The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - By Lawrence Block Page 0,10

as I do in life itself, but on balance I felt I’d done a first-rate job of winnowing.

I hadn’t a clue what the lot was worth. One of the U.S. pages included the twenty-four-cent inverted airmail, a bicolor with the plane appearing upside-down, and I forget the most recent auction record for that issue but I know it ran well into five figures. On the other hand, it would have to be fenced, sold to someone who’d be aware he was buying stolen goods and who’d accordingly expect a bargain. Most of the other material was quite anonymous in comparison, and would bring a much higher proportion of its fair market value.

So what did I have in my attaché case? A hundred thousand? It wasn’t impossible. And what could I net for it? Thirty, thirty-five thousand?

A fair ballpark figure. But it was no more than a guess and I might be miles off in either direction. In twenty-four hours’ time I’d know a good deal more. By then all of the stamps would be off their pages and out of their mounts, sorted by sets and tucked into little glassine envelopes, their prices checked in last year’s Scott catalog, which was the most recent copy to have turned up at the store. (I could buy the book new, but somehow it goes against the grain.) Then Appling’s pages and mounts would go down the incinerator, along with any stamps that might have markings rendering them specifically identifiable. In a day’s time, a box of stamps in glassine envelopes, all quite anonymous, would be my only link with the John Charles Appling collection. An indeterminate time after that, but surely not much more than a week, the stamps would have new owners and I’d have money in their stead.

And it might be months before Appling ever knew they were gone. It was likely that he’d detect their absence the first time he pulled out an album and paged through it, but it was by no means a sure thing. I’d left twenty times as much as I’d taken, in volume if not in value, and he might open a book, turn to a specific page, add a stamp, and never notice that other pages were missing.

It didn’t really matter. He wouldn’t notice the minute he walked into the house, and when he did notice he couldn’t say when the theft had taken place—it might have occurred before or after his Greenbrier jaunt. His insurance company would pay, or it wouldn’t, and he’d come out ahead or behind or dead even, and who cared? Not I. A batch of pieces of colored paper would have changed ownership, and so would a batch of pieces of green paper, and no one on God’s earth was going to miss a meal as a result of my night’s activities.

I’m not offering a moral defense of myself, you understand. Burglary is morally reprehensible and I’m aware of the fact. But I wasn’t stealing the pennies off a dead man’s eyes, or the bread from a child’s mouth, or objects of deep sentimental value. I’ll tell you, I love collectors. I can ransack their holdings with such little guilt.

The state, however, takes a sterner view of things. They draw no distinction between swiping a philatelist’s stamps and lifting a widow’s rent money. However good I get at rationalizing my pursuit, I still have to do what I can to stay out of jail.

Which meant getting the hell out of there. I turned off lights—there was a Tiffany lamp in the study, too, wouldn’t you know—and I made my way to the apartment’s front door. My stomach growled en route and I thought of checking the fridge and building myself a sandwich, figuring they’d no more miss a little food than a fortune in rare stamps. But Sing Sing and Attica are overflowing with chaps who stopped for a sandwich, and if I just got out of there I could buy myself a whole restaurant.

I squinted through the peephole, saw no one in the hallway, and put my ear to the door and heard no one in the hallway, either. I unlocked the door, eased it open, saw no one in the hallway, and let myself out. I picked the Poulard lock again, locking it this time so as to spare the manufacturer’s feelings. I did not reset the spurious burglar alarm cylinder, just gave it a wink and went on my way, pausing only to smudge whatever