The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

CHAPTER Eight

For a moment I thought I’d made a horrible mistake. The apartment was brighter by day than it had been on my last visit. Even with the drapes drawn a certain amount of daylight filtered in, and I thought there were lights on, indicating someone’s presence. My heart stopped or raced or skipped a beat or whatever it does at such times, and then it calmed down and so did I. I put on my rubber gloves and locked the door and took a deep breath.

It felt very odd being back in the Appling place. There was once again the thrill of illicit entry, but it was diminished by the fact that I’d been here before. You can get as much pleasure the second or third or hundredth time you make love to a particular woman-you can get more, actually-but you can’t get that triumphant sense of conquest more than once, and so it is too with the seduction of locks and the breaching of thresholds. On top of that, I hadn’t broken in this time to steal anything. I was just looking for sanctuary.

And that was strange indeed. Less than twenty-four hours earlier I’d been in a state of high tension that didn’t begin to dissipate until I left this apartment. Now I’d had to break into it all over again just to feel safe.

I went to the phone, picked it up. But why call Onderdonk now? I didn’t want to leave the building until midnight, so why break into his place before then? I could go now, of course, if he was out. I could snatch the Mondrian and bring it back downstairs to the Appling apartment, and I could wait there until it was after midnight and safe to leave.

But I didn’t want to. Better to stay where I was and call Onderdonk around midnight, and if he was out I could break and enter and leave in a hurry, and if he was in I could say, “Sorry, wrong number,” and give him three or four or five hours to go to sleep, and then do my breaking and entering while he lay snug in his bed. I’d rather not hit a dwelling while its occupants are at home, intent as I am on avoiding human contact while I work, but the one advantage of visiting them when they’re already at home is you don’t have to worry about their coming home before you’re done. In this case I wanted one thing and one thing only and I didn’t have to search for it. It was right out there in the living room, and if he was asleep in the bedroom I wouldn’t have to go anywhere near him.

I dialed the number anyway. It rang half a dozen times and I hung up. I’d have let it ring longer, but since I wasn’t going in anyway, not for at least seven hours, why bother?

I crossed the living room, edged the drapery aside with a rubber-tipped finger. The window looked out on Fifth Avenue, and from where I stood I had a fairly spectacular view of Central Park. I also had no need to worry about anyone looking in, unless someone was perched half a mile away on Central Park West with a pair of binoculars and a whole lot of patience, and that didn’t seem too likely. I drew the drapes and pulled up a chair so that I could look out at the park. I picked out the zoo, the reservoir, the band shell, and other landmarks. I could see plenty of runners, on the circular drive and the bridle path and the running track around the reservoir. Watching them was like observing highway traffic from an airplane.

Too bad I couldn’t be out there with them. It was a perfect day for it.

I got restless after a while and moved around the apartment. In Appling’s study I took down a stamp album and paged idly through it. I saw a number of things I really should have taken on my last visit but I didn’t even consider taking them now. Before I’d been a burglar, a predator on the prowl. This time around I was a guest, albeit uninvited, and I could hardly so abuse my host’s hospitality.

I did enjoy looking at his stamps, though, without being under any obligation to make them my own. I sat back and let myself relax in the fantasy that this was my apartment and my stamp collection, that I had located and purchased all those little perforated rectangles of colored paper, that my fingers had delighted in fitting them with mounts and affixing them in their places. Most of the time I have trouble imagining why anyone would want to devote time and money to pasting postage stamps in a book, but now I sort of got into it, and I even felt a little guilt about having looted such a labor of love.

I’ll tell you, it’s a good thing I didn’t have his stamps with me. I might have tried putting them back.

Time crawled on by. I didn’t want to turn on the television set or play a radio, or even walk around too much, lest a neighbor wonder at sounds issuing from a supposedly empty apartment. I didn’t have the concentration for reading, and there’s something about holding a book in gloved hands that keeps one from getting caught up in the story. I went back to my chair by the window and watched the sun drop behind the buildings on the west side of the park, and that was about it, entertainment-wise.

I got hungry sometime around nine and rummaged around the kitchen. I filled a bowl with Grape-Nuts and added some suspicious milk. It probably would have curdled in a cup of coffee but it was all right in the cereal. Afterward I washed my bowl and spoon and put them where I’d found them. I went back to the living room and took off my shoes and stretched out on the rug with my eyes closed. My mind’s eye gave itself over to a vast expanse of white, and while I was observing its pure perfection-virgin snow, I thought, or the fleeces of a million lambs-while I was thus waxing poetic, black ribbons uncurled and stretched themselves across the white expanse, extending from top to bottom, from left to right, forming a random rectangular grid. Then one of the enclosed spaces of white blushed and reddened, and another spontaneously took on a faint sky tint that deepened all the way to a rich cobalt blue, and another red square began to bleed in on the lower right, and-

By God, my mind was painting me a Mondrian.

I watched as the pattern changed and re-formed itself, working variations on a theme. I’m not sure just what consciousness is and is not, but at one point I was conscious and at another I wasn’t, and then there came a moment when I caught hold of myself and shook myself loose of something. I sat up, looked at my watch.

Seven, eight minutes past twelve.

I took another few minutes making sure I left Appling’s apartment as I’d found it. I’d slept in my rubber gloves and my fingers were damp and clammy. I stripped off the gloves, dried the insides of the fingers, washed and dried my hands, and put them back on again. I straightened this and tidied that, drew the drapes, put back the chair I’d moved. Then I picked up the phone, checked Onderdonk’s number in the book to make sure I got it right, dialed it, and let it ring an even dozen times.

I turned off the one light I’d had on, let myself out, locked the door after me and wiped the knob and the surrounding area and the doorbell. I hurried through the fire door and up four flights to Sixteen, let myself into the hallway, crossed over to Onderdonk’s door and rang his bell. I waited for a moment, just in case, said a fervent if hurried prayer to Saint Dismas, and knocked off a four-tumbler Segal drop-bolt lock in not much more time than I’d spent pouring the milk over the Grape-Nuts.

Darkness within. I slipped inside, drew the door shut, breathed slowly and deeply and let my eyes adjust. I put my ring of picks back in my pocket and fumbled around for my penlight. I already had my gloves on, not having bothered to remove them for the quick run upstairs. I oriented myself in the darkness, or tried to, and I raised my penlight, pointed it to where the fireplace ought to be, and switched it on.

The fireplace was there. Above it was an expanse of white, just what I’d envisioned on Appling’s floor before the black lines insinuated themselves across its length and breadth. But where were the black lines now? Where were the rectangles of blue and red and yellow?

Where, for that matter, was the canvas? Where was the aluminum frame? And why was there nothing above Onderdonk’s fireplace but a blank wall?

I flicked off my light, stood again in darkness. The familiar thrill of burglary took on the added element of panic. Was I, for heaven’s sake, in the wrong apartment? Had I, for the love of God, climbed one too few or one too many flights of stairs? Leona Tremaine was on Nine, and I’d gone up two flights to Eleven, where I’d been a guest of the Applings. From Eleven to Sixteen was four flights, but had I counted flights as I went and included the nonexistent thirteenth?

I flicked the light on. It was likely that all of the apartments in the B line had the same essential layout, and each would have a fireplace in that particular spot. But would other apartments have bookcases flanking the fireplace? And these were familiar shelves, and I could even recognize some of the books. There was the leatherbound Defoe. There were the two volumes, boxed, of Stephen Vincent Benét’s selected prose and selected poetry. And there, faintly discernible in that expanse of white, looking almost like the negative image of an Ad Reinhardt black-on-black canvas, was the slightly lighter rectangle where the Mondrian had lately hung. Time and New York air had darkened the surrounding wall, leaving a ghost image of the painting I’d come to steal.

I lowered the light to the floor, made my way into the room. The picture wasn’t there and the picture should have been there and something didn’t compute. Was I still asleep? Was I dozing on Appling’s floor, and had I merely dreamed the part about waking up and going upstairs? I decided I had, and I gave a mental yank to pull myself out of it, and nothing happened.

Something felt wrong, and I was feeling more than the unexpected absence of the painting. I moved farther into the room and played my light here and there. If anything else was missing, I didn’t notice it. The Arp painting still hung where I’d seen it on my first visit. Other paintings were where I remembered them. I turned and swung the flashlight around, and its beam showed me a bronze head, Cycladic in style, on a black lucite plinth. I remembered the head from before, though I’d paid it little attention then. I continued to move the light around in a slow circle, and I may have heard or sensed an intake of breath, and then the flashlight’s beam was falling full upon a woman’s face.

Not a painting, not a statue. A woman, positioned between me and the door, one small hand held at waist level, the other poised at shoulder height, palm out, as if to ward off something menacing.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “You’re a burglar, you’re going to rape me, you’re going to kill me. Oh, my God.”

Be a dream, I prayed, but it wasn’t and I knew it wasn’t. I was caught in the act, I had a pocket full of burglar’s tools and no right to be where I was, and a search of my apartment would turn up enough stolen stamps to start a branch post office. And she was between me and the door, and even if I got past her she could call downstairs before I could get anywhere near the lobby, and her mouth was ajar and any second now she was going to scream.

All for the sake of some goddamn cat with a clever name and an assertive personality. Six days a week the ASPCA’s busy putting surplus cats to sleep, and I was going to wind up in slam trying to ransom one. I stood there, holding the light in her eyes as if it might hypnotize her, like a deer in a car’s headlights. But she didn’t look hypnotized. She looked terrified, and sooner or later the terror would ease up enough for her to scream, and I thought about that and thought about stone walls.

Stone walls do not a prison make, according to Sir Richard Lovelace, and I’m here to tell you the man was whistling in the dark. Stone walls make a hell of a prison and iron bars make a perfectly adequate cage, and I’ve been there and I don’t ever want to go back.

Just get me out of this and I’ll-

And I’ll what? And I’ll probably do it again, I thought, because I’m evidently incorrigible. But just get me out of it and we’ll see.

“Please,” she said. “Please don’t hurt me.”

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Don’t kill me.”

“Nobody’s going to kill you.”

She was about five-six and slender, with an oval face and eyes a spaniel would have won Best of Breed with. Her hair was dark and shoulder-length, drawn back from a sharp widow’s peak and secured in unbraided pigtails. She was wearing oatmeal jeans and a lime polo shirt with a real alligator on it. Her brown suede slippers looked like something a Hobbit would wear.

“You’re going to hurt me.”

“I never hurt anyone,” I told her. “I don’t even kill cockroaches. Oh, I put boric acid around, and I guess that’s the same thing from a moral standpoint, but as far as hauling off and swatting ’em, that’s something I never do. And not just because it makes a spot. See, I’m basically nonviolent, and-”

And why was I running off at the mouth like this? Nerves, I suppose, and the premise that she’d be polite enough not to scream while I was talking.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I’m so frightened.”

“I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“Look at me. I’m shaking.”

“Don’t be afraid.”

“I can’t help it. I’m scared.”

“So am I.”

“You are?”

“You bet.”

“But you’re a burglar,” she said, frowning. “Aren’t you?”

“Well-”

“Of course you are. You’ve got gloves on.”

“I was doing the dishes.”

She started to laugh, and the laughter slipped away from her and climbed toward hysteria. She said, “Oh, God, why am I laughing? I’m in danger.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I am, I am. It happens all the time, a woman surprises a burglar and she gets raped and killed. Stabbed to death.”

“I don’t even have a penknife.”

“Strangled.”

“I don’t have any strength in my hands.”

“You’re making jokes.”

“You’re sweet to say so.”

“You’re-you seem nice.”

“That’s exactly it,” I said. “You hit it. What I am, I’m your basic nice guy.”

“But look at me. I mean don’t look at me. I mean-I don’t know what I mean.”

“Easy. Everything’s going to be all right.”

“I believe you.”

“Of course you do.”

“But I’m still frightened.”

“I know you are.”

“And I can’t help it. I can’t stop trembling. On the inside it feels like I’m going to shake myself to pieces.”

“You’ll be okay.”

“Could you-”

“What?”

“This is crazy.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, you’re going to think I’m crazy. I mean, you’re the one I’m afraid of, but-”

“Go ahead.”

“Could you just hold me? Please?”

“Hold you?”

“In your arms.”

“Well, uh, if you think it’ll help-”

“I just want to be held.”

“Well, sure.”

I took her in my arms and she buried her face in my chest. Our polo shirts pressed together and became as one. I felt the warmth and fullness of her breasts through the two layers of fabric. I stood there in the dark-my penlight was back in my pocket-and I held her close, stroking her silky hair with one hand, patting her back and shoulder with the other, and saying “There, there,” in a tone that was meant to be reassuring.

The awful tension went out of her. I kept holding her and went on murmuring to her, breathing in her scent and absorbing her warmth, and-

“Oh,” she said.

She lifted up her head and our eyes met. There was enough light for me to stare into them and they were deep enough to drown a man. I held her and looked at her and Something Happened.

“This is-”

“I know.”

“Crazy.”

“I know.”

I let go of her. She took her shirt off. I took my shirt off. She came back into my arms. I was still wearing those idiot gloves, and I tore them off and felt her skin under my fingers and against my chest.

“Gosh,” she said.