The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,12

don’t go there unless you have to, so who would even think that a basement window might be a burglar’s way in? Could he even fit through a basement window if he wanted to? And why would he want to?

The basement windows were all rimmed with the same metallic tape. That was disappointing but not surprising, and at least I hadn’t had to crane my neck to find out I wasn’t going to get in that way.

And the third-floor windows? I couldn’t tell from where I stood, and I couldn’t see what difference it made. I’m all right with heights, but I’m not crazy enough to climb two stories on a housebreaking expedition. Even if I could find a ladder that would reach that far, and even if I could brace it so that it wouldn’t slip out from under me, I wasn’t willing to spend that much time that exposed to the gaze of anyone who happened to glance my way. There are any number of illegal things you can do that can appear innocent to a casual glance, but climbing into a third-story window is not one of them.

Okay, forget the windows. Forget the doors, too. What did that leave?

The house, like all the others on the block, had been built at least three-quarters of a century ago. It was obviously prewar (which will always mean World War II when you’re talking about New York real estate, no matter how many wars have been fought since then, just as antebellum will always refer to the War Between the States, and antediluvian will always indicate Noah’s flood, unless you happen to live in Johnstown) and my guess was that it had been built in the 1920s. I could find out for certain, but it didn’t matter. What was significant was that it had almost certainly been equipped originally with a coal furnace, and that meant a coal cellar, and that meant a chute down which the delivery vehicle could pour the stuff.

That in turn meant a wooden cellar door, probably built to lean against the rear of the house at an angle of somewhere between forty-five and sixty degrees. Remember the song “Playmate”? Oh, sure you do, and it’s got nothing to do with magazine centerfolds. Playmate, come out and play with me/And with my dollies three/Climb up my apple tree/Shout down my rain barrel/Slide down my cellar door/ And we’ll be jolly friends/Forevermore.

They don’t write ’em like that anymore, but then neither do they make cellar doors you can slide down. They did when they built the Mapes house, however. People kept them locked, generally securing them with a padlock, but how the hell did you tie a padlocked wooden cellar door into a burglar alarm system?

There may be a way, but the whole thing became academic when I went around to the back of the house and tried to find the entrance to the coal cellar. They’d had one, sure enough, but somewhere along the way it had been removed, with brickwork and concrete filling in where the opening had been. I could get in, all right, but not without a jackhammer, and they tend to draw attention.

Rats.

There’s always a way in, I told myself. It makes a nice mantra, but even as I ran it through my mind I found myself beginning to doubt the universal verity of it. What if there wasn’t always a way in?

But there had to be. It was a big old house, sure to be chock full of crannies and nooks (or, if you insist, nooks and crannies) and window seats and stair cupboards and rooms no one ever went into. That was fine, but they were all on the inside, and on the outside there was nothing but stone, along with two doors and more windows than I troubled to count, all of them wired into an alarm system that I couldn’t knock out unless I found a way to create a power failure for the whole neighborhood.

I was trying to figure out just how I might manage that, which comes more under the heading of idle speculation than the exploration of a real possibility, when I opened my eyes and saw something that had been in front of them all along. How had I missed seeing it? The answer, of course, was that I had indeed seen it, but that it had somehow failed to register. I’d seen it and known what it was, but what I hadn’t recognized