The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart

by Lawrence Block

  “Wait a minute. Budapest’s in Anatruria?”

  “No, it’s in Hungary.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “The stamps never got to Anatruria,” I explained. “As a matter of fact, the only government independent Anatruria ever had was a government in exile. A little band of patriots scattered all over Eastern Europe proclaimed Anatrurian independence. Then they tried lobbying the League of Nations, but they didn’t get anywhere. They even put Woodrow Wilson on one of their stamps, for all the good it did them.”

  “Why Woodrow Wilson? Did he have relatives in Anatruria?”

  “He was big on self-determination of nations. But by the time they got the stamps printed, Warren G. Harding was president. I doubt the Anatrurians ever heard of him, and I’d be willing to bet he never heard of Anatruria.”

  “Well, neither did I. Where is it, exactly?”

  “You know where Bulgaria and Romania and Yugoslavia come together?”

  “Sort of. Except there’s no more Yugoslavia, Bern. It’s five different countries now.”

  “Well, part of one of them is part of Anatruria, and the same thing goes for Bulgaria and Romania. Anyway, that’s where Ilona was born, but she hasn’t been home in quite a while. She lived in Budapest for a year or two, or maybe it was Bucharest.”

  “Maybe it was both of them.”

  “Maybe. And she was in Prague, which used to be in Czechoslovakia.”

  “Used to be? Where’d it go?”

  “There’s no more Czechoslovakia. There’s Slovakia and there’s the Czech Republic.”

  “Oh, right. You know what’s weird? At the same time that Europe is deciding to be one big country, Yugoslavia’s deciding to be five little countries all by itself. Now you’ve got the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union and the former Czechoslovakia. It’s like Formerly Joe’s. Remember Formerly Joe’s?”

  “Vividly.”

  “Oh, right, we didn’t like our meal, did we? I guess lots of people felt the same way, because they didn’t last long. There was this restaurant called Joe’s at the corner of West Fourth and West Tenth, and it was there for years, and then it was out of business for years. It just sat there vacant.”

  “I know.”

  “So then, when a new restaurant finally moved in, they called it Formerly Joe’s. And now it’s gone, in fact it’s been gone for a long time, and when somebody finally takes it over what are they gonna call it? Formerly Formerly Joe’s?”

  “Or Two Guys From Anatruria.”

  “I guess anything’s possible. You seeing her tonight, Bern?”

  “Yes.”

  “And seeing more Bogart movies?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How long’s this festival going on, anyway?”

  “Another ten or twelve days.”

  “You’re kidding.” She looked at me. “You’re not kidding. How many movies did the guy make, anyway?”

  “Seventy-five, but they didn’t manage to get them all.”

  “What a shame. How long are you gonna stay with it, Bern?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m kind of enjoying it. The first week there were times when I was wondering what I was doing there, but then it became this magical other world that I would slip into for a few hours every night.” I shrugged. “After all,” I said, “it is Bogart. He’s always interesting to watch even in some dog of a movie you never heard of. And when it’s a picture I’ve seen a dozen times, well, who can get tired of Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon? They get better every time you see them.”

  “What’s the program for tonight?”

  “The Caine Mutiny,” I said, “and Swing Your Lady.”

  “I remember The Caine Mutiny. He was great in that, playing with those marbles.”

  “Ball bearings, I think they were.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. What’s the other one? Swing Your Partner?”

  “Swing Your Lady.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  “Nobody did. Bogart’s a wrestling promoter in the Ozarks.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “I am not. According to the program, Reagan has a small part.”

  “Reagan? Ronald Reagan?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Well, at least it’s only a small part. Wrestling in the Ozarks. And square dancing, I’ll bet. Why else would they call it Swing Your Lady?”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “Wrestling and square dancing and Ronald Reagan. You know what, Bern? I bet you get lucky tonight. Any woman who’d make a man go through all that has got to reward him for it.”

  “I don’t know, Carolyn.”

  “I do,” she said. “Better pack your toothbrush, Bern. Tonight’s your lucky night.”

  And, after Bogart had followed his electrifying portrayal of Captain Queeg with a stint as barnstorming wrestling promoter Ed Hatch, and after his wrestler had quit the business to marry a lady blacksmith and spend the rest of his life shoeing horses, we’d gone across the street for a quick espresso and a little holding of hands and trading of long looks. Then we went outside and I hailed her a cab, and when I held the door for her she came into my arms for a kiss.

  “Bear-naaard,” she murmured. “Come with me.”

  “Come with you?”

  “Come home with me. Now.”

  “Oh,” I said, and was ready to stammer out some lame excuse when fifteen nights at the movies came along and rescued me. “Not tonight, sweetheart,” I drawled. “I’m afraid I’ll have to take a rain check.” And I kissed her lightly on the lips and tucked her into the cab and watched her ride away from me.

  Some lucky night.

  CHAPTER

  Six

  I woke up surprisingly clear-headed, if not entirely thrilled about it, and was downtown in time to open my store at ten. I fed Raffles and refilled his water dish, dragged my three-for-a-buck table outside, and settled myself behind the counter with Will Durant. The world, he reassured me, had always been a pretty nasty place. I found this curiously comforting.

  I had the front door closed against the chill of the morning, and so I got to hear the tinkling of little bells each time it opened. I had a couple of early browsers, rang up two sales for a few dollars each, and looked through the sack of books that Mowgli brought me. He’s a curious creature who looks as though he might indeed have been raised by wolves—gaunt, hollow-eyed, with a mop of hair and a scraggle of beard. Speed and acid have burned some substantial holes in his brain, and he’d dropped out of a doctoral program in English at Columbia to take up a nomadic existence, shifting his residence from one abandoned building to another as circumstances dictated.

  He’d collected books during his student days, and on the way down he sold them off piecemeal. His stock was pretty much gone by the time he found his way to Barnegat Books, but I’d bought a few things from him then, including a nice clean set of Kipling. He’d disappeared for the better part of a year, and I gather he started sucking on a crack pipe and pretty much lost touch with the planet for a while there, but when he turned up again he had his act together, in a marginal sort of way. He nowadays limited his chemical adventures to a little righteous herb and the odd hit of organic mescaline, and supported himself by buying books at street fairs and thrift shops and flea markets and reselling them to people like me.

  I picked out a few things, passed on the rest. He had some nice fifties paperback noir, David Goodis and Peter Rabe, but my customers wouldn’t pay collector prices for that kind of material. “Figured as much,” he said. “I’ll run these by Jon at Partners and Crime. Thought you might like to see them, though. Don’t you love the covers?”

  I agreed they were great. I picked out a biography of Thomas Wolfe and Mark Schorer’s life of Sinclair Lewis and a couple of other books I thought I could sell, and we hemmed and hawed until we found a price we could both live with. Toward the end I asked him a question I ask most of my regula
r suppliers.

  “These aren’t stolen,” I said. “Are they, Mowgli?”

  “How could they be otherwise? ‘Property is theft.’ You know who said that, Bernie?”

  “Proudhon.”

  “Give the man a cigar. Proudhon indeed. Matter of fact, St. John Chrysostom said something much along the same line. You wouldn’t expect it of him, would you?” We kicked that around, and then he said, “What can I tell you, Bernie? None of this stuff was stolen by me, unless it’s stealing to buy a David Goodis first from the Sally Ann for two bits when I know I can get a finif for it. Is that stealing?”

  “If it is,” I said, “then we’re all in trouble.”

  The next time the bell rang it was a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses who wanted to talk with me, and we had a nice conversation. Proudhon’s name didn’t come up once, or St. John Chrysostom’s, either. I had to cut the conversation short—they’d still be talking if I hadn’t—but they went away happy and I went back to Will Durant. And a few minutes later the bells sounded again, but this time I didn’t look up until I heard a familiar voice.

  “Well, well, well,” said the best policeman money can buy. “If it ain’t Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s boy Bernard. Every time I see you you got your nose in a book, Bernie. Which more or less figures, seein’ as you got your ass in a bookstore.”

  “Hello, Ray.”

  “‘Hello, Ray.’ You want to put more energy into it, Bernie. Otherwise it don’t sound like you’re glad to see me.”

  “Hello, Ray.”

  “That’s a little better.” He leaned forward, propped an elbow on my counter. “But you always seem nervous when I drop in for a visit, like you’re waitin’ for the third shoe to drop. Why do you figure that is, Bernie?”

  “I don’t know, Ray.”

  “I mean, whattaya got to be nervous about? Respectable businessman, never strays on the wrong side of the law, it oughta be a load off your mind when a sworn police officer comes into your place of business.”

  “Sworn,” I said.

  “How’s that, Bernie?”

  “I like the phrase,” I said. “A sworn police officer. I like it.”

  “Well, be my guest, Bernie. Use it anytime the urge comes over you. Say, tell me something, will you?

  “If I can.”

  “Ever seen this before?”

  He’d been holding it out of sight below the counter.

  “Indeed I have,” I said. “Many times. It’s my attaché case. How do you know Hugo, and why has he got you running errands for him?”

  “What the hell are you talkin’ about, errands?”

  “Well, what else would you call it? I told him he didn’t have to be in any rush to return it.” I reached for the case, and Ray snatched it away from me. I looked at him, puzzled. “What’s going on?” I demanded. “Are you giving me the damn thing or aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He set it down flat on the counter, settled his thumbs on the little buttons. “What do you figure’s inside?”

  “The Empire State Building.”

  “Huh?”

  “The Lindbergh baby. How many more guesses do I get? I don’t know what’s inside it, Ray. When Hugo Candlemas left here the other day there were some hand-colored engravings he didn’t want to risk creasing, along with a couple of other packages he’d picked up along the way.”

  “I didn’t know you sold pictures, Bernie.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “Don’t ask me where he bought them. All I sold him was a book of poems for five bucks plus tax.”

  “And you threw in this here? Very generous of you.”

  “I lent it to him, Ray. He’s a decent old gent and a good customer. I can’t pay the rent on guys like him, but he’s pleasant company and he usually buys something before he leaves. Why? What’s this all about, anyway?”

  He popped the locks, opened the case.

  “Why, it seems to be empty,” I said. “Nice showmanship, Ray, but a little bit anticlimactic, don’t you think?”

  “It looks empty,” he said. “Don’t it? But it ain’t.”

  “Because it contains air? What is this, physics class?”

  “I got no need for physics,” he said, “bein’ as I’m regular as clockwork. What’s in here’s your prints, Bernie.”

  “The engravings?” I leaned forward, squinted. “They seem to have grown transparent. I don’t see them.”

  “Not that kind of prints. Your fingerprints.”

  “My fingerprints?”

  “A full set.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” I said, “but not terribly surprising. It’s my case. I already told you that.”

  “So you did, Bernie, and what’s surprisin’ is for you to admit it.”

  “Why shouldn’t I admit it? What have I got to be ashamed of? It’s not Louis Vuitton, but it’s a perfectly respectable piece of luggage. And if you’re going to tell me it’s stolen, the statute of limitations ran out a long time ago. I must have owned the thing for eight or ten years.”

  He struck a pose not unlike Rodin’s Thinker and took a long searching look at me. “You’re slicker than ice on the sidewalk,” he said. “I thought you’d twitch a little when I showed you the case, but no, it was like you expected it. That was you on the phone, right?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Let it go. I’ll tell you, soon as we ran the prints on this thing and they turned out to be yours, I couldn’t wait to hear you explain how your prints wound up all over this guy Candlemas’s case. I figured it’d be a good story. But you went one better and got the nerve to claim it’s your case. I like that, Bernie. It’s real imaginary.”

  “It happens to be the truth.”

  “Truth,” he said sourly. “What the hell’s truth?”

  “You’re not the first officer of the law to ask that question,” I told him. “What happened to Candlemas?”

  “Who said anything happened to him?”

  “Oh, please,” I said. “Why would you dust an empty attaché case for prints? You found it in his apartment, and he could have told you how it got there, so I can only conclude he wasn’t doing any talking. Either the place was empty or he was in no shape to talk. Which was it?”

  He measured me with a long look. “I guess there’s no reason not to tell you,” he said. “Anyway, another couple of hours an’ you’ll be readin’ about it in the papers.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “If he’s not,” he said, “then it’s a hell of an act he’s puttin’ on.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “I don’t know, Bern. I was kind of hopin’ it’d turn out to be you.”

  “Get a grip, Ray. It never turns out to be me, remember? I’m not a killer. It’s not my style.”

  “I know that,” he said. “All the years I known you, you never been a violent fellow. But who’s to say what might happen one of these days if somebody surprises you while you’re burglarizin’ their premises? And don’t give me any of that crap about how you’re spendin’ all your time sellin’ books these days. You’re a burglar through an’ through, Bernie. You’ll still be breakin’ an’ enterin’ when you’re six feet under.”

  There was a cheering thought. “Tell me about Candlemas,” I said. “How was he killed?”

  “What’s the difference? Dead is dead.”

  “How do you even know it was murder? He wasn’t a kid. Maybe he died of natural causes.”

  “Naw, it was suicide, Bernie. He stabbed himself a couple of times in the chest and then ate the knife to throw us off.”

  “That’s what killed him? Stab wounds?”

  “That’s what the doc tells us. A lot of internal bleedin’, he said. Plenty of external bleedin’, too. Made a mess of the rug.”

  I winced, feeling sorry at once for Hugo Candlemas and his Aubusson. I told Ray I hoped he hadn’t suffered much.

  “He must of,” he said, “unless he was some kind of a massy-kissed. Somebody sticks a kni
fe into you two or three times, naturally you’re gonna suffer.” He frowned, considering. “They say you go into shock the first time you get stabbed and don’t feel the others, an’ I guess I’ll have to take their word for it. I wouldn’t want to test it out for myself.”

  “Neither would I. The murder weapon didn’t turn up?”

  He shook his head. “Killer took it away with him. Time the lab’s done, they’ll be able to tell you the size an’ shape of the blade, along with the name an’ home phone number of the guy who made it. Right now all I can say for sure is it was some kind of a knife. Long an’ thin’d be my guess, but all I’d be is guessin’.”

  “How did you get the case, Ray?”

  “Somebody called it in around one in the morning. Couple of blues responded, found the door locked, went next door an’ got the super to open up for ’em. Except there were three locks on the door an’ the super only had keys for two of ’em. That’s your fault, Bernie.”

  “How is it my fault?”

  “Wasn’t for guys like you, people wouldn’t hang three locks on a goddam door. The whole city’s walkin’ around with more keys in their pockets than a person oughta have to carry, and it’s the burglars of New York who are the cause of it. I ran into this woman one time, she had six locks on her front door. Six of ’em! Time she got out of her house in the morning, it was pretty near time for her to go back in again.” He shook his head at the very idea.

  I said, “So what did they do? Kick the door in?”

  “No reason to. All they got is an anonymous tip, sounds of a struggle up on the fourth floor. This was on the Lower East Side you’d maybe think about kicking it in, but not in a good neighborhood. They called a locksmith.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “What’s wrong with that? There’s plenty of ’em offer twenty-four-hour service, an’ they’re not like doctors. They still make house calls.”

  “It’s a good thing. It’d be tough to bring the door to them.”

  “Or squirt aspirin in the lock and call ’em in the mornin’. Guy they called, though, either he wasn’t so good or the lock was a pip. It took him half an hour to open it.”