Dear Sirs: Let me begin by clearing up any possible misconception in your minds, wherever you are. The collective by which I address you in the title above is neither patronizing nor jocose but an exact industrial term in use among professional thieves. It is, I am reliably given to understand, the technical argot for those who engage in your particular branch of the boost; i.e., burglars who rob while the tenants are absent, in contrast to hot-slough prowlers, those who work while the occupants are home. Since the latter obviously require an audacity you do not possess, you may perhaps suppose that I am taunting you as socially inferior. Far from it; I merely draw an etymological distinction, hoping that specialists and busy people like you will welcome such precision in a layman. Above all, disabuse yourselves of any thought that I propose to vent moral indignation at your rifling my residence, to whimper over the loss of a few objets d'art, or to shame you into rectitude. My object, rather, is to alert you to an aspect or two of the affair that could have the gravest implications for you, far beyond the legal sanctions society might inflict. You have unwittingly set in motion forces so malign, so vindictive, that it would be downright inhumane of me not to warn you about them. Quite candidly, fellows, I wouldn't be in your shoes for all the rice in China.

As you've doubtless forgotten the circumstances in the press of more recent depredations, permit me to recapitulate them briefly. Sometime on Saturday evening, August 22nd, while my family and I were dining at the Hostaria dell' Orso, in Rome, you jimmied a window of our home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and let yourselves into the premises. Hastening to the attic, the temperature of which was easily hotter than the Gold Coast, you proceeded to mask the windows with a fancy wool coverlet, some khaki pants, and the like, and to ransack the innumerable boxes and barrels stored there. What you were looking for (unless you make a hobby of collecting old tennis rackets and fly screens)eludes me, but to judge from phonograph records scattered about a fumed-oak Victrola, you danced two tangos and a paso doble, which must have been fairly enervating in that milieu. You then descended one story, glommed a television set from the music room- the only constructive feature of your visit, by the way- and, returning to the ground floor, entered the master bedroom. From the curio cabinet on its south wall and the bureaus beneath, you abstracted seventeen ivory, metal, wood, and stone sculptures of Oriental and African origin, two snuffboxes, and a jade-handled magnifying glass. Rummaging through a stack of drawers nearby, you unearthed an antique French chess set in ivory and sandalwood, which, along with two box Kodaks, you added to your haul. Then, having wrapped the lot in an afghan my dog customarily slept on, you lammed out the front door, considerately leaving it open for neighbors to discover.

So much for the tiresome facts, as familiar to you, I'm sure, as to the constables and state troopers who followed in your wake. The foregoing, aided by several clues I'll withhold to keep you on your toes, will pursue you with a tenacity worthy of Inspector Javert, but before they close in, gird yourselves, I repeat, for a vengeance infinitely more pitiless. Fourteen of the sculptures you took posses properties of a most curious and terrifying nature, as you will observe when your limbs begin to wither and your hair falls out in patches. In time, these minor manifestations will multiply and effloresce, riddling you with frambesia, the king's evil, sheep rot, and clonic spasm, until your very existence becomes a burden and you cry out for release. All this, though, is simply a prelude, a curtain-raiser, for what ensues, and I doubt whether any Occidental could accurately forecast it. If, however, it would help to intensify your anguish, I can delimit the powers of a few of the divinities you've affronted and describe the punishment they meted out in one analogous instance. Hold on tight.

First of all, the six figures of the Buddha you heisted- four Siamese heads, a black obsidian statuette in the earth-touching position, and a large brass figure of the Dying Buddha on a teakwood base. Now, you probably share the widespread Western belief that the Lord Buddha is the most compassionate of the gods, much more so than Jehovah and Allah and the rest. 'Fess up- don't you? Well, ordinarily he is, except (as the Wheel of the Law specifies) toward impious folk who steal, disturb, or maltreat the Presence. Very peculiar retribution indeed seems to overtake such jokers. Eight or ten years ago, a couple of French hoods stole a priceless Khmer head from the Musee Guimet, in Paris, and a week later crawled into the Salpetriere with unmistakable symptoms of leprosy. Hell's own amount of chaulmoogra oil did nothing to alleviate their torment; they expired amid indescribable fantods, imploring the Blessed One to forgive their desecration. Any reputable French interne can supply you with a dozen similar instances, and I'll presently recount a case out of my own personal experience, but, for the moment, let's resume our catalogue.

Whether the pair of Sudanese ivory carvings you lifted really possess the juju to turn your livers to lead, as a dealer in Khartoum assured me, I am not competent to say. Likewise the ivory Chinese female figure known as a ``doctor lady'' (provenance Honan); a friend of mine removing her from the curio cabinet for inspection was felled as if by a hammer, but he had previously drunk a quantity of applejack. The three Indian brass deities, though- Ganessa, Siva, and Krishna- are an altogether different cup of tea. They hail from Travancore, a state in the subcontinent where Kali, the goddess of death, is worshiped. Have you ever heard of thuggee? Nuf sed. But it is the wooden sculpture from Bali, the one representing two men with their heads bent backward and their bodies interlaced by a fish, that I particularly call to your attention. Oddly enough, this is an amulet against housebreakers, presented to the mem and me by a local rajah in 1949. Inscribed around its base is a charm in Balinese, a dialect I take it you don't comprehend. Neither do I, but the Tjokorda Agoeng was good enough to translate, and I'll do as much for you. Whosoever violates our rooftree, the legend states, can expect maximal sorrow. The teeth will rain from his mouth like pebbles, his wife will make him cocu with fishmongers, and a trolley car will grow in his stomach. Furthermore- and this, to me, strikes an especially warming note- it shall avail the vandals naught to throw away or dispose of their loot. The cycle of disaster starts the moment they touch any belonging of ours, and dogs them unto the forty-fifth generation. Sort of remorseless, isn't it? Still, there it is.

Now, you no doubt regard the preceding as pap; you're tooling around full of gage in your hot rods, gorging yourselves on pizza and playing pinball in the taverns and generally behaving like U^bermenschen. In that case, listen to what befell another wisenheimer who tangled with our joss. A couple of years back, I occupied a Village apartment whose outer staircase contained the type of niche called a ``coffin turn''. In it was a stone Tibetan Buddha I had picked up in Bombay, and occasionally, to make merit, my wife and I garlanded it with flowers or laid a few pennies in its lap. After a while, we became aware that the money was disappearing as fast as we replenished it. Our suspicions eventually centered, by the process of elimination, on a grocer's boy, a thoroughly bad hat, who delivered cartons to the people overhead. The more I probed into this young man's activities and character, the less savory I found him. I learned, for example, that he made a practice of yapping at dogs he encountered and, in winter, of sprinkling salt on the icy pavement to scarify their feet. His energy was prodigious; sometimes he would be up before dawn, clad as a garbage collector and hurling pails into areaways to exasperate us, and thereafter would hurry to the Bronx Zoo to grimace at the lions and press cigar butts against their paws. Evenings, he was frequently to be seen at restaurants like Enrico + Paglieri's or Peter's Backyard drunkenly donning ladies' hats and singing ``O Sole Mio''. In short, and to borrow an arboreal phrase, slash timber. Well, the odious little toad went along chivying animals and humans who couldn't retaliate, and in due course, as was inevitable, overreached himself. One morning, we discovered not only that the pennies were missing from the idol but that a cigarette had been stubbed out in its lap. ``Now he's bought it'', said my wife contentedly. ``No divinity will hold still for that. He's really asking for it''. And how right she was. The next time we saw him, he was a changed person; he had aged thirty years, and his face, the color of tallow, was crisscrossed with wrinkles, as though it had been wrapped in chicken wire. Some sort of nemesis was haunting his footsteps, he told us in a quavering voice- either an ape specter or Abe Spector, a process-server, we couldn't determine which. His eyes had the same dreadful rigid stare as Dr. Grimesby Roylott's when he was found before his open safe wearing the speckled band. The grocery the youth worked for soon tired of his depressing effect on customers, most of whom were sufficiently neurotic without the threat of incubi, and let him go. The beautiful, the satisfying part of his disintegration, however, was the masterly way the Buddha polished him off. Reduced to beggary, he at last got a job as office boy to a television producer. His hubris, deficiency of taste, and sadism carried him straightaway to the top. He evolved programs that plumbed new depths of bathos and besmirched whole networks, and quickly superseded his boss. Not long ago, I rode down with him in an elevator in Radio City; he was talking to himself thirteen to the dozen and smoking two cigars at once, clearly a man in extremis. ``See that guy''? the operator asked pityingly. ``I wouldn't be in his shoes for all the rice in China. There's some kind of a nemesis haunting his footsteps''.

However one looks at it, therefore, I'd say that your horoscope for this autumn is the reverse of rosy. The inventory you acquired from me isn't going to be easy to move; you can't very well sidle up to people on the street and ask if they want to buy a hot Bodhisattva. Additionally, since you're going to be hors de combat pretty soon with sprue, yaws, Delhi boil, the Granville wilt, liver fluke, bilharziasis, and a host of other complications of the hex you've aroused, you mustn't expect to be lionized socially. My advice, if you live long enough to continue your vocation, is that the next time you're attracted by the exotic, pass it up- it's nothing but a headache. As you can count on me to do the same.

compassionately yours,

S. J. Perelman.

The doors of the ~D train slid shut, and as I dropped into a seat and, exhaling, looked up across the aisle, the whole aviary in my head burst into song. She was a living doll and no mistake- the blue-black bang, the wide cheekbones, olive-flushed, that betrayed the Cherokee strain in her Midwestern lineage, and the mouth whose only fault, in the novelist's carping phrase, was that the lower lip was a trifle too voluptuous. From what I was able to gauge in a swift, greedy glance, the figure inside the coral-colored boucle dress was stupefying.