Poofy—our neighbor Rodika’s white cat—knows who robbed us in the wee hours of Friday morning. I know this, because Rodika, told me last night, while we both stood on the small landing between our two doors, watching Poofy pace quick circles around us and between our legs.
“Why not you go and wake Brett,” she said sternly to him, rolling the ‘r’ in my name. She turned and crouched down, making rapid pawing motions at my door in a decent impression of what Poofy actually does. “Wake up Brett, wake up.” She stopped and straightened up. “He knows who it was, but I do not know how to make him tell.” She shrugged.
“Hm,” I said, nudging him with my toe. Poofy can be quite the magnificent bastard, pooping on our balcony all the time, urinating in the hall, and mewling loudly outside our windows, but this one really took the cake.
Instead of finding out about the burglary from Poofy ahead of time, I found out the next morning. It was 6:40, and I was having some trouble getting out of bed.
“Brett,” Angela called from the living room, “Can you come look at the fridge please?” There was something unusual in her voice, and asking me to come look at our refrigerator seemed a strange request. I was unhappily thinking big brown jumping tarantula.
“Am I going to need my glasses for this,” I yelled back as I kicked off the covers.
“Can you just come here please!” Something was definitely different. When I walked out of the bedroom, through the hallway, and into our living room, I saw what it was. Angela was standing by the refrigerator, her hair still wet from the shower, and at her feet was the chain and padlock from our iron grate. The lock had been cut. The curtains were open, which we were careful to always keep closed at night, and the sliding glass door was open about a foot. There were pry bar marks on it.
“We got broken into last night,” Angela said, tears welling up in her eyes.
It was a strange feeling. Someone had been in our house the night before, doing basically whatever they wanted. I turned around and looked at the room behind me in a new light. What was different? What had they taken? I had taken the computer into the bedroom with me, and Angela went to check on our ipods. They were both there. The only thing missing was a little bit of money from a make-up bag that had been pulled out of a drawer.
Now I don’t want this blog to turn into an episode of Touched by an Angel, but I will point out these few facts. About twenty feet in front of the glass door is our dining room table. On the table, I had left 25,000 CFA, which is the approximate equivalent of 50.00 US Dollars. The money was untouched, left in the same neat stack I had piled it into the night before. I would say the thief had left the money, because it was petty cash, and they wanted the big score, except that they had gladly taken the money in the make-up bag, which I believe was only around forty dollars. And they had taken nothing else. In fact, it looked as though the intruder had not been in the apartment for longer than five minutes, and had never made it past the dining room table.
Maybe someone woke up (Our Guard, for instance? Anyone?), and spooked the thief. Maybe Angela and I made a noise. But nothing like that bothered the fellow(s) who had carried a ladder over to our wall to climb over, then carried the ladder to our porch, climbed up, cut the lock on our iron grate, pried open the glass door, and slipped into our silent living room. Whatever happened, he walked right back out, leaving a stack of bills neatly piled on the table.It’s strange, I’ve heard that sometimes after people get robbed, or had their homes broken into, they have a hard time getting to sleep for a while. Last night, I slept pretty heavy.
The mean streets of Libreville
Not the best guards. (Poofy, and his un-named sister.)
