The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - By Lawrence Block Page 0,5

perhaps his military bearing was an attempt to compensate for this. Alternatively, perhaps he’d been in the military. I somehow didn’t think he’d ever served as a doorman, or an Ecuadorian admiral.

We had our coffee at a marble-topped table in his living room. The carpet was an Aubusson and the furniture was mostly Louis Quinze. The several paintings, all twentieth-century abstracts in uncomplicated aluminum frames, were an effective contrast to the period furnishings. One of them, showing blue and beige amoeboid shapes on a cream field, looked like the work of Hans Arp, while the canvas mounted over the Adam fireplace was unmistakably a Mondrian. I don’t have all that good an eye for paintings, and I can’t always tell Rembrandt from Hals or Picasso from Braque, but Mondrian is Mondrian. A black grid, a white field, a couple of squares of primary colors—the man had a style, all right.

Bookshelves ran from floor to ceiling on either side of the fireplace, and they accounted for my presence. A couple of days ago, Gordon Kyle Onderdonk had walked in off the street, dropping in at Barnegat Books as casually as someone looking to buy Drums in Our Street or sell Lepidopterae. He’d browsed for a spell, asked two or three reasonable questions, bought a Louis Auchincloss novel, and paused on his way to the door to ask me if I ever appraised libraries.

“I’m not interested in selling my books,” he said. “At least I don’t think I am, although I’m considering a move to the West Coast and I suppose I’d dispose of them rather than ship them. But I have things that have accumulated over the years, and perhaps I ought to have a floater policy to cover them in case of fire, and if I ever do want to sell, why, I ought to know whether my library’s worth a few hundred or a few thousand, oughtn’t I?”

I haven’t done many appraisals, but it’s work I enjoy. You can’t charge all that much, but the hourly return is greater than I get sitting behind the counter at the store, and sometimes the chance to appraise a library turns into the opportunity to purchase it. “Well, if it’s worth a thousand dollars,” a client may say, “what’ll you pay for it?” “I won’t pay a thousand,” I may counter, “so tell me what you’ll take for it.” Ah, the happy game of haggling.

I spent the next hour and a half with my legal pad and a pen, jotting numbers down and totting them up. I looked at all of the books on the open walnut shelves that flanked the fireplace, and in another room, a sort of study, I examined the contents of a bank of glassed-in mahogany shelves.

The library was an interesting one. Onderdonk had never specifically collected anything, simply allowing books to accumulate over the years, culling much of the chaff from time to time. There were some sets in leather—a nice Hawthorne, a Defoe, the inevitable Dickens. There were perhaps a dozen Limited Editions Club volumes, which command a nice price, and several dozen Heritage Press books, which retail for only eight or ten dollars but are very easy to turn over. He had some favorite authors in first editions—Evelyn Waugh, J.P. Marquand, John O’Hara, Wallace Stevens. Some Faulkner, some Hemingway, some early Sherwood Anderson. Fair history, including a nice set of Guizot’s France and Oman’s seven-volume history of the Peninsular War. Not much science. No Lepidopterae.

He had cost himself money. Like so many non-collectors, he’d disposed of the dust jackets of most of his books, unwittingly chucking out the greater portion of their value in the process. There are any number of modern firsts worth, say, a hundred dollars with a dust jacket and ten or fifteen dollars without it. Onderdonk was astonished to learn this. Most people are.

He brought more coffee as I sat adding up a column of figures, and this time he’d brought along a bottle of Irish Mist. “I like a drop in my coffee,” he said. “Can I offer you some?”

It sounded yummy, but where would we be without standards? I sipped my coffee black and went on adding numbers. The figure I came up with was somewhere in excess of $5,400, and I read it off to him. “I was probably conservative,” I added. “I’m doing this on the spot, without consulting references, and I shaded things on the low side. You’d be safe rounding that figure off at six