as a silent alarm. Open the door and there’s no warning whine, no sound at all beyond the music of the spheres. There’s a keypad concealed somewhere, but you’ve got no reason to go looking for it, and after forty-five seconds it’s too late, because by that time an alarm has registered in the office of the security firm, and they turn up with guns in their hands while you’re filling a pillowcase with the good sterling.
The thing is, hardly anybody installs a silent alarm these days, except as a supplementary system. What you want a burglar alarm to do is keep burglars out, not give you a shot at catching them once they’re already inside. Most burglars, it pains me to say, are just looking for the easy dollar. They’ve got no calling for the profession. The great majority, once they breach the system and hear the telltale whine, are out of there like a shot. A certain number, including the junkies and crackheads who get in by breaking a window or kicking in a door, will take a few minutes to grab a radio or go through a top dresser drawer. Then they’re gone.
If the only alarm’s a silent one, the burglar doesn’t know it’s there—which, after all, is the point of the thing. So the burglar goes about his business, and if he’s a junkie or even if he’s not, he’ll very likely finish up and go home before the armed-response guys turn up. Even when traffic’s light, it takes a while to answer a call. In rush hour, forget it.
Besides, a silent alarm is a pain in the neck for the householder. Because it’s silent, there’s nothing to remind you that you’re supposed to key in your code. A certain amount of the time you forget, and the rent-a-cops turn up while you’re sitting there switching back and forth between Leno and Letterman. After that happens a few times you stop setting the alarm in the first place.
Groceries in hand, I crossed the threshold and moved into the entering phase of breaking and entering. I nudged the door closed with my hip, cutting off the light from the hallway. It was pitch dark where I was standing, and silent as a tomb.
Lord, what a feeling! A quickening of the pulse, a tingling in the fingertips, a lightness in the chest—but that doesn’t begin to describe what I felt, and always feel in such circumstances. I’d told Carolyn about the excitement, the thrill of it all, but there was more. I felt an abiding sense of satisfaction, as if I was doing what I’d been placed on earth to do. I was a born burglar, and I was aburgling, and whatever had led me to think I could possibly give it all up?
I set down my grocery bags and put on my disposable gloves. I got hold of my tiny flashlight, dropped it, and fumbled around on the floor for it, cursing the darkness. I found it, finally, and switched it on, then got to my feet and followed the straight and narrow beam all around the apartment. Once I’d established that every window was heavily curtained, I turned on a few lights and took another deliberate tour of the premises.
Walking from room to room, I felt like a gentleman farmer riding his fences, master of all he surveyed. But there was method in it. Long ago, in a nice apartment on East Sixty-seventh Street, I had amused myself looting a living room while the apartment’s bona fide occupant was lying dead on the other side of the bedroom door. He had died, it must be said, of natural causes; someone had murdered him. The police, who conveniently turned up while I was still busy with my looting, jumped to the completely unwarranted conclusion that I ought to be listed as the proximate cause of death, and I had a hell of a time getting it all straightened out.
It’s not the sort of thing anybody would want to go through twice, believe me. So I’ve learned to spend my first moments in a burglary checking around for dead bodies, and of course I never find any. They’re like cops and cabs, never there when you’re looking for them.
What I found instead was what realtors call a Classic Six, by no means a scarce item in prewar apartment buildings on the Upper West Side. An entrance foyer, where I’d groped for my flashlight. A living room, a formal