The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,15
postalcoholic remorse. Then I started chasing women in a rather frantic fashion, and even managed to catch some, though the ones I landed were the sort any self-respecting sportsman would have thrown back. Finally, I went on a burglary spree, in the course of which I must have averaged a break-in a night for close to two weeks. I was a one-man crime wave, and the risks I took don’t bear thinking about, but at least I wasn’t suicidal about it. I didn’t have a deep unconscious desire to get caught, and nobody caught me, and when I finally came to my senses and settled down again, at least I had a tidy sum tucked away in my rainy day account. I came out of it ahead, which is more than I could say for the drinking and the woman-chasing.
And since then…well, since then I’d been as sexually active as a priest who took his vows seriously. I’d helped Carolyn compose her listing for Date-a-Dyke (“LOOKING FOR A SPRING FLING? Five-foot-two, eyes for you. Bright and cute and funny, you can think of me as the long-lost bastard daughter of L. L. Bean and Laura Ashley. Love scotch, love New York, hate softball, and limit myself to two cats. My meaningful relationships always lead to heartbreak or LBD, so how about a meaningless relationship?”) but wouldn’t hear of cobbling up an equivalent listing for myself. It was, I told myself, a phase I was going through. I was evidently not yet ready to have a woman in my life, and when I was I would automatically change the vibe I put out, and women who now had the good sense to steer clear of me would suddenly think I was catnip. Just a question of time, I told myself. Time. That’s all.
So when Law & Order packed it in I watched the first five minutes of the local news, then surfed my way around the channels, watching thirty seconds here and two minutes there, not getting caught up in any of it, perhaps because I didn’t stay with anything long enough to give it a chance to catch me. I thought about calling Francine (“Hi, I saw you on Law & Order tonight, and I swear I couldn’t take my eyes off the jury box. You absolutely lit up the screen!”) and looked for her number, but I’d recopied my address book since we stopped seeing each other, and she hadn’t made the cut. I reached for the phone book and put it back when I realized I couldn’t remember her last name. Then I channel-surfed some more, and then I turned off the TV and stood up.
All of the foregoing is by way of explanation for what I did next, and maybe it explains it, but it doesn’t justify it. The whole thing’s embarrassing, so I won’t dwell on it. I’ll just report it in plain English.
I went to my closet, opened up the hidden compartment, gathered up my tools and gloves, put on my windbreaker, changed my mind and swapped it for a blue blazer, and went down the stairs and out of the building.
And on the prowl.
Six
On the prowl.
The phrase has a wonderful ring to it, doesn’t it? It sounds at once menacing and exciting, deliciously attractive in an unwholesome way. Byron, someone observed, was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”—which evidently made the son of a bitch irresistible. Can’t you picture him going on the prowl?
When a burglar goes on the prowl, he’s improvising. Now improvisation is vastly useful in the arts, and in jazz it’s fundamental; when a jazz musician gives himself free rein to improvise, he finds himself playing notes and creating phrases he hadn’t thought of, unearthing the music from some inner chamber of his private self. When I play a record and listen to some solo piano by, say, Lennie Tristano or Randy Weston or Billy Taylor, I can get lost in the intricacies and subtleties the pianist is working out on the spot, creating this beauty as he threads his way through the notes.
That’s great if you’re a musician, and what I really should have done was stay home and play some of my old LPs, admiring the way those fellows could prowl the keyboard. Because improvisation in burglary is different. It’s a foolproof method for minimizing rewards while maximizing risk, and what kind of a way is that to run a business?