The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza

  At the corner of Ninth Avenue Carolyn said, “Somebody else must have known about their trip. That they were taking the dog and all. Unless someone was just going over the roofs and got lucky.”

  “Not very likely.”

  “No. Wanda must have told someone else. Nobody heard it from me, Bernie.”

  “People talk,” I said, “and a good burglar learns how to listen. If we’d gotten there first we’d have scored a lot bigger, but this way we can travel light. And we’re free and clear, look at it that way. Those clowns went through that poor house like Cromwell’s men at Drogheda, and it shouldn’t take the cops too long to catch up with them. And we didn’t leave a trace, so they’ll hang the whole thing on them.”

  “I thought of that. What did you think of the Chagall?”

  “I hardly looked at it.”

  “I was wondering how it would look in my apartment.”

  “Where?”

  “I was thinking maybe over the wicker chair.”

  “Where you’ve got the Air India poster now?”

  “Yeah. I was thinking maybe it’s time I outgrew my travel poster phase. I might want to have the litho rematted, but that’s no big deal.”

  “We’ll see how it looks.”

  “Yeah.” Three cabs sailed by, all with their off-duty signs lit. “I just took it because I wanted to take something, you know? I didn’t want to leave empty-handed.”

  “I know.”

  “I had figured you’d be cracking the safe while I went through the drawers, but some bastards already went through the drawers and there was nothing for me to do. I felt sort of out of it.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “So I stole the Chagall.”

  “It’ll probably look terrific over the chair, Carolyn.”

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  CHAPTER

  Three

  Abel Crowe lived in one of those towering prewar apartment buildings on Riverside Drive. Our taxi let us out in front and we walked around the corner to the entrance on Eighty-ninth Street. The doorman was planted in the entranceway, holding his post like Horatius at the bridge. His face was a glossy black, his uniform a rich cranberry shade. It sported more gold braid than your average rear admiral and he wore it with at least as much pride of place.

  He gave Carolyn a quick look-see, then checked me out from haircut to Pumas. He did not appear impressed. He was no more moved by my name, and while Abel Crowe’s name didn’t quite strike him with awe, either, at least it took the edge off his hostility. He rang upstairs on the intercom, spoke briefly into the mouthpiece, then informed us we were expected.

  “Apartment 11-D,” he said, and waved us on to the elevator.

  A lot of those buildings have converted to self-service elevators as a means of cutting overhead in the name of modernization, but Abel’s building had gone co-op a few years ago and the tenants were big on keeping up the old standards. The elevator attendant wore a uniform like the doorman’s but didn’t fill it nearly so well. He was a runty wheyfaced youth with a face that had never seen the sun, and about him there hung an aroma that gave the lie to the advertiser’s assurance that vodka leaves you breathless. He did his job, though, wafting us ten flights above sea level and waiting to see that we went to the designated apartment, and that the tenant was happy to see us.

  There was no question about that last point.

  “My dear Bernard!” Abel cried out, gripping me urgently by the shoulders. “And the beloved Carolyn!” He let go of me and embraced my partner in crime. “I’m so glad you could come,” he said, ushering us inside. “It is half past eleven. I was beginning to worry.”

  “I said between eleven and twelve, Abel.”

  “I know, Bernard, I know, and all the same I began at half past ten to check my watch, and I seemed to be doing so every three minutes. But come in, come in, let us make ourselves comfortable. I have a house full of wonderful things to eat. And of course you’ll want something to drink.”

  “Of course we will,” Carolyn agreed.

  He took a moment to lock up, sliding the massive bolt of the Fox lock into its mount on the jamb. Fox makes a couple of police locks. The kind I have features a five-foot steel bar fixed at a forty-five-degree angle between a plate set into the floor and a catch on the door. Abel’s was a simpler mechanism but almost as good insurance against somebody’s knocking the door down with anything lighter than a medieval battering ram. It featured a bolt two feet long and a good inch wide, made of tempered steel and mounted securely on the door and sliding sideways to engage an equally solid catch on the doorjamb. I’d learned on a previous visit that an identical lock secured the apartment’s other door, the one leading to the service area and freight elevator.

  I don’t suppose most of the tenants bothered with such heavy-duty locks, not in a building so well protected by the staff. But Abel had his reasons.

  His occupation, for one. Abel was a fence, and probably the best in the New York area when it came to top-quality collections of rare stamps and coins. He would take other things as well—jewelry, objets d’art—but stamps and coins were the sort of stolen goods he was happiest to receive.

  Fences are natural targets for thieves. You’d think they’d be off-limits, that criminals would forbear to bite the hands that feed them, but it doesn’t work that way. A fence generally has something on hand worth stealing—either goods he’s lately purchased or the cold cash with which he conducts all his business. Perhaps as important, he can’t complain to the police. As a result, most of the fences I know live in fully serviced buildings, double-lock their doors, and tend to have a gun or two within easy reach.

  On the other hand, Abel might have been almost as security-conscious however he earned his living. He had spent the Second World War in Dachau, and not as a guard. I can understand how the experience might leave one with a slight streak of healthy paranoia.

  Abel’s living room, richly paneled in dark woods and lined with bookshelves, looks westward over Riverside Park and the Hudson River to New Jersey. Almost a year earlier, on the Fourth of July, the three of us had watched the Macy’s fireworks display from Abel’s windows, listening to a radio broadcast of classical music with which the fireworks were presumably coordinated and putting away vast quantities of pastry.

  We were seated in the same fashion now, Carolyn and I with glasses of Scotch, Abel with a mug of espresso topped with fresh whipped cream. WNCN was playing a Haydn string quartet for us, and outside there was nothing more spectacular to watch than the cars on the West Side Highway and the joggers circumvolving the park. No doubt some of the latter had shoes just like mine.

  When Haydn gave way to Vivaldi, Abel set his empty mug aside and leaned back in his chair with his pink hands folded over his ample abdomen. Only his midsection was fat; his hands and arms were lean, and there was not much spare flesh on his face. But he had a Santa Claus belly and upper thighs that bulged in his blue gabardine trousers, attributes quite consistent with his boundless enthusiasm for rich desserts.

  According to him, he had never been fat until after the war. “When I was in the camps,” he had told me once, “I thought constantly of meat and potatoes. I dreamed of fat sausages and great barons of beef. Crown roasts of pork. Kids roasted whole on a spit. Meanwhile I grew gaunt and my skin shrank on my bones like leather left to dry in the sun. When the American forces liberated the camps they weighed us. God knows why. Most fat men claim to be large-boned. Doubtless some of them are. I have small bones, Bernard. I tipped the scales, as they say, at ninety-two pounds.

  “I left Dachau clinging to one certainty. I was going to eat and grow fat. And then I discovered, to my considerable astonishment, that I had no interest in the meat and potatoes I had grown up on. That SS rifle butts had relieved me of my own teeth was only a partial explanation, for I had for meat itself a positive aversion—I could not eat a sausage without feeling I was biting into a plump Teutonic finger. And yet I had an appetite, a bottom
less one, but it was a most selective and specific appetite. I wanted sugar. I craved sweetness. Is there anything half so satisfying as knowing precisely what one wishes and being able to obtain it? If I could afford it, Bernard, I would engage a live-in pastry cook and keep him occupied around the clock.”

  He’d had a piece of Linzer torte with his coffee and had offered us a choice of half a dozen decadently rich pastries, all of which we’d passed for the time being while we tended to our drinks.

  “Ah, Bernard,” he said now. “And the lovely Carolyn. It is so very good to see you both. But the night is growing old, isn’t it? You have brought me something, Bernard?”

  My attaché case was close at hand. I opened it and drew out a compact volume of Spinoza’s Ethics, an English edition printed in London in 1707 and bound in blue calf. I passed it to Abel and he turned it over and over in his hands, stroking the smooth old leather with his long and slender fingers, studying the title page at some length, flipping through the pages.

  He said, “Regard this, if you will. ‘It is the part of the wise man to feed himself with moderate pleasant food and drink, and to take pleasure with perfumes, with the beauty of living plants, dress, music, sport and theaters, and other places of this sort which man may use without any injury to his fellows.’ If Baruch Spinoza were in this room I’d cut him a generous piece of Linzer torte, and I don’t doubt he’d relish it.” He returned to the title page. “This is quite nice,” he allowed. “1707. I have an early edition in Latin, printed in Amsterdam. The first edition was when, 1675?”

  “1677.”

  “My own copy is dated 1683, I believe. The only copy I own in English is the Everyman’s Library edition with the Boyle translation.” He moistened a finger, turned some more pages. “Quite nice. A little water damage, a few pages foxed, but quite nice for all that.” He read to himself for a moment, then closed the book with a snap. “I might find a spot for this on my shelves,” he said carelessly. “Your price, Bernard?”

  “It’s a gift.”

  “For me?”

  “If you can find a spot for it. On your shelves.”

  He colored. “But I expected no such thing! And here am I, mean-spirited enough to point out water damage and the odd foxed page as if to lay the groundwork for some hard bargaining. Your generosity shames me, Bernard. It’s a splendid little volume, the binding’s really quite gorgeous, and I’m thrilled to have it. You’re quite certain you don’t want any money for it?”

  I shook my head. “It came into the store with a load of fine bindings, decorator specials with nothing substantial between the covers. You wouldn’t believe what people have seen fit to wrap in leather down through the years. And I can sell anything with a decent binding. Interior decorators buy them by the yard. I was sorting this lot and I spotted the Spinoza and thought of you.”

  “You are kind and thoughtful,” he said, “and I thank you.” He drew a breath, let it out, turned to place the book on the table beside his empty mug. “But Spinoza alone did not bring you out at this hour. You have brought me something else, have you not?”

  “Three things, actually.”

  “And they will not be gifts.”

  “Not quite.”

  I took a small velvet bag from the attaché case, handed it to him. He weighed it in his hand, then spilled its contents into his palm. A pair of teardrop earrings, emeralds, quite simple and elegant. Abel drew a jeweler’s loupe from his breast pocket and fixed it in his eye. While he was squinting through it at the stones, Carolyn crossed to the sideboard where the liquor and pastries were laid out. She freshened her drink. She was back in her chair and her glass was a third empty by the time Abel was through examining the emerald earrings.

  “Good color,” he said. “Slight flaws. Not garbage, Bernard, but nothing extraordinary, either. Did you have a figure in mind?”

  “I never have a figure in mind.”

  “You should keep these. Carolyn should wear them. Model them for us, liebchen.”

  “I don’t have pierced ears.”

  “You should. Every woman should have pierced lobes, and emerald teardrops to wear in them. Bernard, I wouldn’t care to pay more than a thousand for these. I think that’s high. I’m basing that figure on a retail estimate of five thousand, and the true price might be closer to four. I will pay a thousand, Bernard. No more than that.”

  “Then a thousand is the price.”

  “Done,” he said, and returned the earrings to their velvet bag and placed the bag on top of Spinoza’s Ethics. “You have something else?”

  I nodded and took a second velvet bag from the attaché case. It was blue—the one with the earrings had been the color of the doorman’s uniform—and it was larger, and equipped with a drawstring. Abel undrew the string and took out a woman’s wristwatch with a rectangular case, a round dial, and a gold mesh band. I don’t know that he needed the loupe, but he fixed it in his eye all the same and took a close look.

  “Piaget,” he said. “What time do you have, Bernard?”

  “Twelve oh seven.”

  “Mr. Piaget agrees with you to the minute.” I wasn’t surprised; I’d wound and set the watch when I took it from the safe. “You’ll excuse me for a moment? I just want to look at a recent catalog. And won’t you help yourselves to some of those pastries? I have eclairs, I have Sacher torte, I have Schwarzwälder kuchen. Have something sweet, both of you. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  I broke down and took an eclair. Carolyn selected a wedge of seven-layer cake with enough chocolate between the layers to make an entire high school class break out. I filled two mugs with coffee and two small snifters with tawny Armagnac that was older than we were. Abel came back, visibly pleased to see us eating, and announced that the retail price of the watch was $4,950. That was a little higher than I’d thought.

  “I can pay fifteen hundred,” he said. “Because I can turn it over so quickly and easily. Satisfactory?”

  “Satisfactory.”

  “That’s twenty-five hundred so far. You said three items, Bernard? The first two are nice merchandise, but I hope they don’t represent too great an investment of time and effort on your part. Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to keep them? Ears can be pierced readily enough, and painlessly, I’m told. And wouldn’t the watch grace your wrist, Carolyn?”

  “I’d have to keep taking it off every time I washed a dog.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” He grinned widely. “What I should do,” he said, “is put aside both of these articles and make you a present of them when the two of you get married. I’d have to find something suitable for you as well, Bernard, though wedding presents are really for the bride, don’t you think? What about it, Carolyn? Shall I put these away?”

  “You’d have a long wait, Abel. We’re just good friends.”

  “And business associates, eh?”

  “That too.”

  He chuckled heartily and sat back and folded his hands once again on his belly, an expectant look on his face. I let him wait. Then he said, “You said you had three items.”

  “Two earrings and a watch.”

  “Ah, my mistake. I thought the earrings counted as a single unit. Then the total sum is twenty-five hundred dollars.”

  “Well, there is something else you might want to look at,” I said carelessly, and from the attaché case I produced a brown kraft envelope two inches square. Abel shot me a look, then took the envelope from me. Inside it was a hinged Plexiglas box just small enough to fit into the envelope, and inside that was a wad of tissue paper. Abel opened the tissue paper very deliberately, his fingers moving with the precision of one accustomed to handling rare coins. When a nick or a scratch can reduce a coin’s value substantially, when a finger mark can begin the hateful process of corrosion, one learns to grasp coins by their edges and to hold them gently but securely.

  The object Abel Crowe held gently but securely between the thumb and index finger of his left hand was a metallic disc jus
t under seven-eighths of an inch in diameter—or just over two centimeters, if you’re into metrics. It was, in short, the size and shape of a nickel, the sort of nickel that’s the price of the good cigar this country is purported to need. It was the color of a nickel, too, although its frosted features and mirrorlike field were a ways removed from anything you’d be likely to have in your pocket.

  By and large, though, it looked like a nickel. And well it might, for that was precisely what it was.

  All it lacked was Thomas Jefferson’s head on the one side and his house on the other. The side Abel looked at first showed a large V within a wreath open at the top, the word Cents inscribed directly beneath the V. Circling the wreath were the issuing nation’s name and motto—United States of America above, E Pluribus Unum below.

  Abel flicked me a glance from beneath upraised eyebrows, then deftly turned the coin in his fingers. Its obverse depicted a woman’s head facing left, her coronet inscribed Liberty. Thirteen stars circled Miss Liberty, and beneath her head was the date.

  “Gross Gott!” said Abel Crowe. And then he closed his eyes and said another long sentence that I didn’t understand, possibly in German, possibly in some other language.

  Carolyn looked at me, her expression quizzical. “Is that good or bad?” she wanted to know.

  I told her I wasn’t sure.

  CHAPTER

  Four

  He didn’t say anything else until he’d looked long and hard at both sides of the coin through his jeweler’s loupe. Then he wrapped the coin in tissue paper, returned it to the Plexiglas box and tucked the box into the kraft envelope, which he placed on the table beside him. With an effort he heaved himself out of his chair to fetch another slab of nutritionist’s nightmare and a fresh cup of coffee mil schlag. He sat down, ate for a while, set his plate down half finished, sipped the coffee through the thick whipped cream, and glared at me.

  “Well?” he demanded. “Is it genuine?”