The Burglar in the Rye - By Lawrence Block Page 0,1

said to be gay, although he’d been married twice and had children and grandchildren. She had never married and was said to have had lovers of both sexes. And both of them were supposed to have slept with Edgar Lee Horvath, who’d never slept with anyone. Except for his bears, of course.

It was Horvath, the founder of Pop Realism, who had painted the Paddington Bear over the lobby fireplace. He’d taken rooms in the hotel in the mid-sixties, shortly after the success of his first one-man show, and had lived there until his death in 1979. The painting had been a gift to the hotel, given early in his stay, and, with the sharp increase in value of Horvath’s works since his death, it was probably worth close to a million dollars. And there it was, hanging right there in plain sight, in an essentially unguarded lobby.

Of course a person would have to be crazy to steal it. Edgar Horvath had painted a whole series of teddy bears, from bedraggled early Stieff creations to contemporary plush creatures, and a teddy bear of one sort or another was invariably present in his portraits and landscapes and interiors. His desert landscapes, done during a brief stay in Taos, show bears sprawled at the foot of an enormous cactus, or straddling a fence rail, or propped up against an adobe wall.

But, as far as anyone knew, he’d only painted Paddington once. And that painting hung famously in the hotel’s famously threadbare lobby. It was there for the taking, but so what? If you hooked that painting, how and to whom would you sell it?

I knew all that. But old habits die hard, and I’ve never been able to look at something of great value without trying to figure out a way to rescue it from its rightful owner. The painting was in a massive frame of gilded wood, and I pondered the relative merits of cutting it out of its frame as opposed to lifting it, frame and all.

I was busy contemplating grand larceny when the desk clerk asked if he could help me.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was looking at the painting.”

“Our mascot,” he said. He was a man about fifty, wearing a dark green silk shirt with a flowing collar and a string tie with a turquoise slide. His hair was Just for Men black, and his sideburns were longer than fashion would have them. He was clean-shaven, but he looked as though he ought to have a mustache, and as though it ought to be waxed.

“Poor Eddie Horvath painted him,” he said. “Such a loss when he died, and so ironic.”

“He died in a restaurant, didn’t he?”

“Right around the corner. Eddie had the world’s worst diet, he lived on cheeseburgers and Coca-Cola and Hostess cupcakes. And then some doctor convinced him to change his ways, and overnight he became a health-food fanatic.”

“And it didn’t agree with him?”

“I didn’t notice any difference,” he said, “except that he became a bit of a bore on the subject, as converts will do in the early days of their conversion. I’m sure he’d have outgrown it, but he never had the chance. He died at the dinner table, choked to death on a piece of tofu.”

“How awful.”

“Awful enough to eat it,” he said. “Hideous to die of it. But Eddie’s painting linked us forever to Paddington Bear, to the point where people think we’re named for him.”

“The hotel came first, didn’t it?”

“By a good many years. Michael Bond’s book about the brave little bear in the Left Luggage isn’t much more than thirty years old, while we go back to the turn of the century. I can’t say for certain if we were named for Paddington Station or its immediate environs. The neighborhood’s not the best in London, I’m sorry to say, but it’s not the worst, either. Cheap hotels and Asian restaurants. The Welsh take rooms there, fresh off the trains that pull into Paddington Station. And there’s a tube stop there as well, but I can’t believe this hotel was named after a tube stop.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t.”

“And I’m sure you’re terribly polite, letting me natter on this way. Now how may I help you?”

The nattering had changed the way he sounded, I noted; talking about London had given him an English accent. I told him I had a reservation, and he asked my name.

“Peter Jeffries,” I said.

“Jeffries,” he said, thumbing a stack of cards. “I don’t seem to…oh, for heaven’s sake. Someone’s