The Burglar on the Prowl (5 page)

O
n the prowl.

The phrase has a wonderful ring to it, doesn’t it? It sounds at once menacing and exciting, deliciously attractive in an unwholesome way. Byron, someone observed, was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”—which evidently made the son of a bitch irresistible. Can’t you picture him going on the prowl?

When a burglar goes on the prowl, he’s improvising. Now improvisation is vastly useful in the arts, and in jazz it’s fundamental; when a jazz musician gives himself free rein to improvise, he finds himself playing notes and creating phrases he hadn’t thought of, unearthing the music from some inner chamber of his private self. When I play a record and listen to some solo piano by, say, Lennie Tristano or Randy Weston or Billy Taylor, I can get lost in the intricacies and subtleties the pianist is working out on the spot, creating this beauty as he threads his way through the notes.

That’s great if you’re a musician, and what I really should have done was stay home and play some of my old LPs, admiring the way those fellows could prowl the keyboard. Because improvisation in burglary is different. It’s a foolproof method for minimizing rewards while maximizing risk, and what kind of a way is that to run a business?

It is, I should point out, not a career I would recommend for anyone. It’s morally reprehensible, for starters, and the fact that I evidently can’t give it up doesn’t mean I’m not well aware of the disagreeably sordid nature of what I do. Such considerations aside, it’s still a poor vocational choice.

Oh, there are attractive elements, and let’s acknowledge them right in front. You’re your own boss, and you never have to sit through a job interview, never have to convince anyone that you have the requisite experience for the task at hand, or, conversely, that you’re not overqualified. No one has to hire you and no one can fire you.

Nor, like the ordinary tradesman, are you dependent upon the good will of your customers. That’s just as well, as ill will is what they’d bear you, and it’s all to the good if they never know more about you than that you’ve paid them a visit. But you don’t have to drum up business, and you don’t have to deal with suppliers, and no avaricious landlord can raise the rent on your business premises, because you don’t have any.

Your business is essentially unaffected by booms and busts in the national or world economy. There’s a built-in hedge against inflation—the value of what you steal keeps pace with your higher costs—and depression won’t throw you out of work. (The competition’s a little keener in bad times, as otherwise solid citizens decide to find out what’s behind Door Number Three, but that’s all right. There’s always enough to go around.)

You don’t need a license from the city or state, either, and there’s no union to join, no dues to pay, and no paperwork to fill out. On the other hand, there’s no pension plan, and since you don’t pay taxes neither do you qualify for Social Security and Medicare and all the other benefits that sparkle like diamonds in the setting of the golden years. No sick days, either, and no paid vacation. No health care. Bottom line, you’re pretty much on your own.

You set your own hours, of course, and you’ll never find yourself putting in a forty-hour week. Even allowing for study and research, you’re not likely to work forty hours in the course of an entire month. Once you get down to cases, time is of the essence, and burglary,
unlike some other pursuits, does not reward the chap who makes the whole thing last as long as possible. The idea is to get in and get out as quickly as possible.

All of this sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Even the drawbacks—no pension, no security, no guaranteed annual wage—are part of the image of the romantic self-sufficient loner, making his rugged-individualist way in the world. You can almost hear country music playing in the background, and Merle Haggard urging you to chuck the effete urban rat race and move to Montana like a man.

Well, there’s a downside. For one thing, you never get to feel like a useful and productive member of society, because you’re not. Even if you can shrug off the natural guilt that comes from taking things that don’t belong to you, even if you rationalize it by arguing with Proudhon that all property is theft, there’s nothing to give you a sense of accomplishment.

A construction worker, walking past a skyscraper, can say to himself, “Hey, I built that.” An obstetrician, lamenting the endless escalation of his malpractice insurance premiums, can console himself with the thought of all the children he brought into the world. A chef, a hooker, a bartender, even a drug dealer, can rejoice at the day’s end with the thought that any number of people feel better for having been his or her customers that day.

And what can a burglar tell himself? “Hey, see that house? I broke into that house, robbed ’em blind. Stole everything but the paint off the walls. Made out like a bandit. And that’s just one of my houses…”

Great. And that’s not the worst of it, either.

Because here’s the thing: you can get caught. And, if they catch you, they’ll throw you in prison.

For all I know, you may have romantic ideas about prison. Maybe you figure you’ll finally get to read Proust. Maybe you watched
Oz,
overlooked the less savory aspects, and decided it would be neat to be a part of all that high drama and snappy dialogue. Well, put those notions right out of your head. I’ve been there—just once, and just briefly, thank God and St. Dismas—and I have to say I learned my lesson.

Because it’s really horrible inside. All the freedom that makes burglary attractive is taken away from you, and people are forever telling you what to do. The guards are unpleasant, and your fellow prisoners are no bargain, either. I mean, consider what they did to get locked up there. All in all, I have to say you meet a better class of people on the D train.

And you won’t read Proust, either, or
War and Peace,
or any of the worthy works you’ve promised yourself you’d get around to if you only had the time. You’ll have plenty of time, but it’s noisy inside, noisy all the time, with people yelling and banging things and doors slamming. If
Oz
had shown that aspect of prison life realistically, nobody could have heard the snappy dialogue. The background roar would have drowned it out.

The right or wrong of it aside, burglary just doesn’t make sense. I know I should give it up, and believe me, I’ve tried. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve sworn off. Once I actually managed to stay away from it for a couple of years, and then I knocked off an apartment, and I was hooked again. It’s an addiction, a compulsion, and so far I haven’t found a 12-Step program that addresses it. I suppose I could start up a chapter of Burglars Anonymous, and we wouldn’t even have to find a church willing to rent us a meeting place. We could just break into a loft somewhere.

Until then, the best I can do is remember the lesson I learned in prison. It wasn’t the one they hoped to teach me—
Thou Shalt Not Steal
—but a pragmatic variation thereof—
Don’t Get Caught.

The way to avoid getting caught is to keep risk to a minimum, and the way to manage that is to size up each potential job in advance and do as much planning and preparation as possible. Consider the Mapes house, if you will. I’d been provided in advance with some useful information about Mapes—the location of his safe, the likelihood that it would contain cash, and the happy knowledge that it was cash he hadn’t reported to the government, which meant he might very well choose not to report the burglary to the authorities. I’d established who lived in the house—just Mapes and
his wife, his kids were grown and had long since moved away—and learned that Mr. and Mrs. Mapes had season tickets to the Met, and that’s where they’d be come Friday night. I’d dropped by Lincoln Center—it’s just five minutes from my apartment—and determined that the opera they were seeing would keep them in their seats until close to midnight.

And then, two nights before the event, I’d gone up for a look-see. I’d assessed the locks and the alarm system, probed the defenses, and kept at it until I saw a way through them. Then I’d gone home, prepared to devote another two days to refining my plan and working out the details.

That didn’t mean nothing could go wrong. Here’s another maxim:
Something can always go wrong
. Either of the Mapeses could come down with a migraine and decide that it was no night for Mozart. Mapes’s daughter-in-law could have kicked her spouse out of the house—if he was a shitheel like his father, God knows she’d have ample cause—prompting the junior Mapes to come home with his tail, among other things, between his legs, ready to hole up in his old room until his wife came to her senses. I could let myself in and find him there, a former college athlete who still worked out regularly at the gym, and who’d lately added a course in martial arts, all the better to defend the family home against a hapless burglar.

I could go on, but you get the point. Something can always go wrong, but that doesn’t mean you just plunge blindly ahead, kicking in the first door you come to.

And here I was, on the prowl. Walking the darkened streets, gloves in one pocket, tools in another, risking life and liberty for no good reason. I knew what I was doing, and I damn well should have known better.

I was acting out, that’s what I was doing. I felt crummy because I didn’t have a girlfriend and I was leading a purposeless existence, and I wanted to do something to change my mood, and I didn’t have the urge to get drunk or chase women, somehow knowing that neither would do me any good.

I caught a cab, had the driver drop me at the corner of Park Avenue and 38th Street. I walked the streets of Murray Hill, knowing I was making a big mistake, knowing nothing good could come of this, knowing I was courting disaster.

And here’s the worst part of all: It felt wonderful.

T
he first place that looked good to me was a house on the south side of 39th Street a little ways east of Park. I studied it from across the street and decided nobody who lived there had to worry where his next meal was coming from. I crossed the street for a closer look and spotted a plaque that identified the place as the Williams Club. (That meant that the members had all attended Williams College, not that they were all guys named Bill.)

For a moment or two I found myself thinking it over. On the plus side, I could pretty much take it for granted that the place would be empty. They’d shut down for the night, and there was no nonsense about leaving a light on to ward off intruders. The windows on all four floors were dark as a burglar’s conscience. Some clubs, I knew, had sleeping rooms they kept available for out-of-town members, or local members with marital problems, but any such residents would be lodged on the top floor, and they’d never hear me moving around below, or do anything about it if they did.

Nor did I expect to encounter a state-of-the-art security system. As far as I knew, there had never been a break-in at a private club in New York, so why spend a few thousand dollars of membership funds to prevent something that wasn’t going to happen? There’d
be a lock on the door, and I was sure it would be a good one, but so what? The better the lock, the greater the satisfaction when the tumblers tumble. Where’s the fun if they leave the door wide open for you? Where’s the sense of accomplishment?

But it’s not enough to get in. You have to get out, too, and with something to show for your efforts. I was fairly sure they had a decent wine cellar, and a cozy billiard room, and a welcoming bar, but I couldn’t see myself waltzing out of there with a couple of bottles in hand, however splendid the vintage.

There wouldn’t be any cash. You don’t part with cash at a private club. You don’t even need plastic, you just sign for everything, and write a check once a month. There’d be paintings on the walls, no doubt in elaborately carved and gilded frames, but they’d likely be portraits of whatever Williams had founded the school, along with various college presidents, distinguished alumni, and star athletes. If you wanted to turn them into cash, you’d have to cut them out of their frames—and then sell the frames, because no one would give you anything for the portraits.

I walked on. Not without some reluctance, I have to say, because I’d already imagined the pleasure I’d take walking silently through the darkened rooms of the club, a fine if somewhat worn carpet underfoot, the heavy drapery redolent with the aroma of expensive cigars. Maybe there’d be a humidor of cigars behind the bar, and I could take one to the reading room, along with a glass of tawny port or a small snifter of brandy. I could sit in an overstuffed leather club chair with my feet on a matching ottoman and a lamp lit at my shoulder, and I could dip into one of the books from the club library, and—

Go home,
an inner voice suggested, but I barely heard it.

I wanted a brownstone.

In the loosest sense of the word, that is. Strictly speaking, a New York brownstone is a structure three or four or five stories tall, with a façade made of—surprise!—brown stone. The term, however, has
stretched to cover similar structures fronted in other materials, including limestone and even brick.

If brownstones can vary some on their outsides, it is within their exterior walls that they approach infinite variety. Many were built originally as single-family homes; typically there’s a parlor floor, usually a half flight up from street level, with a higher ceiling than the two floors above (where the bedrooms are) or the semi-basement below. Others started out as three-or four-family residences, with one apartment per floor. (Tenements, with four apartments to a floor, sometimes sport façades of brown stone, which does tend to confuse things.)

Over the years, a vast number of one-family brownstones have been chopped up for multiple occupancy, some of them converted into rooming houses, with a couple dozen individual tenants. These conversions have themselves occasionally been reconverted in the process of neighborhood gentrification, turned into three-family dwellings or even all the way back into single-family houses.

Murray Hill was a neighborhood that had never declined significantly, and as far as I knew none of its brownstones had ever had more than one apartment to a floor. Many were still one-family dwellings. A few had commercial tenants on the lower floors, with residential apartments above. Some were private clubs—I’d already stumbled on one of those—and a few were entirely commercial, but the greater portion had people living in them, and looked to be better targets of opportunity than the apartment buildings, which almost all had doormen or security cameras or both.

Although the uniform might lead you to think otherwise, the average New York doorman is a less formidable bulwark of security than the Beefeaters posted at the Tower of London. Under the right circumstances, I’m more than willing to try to flimflam a doorman. But these were by no means the right circumstances. I didn’t know the names of any of the tenants, didn’t have a particular apartment targeted, and knew I’d be a lot better off with a brownstone.

So I walked around trying to decide which one to hit.

I must have wandered around for a good half hour, and it may have been closer to forty-five minutes. That’s a lot of time to devote to an essentially random choice, almost on a par with feeling every last ticket stub before drawing one out of a hat. There’s a limited amount you can learn about a house by strolling past it, and all I can think is that I may have been trying to outlast the impulse, to walk and walk and walk until the compulsion to burgle left me and I could go home and get some sleep.

No such luck. I stopped abruptly in front of a brownstone (with a façade of actual brown stone, as it happens) on East 36th between Lexington and Third. There was a travel agent on the ground floor, while the parlor floor was occupied by a gallery dealing in tribal art; the window was lit, and most of what I saw was Oceanic, along with a handful of African pieces, including a Benin bronze leopard and a mask that looked Dogon to my admittedly untrained eye.

The gallery figured to have some sort of security system, but I’d have passed it up even if the door had been wide open. You couldn’t walk down the street with your arms full of primitive tribal artifacts. That’ll draw attention, even in New York. And, even if you got away with it, where would you sell the stuff?

I mounted the steps, checked out the nameplates next to the three doorbells. (The basement travel agency had its own entrance a half-flight down from street level.)
Ladislas Szabo Gallery,
read the bottommost nameplate. The one above it said
J. Feldmaus,
while the top one said simply
Creeley.

Creeley or Feldmaus, Feldmaus or Creeley. I’d have to decide, but I didn’t have to decide yet. First I had to get into the building.

There was a double set of doors, one leading into the vestibule, the other leading from that little antechamber into the building’s interior. Both sported locks, but neither put one in mind of the Gordian knot. I studied the first one, stroked the cylinder with the tip of my forefinger, and wouldn’t have been overly surprised if that had been enough to make it pop open. But it wasn’t, so I took out my ring of tools and glanced over my shoulder before I got down to business.

And saw a police cruiser from the local precinct, just moseying along, keeping an unblinking eye on things.

And, if they were looking my way, what could they see? Just a harmless-looking fellow, respectably turned out in khakis and a blazer, fitting his key in the lock with no more difficulty than you’d expect after a round or two (or three or four) at the gin joint around the corner. The lock was a sweetie, I could have opened it with a toothpick, and it surrendered in no time at all, and only when I was within the vestibule did I take another look at the street. The police car was nowhere to be seen.

Comforting, though, to know they’re on the job.

I took a moment to put on my Pliofilm gloves—now that would have caught a cop’s eye, a man putting on clear plastic gloves before unlocking his own front door—and then I opened the inner door with not much more difficulty than I’d had with its outer cousin. I closed it quietly and stood there with no more light than filtered in from the street, stood there listening to the house.

It was, as far as I could tell, as still as a tomb.

I climbed a flight of stairs and stopped in front of the door of the Feldmaus apartment. The name, a new one on me, was German, and I knew just about enough of that language to translate it as
field mouse
. Creeley is Irish, I think, or possibly Scots-Irish, and I’ve no idea what it means. A creel is the woven basket a fisherman keeps his catch in, but I can’t see how that could enter into the equation.

Creeley or Feldmaus? Feldmaus or Creeley?

All things being equal, one’s best advised to take the apartment on the lower floor. One less floor to climb up, and, more to the point, one less floor to descend from on the way out. No light showed beneath the Feldmaus door. I listened for a long moment at that door, heard nothing whatsoever, took a breath, and rang the Feldmaus bell.

And once again heard nothing, nothing but the bell itself, but waited, waited patiently, and was just about to ring again when, yes, I heard footsteps, and then the sort of grunt you utter when you bump into something, probably because you’re stumbling around in the dark. The footsteps stopped, then resumed.

Was the top-floor tenant male or female? I didn’t know, and slurred my way accordingly. “Mis’ Creeley?” I called through the door.

The footsteps stopped again, and the silence was eloquent. Then a male voice, thickened with sleep and irritation, said, “Up a flight.”

“I say, terribly sorry.” For some reason I was affecting an English accent.

“Fucking idiot,” Feldmaus said, but the words didn’t have much force to them. I headed for the stairs, and heard his footsteps heading back to bed.

A flight up, I went through the same routine at Creeley’s door. I determined that no light showed below it or through the keyhole, then put my finger on the buzzer and buzzed away. When I heard Creeley’s approaching footsteps, I knew just what I would do. I’d say “Mister Feldmaus?” and I wouldn’t have to fudge the first word, because I’d established that Feldmaus was a man. (There might be a Mrs. Feldmaus as well, for all I knew, but that was neither here nor there.)

Then Creeley, Ms. or Mr., would tell me Feldmaus was a flight below, and I’d excuse myself, using the same English accent that had served me so well thus far. And then I’d go downstairs, not one flight but two, and then I’d go out of the building and, please God, catch the first cab I saw and go home.

But I didn’t hear any footsteps.

I rang again, and got the same non-response. I put my ear to the door and listened to the silence.

There were three locks on the door. I unlocked all three of them, or at least I thought I did, but the one in the middle was unlocked to begin with, so picking it only served to lock it, as I found out when I went to open the door. I picked it again, retracting the bolt I’d unwittingly extended, and now the door opened.

And in I went.