16
Walt can usually be relied on to sleep until somebody jangles his leash at him, so Patrick isn’t expecting to wake up to a wet nose in his face and the sound of whimpering. When Patrick opens his eyes, Walt is staring tragically at him. It’s barely light out.
“All right, all right.” Patrick scrambles to put on some pants and shoes, then snaps the leash on Walt’s collar and opens the apartment door as quietly as possible so they don’t wake Nathaniel.
Walt tugs at the leash. Usually Walt has to be practically dragged around the block in the morning, then passes back out a few minutes after they come home.
Whatever labor union he belongs to regards forty-five minutes as the longest shift anyone can work without a nap.
But today Walt is bounding down the stairs faster than Patrick would like, when Patrick stops dead, the leash going taut in his hand. Books are all over the floor. It looks like the shop’s been ransacked.
And the sound—he can hear the traffic coming from Bleecker. The front window is smashed, and there’s glass all over the floor.
Patrick drops the leash and runs back upstairs to check the safe. It’s closed. The glass case, however, is empty, one of its sides shattered.
He should call the police. That’s what you do when there’s a break-in, right?
You call the cops, and they take down your name and contact information and don’t do anything about it other than notice if you have a record.
Practically everybody he knows has had a burglary in their building at some point, and all the police have done is confirm that, yes, there sure are a lot of burglaries in the city these days, have you thought about putting in an extra lock?
Walt starts poking his nose into Patrick’s leg, which puts Patrick in mind of the only thing that’s clear: dogs need to get walked no matter what. He picks Walt up so he doesn’t get glass in his paws and only puts him down on the sidewalk when he’s sure there aren’t any shards of glass.
When he gets back, he finds Nathaniel standing in front of the cash register, ashen.
“There you are,” Nathaniel says. “I thought you’d been—I don’t even know what I thought. Don’t you ever, ever do that again.”
Nathaniel gets peeved and cross every day of his life but this is something else.
“Don’t disappear after the shop’s been robbed?
” Patrick asks, aiming for levity. He carries Walt into the kitchen and puts him down, then gives him a bowl of dog food.
Nathaniel follows them, cornering Patrick against the counter.
“Yes! These are things nobody should need to tell you. I was worried sick.” His fists are clenched and he looks furious.
“I spaced out,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“That much is clear!” Nathaniel’s hands are on Patrick’s chest, now, his fingers digging into the fabric of his shirt and into Patrick’s skin like he needs the proof that Patrick is really there. “Think of how you’d feel if you woke up and the shop was in mayhem and I was gone.”
Patrick shudders. He takes Nathaniel’s hands in his own.
“I would have had a heart attack.” He thinks he nearly did, just imagining it.
Maybe if he were a little less frightened, a little less addled by the break-in, he’d be warier about how they’re standing here, admitting—something.
That they care about one another? That’s hardly an admission.
What, after all, have they been doing for the past few months, if not caring for each other? That isn’t a secret.
But Patrick learned long ago not to let his happiness depend on anyone caring for him. Or so he thought—clearly the lesson hadn’t stuck. Nathaniel bends his head and presses his lips to Patrick’s knuckles and the sensation reverberates through Patrick’s body, seismic.
“What did they take?” Nathaniel asks, disorientingly practical while Patrick’s mind is still reeling from the shock of what Nathaniel just did, his thoughts ricocheting between imagining Nathaniel being hurt and the fact of him safe and close and having just touched Patrick in a way that doesn’t allow any misinterpretation.
Nathaniel drops Patrick’s hands. “What did they take?” he repeats.
Patrick tries to get himself under control. “Everything in the glass case. Everything in the cash register, but that was only twenty dollars because I went to the bank yesterday. The typewriter. The safe is still locked.”
“That’s all?”
“Who knows? I can’t exactly tell what’s missing when half the books downstairs are in a heap on the floor.”
“What about your files?”
“My files? ” Patrick can’t imagine what burglars would think they’d find in the file cabinet of a book dealer. Still, he turns toward the cabinet. It’s on its side, its contents all over the floor.
Nathaniel takes a breath, lets it out. “Why would they take your typewriter?”
“Pawn shops are full of stolen typewriters. They’re easy to grab, hard to identify as stolen.” It isn’t even the first time Patrick’s had a typewriter stolen.
“Hmm,” Nathaniel says, sounding skeptical.
Patrick doesn’t know what there is to be skeptical about. It’s a straightforward burglary, textbook in every way. The thieves grabbed whatever was portable and valuable, including some books—putting something in a glass case is a great way to let the world know that it’s worth something.
Patrick calls Mrs. Kaplan, then calls the police, because they’ll need a police report to collect on their insurance policy. She gives him the name of a glazier to fix the front window and the glass case.
“What happened here?” Susan asks when she comes down.
“We had a break-in,” Patrick says. “Just the shop, not the apartment.”
When he tells the Valdezes there was a break-in, they seem wildly unconcerned.
They’ve lived in New York a lot longer than he has.
Mr. Valdez shows him the police lock he has on the door, a metal pole that fits into the floor.
Patrick always thought this was paranoid, but then again he’s always had doors too flimsy for that kind of system to make sense.
The door to Susan’s apartment is solid wood. He calls a locksmith right away.
Mrs. Kaplan gets there at the same time as the police. The cops take some pictures, act suspicious, complain about junkies, and leave before it’s even noon.
“Thank you,” Patrick tells Mrs. Kaplan. She didn’t have to drive out here during rush hour to talk to the cops, when that’s rightfully Patrick’s responsibility.
“Nonsense. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to deal with the police. There was a rock through the window in 1922, some teenage hooligans in 1938, and a hold-up in—it must have been ‘56 or ‘57, because Abe was gone and you weren’t around yet.”
Patrick has already heard all those stories, but he’d bet that Mrs. Kaplan really came because she knows Patrick doesn’t like cops.
Nobody with a record wants to talk to cops.
It doesn’t matter that Patrick’s rap sheet consists of one count of disorderly conduct—that’s what they charge everyone with who gets caught in a raid—and not anything to do with theft.
“Now,” Mrs. Kaplan says, “somebody ought to tell Nathaniel that the coast is clear.” Nathaniel made himself scarce as soon as the cops arrived.
That’s definitely something that Patrick ought to be worried about, but he has enough to worry about right now—that first edition of Manhattan Transfer he bought from Gary was in the glass case, and the loss makes Patrick’s skin crawl.
He’d been waiting for a chance to get Mrs. Kaplan alone to ask her where she found Nathaniel, but right now he doesn’t care. Nathaniel can keep his damn secrets; they aren’t hurting anybody. And maybe Patrick doesn’t want to know.
“I’ll get him,” Susan says. “He’s in my apartment.”
“I’ll drive you back home,” Patrick offers Mrs. Kaplan.
“I’ll drive myself later on. You look like you’d break the steering wheel in two, and you have enough to do,” she says, gesturing at the mess in the store. “Don’t you have anything to drink around here?”
“It’s barely noon.”
“Put it in your coffee,” Mrs. Kaplan says.
“I’ll bring down the Ballantine’s!” Susan shouts from the stairs.
It’s going to take the rest of the day to get the books back on the right shelves.
There isn’t any point in opening, but Nathaniel goes to the Italian bakery anyway and comes back with three big white cardboard boxes filled with pastries; he also comes back looking only the slightest bit shaken, even though he went by himself.
Patrick watches him take some dishes out of the kitchen and arrange them on the table by the door, alongside the coffeepot and the cups and that stupid porcelain milk pitcher.
“I wanted something nice,” Nathaniel says by way of explanation. That apparently means spending too much money on snacks for customers who won’t even buy anything, because the merchandise is mostly all over the floor.
Susan puts on some Motown. Nathaniel takes out the broom and borrows an extra dustpan from the dry cleaners across the street.
Patrick puts the open bottle of Ballantine’s next to the coffee and pastries, figuring that anyone who makes it that far into the store deserves it.
The weather’s warm enough that the breeze through the broken window is kind of nice.
It’s the summer, so there’s more foot traffic than usual, even on a weekday.
Some people look in, see chaos, and beat a hasty retreat.
But a lot of regulars stay longer. After they help themselves to coffee and a pastry and gasp and cluck about the break-in, most of them shelve some books.
Jerome comes by in street clothes but with the makeup only partly scraped off his face, clearly on his way home from wherever he spent the night.
“Poor darling,” he says, apparently to the store itself, and shelves all the nineteenth-century French novels.