The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza

In his kitchen, I helped myself to a piece of dense chocolatey layer cake. I think it was of the sort he called Schwarzwälder kuchen. Black Forest cake. Except for that and the glass of milk I drank along with it, I took nothing whatsoever from Abel Crowe's apartment.

I thought of it. Every time I hit something really tempting I tried to talk myself into it, and I just couldn't manage it. You'd think it would have been easy to rationalize. As far as I knew, Abel had no heirs. If an heir did turn up, he'd probably never see half the swag stashed in that apartment. The library would be sold en bloc to a book dealer, who in turn would profit handsomely enough reselling the volumes individually without ever discovering the bonuses that some of them contained. The watch and earrings would wind up the property of the first cigar smoker to wander in, while the $23,000 would stay in the telephone forever. What happens to telephones when somebody dies? Do they go back to the phone company? If they don't work, does somebody repair them? Whoever repaired this particular one was in for the surprise of his life.

So why didn't I help myself?

I guess I just plain found out that robbing the dead was not something I was prepared to do. Not the newly dead, anyway. Not a dead friend. All things considered, I'll be damned if I can think of a single logical argument against robbing the dead. One would think they'd mind it a good deal less than the living. If they can't take it with them, why should they care where it goes?

And God knows the dead do get robbed. Cops do it all the time. When a derelict dies in a Bowery flophouse, the first thing the officers on the scene do is divvy up whatever cash they find. Admittedly I've always set higher standards for myself than those of a policeman, but my standards weren't all that lofty, were they?

It was hard leaving the cash. When I've broken into a home or place of business I invariably take whatever cash presents itself. Even if I've entered the place for some other purpose, I still pocket cash automatically, reflexively. I don't have to think about it. I just do it.

This time I didn't. Oddly enough, I came close to taking the Piaget watch and the emerald earrings. Not that I found them tempting, but because I thought I might take them with something approaching legitimacy. After all, Carolyn and I had stolen them to begin with.

But we had been paid for them, hadn't we? So they weren't ours any longer. They were Abel's, and they would remain in his apartment.

One of the books I paged through was the copy of Spinoza's Ethics we'd brought him, and when I'd run out of places to search I took it down from its shelf and flipped idly through it. Abel had made shelf space for it on the last night of his life. Perhaps he'd paused first to thumb through it, reading a sentence here, a paragraph there.

"It may easily come to pass," I read, "that a vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance."

I took the book with me when I left. I don't know why. It was Abel's property-a gift is a gift, after all-but I somehow felt entitled to reclaim it.

I guess I just hate to leave a place empty-handed.

CHAPTER Thirteen

I would have taken the stairs as far as Murray Feinsinger's floor, on the chance that the same elevator operator was on the job and that his memory was working overtime. But as I neared the elevator an elderly woman slowed me with a nod and a smile. She was wearing a black Persian lamb jacket and held a very small dog in her arms. It might have been a Maltese. Carolyn would have known at a glance.

"You'll be caught in the rain," she told me. "Go back and get your raincoat."

"I'm ru

"I have a plastic raincoat," she said. "Folded, and in my purse at all times." She patted her shoulder bag. "You're the Stettiner boy, aren't you? How's your mother?"

"Oh, she's fine."

"The sore throat's better?"

"Much better."

"That's good to hear," she said, and scratched the little dog behind the ear. "It must be doing her a world of good to have you home for a few days. You'll be here how long? The weekend or a little longer?"

"Well, as long as I can."

"Wonderful," she said. The elevator arrived, the door opened. I followed her onto it. The same operator was indeed ru

"Of course I remember you, Mrs. Pomerance."

"And your mother's feeling better? I'm trying to remember the last time I talked with her. I was so sorry to hear about her brother. Your uncle."

What about him? "Well," I said, tightening my grip on Spinoza, "these things happen."

"His heart, wasn't it?"

"That's right."

"Listen, it's not the worst way. You must have heard about our neighbor? Mr. Crowe in 11-D?"

"Yes, I heard. Just the other day, wasn't it?"

"The day before yesterday, they say. You've heard what they're saying about him? That he bought from thieves? It was in the papers. Imagine in this building, after the co-op conversion and everything, and one of the residents is a man who buys from thieves. And then to be struck down and killed in his own apartment."

"Terrible."

We had reached the ground floor and walked together through the lobby. Just inside the entrance she stopped to clip a leash to the little dog's collar, then extracted a folded plastic raincoat from her bag. "I'll just carry this over my arm," she said, "so that when it starts raining I won't have to go looking for it. That Mr. Crowe-it makes a person think. He was always a nice man, he always had time for a kind word on the elevator. If he was a criminal, you would still have to say he was a good neighbor."

We strolled past the doorman, hesitated beneath the canopy. The little dog was pulling at his leash, anxious to head west toward Riverside Park. I was at least as anxious to head east.

"Well," I said, "he was a fence."

"That's the word. A fence."

"And you know what they say. Good fences make good neighbors."

There was no point going downtown. It was already past closing time when I left Abel's apartment. I got a bus on Broadway, not wanting to get caught in the rain with Spinoza under my arm. The rain was still holding off when I got off at Seventy-second Street and walked home.

Nothing but bills and circulars in my mailbox. I carried them upstairs, threw away the offers from those who wanted to sell me something, filed the demands from those who wished to be paid. Getting and spending we lay waste our powers, I thought, and put Spinoza up there on the shelf alongside of Wordsworth.

I called Carolyn's apartment. She didn't answer. I called Narrowback Gallery and Jared answered and told me his mother was out. I called the Poodle Factory and got Carolyn's machine. I didn't leave a message.

I hung up the phone and it rang before I could get three steps away from it. I picked it up and said hello. I was about to say hello a second time when it clicked in my ear.

A wrong number. Or my caller of the night before. Or some friend who'd decided at the last moment that she didn't really want to talk to me tonight after all. Or someone, anyone, who'd merely wanted to establish that I was at home.

Or none of the above.

I got an umbrella, started for the door. The phone rang again. I let myself out, locked up after me. The ringing followed me down the hall.

A block away on Broadway I had a big plate of spaghetti and a large green salad with oil and vinegar. I hadn't had anything since breakfast aside from the cake and milk at Abel's apartment, and I was hungry and angry and lonely and tired, and the first of the four seemed the only one I could do anything about for the moment. Afterward I had a small portion of tortoni, which never turns out to be as interesting a dessert as one would hope, and with it I drank four tiny cups of inky espresso in quick succession, each flavored with just a drop of anisette. By the time I got out of there caffeine was perking through my veins. I was neither hungry nor tired now, and it was hard to remember what I'd been angry about. I was still lonely but I figured I could live with it.