I read continually about burglars who experience some sort of deep, even sexual pleasure at the moment of entry, as though the house were a long-desired body to which they had finally gained access. For me, a house is an inconvenience. It’s a bunch of walls surrounding something I want. In order to get what I want, I have to put myself inside the walls, and then get out as fast as I can. I figure that the risk of being caught increases by about five percent each minute once you get beyond four minutes. Anybody who stays inside longer than twenty to twenty-five minutes deserves a free ride in the back of a black-and-white.
The alarm was exactly where Janice said it would be, blinking frantically just around the corner from the front door, and the code she gave me calmed it right down. The dogs were going nuts in the back, but that was where they seemed to be staying. I gave it a count of ten with one foot figuratively outside the door just to make sure, but all they did was bark and howl and scrabble with their toenails at a glass door somewhere on the far side of the house. When I was certain none of them was toting his fangs from room to room inside, I went back out onto the porch, used the dolly to tilt the carton, and wheeled it inside. Then I closed the door.
Getting in is more than half of it; in fact, I figure that a safe entry is about sixty percent of the work. Finding what you want will burn up another twenty to thirty percent, and getting out is pretty much a snap. Usually.
The house was a temple of gleam. Entire quarries in Italy had been strip-mined to pave the floors, and many young Italian craftspersons had probably died of dust inhalation to bring the stone to this pitch of polish. I was in a circular grand entry hall, maybe thirty-five feet high, dominated by a massive chandelier in what might have been Swarovski crystal, dangling by a heavy golden chain. To the right was a circular stair curving up the wall of the hall, with a teak banister that had been sanded, polished, stained, polished, varnished, polished, and varnished again.
Not for the first time, I asked myself what Mr. and/or Mrs. Huston did for a living.
Despite the museum-like grandeur of the entry, there was a homely smell that took me back years and years, to my grandmother’s house. I needed a second to identify it as camphor, the active ingredient in mothballs. We don’t use mothballs so much any more, maybe because we have fewer natural fabrics, but they were being used here. The odor suggested a certain strained fussiness, not an attitude that would be comfortable with Rottweilers leaving piles on the rugs.
The camphor seemed to come from my right, where a set of steps led up to the living room, so perhaps the mothballs were intended to protect the carpets. Straight ahead, a set of five steps led up to the rest of the first floor, accounting for the high front windows. The piece I had been sent for was all the way upstairs, in what Janice had described as the marital theme park.
As I climbed the curving stairway, the dogs reached a new pitch of frenzy, and I began to think about accelerating the process. Some neighbor might get pissed off and call the cops, and the cops, in turn, might wonder why the Fidos were so manic. I took the stairs two at a time.
The master bedroom was bigger than Versailles. Three things about its occupants were immediately obvious. First, they were sexually adventurous and willing to pay for it. The ceiling was mirrored, the bedspread was some sort of black fur, a shelf recessed in the wall above the head of the bed held a garish assortment of toys, lubricants, and, for all I could tell, hors d’oeuvres. There were at least a dozen little bottles of amyl nitrate under different brand names, and a crystal bowl of white powder on a mirror, with a razor gleaming beside it. Over against one wall was an actual gynecologist’s table. The stirrups had sequins on them.
The second thing that was apparent was that they both thought Mrs. Huston was a knockout. There were at least a dozen large color photos of her, blond, a little over-vibrant, and seriously under-dressed, along the wall to the right of the bed. She didn’t look like someone who puts mothballs on her carpets, if only because they’d aggravate carpet burn. Of course, it was an assumption that the woman wearing, in some of the pictures, no more than a coat of baby oil, was Mrs. Huston, but if she wasn’t, the relationship was even stranger than the bedroom would suggest. The odd energy she was projecting in some of the pictures might have owed something to the bowl of white powder on the shelf. Even without the energy, even without the baby oil, she had a kind of raw, slightly crude appeal that probably interested men whose tastes were coarser than mine.
The third obvious thing was that-while they might have been unanimous in their admiration of Mrs. Huston-they had very different tastes in art. On the far wall were five, count them if you can bear to look at them long enough, five of those flesh-puckering big-eyed children painted in the 1950s by Mr. Keane or Mrs. Keane: waifs of the chilly dawn with dreadful days awaiting them, days they will meet with eyes as big as doorknobs, but not as expressive. It had always amazed me that Mr. and Mrs. Keane went to court to establish which of them was responsible for these remorseless reiterations of elementary-school bathos. If I’d been the judge, I’d have yanked their artistic licenses in perpetuity and sentenced them to a lifetime twelve-step program in which all twelve steps consisted of spending fourteen hours a day watching real children through a foot-thick pane of glass.
By contrast, on the wall directly opposite the door was the Paul Klee painting that was the object of Janice’s client’s lust. Even at this distance, I hated it, although not as much as I hated the Keanes. Full of thin angular shapes and flat 1950s colors that looked like they were inspired by Formica, it looked to me like something painted with a coat hanger. Klee despised color in his early career, so I didn’t feel so bad about despising the ones he’d used here. I looked back at the Keanes, thinking that when I came back to the Klee I’d like it better through sheer contrast, but it didn’t work. It still looked like a watch-spring’s daydream.
Now that I was all the way inside the room, I saw a small surprise on the wall into which the door was set: another Klee, this one smaller and maybe, just marginally, not as ugly. I’d been told only about the one for some reason, and I wasted a brief moment wondering whether to bag both of them, then rejected the thought. I was in no position to fence a Klee. Fine art fencing was a specialty, and a perilously risky specialty at that. I’d take the one I’d been sent to take, and let my employer worry about handing it off to someone.
The room was bright with the sun banging on the big windows, the light filtered white through semi-opaque curtains of organdy or something diaphanous. The bed was to the left, and beyond it was an open door. I slogged my way across a carpet about five inches deep and checked out the door. It led to a sort of sitting room, all mirrored, with a makeup table big enough for the Rockettes on one wall. Beyond that yawned an enormous bathroom. The bathroom, in turn, had two doors leading off it, one into a chamber built just to hold the toilet, and the other into a room that could have slept four but was filled entirely with women’s clothes. There was a door at the far end that undoubtedly led back to the hallway.
I went back into the bedroom. The other door, to the right of the wall, was a closet, obviously his unless she liked to wear men’s suits to spice things up from time to time. Content that I had the floor plan stored where I could find it if I needed it suddenly, I approached the painting.
God, it was ugly. I checked behind it, found no evidence of an alarm or any cute little locking mechanisms that would prevent its being lifted from the wall. In fact, it seemed to be hanging on a regular old picture hanger like the ones you can buy in the supermarket, although a little heavier. I centered myself in front of the picture, grasped the frame by the sides, and lifted it. It came up easily, weighing only four or five pounds, and I pulled it away and lowered it to the floor.