The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online Page B

and me to stay here and I don’t like it.”
    “Why?”
    “Well, who knows what she’s going to try to pull?”
    “I have to go downtown anyway. Somebody’s bringing me a schnauzer at eleven. Shit, I don’t have much time, do I? I can’t face a schnauzer with a head like I’ve got. Thank God it’s a miniature schnauzer. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to wash a giant schnauzer on a day like this.”
    “Stop at your apartment on the way. If you’ve got time.”
    “I’ll make time. I have to feed Ubi, anyway. You don’t think—”
    “What?”
    “That they took him too? Maybe that’s why they want me to go to my apartment.”
    “They said to check your mailbox.”
    “Oh, God,” she said.
    When she left I went to work on Appling’s stamp collection. I suppose it was a cold-blooded thing to do, what with Archie’s life hanging in the balance, but that still left him with eight and I wanted to render the Appling stamps unidentifiable as soon as possible. I sat under a good light at my kitchen table with a pair of stamp tongs and a box of glassine envelopes and a Scott catalog, and I transferred the stamps a set at a time from their mounts to the envelopes, making the appropriate notation on each envelope. I didn’t bother figuring out the value. That would be another operation, and it could wait.
    I was laboring over George V high values from Trinidad & Tobago when the phone rang. “What’s this crap about my mailbox?” Carolyn demanded. “There’s nothing in it but the Con Ed bill.”
    “How’s Ubi?”
    “Ubi’s fine. He looks lost and lonely and his heart is probably breaking, but aside from that he’s fine. Did that Nazi call back?”
    “Not yet. Maybe she meant the mailbox at your shop.”
    “There’s no box there. There’s just a slot in the door.”
    “Well, maybe she got a wire crossed. Go wash the saluki anyway and see what happens.”
    “It’s not a saluki, it’s a schnauzer, and I know what’ll happen. I’ll wind up smelling of wet dog for a change. Call me when you hear from them, okay?”
    “Okay,” I said, and fifteen minutes later the phone rang again and it was the mystery woman. No accent this time, and no elaborate runaround, either. She talked and I listened, and when she was done I sat for a minute and thought and scratched my head and thought some more. Then I put Appling’s stamps away and called Carolyn.
     
    And now we were in a small room on the second floor of the gallery. We’d followed my caller’s directions to the letter, and we were accordingly standing in front of a painting that looked remarkably familiar.
    A small bronze rectangle affixed to the wall beside it bore the following information: Piet Mondrian. 1872-1944. Composition with Color, 1942. Oil on canvas, 86 x 94 cm. Gift of Mr. & Mrs. J. McLendon Barlow.
    I wrote the dimensions in my pocket notebook. In case you haven’t caved in and learned to think metric, they worked out in real measurement to something like 35 by 39 inches, with the height greater than the width. The background color was white, tinted a little toward gray by either time or the artist. Black lines crisscrossed the canvas, dividing it into squares and rectangles, several of which were painted in primary colors. There were two red areas, two blue ones, and a long narrow section of yellow.
    I stepped closer and Carolyn laid a hand on my arm. “Don’t straighten it,” she urged. “It’s fine the way it is.”
    “I was just having a closer look.”
    “Well, there’s a guard by the door,” she said, “and he’s having a closer look at us. There’s guards all over the place. This is crazy, Bern.”
    “We’re just looking at pictures.”
    “And that’s all we’re gonna do, because this is impossible. You could no more get a painting out of this place than you could get a child into it.”
    “Relax,” I said. “All we’re doing is looking.”
    The building where we stood, like the painting in front of us,