I once fell in love with a woman I met while she was trying to burgle my house. I lived at the time in a ramshackle old wooden house near the top of the Berkeley Hills, not far from the university.
This is her story. It may be the world’s shortest biography.
I miss her still.
Once upon a time there was a cat burglar who worked assiduously to improve her technique of robbing houses and apartments. There are, for example, many ways to pick a lock, and our criminal friend invented new, more efficient, more durable tools before which even the most savage locks became pliant. She developed as well the ability to cut artfully, almost surgically, through the most ornamental window glass, so that there would be no breakage, and so that no house need suffer the offense of fragments or splinters. Often she would, after stealing what she pleased, considerately replace the cut windowpane with fresh glass she had prepared specially for the purpose. Before too long, she began to redesign whole windows, and install them furtively, so that the inhabitants of the burgled house might observe the world through a more beautiful aperture.
So delightful to her were these tricks that she began to invent more of them; and she became so entranced by the effort that she often neglected to sell in the underworld the goods she had so improperly acquired.
One time she posed as a florist and sold potted plants and trees to people whose goods interested her. Her studies in biology and horticulture had enabled her, after painstaking genetic experiments, to cultivate flowers so iridescent that tropical rainbows began to study their colors. These blooms became everywhere prized, though they had one noteworthy weakness: they perished quickly unless exposed to a flow of fresh night air. Coincidentally, the windows left open to give the splendid plants life also gave entry to a certain notorious and scholarly burglar.
Now, as she burgled, she was extremely selective. She would examine fastidiously the goods in a house and take only those which met her standards, as to integrity of design, harmony of proportion, delicacy of color, and durability of materials. Sometimes she took nothing at all. Sometimes she would leave one of her newly bred, rare plants, one that would infuse a room with a finery of color and luscious fragrance and complement the flora she found already in place.
Another ruse of hers was to design and manufacture her own locks—superb ones that made a house well-nigh impenetrable. Impenetrable to everyone, of course, except the lock designer. Now these locks were so ingenious and intransigent that advanced versions came to be used on safes, on big vaults at important banks, on the security doors at the great compounds where national treasuries were kept. In fact, so respected were these instruments that our cat burglar was summoned urgently hither and yon, to distant lands and curious nations, to sell and install her locks. So busy was she making the world safe from assaults upon treasures public and private, that she hardly had time to threaten us with her fine and enthusiastic criminality.
All of this was just as well, for her stock of stolen goods had, over all this time, grown immensely; and she next determined she would use her felonious and impeccable talents to distribute them where they did the most good. So did she become a cat giver: people who had once lost things to her would find in their house other goods, chosen to be more useful to the cause of strange living. And other people, strange already but lacking in some truly necessary item, would come home to find a new chair in their apartment, a cooking stove, a basket of food, a computer, a shelf of carefully chosen books, an uncanny watercolor on the wall; or even a medicine to take, so as to arrest an illness they did not yet know they had.
There were other duties: sometimes, when a bank was defrauded and threatened with default, our burglar would go to their vaults and replenish their funds. Occasionally, also, the problems with the international balance of payments were so intractable and wearisome that she was obliged to travel wildly around to redistribute money among countries.
One day the forces of law and order caught our cat giver in a house not her own, installing a safety latch. She was doing so because, without this certain door latch, the little girl who lived there would, the next day, have wandered outside and drowned in a nearby ditch. The authorities did not, of course, believe her story; and she was tried, convicted, and sent to prison. On the way to her cell she stole the guard’s keys; and so was able, over the years, to visit all her fellow prisoners at the facility and teach them her arts. The prison became notorious as the breeding ground of most of the cat givers now at large in society.
And so our dear world, that once so feared crime, now must confront an even more desperate and perilous situation: that in spite of all its efforts, it will not be able to prevent good from being done.