The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,9

reason to frisk me. And it wasn’t as if I were walking along with a loaded gun on my hip. They were burglar’s tools, that’s all. They weren’t apt to go off on their own.

Riverdale’s a part of the Bronx, but don’t be ashamed of yourself if you hadn’t known that. They’re doing everything they can to keep it a secret. In the classified ads, under Houses for Sale, there’s a special section of listings for Riverdale after the Manhattan listings. Then come the Bronx listings, following along after them.

The subway’s elevated by the time it gets to the northern reaches of Manhattan, so you can watch through the window as the train crosses the Harlem River and presses on through Kingsbridge and into Riverdale. If you do, you won’t spot a billboard that proclaims “RIVERDALE—PART OF THE BRONX AND DAMN PROUD OF IT!” It’d make a nice billboard, but so far no one’s been prompted to put one up.

And, when you get off at the last stop at 242nd Street and make your circuitous way south and west on Manhattan College Parkway, so named because it winds its way around the ivied campus of Manhattan College, you might be excused if you leapt to the conclusion that you were in, uh, Manhattan. Manhattan Community College is in Tribeca, and Marymount Manhattan College is on East 71st Street, and you’ll find the Manhattan School of Music on Broadway and 122nd. They’ve got Manhattan in their names, and they’re in Manhattan, but Manhattan College, curiously enough, is in Riverdale, and Riverdale is in the Bronx.

Ah, well. The Bronx?/ No, thonx! wrote Ogden Nash, some seventy or eighty years ago. Even then the borough got no respect, and time has not been kind to its image. Riverdale, with its fine old fieldstone houses and its very preppy Riverdale Country Day School, understandably blanches at being mentioned in the same breath as, say, Fort Apache.

I mused on all of this as I tried to find the Mapes house and found myself wishing I’d brought a map along. I have a Hagstrom atlas of the five boroughs at home, and I’d studied the map of Riverdale and plotted my route, but it would have been handy to have the map in front of me now. The atlas says it’s pocket-size, but only if you’re a kangaroo. I’d thought of tearing out the relevant page, but I’m too much of a bookman to mutilate a useful book on a whim. I have a folding map of Manhattan that I could have taken along, but what good would that do me? Riverdale, despite the likely wishes of its inhabitants, is not to be found thereon. The mapmakers know damn well it’s in the Bronx.

There were a couple of convenience stores on Broadway at the foot of the subway terminal, and one of them would probably have been happy to sell me a map of the Bronx, if I promised not to say where I got it. But I didn’t even think of that until I’d walked far enough on the winding stretch of Manhattan College Parkway to scramble my mental compass. I was damned if I was going to go back and buy a map and start over, so I kept on going, and took a right on Delafield Avenue and a left on 246th Street, which got me under the Henry Hudson Parkway and within shouting distance of the Hudson River. I kept myself pointed toward the river and hit streets I remembered from the map, and I took a wrong turn here and there but figured it was just part of getting to know the neighborhood, and wasn’t that part of my assignment?

And then I was on Devonshire Close, a dead-end street that ran north a single block from another street with the irresistible name of Ploughman’s Bush. Riverdale is hilly, and Devonshire Close perched on the slope of a rise, with the houses on the east side of the street—Mapes’s was among them—situated at the top of the slope. They were large houses and they stood on good-sized lots, with their lawns angling down to the sidewalk. The lawns looked too steep for easy mowing, and about a third of the homeowners had finessed the problem by substituting a ground cover, ivy or pachysandra, for the usual grass. Mapes had grass, though, and his lawn looked well tended, his shrubbery neatly trimmed. Well, he was a plastic surgeon, wasn’t he, given to reshaping