The Burglar on the Prowl

Four

I didn't really have to go home first. I was dressed all right in what I'd worn to work that morning. They haven't got a dress code in the subway, and I don't suppose they've got one on the streets of Riverdale, but one wants to avoid calling attention to oneself, and the only thing my khakis and polo shirt might call to anyone's attention was the relative poverty of my sartorial imagination.

It was spring-I may not have mentioned that-and, if the thermometer dropped a few degrees with nightfall, I might feel the chill in a short-sleeved shirt. Even if it didn't, I'd had a pair of stiff scotches at the Bum Rap, and it wouldn't hurt me to give them a little extra time to wear off. There was nothing on the agenda that required a sober head or quick reflexes, but my mission, while lawful enough all by itself, was part of a larger campaign that was as felonious as a monk. I'd had a slice of pizza on my way from the Bum Rap to the subway, and I suppose that had a sobering effect, but why not make assurance doubly sure? Why not stop home, and even make myself a cup of coffee while I was at it?

As it turned out, it didn't cool off that much, but I couldn't know that ahead of time, when I stopped at my apartment for my windbreaker. It was tan, a shade or two deeper than my slacks, and completed the costume of an ordinary guy, Mr. Middle of the Road, leading a blameless and certainly law-abiding existence.

My apartment's in a prewar building on West End and 70th. Much of my life centers in the Village-the bookstore's there, of course, on East 11th, and Carolyn's apartment on Arbor Court is less than a mile south and west of our two stores, in the West Village. She walks to work every day, and it's often occurred to me that it would be nice to be able to do the same. I suppose I could as things stand, but I'd have to allocate two hours to the process, and so far it's never seemed like a good idea.

Moving to the Village hasn't seemed like a good idea, either, because it's just not feasible. My apartment's rent-stabilized, which means that it costs me around a third of what it would otherwise. If I gave it up I'd have to pay at least three or four times as much for an equivalent apartment downtown. Or, if my nighttime activities brought me a really big score, I could buy a co-op or condo downtown-and then shell out in monthly maintenance about as much as I pay now for rent.

Besides, I'm used to the place. It's not much, a skimpy one-bedroom with a view of another apartment on the other side of the airshaft, and I've never taken the trouble to improve its furnishings or décor.

Well, wait a minute. That's not entirely true. First thing I did when I moved in was build in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. (On the rare occasions when I actually have someone over, she invariably asks if the fireplace works. No, I explain, it's retired.) And the second change I made, a few years later, was to construct a hidden compartment at the rear of the bedroom closet. That's where stolen goods go, until I manage to figure out how to unload them. It's also where I keep my Get Out of Dodge kit, which consists of five to ten thousand dollars in cash and a pair of passports, one of them genuine, the other a very decent facsimile.

Plus, of course, the little collection of picks and probes and thingamajigs and whatchamacallits that come under the general heading of burglar's tools. Unless you're a licensed locksmith, the mere possession of such implements is enough to earn you a stretch upstate as the guest of the governor. It's occasionally occurred to me to pick up a locksmith's license, just to keep from getting nailed for possession of burglar's tools, but they'd laugh themselves silly if they saw my name on an application. Or at least I think they would; maybe the people who give out the licenses don't check the names against a master list of convicted burglars. If not then I'd have to say the system's flawed, and wouldn't that be a shock?

I made a cup of coffee and drank it, and I went to the closet for my windbreaker, and somewhere around eight o'clock I went downstairs and walked over to 72nd and Broadway to catch the West Side IRT. I had my hands in the pockets of my windbreaker, and in a trouser pocket I had my burglar's tools.

And for the life of me I couldn't tell you why.

I suppose it must have been automatic. I was going to work, even though I knew my work would be strictly limited to reconnaissance. But a man on his way to work takes the tools of his trade along with him, and that was precisely what I did.

Halfway to the subway station, I realized what I'd done. I thought about going home and putting the tools back where they belonged, and I decided it was a fool's errand. No one was going to put his hand in my pocket, with the possible exception of myself. I wouldn't be doing anything illegal, so no cop would have a reason to frisk me. And it wasn't as if I were walking along with a loaded gun on my hip. They were burglar's tools, that's all. They weren't apt to go off on their own.

Riverdale's a part of the Bronx, but don't be ashamed of yourself if you hadn't known that. They're doing everything they can to keep it a secret. In the classified ads, underHouses for Sale, there's a special section of listings for Riverdale after the Manhattan listings. Then come the Bronx listings, following along after them.

The subway's elevated by the time it gets to the northern reaches of Manhattan, so you can watch through the window as the train crosses the Harlem River and presses on through Kingsbridge and into Riverdale. If you do, you won't spot a billboard that proclaims "RIVERDALE-PART OF THE BRONX AND DAMN PROUD OF IT!" It'd make a nice billboard, but so far no one's been prompted to put one up.

And, when you get off at the last stop at 242nd Street and make your circuitous way south and west on Manhattan College Parkway, so named because it winds its way around the ivied campus of Manhattan College, you might be excused if you leapt to the conclusion that you were in, uh, Manhattan. Manhattan Community College is in Tribeca, and Marymount Manhattan College is on East 71st Street, and you'll find the Manhattan School of Music on Broadway and 122nd. They've got Manhattan in their names, and they're in Manhattan, but Manhattan College, curiously enough, is in Riverdale, and Riverdale is in the Bronx.

Ah, well.The Bronx?/ No, thonx! wrote Ogden Nash, some seventy or eighty years ago. Even then the borough got no respect, and time has not been kind to its image. Riverdale, with its fine old fieldstone houses and its very preppy Riverdale Country Day School, understandably blanches at being mentioned in the same breath as, say, Fort Apache.

I mused on all of this as I tried to find the Mapes house and found myself wishing I'd brought a map along. I have a Hagstrom atlas of the five boroughs at home, and I'd studied the map of Riverdale and plotted my route, but it would have been handy to have the map in front of me now. The atlas says it's pocket-size, but only if you're a kangaroo. I'd thought of tearing out the relevant page, but I'm too much of a bookman to mutilate a useful book on a whim. I have a folding map of Manhattan that I could have taken along, but what good would that do me? Riverdale, despite the likely wishes of its inhabitants, is not to be found thereon. The mapmakers know damn well it's in the Bronx.

There were a couple of convenience stores on Broadway at the foot of the subway terminal, and one of them would probably have been happy to sell me a map of the Bronx, if I promised not to say where I got it. But I didn't even think of that until I'd walked far enough on the winding stretch of Manhattan College Parkway to scramble my mental compass. I was damned if I was going to go back and buy a map and start over, so I kept on going, and took a right on Delafield Avenue and a left on 246th Street, which got me under the Henry Hudson Parkway and within shouting distance of the Hudson River. I kept myself pointed toward the river and hit streets I remembered from the map, and I took a wrong turn here and there but figured it was just part of getting to know the neighborhood, and wasn't that part of my assignment?

And then I was on Devonshire Close, a dead-end street that ran north a single block from another street with the irresistible name of Ploughman's Bush. Riverdale is hilly, and Devonshire Close perched on the slope of a rise, with the houses on the east side of the street-Mapes's was among them-situated at the top of the slope. They were large houses and they stood on good-sized lots, with their lawns angling down to the sidewalk. The lawns looked too steep for easy mowing, and about a third of the homeowners had finessed the problem by substituting a ground cover, ivy or pachysandra, for the usual grass. Mapes had grass, though, and his lawn looked well tended, his shrubbery neatly trimmed. Well, he was a plastic surgeon, wasn't he, given to reshaping things to their aesthetic betterment? He might not be out there with hedge clippers himself, but he'd damn well make sure the job got done.

You couldn't see the Hudson from where I was standing, but when I walked up the driveway to where the house began, there was just a sliver of river visible. You'd see more from the first-floor windows, and you'd have a good view from either of the two higher floors. There's something in the human spirit that longs to look at water, and I think that may explain why so many people have fish tanks in their houses and apartments. It's not the fish, it's the water, and I knew that the folks on Devonshire Close didn't need to stare at tanks full of guppies. They'd be able to see the Hudson.

I returned to the front walk, where all I could see was the baronial manse of Crandall Rountree Mapes, and for the time being that was plenty. It was quite a house, but then so were all the others on the block. A few were of red brick, and two were of Tudor-style half-timbered stucco, but the rest were made of stone, which you'll recall is the very same material they build castles out of. The houses on Devonshire Close weren't castles-I didn't spot a single moat or drawbridge, and not even a portcullis-but there was nevertheless something distinctly castleish-castlesque? castleine? Castilian?-about them. They felt substantial, which was ideal from my point of view, but they also felt impregnable, which was not.No one's getting in here, roared the lion's-head brass knocker in the center of the massive oak door.Go home and start over, murmured the thick stone walls.Don't even think about it, growled the windows, all so neatly outlined at their borders with metallic tape.

The tape indicated the presence of a burglar alarm system, and an extra escutcheon plate just below the Rabson lock on the front door told me the system was a Kilgore. I'm familiar with the Kilgore, and even bought one to increase my familiarity, and for a change familiarity bred not contempt but grudging respect. I couldn't bypass it, not without running an electric drill that would draw more attention than the alarm itself. I could turn it off once I was inside the house, I knew how to do that, but first I had to get in, and the Kilgore system was sitting there smugly and telling me I'd have an easier time getting into Fort Knox.

The thing is, you can get in anywhere. I've never had a look at Fort Knox, and can't see why I would want to-I'm not even certain there's any gold there, are you?-but I'm sure it would be possible to get in. It wouldn't be easy, but you can sail a long ways from Easy before you reach the shores of Impossible.

And the Mapes house wasn't Fort Knox. It might be tricky, but there would be a way in. There always was, and the idea was to spot it now so I'd know just what to do come Friday.

First, though, I walked back to Ploughman's Bush and circled the block. I'd been standing in front of the Mapes house for several minutes, and I didn't want to attract any attention. If anyone had spotted me, I'd give them a chance to watch me walk away, and while I was at it I could get a fuller picture of the overall neighborhood.

I took five or ten minutes, and when I came back the big stone house with the manicured lawn and shrubbery looked just as I had left it, with the same lights glowing in the same windows. I couldn't tell if anyone was home or not, because just about everybody with a house leaves lights on routinely, figuring that a darkened house is an invitation to burglars. (To this burglar, a completely unlighted house suggests that the occupants are at home and asleep, though admittedly that doesn't hold until the late hours.)

Apartment dwellers are more apt to darken the place when they go out, figuring reasonably enough that anyone wishing to kick the door in would do so without being able to tell whether the lights were on or off on the other side of it. The occasional break-in was just a chance you had to take, whereas a high Con Ed bill was a certainty, month in and month out.

But people in houses feel more vulnerable, and also feel they ought to be able to do something about it. For a while you could spot the empty houses by the lights that stayed on all night, blazing away at four in the morning to announce their owners' absence, but nowadays everybody has lights on timers, winking on and off in realistic fashion.

It's all part of the eternal game, a domestic version of the arms race. They keep coming up with better locks and more sophisticated alarm systems, and reprobates like me keep finding ways to get past the locks and around the alarm systems. The same technology that reinforces a door provides me with a new way to get through it.

Were the Mapeses home? There were ways to find out no matter how clever they were with their lights. I could call them on the phone and see if they answered. Voice mail and answering machines muddy the waters some, and when a machine picks up there's no guarantee there's nobody home. The next step is to ring the doorbell. Even if they don't come to the door-and why should they, if it's the middle of the night?-you almost always get some indication of occupancy. They switch on a light, they walk around, they make noise, and the painstaking burglar slinks away, and lives to steal another day.

And, finally, there's something else, an instinct you tend to develop, a sense you get just standing outside of a door as to whether or not there's someone with a pulse on the other side of it. It's not infallible, that instinct, and it's subject to influence by such forces as impatience and wishful thinking, but it's there, and you get to a point where you learn to rely on it.

And what did it tell me?

It told me I was standing in front of an empty house. There was no evidence pointing me toward this conclusion, no logical argument against their presence. It was just a feeling I had.

But what difference could it possibly make? I wasn't here to break and enter. There would be plenty of time for that on Friday, when I wouldn't need my intuition to let me know the place was empty becauseDon Giovanni would guarantee it. And I'd have a helper along, and a car to carry me and my helper and our well-gotten gains quickly and safely away. All I had to do now was figure out how, come Friday, I was going to get inside of the goddam place.

The first thing I did was check the windows. I'd already spotted the metallic tape on the first-floor windows (which a burglar from Britain or the Continent would call the ground-floor windows, due to a cultural predisposition to begin counting at the top of a flight of stairs rather than at the bottom). Sometimes, though, a homeowner will save time and money by wiring the more accessible windows into the alarm system but leaving out those he figures are too remote for a burglar to get to. After all, does he really want to have to close every window in the house before he sets the alarm? He might want to leave the odd upstairs window open for ventilation. Simpler, isn't it, to leave the upper windows untaped? And just as safe, too, right?

Simpler, perhaps; safe, perhaps not. If a window a flight up would provide Kilgore-free access, how hard would it be to bring along a telescoping aluminum ladder long enough to get me up and in? And, if that turned out to be the sesame that would open the Mapes house, I could pop into the garage tonight and see if they might not have a ladder I could borrow. I'd put it back when I was finished, and in the same condition I found it.

I took a good look, and knew I didn't have to break into the garage because a ladder wouldn't do me any good. The windows on the second floor had metallic tape on them. (There was a chance, slim but real, that the tape on the upstairs windows was just for show, just as there's a chance that a 100-to-1 shot will sweep the Triple Crown. It's possible, sure, but you wouldn't want to bet the rent money on it.)

How about the basement windows? They're small, and their panes get broken and aren't always replaced right away, and basements are dirty and cluttered and yucky, home to spiders and centipedes and things that go slither in the night, and you don't go there unless you have to, so who would even think that a basement window might be a burglar's way in? Could he even fit through a basement window if he wanted to? And why would he want to?

The basement windows were all rimmed with the same metallic tape. That was disappointing but not surprising, and at least I hadn't had to crane my neck to find out I wasn't going to get in that way.

And the third-floor windows? I couldn't tell from where I stood, and I couldn't see what difference it made. I'm all right with heights, but I'm not crazy enough to climb two stories on a housebreaking expedition. Even if I could find a ladder that would reach that far, and even if I could brace it so that it wouldn't slip out from under me, I wasn't willing to spend that much time that exposed to the gaze of anyone who happened to glance my way. There are any number of illegal things you can do that can appear innocent to a casual glance, but climbing into a third-story window is not one of them.

Okay, forget the windows. Forget the doors, too. What did that leave?

The house, like all the others on the block, had been built at least three-quarters of a century ago. It was obviously prewar (which will always mean World War II when you're talking about New York real estate, no matter how many wars have been fought since then, just as antebellum will always refer to the War Between the States, and antediluvian will always indicate Noah's flood, unless you happen to live in Johnstown) and my guess was that it had been built in the 1920s. I could find out for certain, but it didn't matter. What was significant was that it had almost certainly been equipped originally with a coal furnace, and that meant a coal cellar, and that meant a chute down which the delivery vehicle could pour the stuff.

That in turn meant a wooden cellar door, probably built to lean against the rear of the house at an angle of somewhere between forty-five and sixty degrees. Remember the song "Playmate"? Oh, sure you do, and it's got nothing to do with magazine centerfolds.Playmate, come out and play with me/And with my dollies three/Climb up my apple tree/Shout down my rain barrel/Slide down my cellar door/ And we'll be jolly friends/Forevermore.

They don't write 'em like that anymore, but then neither do they make cellar doors you can slide down. They did when they built the Mapes house, however. People kept them locked, generally securing them with a padlock, but how the hell did you tie a padlocked wooden cellar door into a burglar alarm system?

There may be a way, but the whole thing became academic when I went around to the back of the house and tried to find the entrance to the coal cellar. They'd had one, sure enough, but somewhere along the way it had been removed, with brickwork and concrete filling in where the opening had been. I could get in, all right, but not without a jackhammer, and they tend to draw attention.

Rats.

There's always a way in, I told myself. It makes a nice mantra, but even as I ran it through my mind I found myself beginning to doubt the universal verity of it. What if there wasn't always a way in?

But there had to be. It was a big old house, sure to be chock full of crannies and nooks (or, if you insist, nooks and crannies) and window seats and stair cupboards and rooms no one ever went into. That was fine, but they were all on the inside, and on the outside there was nothing but stone, along with two doors and more windows than I troubled to count, all of them wired into an alarm system that I couldn't knock out unless I found a way to create a power failure for the whole neighborhood.

I was trying to figure out just how I might manage that, which comes more under the heading of idle speculation than the exploration of a real possibility, when I opened my eyes and saw something that had been in front of them all along. How had I missed seeing it? The answer, of course, was that I had indeed seen it, but that it had somehow failed to register. I'd seen it and known what it was, but what I hadn't recognized was what itmeant.

It meant I was in like Errol, that's what it meant.