The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - By Lawrence Block Page 0,68

of New York’s polluted atmosphere to counteract the effects of three and a half large whiskeys, and I felt a little woozy in the elevator. The light in there, unkind as it was to my companion, didn’t help either. We walked to her door, and she had more trouble opening it with the key than I generally have without one, but I let her do the honors and she got it open.

Inside, she said, “Oh, Donald!” and swept me in her arms. She was almost my height, and there was quite a bit of her. She wasn’t fat or blowsy or anything. There was just a lot of her, that’s all.

I said, “You know what? I think we could both use a drink.”

We used three. She drank hers and I dumped mine in an areca palm that looked as though it was going to die soon anyway.

Perhaps it was just intimidated by its surroundings. The apartment looked like a spread in Architectural Digest, with not much furniture and a lot of carpeted platforms and such. The only picture on the wall was a mural and it was all loops and swirls without a single right angle to be found in it. Mondrian would have hated it, and you’d have had to take the whole wall to steal it.

“Ah, Donald—”

I’d hoped she might dim out with all that whiskey, but it didn’t seem to be affecting her at all. And I wasn’t getting a whole lot more sober with the passage of time. I thought, Oh, what the hell, and I said, “Eve!” and we went into a clinch.

There was no bed in her bedroom, just another carpeted platform with a mattress on it. It did the job. And so, much to my surprise, did I.

It was odd. At first I just concentrated on not thinking about my mother’s younger sister, which should have been a cinch in view of the fact that she’d never had one. Then I tried to build a fantasy incorporating our age differences, imagining myself as an eager youth of seventeen and Eve as a ripe, knowing woman of thirty-six. That didn’t work too well because I imagined myself right back into a state of coltish clumsiness and embarrassment.

Finally I just gave up and forgot who either of us was, and that worked. I don’t know if the whiskey helped or hindered, but one way or another I stopped thinking about what was going on and just let it happen, and damned if it didn’t.

Go figure.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Afterward, the hardest part was staying awake long enough for her to fall asleep. I kept catching myself just as my mind was starting to drift, following some abstruse line of thought along one of those tangled paths that lead to Dreamland. Each time I yanked myself conscious, and each time it felt like a narrow escape.

When her breathing changed I stayed put for a minute or two, then slipped off the mattress and dropped from the sleeping platform to the floor. The carpet was deep and I padded silently across it, reclaimed my clothes, and put them on in the living room. I was almost to the door when I remembered my five-foot tube and went back for it. “I’ll bet you’re an architect,” Eve had said, “and I’ll bet you’ve got blueprints in there.” I’d asked her how she’d guessed. “Those glasses,” she said, “and that hat. And those sensible sensible shoes. Hell, Donald, you look like an architect.”

I squinted through the judas, unlocked the door, cracked it and checked the hallway. Outside, I thought of using my picks to lock the door behind me and decided against it. Eve’s lifestyle was such that she probably slept behind unlocked doors as a regular thing. For that matter, it wasn’t inconceivable that departing guests often went through her purse on the way out, or that she considered such actions not theft but a quid pro quo. A fair exchange, they say, is no robbery.

I used the fire stairs to reach the eleventh floor. For a moment I couldn’t remember which door led to the Appling apartment, and then I spied the telltale burglar alarm keyhole, the one to which no alarm system was attached. I had my ring of picks in hand and one slim piece of steel probing the innards of the Poulard lock when something stopped me.

And a good thing, too, because there were people inside that apartment. I must have heard something that made me put