The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,7
With that much security, naturally you feel secure. And, when nothing bad ever happens, you stop paying close attention to your own security devices.
Look what happened at Chernobyl. They had a gauge with a warning device on it, and when the crunch came it didn’t fail, it worked the way it was supposed to. And some poor dimwit looked at it and decided it must be broken because it was giving an abnormal reading. So he ignored it.
This notwithstanding, I was just as glad to know I wasn’t going to wind up on America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Four floors below I made sure the hall was clear, then walked the length of it to 8-B. I rang the doorbell. I’d been assured there would be nobody home, but Candlemas could be wrong about that, or he could have steered me accidentally to the wrong apartment. So I rang the doorbell, and when nothing happened I took the time to ring it again. Then I fished out my set of lockpicking tools and let myself in.
Nothing to it. If you’re looking for state-of-the-art locks, don’t look in a luxury building on Park Avenue. Look in the tenements and brownstones where there’s neither doorman nor concierge. That’s where you’ll find window gates and alarm systems and police locks. 8-B had two locks, a Segal and a Rabson, both of them standard pin-and-tumbler cylinders, solid and reliable and about as challenging as the crossword puzzle in TV Guide.
I knocked off one lock, paused for breath, and knocked off the other one—and all in not much more time than it takes to tell about it. In a funny way, I was almost sorry it was so easy.
See, lockpicking is a skill, and on the list of technical accomplishments it ranks several steps below brain surgery. With proper instruction, anyone with minimal manual dexterity can learn the basics. I’d taught Carolyn, for example, and she’d become fairly good at opening simple locks, until she stopped practicing and got rusty.
But for me it’s different. I have a gift for it, and it’s more than a matter of technique. There’s something otherworldly about the whole enterprise, some altered state I slip into when I’m breaking and entering. I can’t really describe it, and it would probably bore you if I could, but it’s Magic Time for me, it really is. That’s why I’m as good as I am at it, and it also helps explain why I can’t stay away from it.
When the second lock sighed and surrendered, I felt the way Casanova must have felt when the girl said yes—grateful for the conquest, but sorry he hadn’t had to work just a little bit harder for it. I sighed and surrendered my own self, turned the knob, stepped inside, and drew the door quickly shut.
It was dark as a coal mine during a power failure. I gave my eyes a minute to accustom themselves to the darkness, but it didn’t get a whole lot brighter. This was good news, actually. It meant the drapes were drawn and the apartment was light-tight, which in turn meant I could flick on all the lights I wanted. I didn’t have to skulk around in the darkness, bumping into things and cursing.
I used my flashlight first to make sure that all the drapes were drawn, and indeed they were. Then, with my gloves on, I flicked the nearest light switch and blinked at the glare. I put my flashlight back in my pocket and took a deep breath, giving myself a moment to relish that little shiver of pure delight that comes over me when I’ve let myself into some place in which I have no business being.
And to think I actually tried to give all this up….
I locked both locks, just to be tidy, and looked around the large L-shaped room. That was all there was to the apartment, aside from a tiny kitchen and a tinier bathroom, and it was furnished in a very tentative fashion, with the kind of Conran’s–Door Store–Crate & Barrel furniture newlyweds buy for their first apartment. A rug with pastel colors and a geometric pattern covered about a third of the parquet floor, and a platform bed filled the sleeping alcove.
I looked in the closet, checked a few of the dresser drawers. The occupant was a male, I decided, but there were enough female garments on hand to suggest that he had either a girlfriend or a problem of sexual identity.