The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

15

“His smile looked a wee bit forced, Bern. I get the feeling he doesn’t like being called Peter-Peter.”

“With any luck at all,” I said, “we’ll never set eyes on him again, or he on us. He’ll have a chance to forget the whole thing. And if he doesn’t, well, months from now he can take it up with the real Mr. Horvath.”

“I’m gonna make some tea.”

“Good idea.”

“Or we could have a drink,” she offered. She raised a hand, her thumb and forefinger about two inches apart. “I think there’s this much left in the bottle, but maybe a drink’s not such a good idea.”

“It sounds like the answer to a prayer,” I said, “but who was it who said the real sign of maturity is the ability to delay gratification?”

“Whoever it was,” she said, “he can’t be a whole lot of fun to hang out with.”

We were at Carolyn’s studio apartment on the ground floor of a four-story building in Arbor Court, one of those back streets in the West Village that your cabdriver never heard of. We usually get there on foot, but not after a downward trek of 221 steps.

And no, I didn’t count them. But from the 42nd floor to the 29th was thirteen flights of stairs, at seventeen steps to a flight — well, I’d say do the math, but I’ve already done it for you, so why bother? While it’s not quite a fourth of my descent of the Washington Monument, it was enough to put us in a taxi.

Carolyn told the driver we wanted the corner of Barrow and Hudson, and that was challenge enough for him. That left us just around the corner from Arbor Court — well, a couple of corners, but close enough. And before long we were settled in, I on the couch and she in the wing chair, with mugs of Earl Grey and a plate of Nutter Butter cookies.

“These almost have to be stale,” she said, “but how are you supposed to tell?”

“They taste all right. I’m starving, and they’ve got to be better than cat food.”

“Marginally, Bern.” She took her bright blue gloves from her pocket. “We’re done with these, right? Shouldn’t we get rid of them?”

“Probably.”

“Gimme.” I gave her mine, and she let herself out, and was back by the time I’d knocked off another cookie. “Down the chute,” she said. “Have we got anything else that might be hard to explain?”

I patted a pants pocket. “Burglar tools,” I said, and patted my breast pocket. “And this.”

“Right. Well, at least we don’t have to worry about the gloves.”

“That’s a relief.”

“Now that we’ve got it,” she said, “what are we gonna do with it?”

“Good question.” I took the case from my pocket, opened it, and let the necklace, stone and chain and all, drop into my open hand. The surge of energy, like a soundless hum, was palpable.

“It’s like it’s alive,” I said.

“Well, maybe it is, Bern. If animals and vegetables can be alive, why leave out the mineral kingdom? It certainly felt alive when I was wearing it.”

I got up and took a few steps, and a moment later she was wearing it once again. She’d taken off her blazer earlier, and now the diamond rested on her dove-gray sweater. She was looking at it, and so was I, and it all felt uncomfortably strange.

Because that meant I was looking at her chest, which is to say at her breasts, and this wasn’t something I normally did. She was a woman, she had breasts, but she was my best friend and the friendship was an entirely platonic one, so much so that I neither looked at her chest nor took pains to avoid looking at her chest.

“Bern,” she said, “what the hell are we going to do with this?”

“I’ve been wondering that myself.”

“There’s a pawnshop on Fourteenth Street, but somehow I don’t think that would work.”

“You’re probably right.”

“When you decided to steal it, what did you have in mind?”

“I didn’t really think it through,” I admitted. “I guess I figured just getting it away from Vandenbrinck would be triumph enough. As far as selling it — well, how do you unload something worth sixty million dollars?”

“Beats me. Isn’t there a way to sell something like that back to the insurance company?”

“It’s been known to happen. The companies hate it, but if they can get out of paying the face amount of the policy by handing over a small fraction of that amount to whoever stole it, well, the larger the numbers, the easier it is to rationalize it.”

“So we could do that?”

“We could try,” I said, “if we could find a go-between, and if we could all trust each other, and there’s already a whole lot of ifs in that sentence. But none of it matters, because the stone’s uninsured.”

“What???”

“I said—”

“I know what you said, Bern, but you’re kidding, right? Who buys something for that kind of money and doesn’t bother insuring it?”

“Orrin Vandenbrinck.”

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“Partly because he doesn’t believe in it. ‘A man buys life insurance, he’s betting that he’ll die. He’s placing a bet he hopes he’ll lose. He’s betting against himself, and why would I do that?’ It’s not a difficult stance for him to take given that there’s no wife or kids in the picture, no one who’ll be ruined by his death.”

“Or even disappointed, Bern. But if the Kloppmann Diamond disappears, he’s out all those millions. Why?”

“That’s the part he doesn’t talk about,” I said. “In one phase of his illustrious corporate career, our man played it fast and loose with an insurance company. Nobody’s in a rush to do business with him.”

“So he can’t get a policy that’ll cover the diamond?”

“He’d probably be able to, sooner or later — if he’d agree to keeping it in a safe-deposit box instead of a night table drawer. But that’s no longer his problem.”

“Because he doesn’t have the diamond anymore.”

“No.”

“We’ve got it.”

“And you’re wearing it,” I said, “and it looks great on you.”

“It feels strange.”

“It does?”

She nodded. “But it also feels kind of nice. It’s like when Archie or Ubi lies on top of me. It almost feels like it’s purring.”

I thought about it. “Maybe you should keep it.”

“Very funny.”

“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”

“Well, you can’t be serious. What could I do with it?”

“What you’re doing now.”

“Yeah, right. Can you picture me walking into Henrietta’s with this thing around my neck?”

“I guess it’d fit in better at the Cubby Hole.”

“Bern—”

“There’s such a thing,” I said, “as owning something for one’s private enjoyment.”

And I pointed, and her eyes followed my finger to the far wall, where a small canvas nestled within a gallery frame.

“My little Chagall,” she said. “It’s right there where anybody can see it, but they all assume it’s a copy.”

“I don’t have many visitors,” I said, “but anybody who shows up is apt to notice the Mondrian, and make the same assumption. The last woman I brought home asked me if I painted it myself.”

“Well, you did, Bern. Not the one you’ve got in your apartment, it’s the real deal, but you painted one that looks an awful lot like it.”

We talked a little about her Chagall and my Mondrian, and how they’d come to be where they were, and the particular pleasure that came from owning them. While we talked, both of her cats came out from wherever they’d been hiding. Archie, the sable Burmese, was the more adventuresome of the two, and he was comfortably nestled in her lap before Ubi, the Russian Blue, padded across the room, paused to consider a leap onto the couch, then found a spot he liked at his mistress’s feet.

“He’s stretching,” she said. “Does he remind you of Marilyn Monroe?”

“Not particularly. Carolyn, I hope you know I didn’t mean anything by that.”

“I know.”

“It just struck me, and—”

“I know.”

Long pause. She petted the cat in her lap while the other one took an interest in her comfortable shoes. She cupped the Kloppmann in one hand, as if weighing it, then took it off and held it in both hands and gazed into it, as if into a crystal ball.

“Bern,” she said, “I’m a lesbian.”

“No kidding.”

“I’ve been a lesbian all my life. And I’ve always known. I knew before I had any idea there even was such a thing.”

“When your parents gave you dolls, you pushed them away and demanded a cap gun and an Erector set.”

“No, I played with dolls. I loved my dollies, Bern. But instead of wanting to dress them up — well, you get the picture. The point is I’m a lesbian.”

“I get the picture,” I agreed, “and as far as the point is concerned, I got that the day I met you.”

“Really? One look and you knew I was gay?”

She’d come into the bookstore within a week or so of my assuming command. She bought a book by a Dorothy, I forget whether it was Dorothy B. Hughes or Dorothy Salisbury Davis, and we got to talking.

“You said you had a hangover,” I reminded her.

“Straight women get hangovers, Bern.”

“You said you had a hangover because you spent the whole night drinking Cutty Sark at the Mona Lisa and couldn’t find anybody to go home with.”

“Oh.”

“So I jumped to a conclusion,” I said, “and had a soft landing.”

“It didn’t put you off?”

“Not at all. And a day or two later I wandered into the Poodle Factory, and we talked some more, and then one afternoon we met on the street, having both locked up at the same time, and you asked me if I liked the Bum Rap, and I hadn’t discovered the place yet. So we went over and had a couple of drinks.”

“And never left,” she said.

“We hit it off,” I said, “as I’ve never hit it off with anybody—”

“Same here.”

“—and very early on I thought thank God she’s a lesbian—”

“‘Because otherwise I’d have to sleep with her, and she’s an ugly little troll.’”

“—because this way we can really be friends,” I said. “I never had a close friendship with a woman before, because sex always got in the way.”

“But with this troll—”

“Oh, stop it, will you? You must know you’re an attractive woman.”

“To some people,” she allowed.

“To most people.”

“Right. I’m just another pretty face.” Her blue eyes bore into mine. “Bern, I can’t seem to say what I want to say.”

Then leave it unsaid, I thought. Because something funny was going on, and it was every bit as unfamiliar to me as my green-and-white SubwayCard.

And I was afraid of it, and where it would take us.

But I waited in silence, and she took her time, and then she told me one more time that she was a lesbian.

We already established that, I could have said. But I didn’t, because I knew where this was going.

“But I’m having feelings tonight that I never had before.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

“I’m, uh—”

“Having similar feelings yourself?”

I nodded, because it had all at once become difficult to speak. It was, in fact, getting difficult to breathe.

“I don’t know when it started,” she said. “But it was already going on when we were cooling our heels in 29-D.”

“Chez Horvath.”

“When I stretched? I certainly didn’t have Marilyn Monroe in mind, I don’t even know if I ever saw the picture you were referring to, but I was trying to look sexy.”

“Well, it worked.”

“I didn’t know that’s what I was trying to do, but it was.” She frowned. “‘It was? I was?’”

“Whatever.”

“Even earlier,” she said. “When we were at the Bum Rap, drinking our Perrier? I was looking across the table at you and I thought how nice you looked.”

“I had the same thought about you.”

“And in the elevator, after you flimflammed Peter-Peter with your all-purpose accent, I had this out-of-nowhere flash that you’d open the door and we’d rush into the bedroom and...”

“Right.”

“But of course we didn’t, and it’s not as though I really expected us to. It was just this passing thought, but in all the years we’ve known each other it’s a thought I’ve never once had, and there it was.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And what do I see when I look at you? I see my best friend in all the world, a man who knows me better than anybody else could ever know me. The one person in the world I’ve always been able to trust, the one person I’ve always felt safe with.”

She opened her hands, looked at the diamond, closed her hands around the stone, and looked at me.

“And I’m a lesbian,” she said, “and I’ve always been a lesbian, and I always will be a lesbian. I’m not bisexual, I’ve known plenty of bisexual women, and there are people who’ll tell you bisexuality isn’t a real thing, but they’re wrong, it is a real thing. But it’s not me.”

She took a breath.

“So why do I want to go to bed with you, Bern? Why do I want to rip your clothes off and screw your brains out? Because I do, and I’ll be damned if I can figure out why.”