The Burglar in the Rye

CHAPTER Three

Since I’d missed lunch, you could say that I’d had two double shots of rye on an empty stomach. Thanks to Carolyn, I wasn’t feeling their effects. Still, I figured I’d better eat something, and on my way back to the Paddington I stopped at a West African place I’d been meaning to try. I ordered a stew of vegetables and groundnuts because it sounded exotic, only to find out that “groundnut” is another name for our old friend the peanut. Still, it tasted exotic, and the waiters were cheerful. I ordered a glass of baobab juice, which sounded even more exotic than the groundnuts, but don’t ask me what that tasted like, because they were out of it. I had lemonade instead, and it tasted like lemonade.

I walked the rest of the way to the hotel, and didn’t recognize any old friends in the lobby, unless you count the desk clerk, the same fellow who’d checked me in almost eight hours earlier. I went to collect my key and mentioned that he seemed to be working a long shift.

“Noon to midnight,” he said. “I’d be getting off at eight, but Paula’s got a show tonight. She’s a magician, and she’s working a bachelor party this evening.”

“A magician at a bachelor party?”

“She performs nude.”

“Oh,” I said.

“She’s covered for me when I’ve had auditions, and I’m glad to return the favor. I just hope she shows up at midnight, or I could be stuck here until Richard comes on at four.”

“And then you start in again tomorrow at noon?”

He nodded, then leaned forward and propped an elbow on the counter. There was a limp, boneless quality to him that reminded me of Plastic Man in the comics. “Yes, but I’ll be off at eight, so it won’t be that bad.” He frowned. “I know you’re on the fourth floor but I can’t remember the room number.”

“Four-fifteen.”

“That’s one of the smaller rooms. I hope it’s all right.”

“It’s fine.”

“I could probably put you in something larger in a day or two.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’m only going to be here for a few nights.”

“That’s what I said myself, and that was over twenty years ago.” He smoothed an eyebrow with a fingertip. “And I’ve been here ever since. I’d been living here for, oh, seven years or so when Mr. Oliphant needed someone to fill in behind the desk, and he’d been awfully good about my rent, in which I was three or four months behind. So I filled in, and continue to do as time permits. I’m an actor, you see.”

He’d mentioned auditions, so this didn’t come as a surprise. And it explained why he’d shifted in and out of an English accent earlier.

“My name’s Carl Pillsbury,” he said. “You may have seen me onstage.”

“I was thinking that you looked familiar.”

He told me some plays he’d been in, all off-Broadway, then said that I wouldn’t have seen them, as I was from out of town. “But you might have seen me on television,” he suggested. “I was the airlines ticket agent in the Excedrin commercial a couple of years ago. And I’ve had small parts in Law amp; Order. Of course, you know what they say. There are no small parts, only small salaries.”

“That’s funny,” I said.

“Do you think so? It’s my own line, and I like it, but not everybody seems to get it. It may be my delivery. I had a stand-up routine that I tried at the comedy clubs, and the material was okay, but I have to say it fell flat most of the time. I just don’t think I’m particularly funny. Funny peculiar, maybe, but not funny ha-ha.”

Funny peculiar for sure. I kept up my end of the conversation with a few words now and then, which was all that was required of me, and he did the rest. He talked largely about himself, which was enough to erase any doubts I might have had about his really being an actor, but he also talked a little about the hotel and how living and working there was like being a member of a large loving family, albeit a dysfunctional one filled with wacky aunts and eccentric uncles.

He had me wondering if I too might turn into a permanent resident, extending my three days to as many decades. Maybe I’d wind up taking the occasional turn behind the desk myself, telling transient guests how I was only doing this as a stopgap while I waited for something to open up in my true line of work, breaking and entering.

By the time I got away from him, I had learned more than I had to know about the Hotel Paddington, and more than anybody needed to know about Carl Pillsbury. He wished me a good night’s sleep, and I told him I hoped his relief showed up on time, and I scooped up my key and headed for the elevator.

The purple envelope, I had noticed, was no longer in the box for Room 602.

My room was as I’d left it, with the bear on the mantelpiece. I gave him a nod. I wasn’t quite prepared to talk to the creature, but I couldn’t bring myself to cut him altogether.

What did I know about Anthea Landau? Well, I knew she was a literary agent. She’d been one for half a century, and for all of that time she’d occupied a suite at the Paddington, where she’d read manuscripts, conducted her business by mail and telephone, and met the odd client. In recent years she’d become increasingly reclusive, and these days she rarely ventured out. And, because of my little trick with the purple envelope, I knew the number of her suite. If I wanted to find her, the place to look was 602.

But I didn’t want to find her. I wanted to find her room, and I wanted to find it empty.

Some burglars don’t mind if the householder’s at home when they come calling. Indeed, one chap of my acquaintance never went in unless he could assure himself that the residents were home and asleep. That way, he explained, you didn’t have to worry about them coming home and catching you in the act.

We were both the guests of the state when he told me this, so his advice needs to be assessed accordingly. (He was a nice enough fellow, if limited conversationally, but in the main the lads you meet in prison are an oafish and mean-spirited lot, and I was as glad to get away from them as from the institution itself. When I made parole they warned me against associating with known criminals, and I didn’t really need to be told.)

For my own part, I’d much rather pay my visit when there’s nobody home. I suppose you could say I’m solitary by nature. I’ve gone in, by mistake or out of necessity, when the householder was home and asleep, and I have to say I hate all that pussyfooting around. I never make a lot of noise, and I always try to leave a place as neat as I found it, but while I’m there I like to feel at home. How can you do that with someone sleeping in the next room?

But I might not have a choice. From what I’d heard, Anthea Landau didn’t get out much. It was her reputation as a stay-at-home, after all, that had led me to pay over six hundred dollars for a room key. If I’d been likely to find her gone during the day, I’d have been inclined to take my chances with hotel security. It’s not all that hard to slip past a desk clerk during the late morning or early afternoon. There are all sorts of impromptu stratagems to render one invisible, or make one look as though one belongs. I have, on various occasions, posed as a deliveryman, arranged an appointment with another guest, or merely walked in carrying a clipboard and looking official.

The one thing you don’t want is to look furtive. Slink and the world slinks after you, and soon enough the long arm of the law reaches out and takes you by the collar. But if you look as though you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing, why, they’ll hand you the key to the front door and the combination to the safe.

I was guided in this matter by my Uncle Hi. A man of unblemished reputation, Hi was on his way home from a business trip when he saw, hanging over the check-in desk at a flight gate, an electrified sign advertising the airline. (It was Braniff, so you know this didn’t happen a week ago. I was in high school at the time. I won’t tell you who was President.)

Hi’s son, my cousin Sheldon, collected signs and decorated his room with them. I remember one from Planters Peanuts, with old Mr. Peanut leaning against a wall and grinning like something Stephen King would write about. (In West Africa I suppose they call him Mr. Groundnut.) This sign, though, showed a plane and a palm tree, and touted Braniff’s flights to the Caribbean, and Uncle Hi thought it would look great in Shelly’s room.

So he walked around the corner to his own flight lounge, where he set down his valise, took off his tie and jacket, and rolled up his sleeves.

Then he went back to the Braniff counter, pocket notebook in hand. There was a line, but he walked right up to the front of it, where a young woman was handling check-ins and issuing boarding passes.

“This the sign?” he demanded.

She looked blank or begged his pardon or stammered. Whatever.

“This here,” he said, pointing. “Is this the sign?”

“Uh, I guess so.”

“Yeah,” Hi said. “This is the one.” And he unhooked it from its moorings, with the young woman interrupting her own chores to give him a hand. He tucked it under his arm and went back to where he’d left his jacket and luggage. It was undisturbed, as he’d assumed it would be. (An honest man himself, Hi took honesty for granted in others, and was rarely disappointed.) He stowed the sign in his valise, unrolled his shirtsleeves, tied his tie, put on his suit jacket, and waited for them to call his flight.

The sign did in fact look splendid in my cousin Shelly’s room, and when he got old enough to redecorate, replacing Mr. Peanut and his friends with Playboy centerfolds, the Braniff sign remained. It sort of fit, Shelly said, because you could just picture those babes under that palm tree, sipping piña coladas and showing off their full-body suntans. You could even imagine them as Braniff stewardesses, offering you your choice of coffee, tea, or milk, and a whole lot more.

Well, that was years ago. Shelly’s a doctor now, and the sign in his waiting room is all about medical insurance, and no one on earth would ever want to steal it. Uncle Hi’s retired and living in Pompano Beach, Florida, clipping coupons and playing golf and adding stamps to his collection. I never steal a stamp collection without thinking of Hi. He collects British Commonwealth, and now and then over the years I’ll run across something I think he can use, some scarce Victorian provisionals or Edward VII high-values, and I’ll send them along with a note explaining that I found them tucked between the pages of an old volume of Martin Chuzzlewit. If Hi suspects the stamps might have a less wholesome provenance, he’s too much of a gentleman to mention it, and too ardent a collector to send them back.

I’m the family’s sole black sheep, and I sometimes wonder what went wrong. With upstanding role models on both the Rhodenbarr and the Grimes sides of my family, why did I wind up with a lifelong penchant for skulking and stealing?

A bad gene in the woodpile, I sometimes think. A chromosome gone haywire. But then I’ll think of my Uncle Hi, and I’ll find myself wondering. Look at his life and you see an honest businessman, ethical and law-abiding. But one afternoon in an airport he’d shown that he had the resourceful imagination of a con artist and the guts of a second-story man. Who’s to say how he might have turned out if circumstances early on had given him a nudge in the wrong direction?

Oh, I don’t suppose he’d have had my natural talent with locks. That’s a gift. But anyone with a little training can learn all you absolutely need to know about locks and how to get around them.

If Hi could manipulate a pair of stamp tongs, he could handle lockpicking tools. And Shelly was a surgeon, certainly capable of applying those same skills to the creations of Rabson and Segal and Fichet and Poulard. If they’d taken a hard left turn a while back, any of my relatives could have turned out wrong. And, if they’d taken up burglary, I bet they’d have been damn good at it.

Instead, they were all leading exemplary lives, and I was getting ready to break into an old lady’s hotel room.

Go figure.

Anthea Landau was listed in the Yellow Pages, under Literary Agents. I got an outside line and had her number half-dialed when I caught myself and broke the connection. If I dialed her private line there’d be a record of the call, and did I want that?

I dialed 7, then 602. I let the phone ring half a dozen times before hanging up.

Could it be that easy? Could I be that lucky? Was she really out somewhere, having dinner or seeing a play or visiting an old friend?

It seemed possible. The envelope I’d left for her had disappeared from her mailbox, suggesting that she might have come down and retrieved it. (It was equally possible that Carl or another hotel employee brought her mail to her door, a not unlikely service for a reclusive tenant.)

Even if she’d gone for the mail herself, that didn’t mean she hadn’t turned around and returned directly to her room. But she hadn’t answered her phone now, and that meant something, didn’t it?

Maybe it meant she was sound asleep. It was not quite nine o’clock, too early to be bedtime for most of the people I know, but how did I know what hours Anthea Landau kept? Maybe she took naps. Maybe she slept in the early evening and stayed up all night. Older people are typically light sleepers, and might be roused by a ringing telephone, but who could say with assurance that Ms. Landau wasn’t an exception? Maybe she welcomed Morpheus with a cocktail of Smirnoff’s and Seconal, and slept so soundly an earthquake wouldn’t wake her.

Maybe she was in the bathroom when the phone rang and couldn’t get to it in time. Maybe she was watching TV and never picked up the phone during Seinfeld.

Maybe I should try her again. I reached for the phone, caught myself in time, put my hand back in my lap before it could get me in trouble. I had called her number once and nobody answered. What was I doing, stalling to get my three nights’ worth out of the hotel? I couldn’t wait for some sort of guarantee that she wasn’t home and that I could get in and out undetected. If I wanted guarantees, I was in the wrong business.

It was time to get to work.