Burglar on the Prowl

by Lawrence Block

  "So this guy took the book," Lacey said, pointing at Quattrone, "and that guy murdered the man and woman," she went on, nodding at Blinsky, "and the photos were still in the apartment. Right?"

  "Hypothetically," said Michael Quattrone.

  "Hypothetically," I agreed.

  "Whatever," she said. "But if somebody found them, and tore them out of the book, they aren't there anymore. Right?"

  "Right."

  "Okay," she said, and flashed a smile at Carolyn. "I like to understand stuff. That's all."

  I like to understand stuff, too, especially if I'm called upon to explain it. But sometimes you can start with the explanation and wait for the understanding to come along in its wake. That had worked once already-until Quattrone spoke, it hadn't occurred to me that the Lyles could have had a second set of visitors after the first set made off with the book.

  So I pressed on.

  "Wednesday the Lyles were robbed and murdered," I said, "and Thursday I got arrested and burglarized, and Friday morning coincidence once again hove into view. I got a phone call from a customer of mine, and perhaps he can tell us what he asked me for."

  "I guess it's my turn," Colby Riddle said. "I certainly thought my request was innocent enough. I'd called your bookstore, Bernie, and I asked if you had a particular book."

  "NotPrinciples of Organic Chemistry, I don't suppose."

  "I'm afraid not. NorQB VII, by the much lamented Mr. Uris. I asked for a book by Joseph Conrad."

  "I don't suppose you remember the title?"

  "The Secret Agent.You determined that you did, and said you'd set it aside for me. I said I'd come by and pick it up when I had the chance, and I suppose we exchanged further pleasantries, though perhaps we didn't, as that's as much as I can recall."

  "That may have been all there was," I said, "because I didn't know who you were."

  "Why didn't you ask my name?"

  "Because your voice was familiar, Colby, and you sounded as though you assumed I'd know who you were, and I didn't want to appear boorish. I'd hardly had any sleep the night before, so I wasn't at my best. I was sure I'd know you when you showed up."

  "And so you did, Bernie. But you didn't have the book anymore."

  "Because I'd given it to a man named Valdi Berzins," I said. "Mr. Grisek, I believe you may have known him."

  The Latvian nodded, looking unhappy. "A good man," he said. "A fine man. A patriotist."

  "It was he to whom the Lyles had promised the Kukarov photos, wasn't it?"

  "He did not tell me the detailings," Grisek said. His English was unaccented, but also unorthodox. "And always he looked on the side where the sun was. `The photos have been thieved,' he told me, `so I will make my deal with the thief. And perhaps he is less of a thief than the man he took them from.' You know this book,The Power to Think Positive ?"

  "That'sThe Power of Positive Thinking ," I said, "by Norman Vincent Peale. A great bestseller in its day. I've got two or three copies in the store, and I suppose I ought to put them on the bargain table, but I somehow feel I owe it to the author to think that someone'll come along and pay full price for it."

  "Valdi Berzins was positively thinking, Mr. Rhodenbarr. He went to your bookstore with money to pay for the book. And instead he was killed."

  I said I saw it happen, and one of the women said it must have been awful for me, and I said it was worse for Berzins. "He came into the shop and said I must have something for him. And I didn't know what he was talking about, and then I remembered Colby Riddle's phone call, although I still didn't know who'd been on the other end of the phone. I knew it wasn't Berzins, the voice was wrong, but he seemed so confident I would know what he wanted, and that was all I could think of. I said the book's title, and that seemed to make him happy, and he sure didn't argue about the price. He paid me a hundred times what I asked him for, evidently assuming that I was leaving off the wordhundred to save time. I realized this just in time to run outside after him and watch him get killed. If there hadn't been a parked car in the way, I might have been killed along with him."

  "Who killed him?" Grisek demanded. "Who killed my friend Berzins?"

  "That's a good question. Here's another. Why did he assume I'd know what book he wanted? And, when I mentioned the book by name, why did it make him happy?"

  "You saidThe Secret Agent, " Carolyn said, "and that was him. He thought you were recognizing him for what he was."

  "That's what I thought at first, but it doesn't add up. It still doesn't explain why he thought I'd have a book for him, or why he was happy with the one I handed him. He didn't flip through it looking for pictures. He just paid for it and left. Colby, what made you ask for that particular book?"

  "I'd been looking for a copy. It's a book, and you're a bookseller, and so-"

  "You don't much care for Conrad."

  "I don't like his sea stories. I'm toldThe Secret Agent is the sort of book the man might have written if he'd never gone to sea. I thought it worth a try."

  "And worth a phone call."

  "Why not?"

  "But I think you already got a phone call," I said. "From a plastic surgeon."

  "Bernie," he said, "you can't be serious. I may look like a candidate for plastic surgery, but I'm afraid I lack the requisite vanity. Am I to assume the plastic surgeon in question is our host, Dr. Mapes? Why would you think I even know the man? How would we have met?"

  "At school," I said, "or on a bus, or in an Internet chat room, with both of you pretending to be lesbians. But if I had to guess, I'd say your dermatologist referred you. Maybe you had a suspicious mole on your face, in a spot that was sufficiently visible to warrant a plastic surgeon's doing the work."

  "How could you possibly know something like that?"

  "Just a wild guess. What I can't figure out is how you knew Valdi Berzins."

  "I didn't."

  "You must have. The two of you probably had a friend in common, some professor teaching a course calledLatvian as a Second Language. One way or another, you knew both of them. And you called Mapes, or Mapes called you, and he let you know about these photos, and that he had a few hundred thousand dollars in a wall safe in his bedroom, and-"

  "Hold it right there," said one of the government men. They were both on their feet. One of them was holding a gun, while the other brandished a piece of paper. "I was wondering when you'd get around to the reason we're here. A couple of hundred thousand dollars in undeclared cash, that sounds about right." He whirled on Mapes. "Crandall Rountree Mapes? I'm from Internal Revenue, and I have here a court order authorizing my partner and I-"

  My partner and me, I thought, you federal dimwit.

  "-to search said Devonshire Close premises. Sir, I'd like you to escort us upstairs and open the safe for us."

  Mapes had weathered everything up to this point. Now it was as if the hand of fate had come at him with a scalpel and savaged all the fine work some colleague had done for him. He aged ten years just like that, and his color faded even as the perspiration poured out of him.

  He was sputtering, something about an attorney, and the IRS man told him he could get one later, but in the meantime they were damn well going to have a look at that safe. Wally Hemphill scanned the piece of paper and told Mapes yes, they had the authority, and there was nothing he could do but keep his mouth shut.

  "The rest of you wait down here," the other IRS agent said.

  And off they went.

  Forty

  They weren't gone long, and when they came back, well, as Carolyn has been known to say, the worm was on the other foot. The IRS robots looked thoroughly disgruntled, so much so that it was hard to believe they had ever been gruntled to begin with, while Mapes had somehow reclaimed the face someone had constructed for him.

  "Well, I told you," he said. "And now you can tell the rest of these ladies and gentlemen. Was there any money in that safe?"

  They glared at him.

  "I'll take that as a no," he said. "Insurance p
olicies, stock certificates. A few pieces of jewelry, none of them terribly costly, and all of them purchased for my wife with after-tax dollars. That's what you found, and what I'd said you would find. But you found not a drop of this mysterious cash."

  "Don't think you're getting off that easy," one of them said. "You can expect to be audited for the rest of your life."

  Mapes drew himself up to his full height and glared down at them. "That's enough," he said. "You've exercised your warrant and exhausted my patience. I want you to leave."

  And I guess they didn't care about the missing photos, or who killed Valdi Berzins, or any of the rest of it. If the cash was gone, so were they, and that was the last we saw of them.

  By walking upstairs and coming down five minutes later and a quarter of a million dollars poorer, Mapes had suddenly blossomed as a folk hero, a little man who had taken a stand against the machine. Michael Quattrone was telling him that the Feds pulled shit like that all the time, and that he could recommend a lawyer who would run rings around them. Wally Hemphill told him there was a limit to how much they could harass a person, and they might have crossed it; he told Mapes he should talk to Quattrone's lawyer.

  I wasn't much surprised that the safe in the bedroom was empty-after all, as you'll recall, I was the one who had emptied it. But what relieved me enormously was the extent to which Mapes was relieved. He was so happy to be off the federal hook that he hadn't yet had a chance to wonder where his money had gone. That meant this was the first time he'd opened the safe since my visit, and that meant the rest of the plan had a chance of working.

  First, though, he tried to throw us out. "I want to thank you all," he said, "for your support just now. But I don't need to keep you any longer. I think you should go."

  "Oh, I dunno about that," Ray said. "Seems like we're just gettin' warmed up."

  "I'll admit I'm growing interested myself," Michael Quattrone said. "I think our friend here should continue."

  I was glad to hear I was his friend, and by implication everybody else's. I'd taken a seat, but I got up now and faced them. "Getting back to you," I said to Colby Riddle, who looked as though he'd hoped I would have forgotten him in all the excitement. "Mapes called you. He mentioned money, whether there's any in the safe right now or not. And he mentioned me, because he'd read the same newspaper stories as everybody else. You were a scholar, a book person. I owned a bookstore not far from where you taughtology, and-"

  "Ology?"

  "Well, whatever. It ends in -ology, doesn't it?"

  "It's comparative linguistics."

  "I stand corrected," I said, "though that's even better, come to think of it. You'd have friends in all languages, including Latvian. Mapes thought you might know me, and he was right, but you also knew some Latvians, and you knew Valdi Berzins was after the Kukarov photos.

  "Mapes wanted them back. He had a pretty good idea what kind of treatment he could expect from the Black Scourge of Riga if they got into the wrong hands. He called you, hoping you could do something. You knew there was an opportunity here, you could smell it, but what action could you take?

  "First, you called me. There was a chance you could keep out of sight altogether, so you didn't bother to identify yourself. You asked for a particular book, one by an author in whom you have no interest-"

  "I don't care for the sea stories, I told you."

  "You don't care for Conrad, period. You once quoted a line fromHeart of Darkness -`The horror! The horror!' According to you, the horror was the way the man wrote."

  "Did I say that? I can't say I recall it."

  "Well, I can. You asked if I hadThe Secret Agent only because you knew the answer would be yes. It was right in the middle of the section you always go to, and it's been there for years. If by some chance I'd sold it since your last visit, you'd just ask for something else. But I hadn't, and you didn't, and I set the book aside for you.

  "Then you got in touch with Berzins. I had the photos, they were in a book calledThe Secret Agent, and all he had to do was pick them up and pay for them. You figured I'd hand him the book, and he'd look through it and throw a fit, and I'd ask him what the hell he expected for twelve lousy dollars, and he'd walk out knowing he'd had a shot at the photos, but now they were gone.

  "But Valdi Berzins was a positive thinker, and Norman Vincent Peale would have been proud of him. It didn't even occur to him that he wasn't getting the photos when he bought the book. He knew others were after them, knew they might show up at my store at any moment, so he was quick to pay for his purchase and get out. When he asked the price I said `Thirteen' and left out the worddollars, and he thought I left outhundred as well. Of course I might have meant thirteen thousand, but that was more than he had, so he thought positively and counted out thirteen hundred-dollar bills and took a hike."

  "And they killed him," Grisek said mournfully. "They killed this good man."

  " `They,' " Sigrid said. "Does this `they' have a name?"

  "Not one that I can supply. At least two people were in a car that pulled up at the curb halfway down the block from my store. When Valdi Berzins walked out the door, the car shot forward. Berzins was gunned down, and either the gunman or another passenger snatched up the book he was carrying, still in the brown paper bag I'd put it in."

  "That's how it musta happened," Ray said. "But you ain't tellin' us nothin' new, Bernie. Who was in the car an' what happened to the book?"

  "I can answer the second part, and maybe the rest will become clear. What happened to the book? Well, one way or another, it wound up here."

  Mapes shook his head. "Ridiculous."

  "Oh? I wish I'd been with you when you opened the safe for the IRS boys. But no, I don't think that's where you'd keep it. It's a book, so you'd hide it with your other books. Have you got a den, Doc?"

  He didn't answer right away. Then he asked me to tell him the book's title again, and I did, and he said he had a copy ofThe Secret Agent, that he'd owned it for years. He'd read it in college and still had it.

  "I'll be doggoned," I said. "Another coincidence."

  "And that's all it is, damn you. Maybe Riddle asked for that book because he knew I had a copy. There must be hundreds of copies of the book in New York."

  "Enough so that I've never been able to sell mine," I said, "until someone came along and gave me thirteen hundred dollars for it. How much did you pay for your copy?"

  "I've no idea. A couple of dollars."

  "I think it was a little more than that. I think you paid a pile for it, but then you weren't buying the book. You were buying the photos."

  I'd just given him an out, and he grabbed it. "I can prove you're wrong," he said, and hurried through the dining room to the den, and came back triumphantly, book in hand. "Here," he said. "Here's the damned book. And if you can find any photos in it-"

  He riffled the pages and stopped in abject horror. Gently I took the book from his hand and flipped it open to show a mug shot of a blond man in profile, with a scar alongside his mouth. It was fastened to the page with Scotch tape, as were three more photos which I found and displayed.

  "No," he cried. "No, that's impossible." He grabbed for the book, but I snatched it out of his reach. He stepped back, plunged a hand into his pocket, and the book wasn't the only thing he'd had in the den, because when his hand came out there was a gun in it. It wasn't a very big gun, but they're all huge when they're pointed at you.

  This one wasn't pointed at me for long. "Youbastard, " he cried, and he could have meant me, God knows, but as he spoke the words he whirled toward Colby Riddle and fired the gun. "Son of a fuckingbitch, " he yelled, and pumped two bullets into Georgi Blinsky, and looked around for someone else to shoot.

  The cops and goons all had their guns drawn, but we were all in a circle, and no one wanted to risk a shot because a miss could kill the wrong person. "You started this," he screamed, "you brainless spic whore!" and took careful aim at Marisol Maris.

  Whereupon Wally Hemphill, m
arathoner turned martial artist, leapt from the sofa, whirled like a dervish, and delivered a spinning back kick that knocked the gun from his hand, following it with a move I couldn't follow that sent Mapes reeling across the room, right into the arms of a cop and two thugs. The thugs slapped him silly, the cop cuffed him, and Ray Kirschmann read him his rights. I hadn't paid attention to Miranda for a while, and noted that Mapes had a nice long list of rights. Somehow, though, I didn't think they were going to do him a whole lot of good.

  Forty-One

  Thanks, Maxine. You're a lifesaver, and don't ask me what flavor, it'll give me ideas. Bern, pick up your glass. Here's to crime."