tell burglars my home address. You might make off with the family silver.”
“Not since the price drop. It’s barely worth stealing these days. Suppose I wanted to see you again?”
“Just keep opening doors. You never know what you’ll find on the other side.”
“Isn’t that the truth? Could be the lady, could be the tiger.”
“Could be both.”
“Uh-huh. You’ve got sharp claws, incidentally.”
“You didn’t seem to mind.”
“I wasn’t objecting, just commenting. I don’t even know your name.”
“Just think of me as the Dragon Lady.”
“I didn’t notice anything draggin’. My name is Bernie.”
She cocked her head, gave the matter some thought. “Bernie the Burglar. I don’t suppose there’s any harm in your knowing my first name, is there?”
“Besides, you could always make one up.”
“Is that what you just did? But I couldn’t. I never lie.”
“I understand that’s the best policy.”
“That’s what I’ve always heard. My name is Andrea.”
“Andrea. You know what I’d like to do, Andrea? I’d like to throw you right back down on the old Aubusson and have my way with you.”
“My, that doesn’t sound bad at all. If we had world enough and time, but we really don’t. I don’t, anyway. I have to get out of here.”
“It would be nice,” I said, “if there were a way I could get in touch with you.”
“The thing is I’m married.”
“But occasionally indiscreet.”
“Occasionally. But discreetly indiscreet, if you get my drift. Now if you were to tell me how to get in touch with you—”
“Uh.”
“You see? You’re a burglar and you don’t want to run the risk that I’ll get an attack of conscience or catch a bad case of the crazies and go to the police. And I don’t want to run a similar sort of risk. Maybe we should just leave it as is, ships that pass in the night, all that romantic stuff. That way we’re both safe.”
“You could be right. But sometime down the line we might decide the risk’s worth running, and then where would we be? You know what the saddest words of tongue or pen are.”
“‘It might have been.’ You’re witty, but John Greenleaf was Whittier.”
“My God, you read poetry and you’re a smartass and you can verb like a mink. I can’t let you get away altogether. I know.”
“You know what?”
“Buy the Village Voice every week and read the personals in the ‘Village Bulletin Board’ section. Okay?”
“Okay. You do the same.”
“Faithfully. Can a burglar and an adulteress find happiness in today’s world? We’ll just have to see, won’t we? Go ahead, you ring for the elevator.”
“You don’t want to ride down with me?”
“I want to tidy up here a little. And I’ll hang around so that we leave the building a few minutes apart. If I get in any trouble, you don’t want to get hooked into it.”
“Will you get in trouble?”
“Probably not, because I’m not stealing anything.”
“That’s what I was asking, really. I mean, I shouldn’t care if you steal anything, including the carpet we verbed on, but evidently I do. Bernie, would you hold me?”
“Are you scared again?”
“Nope. I just like the way you hold me.”
I put my gloves on and waited with the door a few inches ajar until I saw her ring for the elevator. Then I drew the door shut, turned the bolt, and gave the apartment a very quick look-see, just to make sure there was nothing I should know about in any of the other rooms. I didn’t open a drawer or a closet, just ducked into each room and flicked the lights on long enough to establish that there were no signs of Andrea’s presence. No drawers pulled out and dumped, no tables overturned, no signs that the apartment had been visited by a burglar or a cyclone or any comparable unwelcome phenomenon.
And no dead bodies in the bed or on the floor. Not that one goes around expecting that sort of thing, but I was once caught in the act of burgling the apartment of a man named Flaxford, and Mr. F. himself was dead in another room at the time, a fact which became known to the police before it joined my storehouse of information. So I gave a quick look-see here and there, and if I’d come across the Mondrian, leaning against the wall or perhaps wrapped in brown paper and waiting for the framer, I’d have been roundly delighted.
No such luck, nor did I spend much time looking. I did all of this reconnaissance rather more quickly than it takes to tell