Bric or Brac
Shoplifting was entirely outside my realm of my experience. I was completely disoriented. I felt large, I felt lumpen, I felt like I made noise every time I took a step inside the store I’d chosen as the scene of my impending crime. I felt like an amateur.
Over the last twenty years or so, I’ve probably stolen more things than most people own, but theft—the art of skilled theft, the kind of theft I’d trained for—is a solitary enterprise, carried out in the dark, in carefully chosen rooms, and silently, rather than under merciless fluorescents. Not to mention the incessant accompaniment of songs about snow and sleigh bells and merry old elves and being home for the holidays while I was stuck in this mall, two days away from the holiday in question, trying to learn a new way to steal.
I’d worked up my courage for the chore and surveyed the lay of the land by doing a circumnavigation of the mall on the second level. The circuit had taken me about twenty-one minutes. Most people take approximately that long to walk a mile, but I was weaving in and out of shoppers with their eyes on the bright windows and slowing frequently behind an adult or two with small children or groups of adolescent boys or girls (almost never together) who had lagged to appreciate the fine points of a gaggle of the opposite gender, so I wasn’t doing my usual pace. My best guess, by the time I got back to the escalator I’d taken down from Wally’s third-level surveillance room, was that the mall’s internal loop was a little less than half a mile. With three levels, that meant a bit more than a mile’s worth of storefront, given the commercial dead space lost to entrances, exits, eating areas, escalators, elevators, stairways, restrooms, and other unprofitable necessities.
The experience was mildly informative, but it was time to stop stalling. Feeling as big and as conspicuous as a lighthouse, I had made a hurried choice from the shops closest to me and gone into Bonnie’s Bric-a-Brac.
The term bric-a-brac leaked into the English language in the nineteenth century as an approximation of a sixteenth-century French phrase, à bric et à brac, meaning something like any old way, disordered, random. Random certainly applied to the phrase as defined by Bonnie, who used it to encompass absolutely anything small, fey, bright, and useless. Little gnomes and leprechauns clustered on two shelves beneath a shelf full of oddly shaped coffee mugs, spice grinders, and fancy plates with pictures on them. Elsewhere I saw mummified-looking artificial flowers, little ceramic houses that seemed vaguely Dutch, shiny plaster toadstools, miniature wishing wells, trivets, and hand-embroidered potholders that said Ssssssmokin’! and Hot Stuff! Whole corners were devoted to purportedly collectable figurines of animals that, I supposed, were high on the list of animals that people collect figurines of: owls, turtles, dogs, the ever-popular black-and-white Holstein cows, and a great many pigs.
I’d chosen the store because the merchandise was small and theoretically easy to boost, and because the place was surprisingly full, more so than the stuff in the window suggested it would be. When I got inside, I saw one reason why there might have been so many customers. The entire back wall was given over to unusual Christmas wrapping paper, ribbons, and cards, and a huge sign that read boxes for everything. Some of the paper, especially large, flat sheets based on Japanese woodblock prints and magnified Impressionist brushstrokes, looked interesting, but I was there on business.
I wandered off into a relatively uncrowded area full of either bric or brac, in this case kaleidoscopes made in China, bulbous throw pillows, miniature wooden shoes (who buys this stuff?) and framed prints of avowedly comic scenes, dominated by several of the famous series of dogs playing poker. These were originally painted as advertisements by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge around the turn of the twentieth century, and about ten years ago, a pair of the originals sold at auction for almost $600,000, which had led me to revise my criteria for kitsch. Positioned in front of the prints, translating a bad idea into three dimensions, were little ceramic figurines of the dogs from the paintings. I looked around and found no one’s eyes on me, so I picked up the nearest one, a bulldog with a cigar clutched in its teeth, and slipped it into my pocket.
Then it happened.
My nerve utterly failed me. Me—the consummately professional master thief, the never-arrested star protégé of the greatest burglar in San Fernando Valley history. Me, the guy who’d stolen the most expensive modern stamp on earth from a professional killer—you know, that me. Faced with shoplifting a discounted porcelain dog, I froze. I stood there, a charmless, worthless purloined china dog in my pocket, unable to force myself to take a step.
I scanned the store again for a slow count of ten, my fingers interlocked on top of my head, where they couldn’t possibly be doing anything suspicious, the dog feeling bigger than a watermelon in my pocket. Then, eyes everywhere, I browsed several more shelves full of Bonnie’s bric-a-brac for form’s sake, inhaled deeply, and headed for the door.
Which set off an alarm. It went dwoik, dwoik, dwoik at a frequency that pierced eardrums like a red-hot wire, and through it I heard someone say, “Sir?” and turned to see, looking at me with the kind of disappointment I inspired so often as a child, an adorable, harmless, trusting, merry-faced little dumpling of a woman who wore gift wrap ribbon woven gaily into her hair and a green and white dress and whose name tag read bonnie.
“We’ve only got one door,” Bonnie said. We were sitting side by side in the back of the shop, sipping a hot mixture of gallon-bottle red wine, hard cider, cinnamon, and cloves, which tasted less ghastly than it sounds. “The bigger shops have two, and I probably shouldn’t tell you this since you’re pretending to be a thief—” She laughed merrily; she’d talked to Wally on the phone, and whatever he’d told her, I saw no reason to contradict it. “Not that you’ve got any talent at it.” She laughed again, hit her wine again, pretty much emptying the cup, took the lid off a slow cooker plugged into the wall, and ladled herself some more. “Stay honest,” she said. “You turn to a life of crime and you’ll be on public assistance in no time. And listen, if you do want to try it again, don’t do it upstairs in old Sam’s.” She checked the new level in the cup. It was her third cup since we’d sat down.
“Sam who?”
“Saddle store, no, saddlery. Sam’s okay, but shoplifting makes him crazy.” She squinted like someone trying to find the trail she’d been following. “So,” she said happily, “what was I saying?”
“Something you shouldn’t tell me because I’m a thief.”
“Yeah, right,” she said, elbowing me. It might have been the first time I was actually elbowed. “So most of the bigger stores, the ones I was telling you about?” Her eyes narrowed and roamed the shop as though it were an unexpected cloud formation. “Bigger stores, bigger stores, what was it I was saying about them, the bigger stores?”
“They have two doors,” I said.
“I knew that. Well, one of the alarm doodads is usually a dummy. Things cost the earth, so they buy one that works and one that’s a phony, just a prop, you know?”
I said I had grasped the concept.
“And they set off the one that works every now and then to remind people what they’re for.”
“Saints alive,” I said.
“And then there’s the stores with three doors,” she said, still warming to the topic. She pointed at her own door and said, “One,” then pointed at the middle of her window and said, “two,” and then at the opposite corner. “Three. Got it? You have to imagine them, the doors. Except for that one, I mean, the one that’s really there. So.” She closed her eyes and scratched the tip of her nose, evidently seeking the thread again, then opened her eyes and said, “So like I just said, entrance over there, takes you right into the merchandise, and then there’s two exits, both near the cash registers. Come in, see the stuff, pay for the stuff, leave. The merchant loop, they call it. No one alarms their entrance, and remember, one of the two alarm doodads is a fake. So that’s two doors without an alarm.”
“And the really big stores? Boots to Suits and whatever used to be on the other end?”
“You’d think they’d have a million entrances, wouldn’t you? But here’s a s’prise. They’ve only got one—or maybe three or four, but they’re all nexta each other, at the end that opens into the mall. They’re not allowed to have private entrances, ’cause the whole thing about a mall is that you gotta pass other stores to get to the one you want. Hic.”
I said, “Was that an actual hiccup?”
“What do you think, I’m practicing?” She knocked back what could be accurately described as a gulp. “You think anyone in the whole history of everyone has ever practiced a hiccup?”
“Not often,” I conceded. I looked up, surprised to see that the crowd had thinned considerably in the short time we’d been talking. “Where is everybody?”
“They come, they go,” she said. “It’s like fishing. Gotta hook ’em while they’re there. So the big stores like Boots to Suits and Gabriel’s—”
“Gabriel’s?”
“S’what useta be at the ghost town end of the mall, where the little booths are now. The bazaar, they call it. Although it’s more of a swap meet. Anyway, the big stores, like I said, you could only go in and out in one place on each floor, where they had a whole buncha doors right next to each other and, see, they didn’t want to put alarms there ’cause they kept getting the old woo-woo-woo when somebody walked in with something they stole in another store. And, you know, just ’cause someone swiped something someplace else, that doesn’t mean they’re not gonna buy something from you. Right?”
“You guys have to pay for the alarm system?”
“We buy the doodads,” she said. “The thingies in the door. Mall pays the subscription or whatever it is to keep them working and up-to-date. And they also pay for the whatzit, the security staff, like that poor, dim little Wally. Jeez, I keep thinking we’ll lose him to melanoma, especially with the way his hair’s receding. It’s like he leaves a trail of red hair behind him. The skin on top of the head is—”
“It’s okay,” I said, since she showed no signs of winding down. “He spends most of his time in the dark.”
She squinted at me for a moment, trying to find her place. “An’ they pay, the mall does, for the alarms on the big doors in and out of the building. Which don’t work most of the time. I mean what do they care if we get ripped off a little? No skin off, et cetera. And the holiday stuff, tinsel and lights and Santas and witches and Easter eggs, they pay for somebody to supply those. And every now and then, like for Christmas, which is now, they buy some newspaper ads, like anyone reads a paper anymore.” She took another hit on her cup. “This is what Mr. Pickwick drank,” she said,
I said, “Really.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.” She raised the cup and inhaled the fragrance and blinked a couple of times, fast. “Christmas always makes me think about Mr. Pickwick. Things were better when Mr. Pickwick was alive.” She looked around the shop a bit mistily, it seemed to me. “Do you think Mr. Pickwick would have liked my store?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s hard to imagine what he’d want that you don’t have at least one of.”
“It is a muddle, isn’t it?” She leaned forward and looked into my cup. “You’re an abstemious soul.”
“Ah, but I’m a devil once I get started. Are you losing much to shoplifting this year?”
She extended a hand, palm up, and waved it in the general direction of the store. “Lookit these people,” she said, although almost all the customers were gone. “They come in here alla, excuse me, all the time. I know their kids, some of them. We get hit a little harder in December than we do the rest of the year. I’m no math whiz, but I bet if you made a graph of the number of people who come through these doors, I mean this door, every month, with the number of people in one line on the graph and the amount of stuff that gets stolen in the other line, I bet the lines would move along like they were holding hands.” She blinked, apparently reviewing the sentence, then nodded. “Yup, ’swhat I meant,” she said. “Lose a little more ’cause we get more people this time of year, but nothing to cry about.”
“What about the other stores?”
She shrugged. “Not my problem.”
“You must hear things.”
“Everybody complains, ’specially at Christmas. Hell, two days after Christmas last year, Gabriel’s pulled out. In two days. They cheated everybody, even ducked the people returning ugly ties and stuff. Store was there and then it wasn’t.” She pushed out her lower lip and blew out, making her bangs fluff. “Everything’s better at Christmas but everything’s worse, too.”
“That’s the truest thing anybody ever said to me about Christmas.”
She shook her head. “But I mean, look at this place. Not just my shop, the whole thing. Shoplifting isn’t the big problem. The big problem is heart, I think. A loss of heart. Entropy is what my son says, but me, I think it’s sadness. Malls are finished, you know? Nobody shops in them anymore. It’s mos’ly kids hooking up and then it’s Christmas, when people realize there’s things they forgot to buy online and it’s too late to get it delivered so they go to the mall. It’s not what it used to be. Nothing is. Not even Christmas. ’Specially not Christmas.” She let the hand with the cup in it relax, slopping a little onto her lap, and some of the air seemed to go out of her. “I’m finished,” she said. “This is our last year.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“Me, too.” She balanced the cup on her knee and gave the tinsel hanging from her left cuff an experimental tug. “Been a long time. I liked having a store called Bonnie’s. I like the kind of junk I sell. I like the kind of people who used to buy it. But now, you know, it’s just, everybody goes to bricabrac.com or some damn thing. Nothin’s the same.”
“I guess not.”
She picked up the cup and studied it. “All gone,” she said. “Like Mr. Pickwick. It’s all gone.”