Well, that was nice enough in theory, but an inch-wide strip of flexible steel did its work in nothing flat, and then I was easing the door open, making sure that the coast (or at least the hallway) was clear.

I traversed the hallway to 11-B. No light showed under the door, and when I pressed my ear against it I couldn’t hear a thing, not even the roar of the surf. I didn’t expect to hear anything since I’d just let the phone in 11-B ring twelve or twenty times, but burglary is chancy enough even when you don’t take chances. There was a bell, a flat mother-of-pearl button set flush against the doorjamb, and I rang it and heard it sound within. There was a knocker, an art nouveau affair in the shape of a coiled cobra, but I didn’t want to make noise in the hallway. I didn’t, indeed, want to spend an unnecessary extra second in that hallway, and with that in mind I bent to my task.

First the burglar alarm. You wouldn’t think one was necessary at the Charlemagne, but then you probably don’t have a houseful of objets d’art and a stamp collection on a par with King Farouk’s, do you? If burglars don’t take unnecessary chances, why should their victims?

You could tell there was a burglar alarm because there was a keyhole for it, set in the door at about shoulder height, a nickel-plated cylinder perhaps five-eighths of an inch in diameter. What man can lock, man can unlock, and that’s just what I did. There is a handy little homemade key on my ring that fits most locks of that ilk, and with just the littlest bit of filing and fiddling it can make the tumblers tumble, and-oh, but you don’t want to know all this technical stuff, do you? I thought not.

I turned the key in the lock and hoped that was all you had to do. Alarm systems are cunning devices with no end of fail-safe features built in. Some go off, for example, if you cut the household current. Others get twitchy if you turn the key in other than the prescribed fashion. This one seemed docile, but what if it was one of those silent alarms, ringing nastily away downstairs or in the offices of some home-protection agency?