The Burglar on the Prowl
have been closer to forty-five minutes. That’s a lot of time to devote to an essentially random choice, almost on a par with feeling every last ticket stub before drawing one out of a hat. There’s a limited amount you can learn about a house by strolling past it, and all I can think is that I may have been trying to outlast the impulse, to walk and walk and walk until the compulsion to burgle left me and I could go home and get some sleep.
    No such luck. I stopped abruptly in front of a brownstone (with a façade of actual brown stone, as it happens) on East 36th between Lexington and Third. There was a travel agent on the ground floor, while the parlor floor was occupied by a gallery dealing in tribal art; the window was lit, and most of what I saw was Oceanic, along with a handful of African pieces, including a Benin bronze leopard and a mask that looked Dogon to my admittedly untrained eye.
    The gallery figured to have some sort of security system, but I’d have passed it up even if the door had been wide open. You couldn’t walk down the street with your arms full of primitive tribal artifacts. That’ll draw attention, even in New York. And, even if you got away with it, where would you sell the stuff?
    I mounted the steps, checked out the nameplates next to the three doorbells. (The basement travel agency had its own entrance a half-flight down from street level.) Ladislas Szabo Gallery, read the bottommost nameplate. The one above it said J. Feldmaus, while the top one said simply Creeley.
    Creeley or Feldmaus, Feldmaus or Creeley. I’d have to decide, but I didn’t have to decide yet. First I had to get into the building.
    There was a double set of doors, one leading into the vestibule, the other leading from that little antechamber into the building’s interior. Both sported locks, but neither put one in mind of the Gordian knot. I studied the first one, stroked the cylinder with the tip of my forefinger, and wouldn’t have been overly surprised if that had been enough to make it pop open. But it wasn’t, so I took out my ring of tools and glanced over my shoulder before I got down to business.
    And saw a police cruiser from the local precinct, just moseying along, keeping an unblinking eye on things.
    And, if they were looking my way, what could they see? Just a harmless-looking fellow, respectably turned out in khakis and a blazer, fitting his key in the lock with no more difficulty than you’d expect after a round or two (or three or four) at the gin joint around the corner. The lock was a sweetie, I could have opened it with a toothpick, and it surrendered in no time at all, and only when I was within the vestibule did I take another look at the street. The police car was nowhere to be seen.
    Comforting, though, to know they’re on the job.
    I took a moment to put on my Pliofilm gloves—now that would have caught a cop’s eye, a man putting on clear plastic gloves before unlocking his own front door—and then I opened the inner door with not much more difficulty than I’d had with its outer cousin. I closed it quietly and stood there with no more light than filtered in from the street, stood there listening to the house.
    It was, as far as I could tell, as still as a tomb.
    I climbed a flight of stairs and stopped in front of the door of the Feldmaus apartment. The name, a new one on me, was German, and I knew just about enough of that language to translate it as field mouse . Creeley is Irish, I think, or possibly Scots-Irish, and I’ve no idea what it means. A creel is the woven basket a fisherman keeps his catch in, but I can’t see how that could enter into the equation.
    Creeley or Feldmaus? Feldmaus or Creeley?
    All things being equal, one’s best advised to take the apartment on the lower floor. One less floor to climb up, and, more to the point, one less floor to descend from on the way out. No light showed beneath the Feldmaus door. I listened for a long moment at that door, heard

Similar Books

That Liverpool Girl

Ruth Hamilton

Forbidden Paths

P. J. Belden

Wishes

Jude Deveraux

Comanche Dawn

Mike Blakely

Quicksilver

Neal Stephenson

Robert Crews

Thomas Berger