The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

CHAPTER Twenty

It was lunch hour when I hit the downtown financial district. The narrow streets were full of people. Stock clerks and office girls, those vital cogs in the wheel of free enterprise, passed skinny cigarettes from hand to hand and smoked their little capitalist brains out. Older men in three-piece suits shook their heads at all of this and dove into bars for sanctuary and solace.

I made a phone call. When no one answered I joined the take-out line at a luncheonette and emerged with two sandwiches and a container of coffee in a brown paper bag. I carried it into the lobby of a ten-story office building on Maiden Lane. I was still wearing the hat and the horn-rimmed glasses and carrying the pet carryall that Jared had found so disappointingly empty. I stopped on my way to the elevator to sign Donald Brown on the log sheet, entering my destination (Rm. #702) and my time of arrival (12:18). I took the elevator to the seventh floor and then walked up a flight, having prevaricated about everything but the time. I found the office I was looking for. The lock on the door was rather less challenging than Rubik’s Cube. I set down the pet carrier but held the lunch bag in one hand while I opened the door with the other.

Inside the office I sat down at one of those metal desks with a fake wood-grain top and unpacked my lunch. I opened up one sandwich, removed the slices of pastrami and turkey, tore them into small pieces, and arranged them in a pile on the desk top. I ate the other sandwich and drank the coffee, looked up something in the Manhattan phone book, and dialed a number. A woman answered. The voice was familiar but I wanted to be absolutely certain, so I asked to speak to Nathaniel. The voice told me that I had the wrong number.

I made a couple of other calls and talked to some people, and then I dialed 0 and said, “This is Police Officer Donald Brown, my shield number’s 23094, and I need you to get an unlisted number for me.” I told her the name and read off the number I was calling from. She called back less than a minute later and I wrote down the number she gave me. I said, “Thanks. Oh, and what’s the address on that?” and she told me the address. I didn’t have to write it down.

I dialed the number. A woman answered. I said, “This is Bernie. You wouldn’t believe how I’ve missed you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“Ah, darling,” I said. “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep-”

The phone clicked in my ear.

I sighed and dialed another number. I went through channels and then a familiar voice came on the line. “Okay, give,” it said. “How’d you know?”

“They found Seconal?”

“Chloral hydrate, the ever-popular Mickey Finn. How’d you take one look at a dead man with his head beaten in and figure drugs? Even on Quincy they gotta run tests and stick things in microscopes.”

“I’m working up a new series. Bernie Rhodenbarr, Psychic Pathologist.”

We said a few more reasonably pleasant things to one another. I hung up and made a couple more calls, rummaged in some desk drawers and pawed through a filing cabinet. I left the contents of drawers and cabinet as I’d found them. Then I dropped the lunch bag and wrappings in the wastebasket, along with the bread from the pastrami-and-turkey sandwich and the empty coffee container. I opened the case I’d brought along, and a few minutes later I closed it and fastened its clasps.

“Off we go,” I said.

On the way out I checked my watch and entered 12:51 under time of departure.

The sun was out so I switched to sunglasses and caught a cab at the corner of Broadway and John Street. I gave the driver a West Village address. He was a recent arrival from Iran with uncertain English and a very vague sense of the geography of Manhattan, so I guided him and we both got lost. But we wound up on a familiar street and I paid him off and sent him on his way.

I entered a building I’d never been in before, carding my way past the locked vestibule door. I walked through the building to another locked door which led to a rear courtyard. The lock wasn’t a problem, and I left part of a toothpick jammed up against the springbolt so it would be even less of a problem on the way back.

The courtyard held some garbage cans and a neglected garden. I crossed it and clambered over a concrete-block fence leading to another courtyard, where I peered into a window, then opened it, and then closed it. I retraced my steps, case in hand, scaling the block fence, retrieving my broken toothpick as I reentered the building, finally emerging on the street and walking a few blocks and catching another cab.

Back at the Narrowback Gallery, Jared let me in and eyed the case I was carrying. “You’ve still got it,” he said.

“Right you are.”

“Now is it filled with swag?”

“See for yourself.”

“Still empty.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. You keep it. I’ll tell you, I’m sick of carrying the damn thing around.” I walked over to where his mother was eyeing a canvas. “Looks good,” I said.

“You bet it does. We’re lucky Mondrian didn’t have acrylics to play with. He could have painted five hundred pictures a year.”

“You mean he didn’t?”

“Not quite.”

I extended a finger, touched paint. “Dry,” I said.

“And as ready as they’ll ever be.” She sighed and picked up a menacing-looking implement with a curved blade. I think it’s a linoleum knife. I’m not made of linoleum, but I’d certainly hate to irritate somebody who had one of them in his hand. Or her hand, for that matter.

“This goes against the grain,” Denise said. “You’re sure about this?”

“Positive.”

“About an inch? Like about so?”

“That looks good.”

“Well, here goes,” she said, and she began cutting the canvas off the stretcher.

I watched the process. It was unsettling. I’d watched her paint the thing, and I’d painted part of it myself, affixing masking tape to the primed canvas, filling in the lines, peeling off the tape when the quick-drying paint had set. So I knew Mondrian had been no closer to the thing than, say, Rembrandt. Even so, I got a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach as the knife slashed through it as if it were, well, linoleum.

I turned away and went over to where Jared lay stretched out on the floor, writing UNFAIR! on a large square of cardboard with an El Marko marking pen. Several completed signs, neatly tacked to strips of wooden lath, leaned up against a metal table. “Good work,” I told him.

“They should show up well,” he said. “The media’s been alerted.”

“Great.”

“Performance art,” Denise was saying. “First you paint a picture and then you destroy it. Now all we need is Christo to wrap it in aluminum foil. Shall I wrap it up or will you eat it here?”

“Neither,” I said, and began removing my clothes.

I got to the Hewlett Gallery a few minutes after three, walking a little stiffly in my suit. I was wearing the hat and the clear-lensed horn-rimmed glasses, the latter of which had begun giving me a headache an hour or so earlier. I handed over my suggested contribution of $2.50 without a murmur and went through the turnstile and up a flight of stairs to my favorite gallery.

I’d managed to work up a certain amount of anxiety over the possibility of the Mondrian’s having been moved, or removed altogether for loan to the exhibit that was being organized, but Composition with Color was right where it was supposed to be. The first thing I thought was that it didn’t look anything like what we’d thrown together in Denise’s loft, that the proportions and colors were completely wrong, that we’d produced something on a par with a child’s crayon copy of the Mona Lisa. I looked again and decided that legitimacy, like beauty, is largely in the eye of the beholder. The one on the wall looked right because it was there on the wall, with a little brass plaque by its side to attest to its noble origins.

I just studied it for a while. Then I wandered a bit.

Back on the ground floor, I walked through a room full of eighteenth-century French canvases, Boucher and Fragonard, idealized bucolic scenes of fauns and nymphs, shepherds and Bo-Peeps. One canvas showed a pair of barefoot rustics picnicking in a sylvan glade, and studying that canvas under a uniformed guard’s watchful gaze were Carolyn and Alison.

“You’ll notice,” I murmured to them, “that both of those little innocents have Morton’s Foot.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means their second toes are longer than their big toes,” I said, “and they’ll need special orthotic implants if they’re planning to run marathons.”

“They don’t look like runners to me,” Carolyn said. “They look horny as toads, as a matter of fact, and the only kind of marathon they’re likely to be in is-”

“Jared and his friends are in position outside,” I cut in. “Give them five minutes to get started. Okay?”

“Okay.”

In a stall in the men’s room I took off my jacket and shirt, then put them on again and walked somewhat less stiffly to the gallery where the Mondrian was hanging. No one paid me any attention because there was a lot of noise and commotion out in front of the building and people were drifting toward the entrance to see what was going on.

The sound of rhythmic chanting rose to my ears. “Two, four, six, eight! We need art to appreciate!”

I stepped closer to the Mondrian. Time crawled and the kids went on chanting and I glanced for the thousandth time at my watch and started wondering what they were waiting for when suddenly all hell broke loose.

There was a loud noise like a clap of thunder, or a truck backfiring, or a bomb going off, or, actually, rather like a cherry bomb left over from the Fourth of July. And then, from another direction there was a great deal of smoke and cries of “Fire! Fire! Run for your lives!”

Smoke positively billowed. People bolted. And what did I do? I grabbed the Mondrian off the wall and ran into the men’s room.

And caromed off a balding fat man who was just emerging from a stall. “Fire!” I shouted at him. “Run! Run for your life!”

“My word,” he said, and away he went.

A few minutes later, so did I. I left the men’s room and hastened down a flight of stairs and out the main entrance. Fire trucks had drawn up and police were everywhere and Jared and his troops brandished their signs, dodging cops and throwing themselves in front of portable TV cameras. Throughout it all, the Hewlett’s security staff kept a tight rein on things, making sure no one walked off with a masterpiece.

I perspired beneath my hat, blinked behind my glasses, and walked right past all of it.

I caught the six o’clock news in a dark and dingy tavern on Third Avenue, and there was young Jared Raphaelson, angrily asserting Youth’s right of access to great public art collections, then quickly disclaiming all responsibility for the terrorist assault on the Hewlett and the mysterious disappearance of Piet Mondrian’s masterpiece, Composition with Color.

“We don’t think the kids are directly involved,” a police spokesman told the camera. “It’s a little early to tell yet, but it looks as though some quick-witted thief took the opportunity to cut the painting from its frame. We found the frame itself, all broken and with shreds of canvas adhering to it, in the second-floor washroom. Now it looks as though the kids must be responsible for the fire, although they deny it. What happened was somebody tossed an explosive device called a cherry bomb of the type used to celebrate Independence Day, and it happened to go off in a wastebasket in which some tourist had evidently discarded a few rolls of film, and what would have been a big bang turned into a full-scale trash fire. The fire itself didn’t cause any real damage. It put out a lot of smoke and shook people up some, but it didn’t amount to anything except to provide cover to the thief.”

Ah, well, I thought. Accidents will happen. And I kept a close eye on the screen, looking for a sign of the quick-witted opportunistic thief. But I didn’t see him. Not on that channel, at any rate.

A museum official expressed chagrin at the loss of the painting. He talked about its artistic importance and with some reluctance estimated its value at a quarter of a million dollars. The announcer mentioned the recent robbery-cum-murder at the Charlemagne, in which another Mondrian was taken, and wondered whether press coverage of that theft might have led the present thief to pick Mondrian rather than some other masterpiece.

The museum official thought that was highly possible. “He might have taken a van Gogh or a Turner, even a Rembrandt,” he said. “We have paintings worth ten or more times what the Mondrian might bring. That’s why this strikes me as an impulsive, spur-of-the-moment act. He knew the Mondrian was valuable, he’d heard what the Onderdonk Mondrian was valued at, and when the opportunity presented itself he acted swiftly and decisively.”

They cut for a commercial. In Carney’s Bar and Grill, an impulsive, spur-of-the-moment guy in horn-rims and a fedora picked up his glass of beer and swiftly and decisively drank it down.