Fourteen

If anybody had been waiting to ambush me, there wouldn't have been much I could do about it, short of hopping into a time machine and taking a cram course in the martial arts. But there was no one looming behind my door, no one pressed up against my wall. Whoever had broken in had left, and that was all to the good, although it would have been worlds better if they hadn't come around in the first place.

Unlike the cops who'd dropped in earlier, these sons of bitches (or this son of a bitch, though I tended to think in the plural) had not been to charm school. They'd been through my apartment as if they were a tornado and it was a trailer park. They'd stopped short of outright vandalism, and thus hadn't smashed or slashed anything, which is to say they'd done their dirty work without malice-but you could say the same thing for the tornado, couldn't you?

They'd taken my Mondrian off the wall and set it on the floor, but they hadn't damaged it, nor had they thought to take it away with them. Either they hadn't recognized it or they'd assumed, as everyone does, that it was a worthless copy.

I didn't know what they'd come looking for, but I'd bet it was worth a good deal less than the Mondrian, which would probably bring a couple million dollars at auction, assuming the seller had clear title and a provenance for it. On the underground market, well, who knows what it might bring? I've never been tempted to find out, because what could I buy with the money that I'd enjoy as much as the painting?

And I really enjoyed looking at the painting right now, because it was a lot more pleasant to look at than the rest of the apartment.

They'd done quite a job on it. The books were off the shelves, though they'd at least piled them more or less neatly on the floor. The drawers, dresser and desk, had all been pulled out and upended. The clothes were shoved over to one side of the closet, and, at the rear of the closet, damn it to hell, my custom-designed hiding place, impervious to police searches, had been opened and ransacked.

And ruined in the process. I'd had it constructed like one of those cunning wooden boxes they sell at places like the American Craftsmen's Guild, where you have to push this piece of wood to the left in order to snick this other piece back which enables you to nudge this third piece to the right, at which point the lid pops open. It takes no time at all when you know how it works, but no one's born with that knowledge, and it's not that easy to dope it out, especially if, like all my previous visitors, you don't realize there's a secret cupboard in front of you.

They'd known what they were looking at, though, and hadn't wasted time trying to crack the code. Instead they'd applied brute force, and that was the end of my hidey-hole.

They'd left the passports. I guess they weren't worried that I might skip the country. And they'd left my burglar tools, which, judging from the way they'd forced the door, they wouldn't have known what to do with. They'd also left the electric shaver with the cracked plastic case, the one I'd picked up in Barbara Creeley's apartment.

But they took my money. Last night, when I put my tools away for the second and final time, I'd added the $1120 from Barbara Creeley's icebox to my Get Out of Dodge fund. While I was at it, I counted the stack of bills, so I'm able to tell you just how much the bastards got from me. The grand total, including the night's proceeds, had come to precisely $8357. (And yes, that's an odd sum, because I always make sure I have some small bills in my emergency stash. If you're running for your life, you don't want to have to break a hundred-dollar bill at a toll booth.)

Eight thousand bucks and change. They hadn't come for the money, that was clear, but they found it, and it was money, so they took it. And the hell of it was that I couldn't really blame them.

After all, I'd have done the same thing myself.

The first thing I did was pick up an armload of books and start reshelving them.

That, granted, was pretty stupid. Anyone drawing up a list of priorities for someone in my particular situation would be apt to put the orderly reshelving of my personal library down toward the bottom of the list, somewhere between making a laundry list and flossing. The books were in short stacks on the floor, where I could walk around without tripping over them. They were in a sense safer there than back on their shelves, in that they were in no danger of falling anywhere.

But I'm a bookseller, spending the greater portion of each workday in a used bookstore, buying books every day from people who would rather have money, and selling them in turn to people who'd rather have books. The books usually go out one or two or three at a time, but they come to me in larger quantities; while occasionally a book scout like Mowgli brings in one or two choice items he's turned up, I'm more apt to acquire books by the shopping bag or wheelbarrow or truckload. When I buy a whole library, the books go to my back room, where they repose in cartons until I get around to dealing with them, which I generally do a carton at a time, lugging the box out front and putting the individual volumes in their proper places on my shelves.

That's a task I fit in when I can-and, since an antiquarian bookseller's workday is rarely conducted at a breakneck pace, there's generally plenty of time for it. When things are slow, when there's nothing else to do, I find some books and set about shelving them.

So that's what I was doing, and while I did it I tried to figure out what to do next.

First of all, damage control. The feeling of violation aside, what had I lost?

Well, money. Over eight thousand dollars, which is still a tidy sum, even if it's not what it used to be. (My grandfather Grimes paid eight thousand dollars for the house my mother was born in, while nowadays there are people in Manhattan -rich ones, admittedly-who pay that much every month in rent.) It hurt to lose the money, but that's the thing about money: it's always painful to lose it, but it's never more pain than you can stand.

Because all it takes to replace it is other money. Barbara Anne Creeley couldn't replace her class ring, but I could replace the eight grand, and when I did the pain I now felt would go away. So I hated to see my Get Out of Dodge fund depleted all the way to zero, but I knew I'd build it up again, one way or another.

Besides the money, all I could see that I'd lost was time, the time it would take me to make my apartment look as it had before my visitors had come. A certain number of hours, plus a certain number of dollars to replace the lock they'd broken and, now that the horse was stolen, add a more serviceable lock that would lessen the likelihood of the same thing happening again. And some more dollars for a cleaning woman, to whisk away the traces of an alien presence. My neighbor Mrs. Hesch had a woman who cleaned for her once a week, and I'd recruited her occasionally in the past, and could do so again. That would have to wait until the books were on the shelves and the drawers back where they belonged, so general tidying came first, but-

Oh, hell. I was forgetting the damage they'd done to my formerly secret compartment. The fellow who built it for me had moved to the West Coast- Washington State, if I remembered correctly-and I had no idea who I could find to do work like that. If I could reach him I could ask him to recommend someone, but I didn't know what town he'd gone to or if he was still there, and his name was David Miller, so I could forget about trying a computer search. The thing about computer searches is that they make finding a needle in a haystack as easy as falling off a bicycle. Nothing to it. But finding the right David Miller would be more like trying to find a particular needle in a needle stack. I knew better than to try.