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And I’d always been comfortable playing one of these roles. I’d always told myself that I did this sort of thing because I couldn’t afford to let a lady friend know what I really did to support myself, but now I wondered if that was true after all. The more I thought about some of those ladies, the more I got the feeling that they might have reacted pretty much the way Ellie did. Burglary, after all, is the sort of career people are apt to perceive as exciting, the moral implications notwithstanding, and it’s been my observation that most women have highly adaptable moral systems.
I’d kept my career a secret because I liked being secretive. Because I didn’t want anyone to know me all that well.
With Ruth-no, dammit, Ellie, the woman’s name is Ellie, at least until she tells me different-with Ellie, I had no choice. And as a result she’d gotten very close to the real Bernard Rhodenbarr, and at the same time I’d found out what it was like to be intimate with a girl without holding so much of myself in reserve.
And all along I was whispering the wrong name into her ear. The shoe was on the other foot. That’s what it was. All those years of automatically lying to women and now one of them had turned the tables, and I didn’t seem to like it much.
I let the cab drop me right at my door. Not the front door, though, but the service entrance around the corner. I gave the driver one of Peter Alan Martin’s limp five-dollar bills and sent him on his way. Easy come, easy go.
I’d been prepared to pick the service entrance lock in broad daylight, that being safer on the balance than slipping past the doorman, but I didn’t have to exert any of my special talents because the door was wide open when I got to it. Two enormous men were carrying a small spinet piano through it. I stood aside while they cleared the doorway and went on to load the thing into an unmarked half-ton panel truck. Either they were un-licensed gypsy movers or they’d gone into the business of stealing pianos, which seemed unlikely but by no means impossible, New York being New York. Whatever they were doing was clearly no concern of mine, so I went on into the basement and took the elevator up to the sixteenth floor without attracting any attention whatsoever.
The long narrow corridor was happily empty. I hurried down its length to my very own door, dug my personal key ring out of my pocket, and was about to indulge myself in the unaccustomed luxury of opening a door with a key. Then I got a sudden flash that there was someone in the apartment and cursed myself for not calling up first. I extended a finger to ring my bell, then withdrew it. Either the person inside would just freeze and not answer the bell or he’d yank it open and slap cuffs on me.
I hesitated. I glanced down at my hand, the hand that held the key, and my fingers were trembling. I told myself this was silly and I told my fingers to cut it out and they did. Then I stopped looking at my fingers and looked instead at my lock, or more accurately looked where it had been the last time I’d been home.
There was a neat round hole in the door where my Rabson cylinder belonged. Above it, the Yale springlock the landlord supplied was still in place, but my key wouldn’t go into it. I dropped to one knee and had a look at it and it wasn’t the original equipment. I could see marks around it where someone had scratched and gouged the door in the process of demolishing the old lock, and now they’d put on a new one to keep people from walking in at will.
I peered through the hole where my sixty-dollar Rabson had been, but the apartment was dark and I couldn’t see anything, so I went through the rather absurd ritual of picking my own lock to let myself in. By then I had a feeling I knew what I would find, because it was already clear to me that I’d had more than one set of visitors. The cops might have drilled the Rabson out if they didn’t have anyone on hand who could pick it, but they’d have had the super use his key on the other lock, the one that came with the apartment. They certainly wouldn’t have employed brute force to kick it in, not after they’d taken the trouble to drill the Rabson. So someone else had come along afterward, someone not inclined to be gentle and painstaking, and that gave me an idea of what my apartment would look like.
But I still wasn’t prepared for what lay within. I let myself inside, closing the door and flicking on the light in a single motion, and just like that I was transported to Dresden after the bombing. The place had been turned upside-down and inside-out, and after what had been done to it I couldn’t imagine why the super had put a new lock on the door, because no future intruder could have made things any worse than they already were.
Everything I owned was in the middle of the living room floor. Chair cushions had been slashed and the stuffing torn out. Every book had wound up off the shelves and on the floor after having first been taken by the covers and shaken so that anything tucked between its pages would fall out. The wall-to-wall broadloom, imperfectly installed in the first place, had been yanked up so that whatever I might have secreted between it and the padding, or between padding and floor, could be discovered.
God, what a mess! I have always been the neatest of burglars, having nothing but respect for the private property of others, whether I intended to leave that property in their hands or transfer it into my own. The utter lack of consideration my visitors had shown literally sickened me. I had to sit down, but I couldn’t find a place to sit. There was not a single inviting surface in that apartment. I managed to put an unupholstered (hence un-slashed) chair on its feet and planted myself on it.
What was the point of all this?
The police, of course, would have searched the apartment if only to assure themselves that I wasn’t in it. They might have made off with an address book in the hope that it would lead them to possible associates and friends of mine. But the cops, however much they might dislike me for having made them look fairly foolish, would not react by waging total war on my apartment. This carnage was clearly the work of whoever had kicked the door in.
But why?
Someone had been looking for something. While no pack of adolescent vandals could have been more destructive, there was too much method to this particular madness for it to be simple vandalism. I was perfectly willing to believe the bastards had enjoyed their work, but all of their efforts had been undertaken with the aim of finding something.
What?
I walked from room to room, trying to figure it out. The little kitchen, never my favorite room at the best of times, had been sacked. I hadn’t kept anything in it more valuable than ca
The bedroom had received similar treatment. I ignored the disorder as much as I could and waded through it to the bedroom closet. I’d built a false back wall into that closet just above the overhead shelf, giving myself a space five feet wide and three feet high and some fifteen inches deep that the building’s own architect couldn’t have found unless he knew what he was looking for. I used that space to stow whatever I might bring back from a midnight shopping spree, holding it there until I’d made arrangements to fence it. I’d had no end of swag tucked away there at one time or another, though never for terribly long. There’d been nothing in it when I was last in the apartment except for a passport and the sort of personal papers other people keep in safe deposit boxes, but I wanted to see if my visitors, thorough as they’d been, had found my hiding place.
They’d been in the closet, certainly. They had thrown all my clothing onto the bed, pausing only to rip out an occasional jacket lining. But they hadn’t found my hiding place and that made me feel a little better. I opened it up, easing the panel out of its moorings, and there were my passport and high school diploma and class picture and sundry treasures. I found myself wishing I’d left a satchel full of emeralds in there just so the bastards could have missed them.