The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

14

It could hardly have been anything else.

I’ve been to the Museum of Natural History a handful of times over the years. It’s an easy walk from my apartment, and I could certainly go more frequently, but because it’s always there it’s easy to overlook.

Have I ever gone there on my own? It seems to me my visits were always with one lady friend or another, and the women in question were young mothers, and the child for whose benefit we’d gone to the museum wanted to see the dinosaurs. I have nothing against dinosaurs, but I don’t care if I never see another.

It seemed to me that an early visit had included the Hall of Gems and Minerals, but it hadn’t made that much of an impression on me, and anyway it would have been before the Kloppmann stone came into the museum’s possession. All I could recall, and that but dimly, was scanning the exhibits with the eye not of a connoisseur but of a thief. Was there a way to get in and out of the place, my pockets stuffed with gems? No? Well, then, the hell with it.

So I hadn’t ever been up close and personal with the diamond, but I’d certainly seen photographs of it — once when the museum announced the forthcoming deaccessioning, and again when the hammer came down at Sotheby’s and the stone’s new owner, a smug Orrin Vandenbrinck, picked it up and struck a pose.

It was egg-shaped, and it was the size of an egg, too, although of some bird significantly smaller than a chicken. The color was a definite blue, but a more complicated blue than came across in a photograph, and the phrase that came unbidden to my mind was sky-blue pink. I don’t even know what that means, but it seemed to fit the stone.

It was, of course, a cut gem, and possessed forty-nine facets, although I wouldn’t have welcomed the task of counting them. Fine gold wire was so arranged as to secure it so that it could be suspended from a gold chain, and I took each end of the chain in a gloved hand and let the stone dangle from it a few inches in front of my eyes.

Then I let the stone rest on the upturned palm of my right hand, and closed my hand around it, and quite of their own accord my eyes closed, and for a timeless moment there was nothing at all in the world but me and the stone.

“Bern? Where’d you go?”

I opened my eyes, took a breath, and opened my hand. The diamond sparkled in the low light of the bedside lamp. Carolyn was sitting on the bed, and it wasn’t hard to tell where she’d made her discovery. The drawer of one bedside table was open, and nearby on the bed was a three-inch-square jewelry case, its hinged lid open.

“I just opened the drawer,” she said, “and there it was.”

“I never got it before.”

“Got what, Bern?”

“Jewelry,” I said. “Gems. I got the status symbol thing, and the I’m giving you this because I love you so much aspect, and the artistic merit of some pieces of jewelry, even costume jewelry with cut glass, if the design was pleasing. But this thing has its own energy, it’s like a living thing.”

“I know. I thought it was going to burn my hand, but it wasn’t heat. It was something else.”

“Which I’ll call energy,” I said, “maybe because I don’t know what it means.” I stepped closer, fastened the chain around her throat.

Her eyes widened.

“Your eyes are blue,” I said.

“You never noticed before?”

Of course I had, but it was as if I was seeing them for the first time. I said, “When Richard Burton bought the Kloppmann for Elizabeth Taylor, he said it was because of the way it would complement her violet eyes. I thought it was just a good line, but now I can see what he meant.”

“If Elizabeth Taylor wore this, I have to wonder what it’s doing around my neck.”

“It looks like it belongs there,” I said.

I looked into her eyes, and she looked back into mine, and something happened. And I don’t know what it was, any more than I know what happened when I closed my hand around the Kloppmann Diamond.

Each time, something happened. But don’t ask me what it was.

“Bern? We should get out of here.”

“You’re right.”

“I don’t know what time he’s coming back, but—”

But the longer we stayed there, the greater the risk. A wise burglar gets in and gets out, with as little time as possible between arrival and departure.

She got up from the bed, walked around its great circumference, leaned over to smooth its satin sheets. I opened and closed a few dresser drawers at random, reassuring myself that I’d left them as I’d found them.

Not that it mattered. The first thing Vandenbrinck would look for, the first thing anybody would look for, was the diamond.

The next few minutes verged on slapstick. Carolyn reached for the clasp of the necklace and couldn’t manage to get it open. I took a turn, and my fingers couldn’t begin to cope with the mechanism, and I didn’t get anywhere. And then she brushed my hands aside and took hold of the necklace and lifted, and, its clasp still fastened, it cleared her head with room to spare.

She put it in the plush-lined case. I took the case from her, opened it, drew out the necklace, closed the empty case and returned it to the night table drawer.

Why? So that he might open the drawer, see the case where it belonged, and just take it for granted that the necklace was still in it?

No, that was ridiculous. I went back for the case, put the necklace in it once again, closed the case and found room for it in the inside breast pocket of my blazer.

Buttoned my blazer. Unbuttoned my blazer. Wondered why I was standing there like a ninny, buttoning and unbuttoning my blazer.

And so on.

I opened the bedroom door and motioned Carolyn through it. I followed her, and I started to close the door, and tried to remember whether it had been open or closed when we arrived.

Ridiculous. If I couldn’t remember whether Vandenbrinck had left it open or shut, why should I think he would remember? And what difference could it make if he did or didn’t?

We moved in silence, retracing our steps, and I was listening for the television set at the other end of the apartment, or whatever it was that we’d heard. And as we reached the kitchen, I was able to hear what we’d heard earlier, a conversation. As before, I couldn’t make out what was being said, but as we crossed the room and reached the door through which we’d come in, I could tell they were having an argument.

Earlier, I’d locked the door once we were on the right side of it. That had just been a simple matter of turning a bolt, and that’s all it took now to unlock it. I’d need my tools to lock up again from outside, and I got them out of my pocket, and closed the door on an argument that had gotten a whole lot louder in a matter of seconds.

And then—

“Bern? Were those gunshots?”

When we’d descended one flight of stairs, Carolyn put a hand on the door leading to the 41st floor, and I shook my head and pointed downward. Neither of us had said a word since Carolyn had asked about the three sharp noises we’d heard, loud enough to be clearly audible through the fire door, and we went down another flight before I explained that Mr. Horvath and his companion ought to take the precaution of boarding the elevator on 29.

“That means walking down another twelve flights,” I said, “and it’s probably not really necessary, but—”

“But better safe than sorry,” she said, “especially if what we heard was gunfire. At least we’re walking down and not up.”

“Trust you to find the bright side.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s my relentless optimism that makes me so adorable. That was a gun, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t see how it could have been anything else,” I said. “The real question is whether the gun was being fired in the apartment or on television.”

“And?”

“I think it was the real deal.”

“Somebody shot somebody.”

“Or shot at somebody and missed. Or got annoyed at a picture on the wall, or a television set, or maybe a computer.”

“There have been times,” she said, “when my iMac was lucky I don’t own a gun. But that didn’t sound like somebody shooting a computer, did it?”

“No. It sounded like somebody shooting a person.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“After the first few flights,” she said, “walking downstairs gets to be almost as bad as walking upstairs.”

“In a way,” I said, “it’s worse. Walking upstairs, sooner or later you get out of breath and have to take a break. Walking downstairs, you just keep going until your legs fall off.”

“Does that happen before or after we get to 29?”

“We’ll know in a few minutes. And believe me, this is nothing compared to walking all the way down from the top of the Washington Monument.”

“When did you—”

“Class trip,” I said. “Senior year in high school. There was a local businessman who picked up the tab every year to give a little boost to the patriotism of every kid who made it through Thomas A. Hendricks High School.”

“Who was Thomas A. Hendricks?”

“A local boy who served as vice-president during Grover Cleveland’s first administration. But only for eight months.”

“What happened after eight months?”

“He died, but at least by then he’d done enough to get a school named after him. It was a great trip, although I can’t remember much of it. First time I ever stayed in a hotel. On the eleventh floor, which was farther from the pavement than I’d ever been in my life. The idiot I shared a room with kept filling paper bags with water and dropping them out the window.”

“You sure that wasn’t you, Bern?”

“No, I was the idiot who walked down from the top of the Washington Monument. We went up in the elevator—”

“I should hope so.”

“—and the view was spectacular, you could see for miles, but what high school kid cares about that?”

“If there was a water faucet and a supply of paper bags—”

“That might have made a difference, at least to one of us. But once I’d spent a couple of minutes looking in every available direction, I was ready to get back on the elevator.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“Well, it had other things to do. Another group of tourists, mostly teenagers, had streamed in when our group got out, and once it emptied out at the bottom there’d be yet another batch on their way to the top.” I shook my head at the memory. “I didn’t give it any thought at the time,” I said, “but if you ever start thinking you’ve got the worst job in America, think about the poor son of a bitch who spends eight hours a day piloting that elevator.”

“There was an elevator operator?”

“There was,” I said, “and I don’t know how he could stand it, going up and down forever in a little box packed to capacity with obnoxious kids. I was as obnoxious as any of them, and even I couldn’t stand it, all jammed together like anchovies, and the idea of having to spend precious minutes waiting for the damn thing to get there, well, the hell with that. ‘You peasants can wait,’ I announced. ‘I’m taking the stairs. Who wants to join me?’”

“How many took you up on it?”

“Not a single one, which gives you an idea of my leadership abilities. But that was fine with me, because I’d be the only one who did it, and maybe that would impress some sweet young thing. So I set off on my own, and by the time I’d descended a small fraction of the 896 steps—”

“You counted them?”

“No, of course not. That’s the number in the brochure they gave us. Or at least that’s the number I remember, but if you want to go count them yourself—”

“I don’t think so.”

“Anyway, after I’d covered a few flights, I decided my idea might not have been as brilliant as I’d thought. Because there was nothing to look at but the blank walls, so the view never changed. And by then I’d gone too far to turn back, or at least I thought I had.”

“Like Macbeth, Bern. So far stepped in blood, di dah di dah di dah.”

“Something like that. And then my legs started to feel it.”

“Mine have been feeling it for a while now.”

“And it got worse,” I remembered. “And it didn’t really help to stop for a rest, and instead I tried to speed up, because I wanted the whole business to be over as quickly as possible, and that just made it worse.”

“Hearing about it,” she said, “isn’t helping.”

“Just one more flight. Here we go. See the number on the door?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“So it is. Gloves?”

“Oh, right.”

I summoned the elevator with an ungloved index finger, and it didn’t take long to get there. Even if it had, neither of us was about to suggest taking the stairs. We rode to the lobby in silence, standing side by side, staring straight ahead, as if we didn’t really believe we weren’t sharing the space with a security camera or two.

When we got there, the only person in view was our old friend Peter, and his face brightened when he remembered my name. “Mr. Horvath,” he said.

“Peter-Peter,” I said. He managed a smile, and we sailed past him and out onto the street.