The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - By Lawrence Block Page 0,62

glasses and the hat, then looked down at what I was carrying. “That’s pretty neat,” he said. “You can carry anything in there and people figure it’s an animal. What have you got in there, burglar tools?”

“Nope.”

“I bet it’s swag, then.”

“Huh?”

“Swag. Loot. Plunder. Can I see?”

“Sure,” I said, and opened the clasps and lifted the hinged top.

“It’s empty,” he said.

“Disappointing, huh?”

“Very.” We moved on into the loft, where Denise was touching up a canvas. I examined what she’d done in my absence and told her I was impressed.

“You ought to be,” she said. “We worked all night, both of us. I don’t think we got an hour’s sleep between us. What have you been doing in the meantime?”

“Staying out of jail.”

“Well, keep on doing it. Because when all of this is history I expect a substantial reward. I won’t settle for a good dinner and a night on the town.”

“You won’t have to.”

“You can throw in dinner and a night out as a bonus, but if there’s a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, I want a share.”

“You’ll get it,” I assured her. “When will all this stuff be ready?”

“Couple hours.”

“Two hours, say?”

“Should be.”

“Good,” I said. And I called Jared over and explained what I had in mind for him. A variety of expressions played over his face.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You could organize it, couldn’t you? Get some of your friends together.”

“Lionel would go for it,” Denise suggested. “And what about Pegeen?”

“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. What would I get?”

“What do you want? Your pick of every science fiction book that comes through my store for the next—how long? The next year?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He sounded about as enthusiastic as if I’d offered him a lifetime supply of cauliflower.

“Make sure you get a good deal,” his mother told him. “Because you’ll have a lot to handle. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a TV news crew. If you’re the leader you’ll be the one they interview.”

“Really?”

“Stands to reason,” she said.

He thought about it for a moment. I started to say something but Denise silenced me with a hand. “If somebody made a couple of phone calls,” Jared said, “then they’d know to have camera crews there.”

“Good idea.”

“I’ll get Lionel,” he said. “And Jason Stone and Shaheen and Sean Glick and Adam. Pegeen’s at her father’s for the weekend, but I’ll get—I know who I’ll get.”

“All right.”

“And we’ll need signs,” he said. “Bernie? What time?”

“Four-thirty.”

“We’ll never make the six o’clock news.”

“You’ll make the eleven o’clock.”

“You’re right. And not that many people watch the six o’clock on Saturday anyway.”

He tore off down the stairs. “That was terrific,” I told Denise.

“It was wonderful. Look, if you can’t manipulate your own kid, what kind of a parent are you?” She moved in front of one of the canvases, frowned at it. “What do you think?”

“I think it looks perfect.”

“Well, it doesn’t look perfect,” she said, “but it doesn’t look bad, does it?”

Chapter Twenty

It was lunch hour when I hit the downtown financial district. The narrow streets were full of people. Stock clerks and office girls, those vital cogs in the wheel of free enterprise, passed skinny cigarettes from hand to hand and smoked their little capitalist brains out. Older men in three-piece suits shook their heads at all of this and dove into bars for sanctuary and solace.

I made a phone call. When no one answered I joined the take-out line at a luncheonette and emerged with two sandwiches and a container of coffee in a brown paper bag. I carried it into the lobby of a ten-story office building on Maiden Lane. I was still wearing the hat and the horn-rimmed glasses and carrying the pet carryall that Jared had found so disappointingly empty. I stopped on my way to the elevator to sign Donald Brown on the log sheet, entering my destination (Rm. #702) and my time of arrival (12:18). I took the elevator to the seventh floor and then walked up a flight, having prevaricated about everything but the time. I found the office I was looking for. The lock on the door was rather less challenging than Rubik’s Cube. I set down the pet carrier but held the lunch bag in one hand while I opened the door with the other.

Inside the office I sat down at one of those metal desks with a fake wood-grain top and unpacked my lunch. I opened up one sandwich, removed the slices of pastrami and turkey,