The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - By Lawrence Block Page 0,26

I’d rather not hit a dwelling while its occupants are at home, intent as I am on avoiding human contact while I work, but the one advantage of visiting them when they’re already at home is you don’t have to worry about their coming home before you’re done. In this case I wanted one thing and one thing only and I didn’t have to search for it. It was right out there in the living room, and if he was asleep in the bedroom I wouldn’t have to go anywhere near him.

I dialed the number anyway. It rang half a dozen times and I hung up. I’d have let it ring longer, but since I wasn’t going in anyway, not for at least seven hours, why bother?

I crossed the living room, edged the drapery aside with a rubber-tipped finger. The window looked out on Fifth Avenue, and from where I stood I had a fairly spectacular view of Central Park. I also had no need to worry about anyone looking in, unless someone was perched half a mile away on Central Park West with a pair of binoculars and a whole lot of patience, and that didn’t seem too likely. I drew the drapes and pulled up a chair so that I could look out at the park. I picked out the zoo, the reservoir, the band shell, and other landmarks. I could see plenty of runners, on the circular drive and the bridle path and the running track around the reservoir. Watching them was like observing highway traffic from an airplane.

Too bad I couldn’t be out there with them. It was a perfect day for it.

I got restless after a while and moved around the apartment. In Appling’s study I took down a stamp album and paged idly through it. I saw a number of things I really should have taken on my last visit but I didn’t even consider taking them now. Before I’d been a burglar, a predator on the prowl. This time around I was a guest, albeit uninvited, and I could hardly so abuse my host’s hospitality.

I did enjoy looking at his stamps, though, without being under any obligation to make them my own. I sat back and let myself relax in the fantasy that this was my apartment and my stamp collection, that I had located and purchased all those little perforated rectangles of colored paper, that my fingers had delighted in fitting them with mounts and affixing them in their places. Most of the time I have trouble imagining why anyone would want to devote time and money to pasting postage stamps in a book, but now I sort of got into it, and I even felt a little guilt about having looted such a labor of love.

I’ll tell you, it’s a good thing I didn’t have his stamps with me. I might have tried putting them back.

Time crawled on by. I didn’t want to turn on the television set or play a radio, or even walk around too much, lest a neighbor wonder at sounds issuing from a supposedly empty apartment. I didn’t have the concentration for reading, and there’s something about holding a book in gloved hands that keeps one from getting caught up in the story. I went back to my chair by the window and watched the sun drop behind the buildings on the west side of the park, and that was about it, entertainment-wise.

I got hungry sometime around nine and rummaged around the kitchen. I filled a bowl with Grape-Nuts and added some suspicious milk. It probably would have curdled in a cup of coffee but it was all right in the cereal. Afterward I washed my bowl and spoon and put them where I’d found them. I went back to the living room and took off my shoes and stretched out on the rug with my eyes closed. My mind’s eye gave itself over to a vast expanse of white, and while I was observing its pure perfection—virgin snow, I thought, or the fleeces of a million lambs—while I was thus waxing poetic, black ribbons uncurled and stretched themselves across the white expanse, extending from top to bottom, from left to right, forming a random rectangular grid. Then one of the enclosed spaces of white blushed and reddened, and another spontaneously took on a faint sky tint that deepened all the way to a rich cobalt blue, and another red square began to bleed in on the