The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,19

façades of brown stone, which does tend to confuse things.)

Over the years, a vast number of one-family brownstones have been chopped up for multiple occupancy, some of them converted into rooming houses, with a couple dozen individual tenants. These conversions have themselves occasionally been reconverted in the process of neighborhood gentrification, turned into three-family dwellings or even all the way back into single-family houses.

Murray Hill was a neighborhood that had never declined significantly, and as far as I knew none of its brownstones had ever had more than one apartment to a floor. Many were still one-family dwellings. A few had commercial tenants on the lower floors, with residential apartments above. Some were private clubs—I’d already stumbled on one of those—and a few were entirely commercial, but the greater portion had people living in them, and looked to be better targets of opportunity than the apartment buildings, which almost all had doormen or security cameras or both.

Although the uniform might lead you to think otherwise, the average New York doorman is a less formidable bulwark of security than the Beefeaters posted at the Tower of London. Under the right circumstances, I’m more than willing to try to flimflam a doorman. But these were by no means the right circumstances. I didn’t know the names of any of the tenants, didn’t have a particular apartment targeted, and knew I’d be a lot better off with a brownstone.

So I walked around trying to decide which one to hit.

I must have wandered around for a good half hour, and it may have been closer to forty-five minutes. That’s a lot of time to devote to an essentially random choice, almost on a par with feeling every last ticket stub before drawing one out of a hat. There’s a limited amount you can learn about a house by strolling past it, and all I can think is that I may have been trying to outlast the impulse, to walk and walk and walk until the compulsion to burgle left me and I could go home and get some sleep.

No such luck. I stopped abruptly in front of a brownstone (with a façade of actual brown stone, as it happens) on East 36th between Lexington and Third. There was a travel agent on the ground floor, while the parlor floor was occupied by a gallery dealing in tribal art; the window was lit, and most of what I saw was Oceanic, along with a handful of African pieces, including a Benin bronze leopard and a mask that looked Dogon to my admittedly untrained eye.

The gallery figured to have some sort of security system, but I’d have passed it up even if the door had been wide open. You couldn’t walk down the street with your arms full of primitive tribal artifacts. That’ll draw attention, even in New York. And, even if you got away with it, where would you sell the stuff?

I mounted the steps, checked out the nameplates next to the three doorbells. (The basement travel agency had its own entrance a half-flight down from street level.) Ladislas Szabo Gallery, read the bottommost nameplate. The one above it said J. Feldmaus, while the top one said simply Creeley.

Creeley or Feldmaus, Feldmaus or Creeley. I’d have to decide, but I didn’t have to decide yet. First I had to get into the building.

There was a double set of doors, one leading into the vestibule, the other leading from that little antechamber into the building’s interior. Both sported locks, but neither put one in mind of the Gordian knot. I studied the first one, stroked the cylinder with the tip of my forefinger, and wouldn’t have been overly surprised if that had been enough to make it pop open. But it wasn’t, so I took out my ring of tools and glanced over my shoulder before I got down to business.

And saw a police cruiser from the local precinct, just moseying along, keeping an unblinking eye on things.

And, if they were looking my way, what could they see? Just a harmless-looking fellow, respectably turned out in khakis and a blazer, fitting his key in the lock with no more difficulty than you’d expect after a round or two (or three or four) at the gin joint around the corner. The lock was a sweetie, I could have opened it with a toothpick, and it surrendered in no time at all, and only when I was within the vestibule did I take another look at the street.