{"id":1644,"date":"2026-01-03T21:42:39","date_gmt":"2026-01-03T21:42:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/the-burglar-in-the-rye-block-lawrence\/"},"modified":"2026-01-03T21:42:39","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T21:42:39","slug":"the-burglar-in-the-rye-block-lawrence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/the-burglar-in-the-rye-block-lawrence\/","title":{"rendered":"The Burglar in the Rye – Block, Lawrence"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nCHAPTER <\/span>
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\nOne<\/span>
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T<\/span><\/span>he lobby was a bit the worse for wear. The large oriental carpet had seen better days, lots of them. The facing Lawson sofas sagged invitingly and, like the rest of the furniture, showed the effects of long use. They were in use now; two women sat in animated conversation, and, a few yards away, a man with a long oval face and a high forehead sat reading a copy of GQ.<\/span> He wore sunglasses, which made him look dapper and sly. I don\u2019t know how they made the magazine look. Dark, I suppose.<\/p>\n

While the lobby may have been the least bit down at the heels, the overall impression was not so much of shabbiness as of comfort. The glow of a fire in the fireplace, a welcome sight on a brisk October day, put everything in the best possible light. And, centered above the fireplace mantel, painted with such \u0153il-tromping realism you wanted to reach out and pick him up and hug him, was the hotel\u2019s namesake.<\/p>\n

He was a bear, of course, but not the sort whose predilection for sylvan defecation is as proverbial as the Holy Father\u2019s Catholicism. This bear, one saw at a glance, had never been to the woods, let alone behaved irresponsibly there. He was wearing a little red jacket, and he had a floppy royal blue rain hat on his head, and his legs ended in a pair of Wellington boots the color of a canary, and every bit as cheerful. He was perched on a shelf between a battered Gladstone grip and a shopping bag from Harrods, and a stenciled sign overhead proclaimed, \u201cLeft Luggage,\u201d and\u2026<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t need to go on, do I? If you didn\u2019t have such a bear yourself, surely you knew someone who did. For this was Paddington Bear himself, and who else should it be? Who better to grace the lobby of the legendary Paddington Hotel?<\/p>\n

And legendary was the word for it. The Paddington, seven stories of red brick and black ironwork, stands at the corner of Madison Avenue and East Twenty-fifth Street, across from Madison Square and not far from the site of Stanford White\u2019s Madison Square Garden. (That was the second<\/span> Madison Square Garden, as opposed to Garden #3, the one your father remembers at Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, or the current entry, Garden #4, above Penn Station. White\u2019s Garden was an architectural masterpiece, but then so was the original Penn Station. Sic transit damn near everything.)<\/p>\n

But not the Paddington, which had gone up before the Garden and had lived to tell the tale. Built around the turn of the century, it had watched the neighborhood (and the city, and the world) reinvent itself continually over the years. For all that, the old hotel remained essentially the same. It had never been terribly grand, had always had more permanent residents than transient guests, and had from its earliest days drawn persons in the arts. Brass plaques flanking the entrance recorded some of the Paddington\u2019s more prominent tenants, including the writers Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser and the Shakespearean actor Reginald French. John Steinbeck had spent a month there during a period of marital disharmony, and Robert Henri, the Ashcan School artist, had stayed at the Paddington before relocating a few blocks south and east at Gramercy Park.<\/p>\n

More recently, the hotel had drawn touring British rock stars, who seemed less inclined to destroy rooms here than in other American hotels, either out of respect for its traditions or from a sense that the damage they did might go unnoticed. Two of them had died on the premises, one murdered by a drifter he\u2019d brought back to his room, the other more conventionally of a heroin overdose.<\/p>\n

Classical music was represented as well, by at least two of the permanent residents, and the occasional performer on tour. An octogenarian pianist, Alfred Hertel, whose annual Christmas concert at Carnegie Hall was always sold out, had occupied an apartment on the top floor for over forty years. At the opposite end of the same floor lived the aging diva Sonia Brigandi, whose legendary temperament survived the decline of her legendary soprano voice. Once in a while one or both of them would leave their doors open, and one would play what the other would sing, thrilling (or annoying) the other residents with something from Puccini or Verdi or Wagner.<\/p>\n

Other than that they didn\u2019t speak. Rumors abounded\u2014that they\u2019d had an affair, that they\u2019d been rivals for some other tenant\u2019s affections. He was said to be gay, although he\u2019d 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\u2019d never slept with anyone. Except for his bears, of course.<\/p>\n

It was Horvath, the founder of Pop Realism, who had painted the Paddington Bear over the lobby fireplace. He\u2019d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But, as far as anyone knew, he\u2019d only painted Paddington once. And that painting hung famously in the hotel\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

I knew all that. But old habits die hard, and I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

I was busy contemplating grand larceny when the desk clerk asked if he could help me.<\/p>\n

\u201cSorry,\u201d I said. \u201cI was looking at the painting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOur mascot,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cPoor Eddie Horvath painted him,\u201d he said. \u201cSuch a loss when he died, and so ironic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe died in a restaurant, didn\u2019t he?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRight around the corner. Eddie had the world\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd it didn\u2019t agree with him?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t notice any difference,\u201d he said, \u201cexcept that he became a bit of a bore on the subject, as converts will do in the early days of their conversion. I\u2019m sure he\u2019d have outgrown it, but he never had the chance. He died at the dinner table, choked to death on a piece of tofu.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow awful.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAwful enough to eat it,\u201d he said. \u201cHideous to die of it. But Eddie\u2019s painting linked us forever to Paddington Bear, to the point where people think we\u2019re named for him.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe hotel came first, didn\u2019t it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBy a good many years. Michael Bond\u2019s book about the brave little bear in the Left Luggage isn\u2019t much more than thirty years old, while we go back to the turn of the century. I can\u2019t say for certain if we were named for Paddington Station or its immediate environs. The neighborhood\u2019s not the best in London, I\u2019m sorry to say, but it\u2019s 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\u2019s a tube stop there as well, but I can\u2019t believe this hotel was named after a tube stop.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sure it wasn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I\u2019m sure you\u2019re terribly polite, letting me natter on this way. Now how may I help you?\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeter Jeffries,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cJeffries,\u201d he said, thumbing a stack of cards. \u201cI don\u2019t seem to\u2026oh, for heaven\u2019s sake. Someone\u2019s written it down as Jeffrey Peters.\u201d<\/p>\n

I said it was a natural mistake, fairly certain as I spoke that the mistake was mine. I\u2019d somehow managed to screw up my own alias. Inverting the first and last names was a natural consequence of picking an alias consisting of two first names, which in turn is something amateurs tend to do all the time. And that was more dismaying than the mistake itself. For what was I if not a professional? And where<\/span> was I if I started behaving like an amateur?<\/p>\n

I filled out the card\u2014an address in San Francisco, a departure date three days off\u2014and said I\u2019d be paying cash. Three nights at $155 a night plus tax, and a deposit for the phone, came to somewhere around $575. I counted out six hundreds and the fellow ran a finger over his upper lip, grooming the mustache he didn\u2019t have, and asked me if I would be wanting a bear.<\/p>\n

\u201cA bear?\u201d<\/p>\n

He nodded at a trio of Paddington Bears, perched atop a filing cabinet and looking quite like the bear over the fireplace. \u201cYou may think this is all too cute for words,\u201d he said, the English accent gone now, \u201cand perhaps you\u2019d be right. It started after Eddie\u2019s painting brought the hotel a new burst of fame. He collected teddy bears, you know, and after he died his collection brought ridiculous prices at Sotheby\u2019s. A Horvath Collection pedigree is for a bear what a few hours around Jackie O\u2019s neck is for a string of cultured pearls.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd these three bears were his?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOn, no, not at all. They\u2019re ours, I\u2019m afraid, purchased by the management from FAO Schwartz or Bears R Us. I don\u2019t really know where we get them. Any guest who wants can have the company of a bear during his stay. There\u2019s no charge.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cReally.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou needn\u2019t think it\u2019s sheer altruism on our part. A surprising number of guests decide they\u2019d rather take Paddington home with them than get their deposit back. Not everyone takes a bear upstairs in the first place, but of those who do, few want to give them up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll take a bear,\u201d I said recklessly.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I\u2019ll take a fifty-dollar deposit, cheerfully refunded on checkout, unless you want him to share your life forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

I counted out a few more bills and he wrote out a receipt and handed over the key to Room 415, then scooped up the trio of Paddingtons and invited me to select one.<\/p>\n

They all looked the same to me, so I did what I do in such circumstances. I took the one on the left.<\/p>\n

\u201cA good choice,\u201d he said, the way the waiter does when you say you\u2019ll have the rack of lamb with new potatoes. What, I often wonder, are the bad choices? If they\u2019re so awful, what are they doing on the menu?<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s a cute little fellow,\u201d I started to say, and in midsentence the cute little fellow slipped out of my arms and landed on the floor. I bent over and came up with him in one hand and a purple envelope in the other. ANTHEA LANDAU<\/span>, it said, in block capitals, and that was all it said. \u201cThis was on the floor,\u201d I told the clerk. \u201cI\u2019m afraid I\u2019ve stepped on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He curled his lip, then took a Kleenex from a box on the ledge behind the desk and wiped at the mark my shoe had left. \u201cSomeone must have left it on the counter,\u201d he said, rubbing briskly, \u201cand someone else must have knocked it off. No harm done.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPaddington seems to have survived the experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, he\u2019s a durable chap,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I must say you surprised me. I didn\u2019t really think you\u2019d take a bear. I play a little game with myself, trying to guess who will and who won\u2019t, and I ought to give it up because I\u2019m not very good at it. Almost anyone\u2019s apt to take a bear, or not to take a bear. Men on business trips are least likely to be bear people, but they\u2019ll surprise you. There\u2019s one gentleman from Chicago who\u2019s here twice a month for four days at a time. He always has a bear and never takes the little fellow home. And he doesn\u2019t seem to care if it\u2019s the same bear every time. They\u2019re not identical, you know. They vary in size, and in the color of their hats and coats and wellies. Most of the wellies are black, but the pair in the picture are yellow.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI noticed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTourists tend to take bears, and to want to keep them as souvenirs. Especially honeymoon couples. Except one couple\u2014the woman wanted to take Paddington home, and the husband wanted his deposit back. I don\u2019t have much hope for that marriage.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDid they keep the bear?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey did, and he\u2019ll probably wind up fighting her for custody of it when they divorce. For most couples, though, it\u2019s never a question. They want the bear. Europeans, except for the English, don\u2019t generally take the bears in the first place. Japanese always take bears to their room, sometimes more than one. And they always pay for them and take them home.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd take pictures of them,\u201d I ventured.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, you have no idea! Pictures of themselves, holding their bears. Pictures of me,<\/span> with or without the bears. Pictures of them and their bears on the street in front of the hotel, and posed in front of poor Eddie\u2019s painting, and in their rooms, and in front of the various rooms where some of our more famous guests lived or died. What do you suppose they do with all the pictures? When can they possibly find the time to look at them?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe there\u2019s no film in the camera.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy, Mr. Peters!\u201d he said. \u201cWhat a devious mind you have.\u201d<\/p>\n

He had no idea.<\/p>\n


<\/p>\n

Bear or no bear, Room 415 didn\u2019t look like $155 a night plus tax. The maroon carpet was threadbare, the dresser top scarred here and there by neglected cigarettes, and the one window looked out on an airshaft. And, as any member of the Friars Club would be quick to tell you, the room was so small you had to go out to the hall to change your mind.<\/p>\n

But I hadn\u2019t expected anything different. The Paddington was a great deal for its permanent residents, who paid less for a month in a spacious one-bedroom apartment than a transient paid for a week-long stay in a room like mine. There was, I suppose, a trade-off; the transients paid a premium to bask in the painter-writer-musician glamour of the place, and subsidized the artists who lived there year-round and provided the glamour.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t too sure how the little chap in the floppy blue hat fit into the equation. Charming or twee, as you prefer, it made good marketing sense, giving the hotel a human (well, ursine) face while constituting a small profit center in its own right. If half the guests took bears, and if half of those decided they couldn\u2019t part with their bears, and if the per-bear markup was a conservative fifty percent, well, it would come to enough annually to pay the light bill, or a good chunk of it, anyway. Enough, at the very least, to make the operation cost-effective.<\/p>\n

There was a mantelpiece above a fireplace that had long since been bricked up and plastered over, and that\u2019s where I placed Paddington, where he could have a good look around and make sure that everything was all right. \u201cI\u2019d let you look out the window,\u201d I told him, \u201cbut there\u2019s nothing to see out there. Just a brick wall, and a window with the shade down. And maybe that\u2019s a good idea, drawing the shade. What do you think?\u201d<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t say. I drew the shade, tossed my small suitcase onto the bed, popped the catches, and opened it. I put my shirts and socks and underwear in the dresser, hung a pair of khakis in the tiny closet, closed the suitcase, and stood it against a wall.<\/p>\n

I looked at my watch. It was time I got out of there. I had a business to run.<\/p>\n

I said goodbye to the bear, who paid about as much attention as my cat does when I say goodbye to him. I pulled the door shut. That was enough to engage the snap lock, but I double-locked the door with my key before taking the elevator to the lobby.<\/p>\n

The pair of women had ended their conversation, or at least taken it somewhere else. The guy with the long face and high forehead and horn-rimmed shades had put down GQ<\/span> and picked up a paperback. I walked over and dropped my key at the desk. It was an actual brass key, unlike the computerized plastic key cards the newer hotels use, and it had a heavy brass fob attached, designed to punish you for walking off with it by ripping a hole in your pocket. I was happy to leave it, glad of an excuse to pass the desk and have a quick look at the triple row of guest mailboxes.<\/p>\n

That purple envelope I\u2019d found on the floor was in Box 602.<\/p>\n

I slapped down my key, gave the fellow with the too-black hair a nod and a smile, and watched a tall and elegant older gentleman enter the lobby from the street, looking as though he could have stepped out of the pages of the long-faced guy\u2019s GQ.<\/span> He was wearing a beautifully tailored sport jacket and slacks and escorting a much younger woman.<\/p>\n

Our eyes met. His widened in recognition. I couldn\u2019t see mine, but they may have done the same. I recognized him, even as he clearly recognized me. And we did what gentlemen do when they encounter one another in a hotel lobby. We passed each other without a word.<\/p>\n

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Book Preview CHAPTER One The lobby was a bit the worse for wear. The large oriental carpet had seen better days, lots of them. The facing Lawson sofas sagged invitingly and, like the rest of the furniture, showed the effects of long use. They were in use now; two women sat in animated conversation, and, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1643,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[73],"class_list":["post-1644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-lawrence-block"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}