The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

12

The hallway of the 29th floor was as unpopulated as when we’d arrived. There were six apartments on the floor, and for all I knew all their owners were in Buenos Aires. I led Carolyn to the elevator, and watched the indicator while it made its way up to 37 and then descended to the lobby. When it had stayed there while I counted off thirty seconds, I summoned it with a blue-clad finger.

It responded. We entered, and the door closed, and that same finger took us to 41. The door opened, and a heavy-set man with his back to us was locking his door. He turned, looked at me, looked at Carolyn, and said, “Is nice out?”

“A beautiful evening,” I assured him, and held the door until he had taken our place on the elevator.

I looked around. There was a staircase at either end of the hall. The elevator, unsurprisingly, was in the middle of the building, which put both staircases an equal distance away, and I stood there like Buridan’s donkey, starving to death, unable to choose between two bales of hay.

But that wouldn’t happen to us. I’d read a book of John Barth’s, The End of the Road, and I’d absorbed its most important lesson. When you have to make a choice, and all else fails, take the one on the left.

I explained all this as we were walking soundlessly over the thick unpatterned carpet. “At least we’re making a choice,” I said, “but it may not be the right one. According to the blueprints online, only one of them has a flight of stairs leading to the penthouse. The other one never goes higher than Forty-one.”

“And you don’t remember which is which.”

“If I did—”

“Right.”

Wrong, as it turned out. The one on the left, which is to say the staircase at the front of the Innisfree, led only down — to the fortieth floor for starters, and then on to the lobby and, for all I knew, a basement and a subbasement and a dank and forbidding dungeon.

We turned around, retraced our steps, pressed on. We didn’t see anybody, which was a comfort, and the rear staircase ran in both directions.

Before we climbed the up staircase, I put a finger to my lips, and Carolyn rolled her eyes to indicate I needn’t have bothered. Her comfortable shoes had crepe soles, and I was wearing my Saucony running shoes, although I couldn’t remember the last time I’d run anywhere. So our footfalls were silent, and concrete stairs don’t squeak.

The door at the top was just a plain unornamented slab, painted the same muddy blue as the surrounding walls and the stairs themselves. There was no knob to turn, just a handle to pull. I wrapped a blue hand around it and tugged it just enough to assure myself that it wasn’t going to budge, then checked out the lock immediately below it. It was, I was neither surprised nor dismayed to note, another Rabson.

A whisper. “Bern? Are you sure there’s nobody home?”

We’d been over this before. If all was as it was supposed to be, Orrin Vandenbrinck was in a house seat at the DeLorean, one of a cluster of small off-Broadway theaters on Fifteenth Street just east of Union Square. A Definite Maybe, a new play by Efrem Seeger, was opening tonight, and Vandenbrinck had a substantial interest in the production. According to Page Six of the New York Post, he had a comparable interest in one Gillian Fremont, the ingénue cast in the leading role. “This represents a significant step up for the fetching Ms. Fremont,” the anonymous reporter told us, “and we can only assume she has talents unreflected in her résumé.”

So that meant he was at the theater now, and the final curtain wouldn’t come down until after ten, and there was sure to be a party afterward. Even if they skipped it and came straight home, we’d be long gone.

But did that mean the penthouse was empty?

The bodyguards, those two blocks of granite, would most likely be in the theater, or waiting in the limousine, or downing shots of slivovitz at the bar across the street; one way or another, they wouldn’t be far from the body they were guarding. But who was to say what other souls might be on the Vandenbrinck payroll?

I put my ear to the door, as if that was going to tell me something. If you’re near a door, take a minute and put your ear to it. Hear anything?

I didn’t think so.

There was no doorbell to ring, because this was an emergency exit, not how anyone came calling. It offered a way out for the residents should an electrical failure render all the building’s elevators hors de combat. And yes, the lock could be opened from either side, because building staff and early responders might need emergency access, and it’s good it was there, because how else could a burglar expect to get in?

It was, thank God and Mr. Rabson, essentially identical to the Rabson that had done such a good job of safeguarding Apartment 29-D. I’m sure the Innisfree’s master key would open both of them; unless some paranoid international miscreant had installed an extra lock or two of his own, the master would get you through any door in the building.

But then so would my picks and probes.

I stood for a moment, my tools at the ready, and listened. The only sound I could hear was Carolyn’s breathing, and then I couldn’t even hear that, because she was holding her breath.

I went to work, and it seemed to me I could feel the Rabson putting up a show of resistance, then resigning itself to the inevitable and giving way with a soundless sigh. Ridiculous, of course, because all it was was a piece of machinery, and any apparent resistance could only be attributable to disuse.

For all I knew, I was the first person ever to turn its tumblers — with or without a key.

I pocketed my tools and took hold of the door handle. I waited, listening and hearing nothing, and then I gave just enough of a tug to move the door a half-inch or so.

Enough to rule out the presence of an additional lock on the inside, a chain lock or a sliding bolt or some similar annoyance.

I looked down at Carolyn, two steps below me on the staircase, and found her looking up at me. Her eyes asked if there was a problem, and mine sought to assure her there wasn’t. Still, I listened for a long moment.

And heard nothing.

And opened the door.