The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling - By Lawrence Block Page 0,8

the silence. Queens Boulevard was only blocks away but I couldn’t hear any of its traffic. I suppose the trees kept the noise at bay.

I felt hundreds of miles from New York. The Arkwright house belonged in a Gothic novel, brooding over windswept moors.

Myself, I had no time for brooding. I put on my rubber gloves—skintight, their palms cut out for comfort’s sake—and went to have a look at the kitchen door.

Thank God for burglar alarms and pickproof locks and tight security systems. They all help discourage the amateurs even as they give the citizenry a nice sense of safety and well-being. Without them, everybody would stash all the good stuff in safe-deposit boxes. Beyond that, they help make burglary the challenging occupation I’ve always found it. If any splay-fingered oaf could do as well, what fun would it be?

The Arkwright home had a first-rate burglar alarm, Fischer Systems’ model NCN-30. I could see for myself that it was wired to all the ground-floor doors and windows. It might or might not have been connected to higher windows—most people don’t take the trouble—but I didn’t want to walk up a wall to find out one way or the other. It was simpler to rewire the system.

There are a few ways to beat a burglar alarm. One brutally direct method calls for cutting the lines supplying power to the house. This does lack subtlety—all the lights go out, for openers—and it’s counter-productive when you’re dealing with a good system like the NCN-30, because they have fail-safe devices that trigger them under such circumstances. (This can have interesting ramifications during a power failure, incidentally.)

Ah, well. I used some wires of my own, splicing them neatly into the picture, wrapping their ends ever so neatly with electrical tape, and by the time I was done the alarm was working as well as it had ever worked, but for the fact that it no longer covered the kitchen door. A regiment of cavalry could parade through that door without NCN-30 kicking up a fuss. The whole operation was more than your average burglar could do, and isn’t it lucky that I’m not your average burglar?

With the alarm hors de combat, I turned my attention to the thick oak door, an hors of another color. A skeleton key opened its original lock, but there were two others, a Segal and a Rabson. I held my little flashlight in one hand and my ring of picks and probes in the other and went to work, pausing now and again to press an ear against the thick wood. (It’s like seashells; if you listen carefully you can hear the forest.) When the last tumbler tumbled I turned the knob and tugged and shoved and nothing happened.

There was a manual bolt on the inside. I ran the flashlight beam down the edge of the door until I located it, then made use of a handy little tool I’d fashioned from a hacksaw blade, slipping it between door and jamb and working it to and fro until the bolt parted. I tried the door again, and wouldn’t you know there was a chain lock that stopped it when it was three inches ajar? I could have sawed through that as well, but why? It was easier to slip my hand inside and unscrew the chain lock from its moorings.

I pushed the door all the way open and made an illegal entry a crooked accountant would have been proud of. For a moment I just stood there, glowing, radiant. Then I closed the door and locked the locks. I couldn’t do anything about the bolt I’d sawed through, but I did take a moment to restore the chain bolt.

Then I set out to explore the house.

There’s absolutely nothing like it.

Forget everything I said to Ray Kirschmann. True, I was getting older. True, I shrank from the prospect of getting chewed by attack dogs and shot by irate householders and locked by the authorities in some pickproof penitentiary cell. True, true, all of it true, and so what? None of it mattered a whit when I was inside someone else’s dwelling place with all his worldly goods spread out before me like food on a banquet table. By God, I wasn’t that old! I wasn’t that scared!

I’m not proud of this. I could spout a lot of bilge about the criminal being the true existential hero of our times, but what for? I don’t buy it myself. I’m not nuts about