But I still wasn’t prepared for what lay within. I let myself inside, closing the door and flicking on the light in a single motion, and just like that I was transported to Dresden after the bombing. The place had been turned upside-down and inside-out, and after what had been done to it I couldn’t imagine why the super had put a new lock on the door, because no future intruder could have made things any worse than they already were.
Everything I owned was in the middle of the living room floor. Chair cushions had been slashed and the stuffing torn out. Every book had wound up off the shelves and on the floor after having first been taken by the covers and shaken so that anything tucked between its pages would fall out. The wall-to-wall broadloom, imperfectly installed in the first place, had been yanked up so that whatever I might have secreted between it and the padding, or between padding and floor, could be discovered.
God, what a mess! I have always been the neatest of burglars, having nothing but respect for the private property of others, whether I intended to leave that property in their hands or transfer it into my own. The utter lack of consideration my visitors had shown literally sickened me. I had to sit down, but I couldn’t find a place to sit. There was not a single inviting surface in that apartment. I managed to put an unupholstered (hence un-slashed) chair on its feet and planted myself on it.
What was the point of all this?
The police, of course, would have searched the apartment if only to assure themselves that I wasn’t in it. They might have made off with an address book in the hope that it would lead them to possible associates and friends of mine. But the cops, however much they might dislike me for having made them look fairly foolish, would not react by waging total war on my apartment. This carnage was clearly the work of whoever had kicked the door in.
But why?
Someone had been looking for something. While no pack of adolescent vandals could have been more destructive, there was too much method to this particular madness for it to be simple vandalism. I was perfectly willing to believe the bastards had enjoyed their work, but all of their efforts had been undertaken with the aim of finding something.
What?
I walked from room to room, trying to figure it out. The little kitchen, never my favorite room at the best of times, had been sacked. I hadn’t kept anything in it more valuable than canned ravioli, so there was no reason to waste time looking at the mess. They’d even dumped the contents of the refrigerator, so mess was the right word for it
The bedroom had received similar treatment. I ignored the disorder as much as I could and waded through it to the bedroom closet. I’d built a false back wall into that closet just above the overhead shelf, giving myself a space five feet wide and three feet high and some fifteen inches deep that the building’s own architect couldn’t have found unless he knew what he was looking for. I used that space to stow whatever I might bring back from a midnight shopping spree, holding it there until I’d made arrangements to fence it. I’d had no end of swag tucked away there at one time or another, though never for terribly long. There’d been nothing in it when I was last in the apartment except for a passport and the sort of personal papers other people keep in safe deposit boxes, but I wanted to see if my visitors, thorough as they’d been, had found my hiding place.
They’d been in the closet, certainly. They had thrown all my clothing onto the bed, pausing only to rip out an occasional jacket lining. But they hadn’t found my hiding place and that made me feel a little better. I opened it up, easing the panel out of its moorings, and there were my passport and high school diploma and class picture and sundry treasures. I found myself wishing I’d left a satchel full of emeralds in there just so the bastards could have missed them.
Then I went back to the living room and began sifting through the pile of books. At least half of them had their bindings wholly or partially demolished by the treatment they’d been given. I paid as little attention to this as possible, merely going through the heap until I’d found three individual volumes. These were the book-club edition of The Guns of August, the second volume of the three-volume Heritage Press edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and something called The Romance of Beekeeping, which I’d bought because the title struck me as a contradiction in terms. All three books had seen much better days and the cover of the beekeeping book was now attached to the text by a thread and a prayer, but that was all right. I didn’t care. I toted the three books into the bedroom and put them on top of my dresser. There was plenty of room there because my visitors had tipped everything that used to be on the top of the dresser onto the floor. Considerate of them to make room for the books.
There was a smallish canvas suitcase in the closet. My leather suitcase had been carved up by a lunatic looking for a secret compartment, I suppose, but the canvas bag was so flimsy that it was obviously hiding nothing. I put my three books in it and added clean clothing from the pile on my bed and the other pile on the bedroom floor. I left myself a change of clothes, packed enough socks and shirts and underwear to last a few days, zipped up the suitcase, then took off the clothes I’d been wearing. I dropped them on the floor along with everything else and went into the bathroom to take a shower.
It was a sloppy shower because my good friends had pulled down the rod that holds the shower curtain in place. They’d also yanked the towel bars loose from their moorings. Some of these bars are hollow and some people hide things in them. I’ve never been able to understand why; the stash winds up being hard for its owner to get at, while a prowler or cop can reach it in a second by ripping the bar off the wall.
I’ve noticed over the years that your average person is not terribly good at hiding things.
Anyway, I had to shower without the benefit of shower curtain, which meant that an awful lot of water wound up on the floor. There were clothes and things there to absorb most of it as it landed. Somehow I just couldn’t bring myself to care what happened to the floor or the clothes or the whole apartment, because I was never going to have anything to do with any of them again. I couldn’t live in the apartment even if I wanted to, and now I no longer wanted to, so the hell with all of it.
I finished my shower, kicked clothing aside until I found a couple of towels to dry myself with, put on my clean clothes and slid my feet into my best pair of scotch-grain loafers. Then I added a few more things to my suitcase-my own razor, some other toilet articles, a vial of hay fever pills (although it wasn’t the season) and a rabbit’s foot key chain with no keys on it that I’d given up for lost ages ago. It must have been hiding out in the back of a dresser drawer or something and my guests had located it for me in the process of dumping the drawer. An ill wind that blows no good, said I to myself, and paused in my labors to transfer the rabbit’s foot from the suitcase to my pocket, then paused again and attached it to my little ring of picks and keys and such. As little good as the foot may have done its original rabbit owner, it had always been lucky for me, and nowadays I seemed to need all the help I could get. I took a last look around, wondering what I hoped to find. I picked up my telephone, wondered if it was tapped, decided that it probably wasn’t. But who was I going to call? I hung up and found the phone book, which had received the dump and shake treatment like every other book in the apartment. I picked it up and looked for Elaine Christopher without success. There were several E Christophers listed but none on Bank Street. I decided that the lady’s listing or lack thereof was one of an ever-increasing number of things I couldn’t be bothered to think about.