But they took my money. Last night, when I put my tools away for the second and final time, I'd added the $1120 from Barbara Creeley's icebox to my Get Out of Dodge fund. While I was at it, I counted the stack of bills, so I'm able to tell you just how much the bastards got from me. The grand total, including the night's proceeds, had come to precisely $8357. (And yes, that's an odd sum, because I always make sure I have some small bills in my emergency stash. If you're running for your life, you don't want to have to break a hundred-dollar bill at a toll booth.)
Eight thousand bucks and change. They hadn't come for the money, that was clear, but they found it, and it was money, so they took it. And the hell of it was that I couldn't really blame them.
After all, I'd have done the same thing myself.
The first thing I did was pick up an armload of books and start reshelving them.
That, granted, was pretty stupid. Anyone drawing up a list of priorities for someone in my particular situation would be apt to put the orderly reshelving of my personal library down toward the bottom of the list, somewhere between making a laundry list and flossing. The books were in short stacks on the floor, where I could walk around without tripping over them. They were in a sense safer there than back on their shelves, in that they were in no danger of falling anywhere.
But I'm a bookseller, spending the greater portion of each workday in a used bookstore, buying books every day from people who would rather have money, and selling them in turn to people who'd rather have books. The books usually go out one or two or three at a time, but they come to me in larger quantities; while occasionally a book scout like Mowgli brings in one or two choice items he's turned up, I'm more apt to acquire books by the shopping bag or wheelbarrow or truckload. When I buy a whole library, the books go to my back room, where they repose in cartons until I get around to dealing with them, which I generally do a carton at a time, lugging the box out front and putting the individual volumes in their proper places on my shelves.
That's a task I fit in when I can-and, since an antiquarian bookseller's workday is rarely conducted at a breakneck pace, there's generally plenty of time for it. When things are slow, when there's nothing else to do, I find some books and set about shelving them.
So that's what I was doing, and while I did it I tried to figure out what to do next.
First of all, damage control. The feeling of violation aside, what had I lost?
Well, money. Over eight thousand dollars, which is still a tidy sum, even if it's not what it used to be. (My grandfather Grimes paid eight thousand dollars for the house my mother was born in, while nowadays there are people in Manhattan -rich ones, admittedly-who pay that much every month in rent.) It hurt to lose the money, but that's the thing about money: it's always painful to lose it, but it's never more pain than you can stand.
Because all it takes to replace it is other money. Barbara Anne Creeley couldn't replace her class ring, but I could replace the eight grand, and when I did the pain I now felt would go away. So I hated to see my Get Out of Dodge fund depleted all the way to zero, but I knew I'd build it up again, one way or another.
Besides the money, all I could see that I'd lost was time, the time it would take me to make my apartment look as it had before my visitors had come. A certain number of hours, plus a certain number of dollars to replace the lock they'd broken and, now that the horse was stolen, add a more serviceable lock that would lessen the likelihood of the same thing happening again. And some more dollars for a cleaning woman, to whisk away the traces of an alien presence. My neighbor Mrs. Hesch had a woman who cleaned for her once a week, and I'd recruited her occasionally in the past, and could do so again. That would have to wait until the books were on the shelves and the drawers back where they belonged, so general tidying came first, but-
Oh, hell. I was forgetting the damage they'd done to my formerly secret compartment. The fellow who built it for me had moved to the West Coast- Washington State, if I remembered correctly-and I had no idea who I could find to do work like that. If I could reach him I could ask him to recommend someone, but I didn't know what town he'd gone to or if he was still there, and his name was David Miller, so I could forget about trying a computer search. The thing about computer searches is that they make finding a needle in a haystack as easy as falling off a bicycle. Nothing to it. But finding the right David Miller would be more like trying to find a particular needle in a needle stack. I knew better than to try.
Well, I'd find somebody. There was no rush, because for the time being I didn't have anything to hide.
I picked up another stack of books, and resumed the task of stowing them on the shelves. As important as putting my place in order, I thought, was dealing with the people who'd done this. Because it was pretty clear that they'd come looking for something, and my eight thousand dollars wasn't it. It had been worth taking, but it wasn't worth breaking in for, not to those bastards.
Because they had to be the same gang that broke into the Rogovins the night before.
I mean, who else could it be? No professional burglar for profit would single me out, and no snatch-and-grab junkie opportunist, looking to grab something he could turn into smack or crack, would wend his wobbly way into a doorman building, and-
Ohmigod.
I rushed out into the hall, rang for the elevator, then turned around and darted back into my apartment. My tools were in the ruins of my hidey-hole, where my visitors had left them, and I snatched them up and hurried back to the elevator, which had come and gone while I was getting my tools. Rather than wait for it I took the stairs, hurtling down them, terrified of what I was going to find.
The doorman at 34th and Park had suffocated. It was presumably an accident, tape meant for his mouth covering his nose as well, but maybe someone had decided that an extra piece of tape on the nose would avoid leaving a witness as a loose end. And even if it had been an accident, who was to say they wouldn't make the same mistake again?
I went to the parcel room, tried the door. It was locked. I put an ear to it and listened, and couldn't hear a thing but my own heartbeat.
I got out my tools and went to work.
Fifteen
Whoever they were, I guess they must have stocked up on duct tape when some genius in Washington suggested you could seal your windows with it in the event of a terrorist attack. They'd evidently got to Kmart before the supply ran out, so they had plenty, and they weren't stingy with it when it came time to immobilize Edgardo, who was unfortunate enough to be on duty when they came calling.
They'd taped his wrists behind his back, and then they'd sat him down in a straight-backed wooden chair and taped each of his ankles to the chair's front legs. Then they'd wound tape around his middle, fastening him to the back of the chair, and somewhere along the way they'd slapped a piece of tape over his mouth. But they'd left his nose uncovered, thank heavens, and he was still alive.
But that was about as much as you could say for him. He'd made a valiant effort to free himself, rocking to and fro on the chair until he managed to tip it over, but all that did was make his position that much more uncomfortable. He'd wound up more or less on his side, with his feet in the air and his head tilted downward. That way the blood could rush to his head, but it didn't have to rush, it could take its time, because Edgardo wasn't going anywhere.
He was so positioned that he could see a patch of floor and not much else, and when I opened the door he had no way of knowing who it was-someone come to rescue him, or the same guys coming back to finish the job. But it was somebody, so he made as much noise as he could, issuing a string of nasal grunts that were eloquent enough in their own way. If nothing else they let me know he was alive, and I matched his eloquence with a sigh of relief and rolled him over so we could get a look at each other, and so that I could set about getting him loose.