The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,59
to tell you later. But what’s usually there is a closet.”
“Suppose it’s locked?” I gave her a look. “Sorry, Bern, I forgot who I was talking to. If it’s locked you’ll unlock it. Suppose, well, suppose you can’t get through the thing after all?”
“Then I’ll come back out,” I said, “and think of something else, and if there’s nothing else to think of then we’ll go back home and call it a night.”
If you can get your head through an opening, the rest of the body can follow.
That’s a basic guideline, and it’s obviously not universally applicable. If you weigh four hundred pounds, your head is going to slip through apertures that will balk at accepting your hips. (I considered the fat man who’d overpaid so generously for The Secret Agent. A camel would fit more easily through the eye of a needle, I thought, than would he through a milk chute.)
It’s a good general principle, however, and newborns prove it every day. Raffles seems to know it instinctively; if his whiskers clear an opening he’ll follow them through, and if they don’t he’ll step back and think of another way to go, or decide he didn’t really want to go there anyway.
The Mapes milk chute was large enough to accommodate my head, whiskers and all. I put on my gloves and got down to business.
The milk chute had a little catch that you turn prior to pulling the door open. It’s not a lock, just a device to keep the thing from swinging open in the wind. The catch didn’t want to turn, though, and then the door didn’t want to open. Time and paint had made them both stuck in their ways, but a little pressure (and the tip of a knife blade) led them to change their attitude.
The chute’s inner door had a catch as well, but it was on the side away from me, to be opened by the person retrieving the milk. I had my tools in hand, and a thin four-inch strip of flexible steel slipped the catch as if it had been designed for that specific purpose. The inner door opened, but when I pushed it I felt resistance before it had swung inward more than a few inches. It was a yielding, spongy sort of resistance; I could force the door farther open, but when I let go it would spring back.
I used my little flashlight, and saw right away what the problem was. The milk chute opened into a closet, as I’d expected, and the resistance was being supplied by an overcoat.
I reached a hand in, shifted things around, and created enough of a space for the door to swing all the way open. I returned my tools and penlight to my pocket, kept the sheer Pliofilm gloves on, and then proceeded to poke my head into the opening and follow it with as much as possible of the rest of me. I drew my shoulders in, making myself as narrow and eel-like as possible, said a quick and urgent prayer to St. Dismas, and commenced wriggling and squirming for all I was worth.
And I have to say it brought it all back. Not just that first magical moment of youth, when I’d thrilled at having discovered a way to get into a house I’d been locked out of. There was nothing illicit or dangerous about that first time, I’d been locked out by sheer accident and had every right and reason to be inside, but the thrill had been there from the beginning, and everything that came after grew out of that initial venture.
In no time at all I was playing with locks and teaching myself how to open them, sending away to the correspondence schools that advertised in Popular Science and enrolling in their locksmithing courses, pressing my mom’s house key in a bar of soap and filing a duplicate to match the impression.
And if I hadn’t been locked out that fateful afternoon, would I have escaped a life of crime? Somehow I doubt it. There are, as far as I know, no felons swiping peaches from the family tree. Both the Grimeses and the Rhodenbarrs boast generations of law-abiding folk, content to play by the rules and trade an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. I, on the other hand, am a born thief, the sort of reprehensible character of whom it is said that he’d rather steal a dollar than earn five. (That’s not literally