“Can I go now?”
“Sure,” Deal said, “if you don’t mind answering just one little personal question?”
“What?”
“Doesn’t this business you’re in sort of make you a little sick when you look in the mirror?”
“Sure,” I said, “but I usually take something for it.”
“What?”
“Money.”
Myron Greene was waiting for me at the entrance to the Tenth Precinct and we went down the two steps and made our way through the small knot of uniformed cops who were admiring Greene’s new and unticketed de Tomaso Mangusta that he had just traded his Shelby Cobra for. Before that, he had owned an Excalibur until someone had told him it was corny.
We didn’t speak until we had fitted ourselves inside the thing and Myron had revved it up a couple of times to the cops’ delight. Then we streaked off down Twentieth Street for about fifty yards to where the red light was.
“Who’d you have to call?” I said.
“An assistant district attorney and a guy in the mayor’s office that I went to school with.”
Sometimes I felt that Myron Greene had gone to school with half of the nation’s public servants. The other half had gone to Yale.
“Anyone else?”
He turned to look at me. “Procane.”
“What did he say?”
“He was concerned, of course.”
“So am I.”
“He wants to see you.”
“When?”
“Now, if you can make it.”
“I’m pretty scruffy.”
“He thinks it’s quite important, and I agree with him.”
“Why?” I said and grabbed for something to hold on to as Greene drifted his eleven-thousand-dollar machine around the corner and up Sixth Avenue.
“Because,” he said, “he got a call this morning from somebody else who wants to sell him back his diaries.”
I had met Abner Procane for the first time only the day before, but it now seemed weeks ago. Yesterday had been October thirtieth, a Saturday, and there had been just enough bite in the air to make the long walk from Forty-sixth to Seventy-fourth a pleasure instead of an ordeal. I like to walk in New York on Saturday mornings when the weather is fine and the people are few — or relatively so. It reminds me of what the city was like twenty years ago when I first saw it as a visiting teen-ager from Ohio. It had held a lot more promise then. But so had I.
As New York neighborhoods go, Procane’s was fairly clean. At least I didn’t have to wade through the garbage because most of it was neatly tied up in green plastic bags. The bags seem like a good idea to me, but I’m sure there must be something wrong with them, just as there’s something wrong with disposable bottles and flip-top beer cans. It may be that children can crawl into the bags and suffocate. I don’t know that this is true, but it’s something else to worry about.
Myron Greene had set our appointment for ten o’clock and at one minute past ten I was scraping dog shit off my left shoe on the bottom step of Procane’s four-story town house. He must have been waiting for me because he came out to watch.
“I could never understand those who keep large dogs in a city such as this,” he said, much as he might have mentioned it to a neighbor who lived four doors down.
“I’m a cat man myself,” I said. “They like to crap in private.”
After I cleaned off my shoe I went up the steps and shook hands with him. He had a firm, dry shake, much like what you would expect from a CPA or a high school principal.
“You’re a bit younger than I thought you’d be,” he said, and to prove it he let his face display some mild surprise. But then he had a mild face, almost round, with thinning hair the color of old ginger, greenish eyes widely spaced above a broad nose, a moustache of sorts that had more gray in it than did his hair, a pleasant enough mouth that seemed to move around a lot, even in repose, and a round chin that went nicely with everything else.
He opened a wrought-iron gate that barred the way to his front door, which he unlocked with a key, and then we were in a thoughtfully furnished hallway. Procane crossed to a door and held it open. “I think this will be comfortable,” he said.
I entered a rather large room that seemed to be half office and half study. Its windows fronted on Seventy-fourth. There was a fireplace, which was working, a carved desk, a lot of books, some chairs, a leather couch raised at one end like the psychiatrists in cartoons have and which I’ve been unable to find, a large globe, and a number of oil paintings of some pleasant rural scenes.
Procane walked over to an electric coffee pot and filled two waiting cups. “Cream and sugar?” he said.
“A little sugar.”
“Do sit down,” he said and after I chose a comfortable-looking chair next to the fire he handed me a cup. He lowered himself into a chair opposite mine and, what with the fire going, I thought it to be all rather cheery.
“I assume that Mr. Greene filled most of it in for you,” Procane said.
“He told me what he knew,” I said, “but he didn’t mention one thing because he didn’t know it.”
“What was that?”
“That you’re supposed to be the best thief in town.”
I’m still not quite sure what response I expected from Procane. Perhaps nothing more than the cool smile I got.
“You did some checking on me about six or seven years ago when you were still with the paper, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I was pleased, but surprised that you never wrote anything.”
“I could never find a fact to hang it on.”
“Would a fact or two now help things along?”
“It might.”
Procane shifted his gaze from me to the fire. Then he smiled slightly and said, “You’re quite right, Mr. St. Ives; I am a thief.”
5
According to Abner Procane, he never stole anything in his life until he was twenty-five years old. He was in the army then and he stole a truckload of American cigarettes and sold them on the Marseilles black market. He sold them to a man called Marcel Comegys, and if it hadn’t been for Comegys, Procane would be in jail today. At least that’s what Procane thought.
“He was a master thief and he taught me how to steal, what to steal, and whom to steal it from,” Procane said.
Comegys taught Procane to steal only money and to steal it only from those who were in no position to complain about their losses to the police.
“That may be the reason that I’ve never had any professional dealings with you before, Mr. St. Ives,” he said. “One doesn’t ransom money.”
The rest of what Procane told me rounded out the story that I had already put together. He stole but once or twice a year, and then only after the most meticulous planning. He had a high overhead, because he had to pay and pay well for information about his potential victims. And, not surprisingly, he enjoyed his work.
“I like to steal,” Procane said as he rose, picked up a brass poker, and stirred up the logs in the fireplace. “It’s not a compulsion, but from the first there was something about theft that intrigued and excited me. I don’t think there’s anything sexual about it either — not much, at any rate. The nearest thing that I can compare it to is painting, if there were more action in painting. Stealing gives me the same sense of — well, of achievement, except that it’s much more intensified.”
“You seem to have thought about it a lot,” I said.
“Too much probably.” He turned to look at a painting of a much weathered barn that was shaded by trees.
“Yours?” I said.
He nodded. I looked at the painting more carefully. The trees were beeches, I decided. It was a summer scene and I thought he had caught the sunlight rather well.