Without fail, every time the Rat Burglar does a job, Doreen covers it, her pudgy cheeks appling as she blabs away about the haplessness of “J-Mart,” and I can never stop myself from saying something. I know I shouldn’t. There are plenty of reasons why I shouldn’t, among which a) there is no explicable reason why a baseball talent scout should have a beef with the Rat Burglar or Double-D, so b) it therefore unnecessarily raises certain suspicions that could lead to complicated conversations, and c) it is never nice, while in the company of one woman, to call another woman a “slutty, ignorant, obese cretin capable of only the cheapest, most irresponsible, slapdash, jingoistic ‘journalism’ and who has wardrobe people who dress her funny.” Even if it’s true.
Tonight I resolve to be better. In the bathroom I bunker the space under the door with a rolled-up towel and plug my ears with facecloths but I can still hear Doreen and her guests discussing the Rat Burglar. One voice is the academic. I can tell by her phonation, which is both faucalized and mucusy, with strident accentuation and wet vowels that make it sound as if her voice is mayonnaise squirting out of a plastic packet. Plus she has the full-stop terseness of hauteur, as if she knows the soup du jour and you have absolutely no idea.
In other words: she is annoying me already.
The other speaker has an accent that aspires to identify itself as British-American of unspecified but probably aristocratic derivation33 but which succeeds only in designating its speaker as art-world-phony. It belongs, I can tell despite the terry cloth I am forcing deeply into my aural canal, to Arthur Quackenbush, head of Signature, a second-tier auction house from whose employ I have been dropped.
In other words: he has annoyed me for a long time.
As have the words that have become Doreen’s catchphrase, which she utters after introducing her guests: “But America, who is the Rat Burglar?”
Then comes Patriot TV’s familiar machine-gun report and, simultaneously, bullet perforations underscore the Rat Burglar graphic. Canned applause roars over the wire.
It makes me sick to see how much people love their criminals. It was bad enough when the Gottis got their own reality show, but in the last couple of years the Rat Burglar has eclipsed even that standard of perversity. Although he is reviled by many—the media, the authorities, the entire art world, anyone with two brain cells to rub together—to some he has become a cult hero. Such is his celebrity that those five famous words—“Who is the Rat Burglar?”—have attained a pop-culture ubiquity. In bars, on dates, at the watercooler, they are invoked as if they were a jingle. There are innumerable Web sites devoted to theories of identity. An Elephant 6-like all-girl indie band, the Hard Twenties, has a hit song dedicated to the Rat Burglar called “Steal Me.” And Crimies, a brand of trading card that features infamous mafiosi, gangstas, snitches, hitpersons, muscle, gaffers, talent, et cetera, has the Rat Burglar’s infamous blank-silhouette mug shot valued at three Frankie Nickels or two Jimmy the Hats. I ask you: does that make any kind of sense?