breath as it swung quietly shut behind me.
    I climbed one flight, stopped long enough to strip off my rubber gloves and stuff them into my jacket pocket. (I didn’t want to open the attaché case and chance spilling stamps all over the goddamn place.) I climbed three more flights of stairs, slipped the lock on the fire door, emerged in the hallway, and rang for the elevator. While it ascended from the lobby I checked my watch.
    Twenty-five minutes to one. It had been close to eleven-thirty when I said good night to Onderdonk, so I’d spent just about an hour in the Appling apartment. It seemed to me that I should have been able to get in and out in half an hour, but I couldn’t have shaved too many minutes off the time I spent going through the albums. I could have stayed out of the bedrooms, perhaps, and I didn’t have to give as much attention as I did to the Tiffany lamps, but what is it they say about all work and no play? I was out of there safely and that was what counted.
    A shame, though, that I couldn’t have made my exit before midnight, when service shifts commonly change at apartment buildings. I’d be seen now by a second elevator operator, a second concierge, a second doorman. Otherwise I’d have been seen by the same set a second time, and which was riskier? Not that it mattered, since I’d already given my name, and—
    The elevator arrived. As I stepped into the car I turned toward Onderdonk’s closed door. “ ’Night now,” I said. “I’ll have those figures for you as soon as I can.”
    The door closed, the car descended. I leaned back against its wood paneling and crossed my legs at the ankle. “Long day,” I said.
    “Just starting for me,” the operator said.
    I tried to forget about the camera overhead. It was like trying to forget that you’ve got your left foot in a bucket of ice water. I couldn’t look at it and I couldn’t suppress the urge to look at it, and I did a lot of elaborate yawning. It was, actually, a rather quick ride, but it certainly didn’t seem that way.
    A brisk nod to the concierge. The doorman held the door for me, then hurried past me to the curb to summon a taxi. One turned up almost immediately. I gave the doorman a buck and told the driver to drop me at Madison and Seventy-second. I paid him, walked a block west to Fifth, and caught another cab back to my place. On the way I balanced the attaché case on my knees and relived some of the hour I’d spent in apartment 11-B. The moment when the Poulard lock, teased and tickled beyond endurance, threw up its tumblers and surrendered. The sight of that inverted airmail stamp, alone on a page, as if it had been waiting for me since the day they misprinted it.
    I tipped the cabby a buck. My own doorman, a glassy-eyed young fellow who worked the midnight-to-eight shift in a permanent muscatel haze, did not rush to open the door of the taxi. I suppose he’d have held the lobby door for me but he didn’t have to. It was propped open. He stayed on his stool, greeting me with a sly conspiratorial smile. I wonder what secret he thought we shared.
    Upstairs I fumbled my own key into my own lock, for a change, and opened the door. The light was on. Considerate of them, I thought, to leave a light for the burglar. Wait a minute, I thought. What was this them stuff? I was the one who’d left the light on, except I hadn’t, I never did.
    What was going on?
    I put a foot inside, then drew it warily back, as if trying to get the hang of a new dance step. I went on in and turned toward the couch and blinked, and there, blinking back at me like a slightly cockeyed owl, was Carolyn Kaiser.
    “Well, Jesus,” she said, “it’s about time. Where the hell have you been, Bern?”
    I pulled the door shut, turned the bolt. “You picked your way through my Rabson lock,” I said. “I didn’t think you knew how to do that.”
    “I don’t.”
    “Don’t tell me the doorman let you in. He’s not