And got up and looked up two telephone numbers and dialed them in turn. No one answered my first call. My second was answered after two or three rings, and I chatted briefly with the person who answered it. Then I tried the first number again and let it ring an even dozen times. A dozen rings comes to one minute, but when you’re calling it seems longer than that, and when someone else is calling and you let the phone go unanswered, it seems like an hour and a half.
So far so good.
I had to decide between the brown suit and the blue suit, and I wound up choosing the blue. I almost always do, and at this rate the brown’ll still be in good shape when its lapels come back into style again. I wore a blue oxford button-down shirt and selected a striped tie which would probably have indicated to an Englishman that I’d been cashiered from a good regiment. To an American it would be no more than a mark of sincerity and fiscal integrity. I got the knot right on the first try and chose to regard that as a favorable omen.
Navy socks. Scotch-grained black loafers, less comfortable than running shoes but rather more conventional. And comfy enough once I’d slipped in my custom-made orthotic arch supports.
I took up my attaché case, a slimmer and more stylish affair than my book thief’s, covered with beige Ultrasuede and glowing with burnished brass fittings. I filled its several compartments with the tools of my trade-a pair of rubber gloves with their palms cut out, a ring of cunning steel implements, a roll of adhesive tape, a pencil-beam flashlight, a glass cutter, a flat strip of celluloid and another of spring steel, and, oh, a bit of this and a little of that. Were I to be lawfully seized and searched, the contents of that case would earn me an upstate vacation as a guest of the governor.
My stomach did a little buck-and-wing at the thought, and I was glad I’d skipped dinner. And yet, even as I was recoiling at the idea of stone walls and iron bars, there was a familiar tingle in my fingertips and a racy edge to the blood in my veins. Lord, let me outgrow such childish responses-but, uh, not yet, if you please.
I added a lined yellow legal pad to the attaché case and outfitted my inside breast pocket with a couple of pens and pencils and a slim leatherbound notebook. My outside breast pocket already held a hankie, which I took out, refolded, and tucked back into place.
A phone rang as I walked down the hall to the elevator. It may have been mine. I let it ring. Downstairs, my doorman eyed me with grudging respect. A cab pulled up even as I was lifting a hand to summon it.
I gave the balding driver an address on Fifth Avenue between Seventy-sixth and Seventy-seventh. He took the Sixty-fifth Street transverse across Central Park, and while he talked about baseball and Arab terrorists I watched other runners stepping out the miles. They were at play while I was on my way to work, and how frivolous their pastime seemed to me now.
I stopped the cab a half block from my destination, paid and tipped and got out and walked. I crossed Fifth Avenue and mingled with the crowd at the bus stop, letting myself have a good look at the Impregnable Fortress.
Because that’s what it was. It was a massive, brawny apartment house, built between the wars and looming some twenty-two stories over the park. The Charlemagne, its builder had dubbed it, and its apartments turned up in the Real Estate section of the Sunday Times every once in a while. It had gone co-op some years back, and when its apartments changed hands now they did so for six-figure sums. High six-figure sums.
From time to time I would read or hear of someone, a coin collector, let us say, and I would file his name away for future reference. And then I would learn that he lived at the Charlemagne and I would drop him from my files, because it was akin to learning that he kept all his holdings in a bank vault. The Charlemagne had a doorman and a concierge and attended elevators with closed-circuit television cameras in them. Other closed-circuit devices monitored the service entrance and the fire escapes and God knows what else, and the concierge had a console at his desk where he could (and did) watch six or eight screens at once. The Charlemagne made a positive fetish of security, and while I could readily understand their attitude, you could hardly expect me to approve.
A bus came and went, taking with it most of my companions. The light changed from red to green. I hoisted my case full of burglar’s tools and crossed the street.
The doorman at the Charlemagne made mine look like an usher in a Times Square peep show. He had more gold braid than an Ecuadorian admiral and at least as much self-assurance. He took me in from nose to toes and remained serenely unimpressed.
“Bernard Rhodenbarr,” I told him. “Mr. Onderdonk is expecting me.”
CHAPTER Two
Of course he didn’t take my word for it. He passed me on to the concierge and stood by in case I should give that gentleman any trouble. The concierge rang Onderdonk on the intercom, confirmed that I was indeed expected, and turned me over to the elevator operator, who piloted me some fifty yards closer to heaven. There was indeed a camera in the elevator, and I tried not to look at it while trying not to look as though I was avoiding it, and I felt about as nonchalant as a girl on her first night as a topless waitress. The elevator was a plush affair, paneled in rosewood and fitted with polished brass, with burgundy carpeting underfoot. Whole families have lived in less comfortable quarters, but all the same I was glad to leave it.
Which I did on the sixteenth floor, where the operator pointed to a door and hung around until it opened to admit me. It opened just a couple of inches until the chainlock stopped it, but that was far enough for Onderdonk to get a look at me and smile in recognition. “Ah, Mr. Rhodenbarr,” he said, fumbling with the lock. “Good of you to come.” Then he said, “Thank you, Eduardo,” and only then did the elevator door close and the cage descend.
“I’m clumsy tonight,” Onderdonk said. “There.” And he unhooked the chainlock and drew the door open. “Come right in, Mr. Rhodenbarr. Right this way. Is it as pleasant outside as it was earlier? And tell me what you’ll have to drink. Or I’ve a pot of coffee made, if you’d prefer that.”
“Coffee would be fine.”
“Cream and sugar?”
“Black, no sugar.”
“Commendable.”
He was a man in his sixties, with iron gray hair parted carefully on the side and a weathered complexion. He was on the short side and slightly built, and 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.