The Tenant

Rosalind Kaplan had rented out the top floor of her Brooklyn brownstone to eleven tenants in thirty years, and she prided herself on being able to read every one of them within a week. Mr. Halvorsen had now lived upstairs for four months, and she still could not read him at all. That, she decided one wet Tuesday in November, must mean something.

The evidence, when she began to write it down, was considerable. He paid his rent in cash, always on time, always in an envelope with no name on it. He left the house at odd hours and sometimes did not come back until three in the morning. Twice she had heard him on the phone through the ceiling, speaking a language that was certainly not English and might well have been Russian.

Then there were the packages: long, flat cardboard tubes that arrived every couple of weeks from addresses she did not recognize. There was the pair of very expensive binoculars she had glimpsed on his windowsill, pointed, as far as she could judge, straight at the apartment building across the street. And there was the fact that when she asked him, perfectly politely, what he did for a living, he had smiled and said, "Oh, I make things up, mostly."

Her friend Bernice, to whom she presented all of this over coffee, was unimpressed. "Roz, he can't be a spy," she said. "Spies don't rent rooms from retired dental hygienists. Paying in cash just means he doesn't trust banks. And the language could have been Norwegian. Halvorsen is a Norwegian name." Rosalind conceded that it might have been. She did not concede that it was.

Bernice went on, with the patience of someone who had watched a great deal of daytime television. "The tubes are probably posters, or maps, or plans. The late nights? He might work in a restaurant, or a hospital. And the binoculars," she added, "could easily be for birds. There are hawks in this neighborhood, you know. It was in the paper." Every explanation was more likely than espionage. Rosalind found that she disliked every one of them.

The truth arrived, as truths often do, by accident. A week later, a package was left on the front step in the rain, and Rosalind carried it upstairs. The door was ajar. On the desk, beside the famous binoculars, lay a thick stack of typed pages, and the top one bore a title in large letters: THE LANDLADY. A NOVEL.

She should not have read it. She read the first page, and then the second. It was a spy story set in a Brooklyn brownstone, and its most memorable character was a sharp-eyed widow who noticed absolutely everything, suspected everyone and was, in the end, the only person clever enough to solve the case.

Mr. Halvorsen found her there ten minutes later, still holding the package. He did not seem angry. If anything, he seemed slightly embarrassed. "Those are maps of Oslo, by the way," he said, nodding at the tube. "For the sequel. And the phone calls are to my mother, who refuses to speak English on principle." He paused. "I must have been very bad at hiding it. You worked it out, didn't you?"

Rosalind considered telling him that she had worked out nothing, that she had in fact been convinced he was selling secrets to a foreign power. Instead, she handed him the package and said, with great dignity, "Your widow should wear better shoes. Nobody climbs fire escapes in slippers." He wrote that down. When the book came out the following year, the acknowledgments thanked "R.K., without whom this landlady would have been far less suspicious."