The Burglar on the Prowl by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online Page B

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