“Yeah?”
“While we’re in there, pick her up a little something.”
O’Brien perked up. “I can?”
Keenan gave him a look. “And pay for it.”
“Oh, right,” O’Brien said. “You can’t give stolen goods for a Christmas present.”
“That’s right.”
“It’s very hard,” Keenan whispered, “to pick out a nice piece of jewelry in the dark.”
“Usually in this situation,” O’Brien told him, “the perpetrator just takes a couple handfuls and goes.”
“This isn’t the usual situation,” Keenan said. “Can’t we have a little more light from that flash?”
“You wanna spend Christmas at the precinct, explaining your love life?”
“Well, aim it better, anyway.”
Keenan leaned over the counters of brooches and rings, and O’Brien leaned over Keenan, shining the flashlight at the trays. Two strips of electrician’s tape on the lens left only a narrow slit for light to come through. Gold and silver and semiprecious stones gleamed murkily in that amber light.
“Maybe over on this side,” Keenan said, and they bumped each other as they turned to cross the store.
More trays of underlit goodies. O’Brien whispered, “How you gonna pay for this stuff? You can’t use a credit card when the store’s closed.”
“I got cash. I grabbed what I had, and borrowed from guys at the station.”
“Plan ahead, huh?”
“Yeah. Ouch! That’s my foot under your foot, O’Brien.”
“Sorry.”
Finally, after a longer time than O’Brien usually spent in Henderson’s, Keenan chose a nice bracelet, gold filigree with garnets, a nice Christmasy glow. “Six hundred bucks,” he said, reading the tag. “Good, I thought it’d be more. I’ll just leave the money where the bracelet was.” He did, and said, “What about you, O’Brien? Find anything for your lady friend?”
“I think over on the other side there was something. Hold the flashlight for me, okay?”
“Right. Ow!”
“Sorry.”
Rubbing his shin, Keenan said, “I thought you’d be better than that, in the dark.”
“You mean, get like permanent night vision? It doesn’t work that way. Shine it here, will you, Keenan?”
It wasn’t long before O’Brien found what he wanted, a pretty brooch. “That goes with Grace’s eyes,” he said. “How much is it?”
Keenan squinted at the tag. “Four fifty.”
“I think I can do that.” O’Brien pulled out a wad, thumbed through it. “Yep. And thirty bucks left over.”
He left the money, then eased them out of the store and hooked up the alarm again. “I appreciate this, O’Brien,” Keenan said.
“It was easy,” O’Brien said.
When Grace opened the door, her smiling face was framed by the lustrous Christmas tree across the room. It made her look like an angel. O’Brien said, “Grace, you’re beautiful.”
“What a sweet thing to say,” Grace said, and shut the door, and kissed him.
O’Brien took the little box out of his pocket. “Merry Christmas,” he said.
Grace looked at the little box and her smile faded. “What did you do, Harry?” she asked him.
“I got you a Christmas present. It’s Christmas.”
“You didn’t — Harry, you promised me. You didn’t...”
“Steal it?” O’Brien laughed. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “You can’t give stolen goods for a Christmas present.”
“That’s right.” Grace opened the box and gazed in pleasure at the silver brooch with the green stones. “It’s beautiful!”
“Like you.”
Doubtful again, she said, “Harry? You don’t have any money, I know you don’t. How’d you pay for this?”
“I did some consultancy work for a cop tonight,” O’Brien said, “and he paid me. He doesn’t know he paid me, but he paid me.” In his mind’s eye came the memory of Keenan stumbling around in the dark, his pockets full of he couldn’t be sure how much money. “The thing is,” O’Brien said, as he pinned the brooch on his lady friend, “I got great night vision.”
The Burglar and the Whatsit
“Hey, Sanity Clause,” shouted the drunk from up the hall. “Wait up. C’mere.”
The man in the red Santa Claus suit, with the big white beard on his face and the big heavy red sack on his shoulder, did not wait up, and did not come here, but instead continued to plod on down the hall in this high floor of a Manhattan apartment building in the middle of a cold evening in the middle of December.
“Hey, Sanity! Wait up, will ya?”
The man in the Santa Claus suit did not at all want to wait up, but on the other hand he also did not at all want a lot of shouting in this hall here, because in fact he was not your normal Santa Claus but was something else entirely, which was a burglar, named Jack. This Jack was a burglar who had learned some time ago that if he were to enter apartment buildings costumed like the sort of person who in the normal course of events would carry on himself some sort of large bag or box or reticule or sack, he could probably fill that sack or whatever with any number of valuable items without much risk of his being challenged, questioned, or — in the worst case — arrested.
Often, therefore, this Jack would roam the corridors of the cliff dwellers garbed as, for instance, a mailman or other parcel delivery person, or as a supermarket clerk pushing a cart full of grocery bags (paper, because you can see through plastic, and plastic bags don’t stand up). Just once he’d been a doctor, with a stethoscope and a doctor’s black bag, but that time he’d been snagged at once, for everybody knows doctors don’t make house calls. A master of disguise, Jack even occasionally appeared as a Chinese restaurant delivery guy. The bicycle clip around his right ankle, to protect his pants leg from the putative bicycle’s supposed chain, was the masterstroke of that particular impersonation.
But the best was Santa Claus. First of all, the disguise was so complete, with the false stomach and the beard and the hat and the gloves. Also, the Santa sack was more capacious than almost anything else he could carry. And finally, people liked Santa Claus, and it made the situation more humane, somehow, gentler and nicer, to be smiled upon by the people he’d just robbed.
The downside of Santa was that his season was so short. There was only about a three-week period in December when the appearance of a Santa Claus in an apartment building’s public areas would not raise more questions than it would answer. But those three weeks were the peak of the year for Jack, when he could move in warmth and safety and utter anonymity, his sack full of gifts — not for the nearby residents but from them. And all in peace and quiet, because people leave Santa Claus alone, when they see him they know he’s on his way somewhere, to a party or a chimney or something.
So they leave Santa alone. Except for this drunk here, shouting in the hallway. Jack the burglar didn’t need a lot of shouting in the hallway, and he didn’t want a lot of shouting in the hallway, so with some reluctance he turned around at last and waited up, gazing at the approaching drunk from eyes that were the one false in the costume: They definitely did not twinkle.
The drunk reeled closer and stared at the burglar out of his own awful eyes, like blue eggs sunny-side up. “You’re just the guy I need,” he announced, inaccurately, for clearly what he most urgently needed was both a 12-step program and a whole lot of large, humorless people to enforce it.
The burglar waited, and the drunk leaned against the wall to keep the building from falling over. “If anybody can get the goddamn thing to work,” he said, “it’s Sanity Clause. But don’t talk to me about batteries. Batteries not included is not the problem here.”