The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart

by Lawrence Block

  “My book?”

  I turned around and grabbed a book off the shelf behind me. It was the Modern Library edition of Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad, with slight foxing and the binding shaky. I checked the flyleaf, where I’d priced it reasonably enough at $4.50. I picked up a pencil, casually added a two to the left of the 4, and smiled at him. “It’s twenty-four fifty,” I said, “but your discount brings it down to twenty dollars even. And of course there’s no sales tax, since you’re in the trade.”

  He went into his pocket again, but it was the other pocket this time, and he came out with a money clip instead of a gun, which struck me as a vast improvement. He peeled off a twenty while I wrote out a receipt, carefully copying his name from his card. I took his money, slipped his receipt inside the book’s loose front cover, and slid the book into a paper bag. He took it, gave me a look, gave Ray a look, started to say something, changed his mind, and scuttled past Ray and out the door.

  “Odd-lookin’ bird,” Ray said, reaching for the card. “‘Tiglath Rasmoulian.’ What kind of name is Tiglath?”

  “An unusual one,” I said. “At least in my experience.”

  “No address, no phone number. Just his name.”

  “It’s what they call a calling card, Ray.”

  “Now why in the hell would they call it that? You want to try callin’ him, I’d say you’re shit out of luck, bein’ as there’s no number to call. He in the book business?”

  “So he says.”

  “An’ that’s his business card? No phone, no address? An’ on the strength of that you gave him a discount and didn’t charge him the tax?”

  “I guess I’m a soft touch, Ray.”

  “It’s good you’re closin’ early,” he said, “before you give away the store.”

  Twenty minutes later I was standing in a gray-green corridor looking through a pane of glass at someone who couldn’t look back. “I hate this,” I said to Ray. “Remember? I told you I hated this.”

  “You’re not gonna puke, are you, Bernie?”

  “No,” I said firmly. “I’m not. Can we leave now?”

  “You seen enough?”

  “More than enough, thank you.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what? Oh, you mean—”

  “Yeah. It’s him, right?”

  I hesitated. “You know,” I said, “how many times did I actually set eyes on the man? Two, three times?”

  “He was a customer of yours, Bernie.”

  “Not a very frequent one. And you don’t really look at a person in a bookstore, at least I don’t.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Not really. What usually happens is we both wind up looking at the book we’re discussing. And if he’s paying by check I’ll look at the check, and at his ID, if I ask him for ID. Of course Candlemas paid me in cash, so I never had any reason to ask to see his driver’s license.”

  “So instead you looked at his face, like you just did a minute ago, and that’s how you’re able to tell it’s him.”

  “But did I really look at his face?” I frowned. “Sometimes we look without seeing, Ray. I looked at his clothes. I could swear he was a sharp dresser. But now all he’s wearing is a sheet, and I never saw him on his way to a toga party.”

  “Bernie…”

  “Think about the man you just met in my store. That was no more than half an hour ago, Ray, and you looked right at him, but did you really see him? If you had to do it, could you furnish a description of him?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Name, Tignatz Rasmoolihan. Height, five foot two. Weight, a hundred an’ five. Color of hair, black. Color of eyes, green.”

  “Really? He had green eyes?”

  “Sure, matched his shirt. Probably why he picked it, the vain little bastard. Complexion, pale. Spots of rouge here an’ here, only it ain’t rouge, it’s natural. Shape of face, narrow.”

  He went on, describing the clothes Rasmoulian was wearing down to an alligator belt with a silver buckle, which I certainly hadn’t noticed. I must have seen it but it didn’t register. “That’s amazing,” I said. “You barely looked at him and you got all that. You fluffed the name a little, but everything else was picture-perfect.”

  “Well, I’m what you call a trained observer,” he said, clearly pleased. “I’ll screw up a name now an’ then, but I get the rest of it right most of the time.”

  “Now that just shows you,” I said. “I’m the other way around. I guess I’m just more verbal than visual. I’ll get the names right every time, but the faces are another story.”

  “I guess it comes from hangin’ around books all the time.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Instead of gettin’ out and mixin’ with people.”

  “That must be it.”

  “So?”

  “How’s that, Ray?”

  “So are you gonna ID this poor dead son of a bitch or what?”

  “Just hypothetically,” I said. “Suppose I wasn’t a hundred percent certain.”

  “Aw, Jesus, why’d you have to go an’ say a thing like that?”

  “No, let me finish. I get the impression that my identifying the body is really nothing more than a formality.”

  “That’s exactly what it is, Bernie.”

  “You’ve probably already identified him from fingerprints and dental records. You just need somebody to eyeball the deceased and confirm what you already know.”

  “So far we didn’t get any kind of a bounce from the prints or the dental records. But we sure as hell know who he is.”

  “So it’s just a formality.”

  “Didn’t I just say that, Bernie?”

  I made up my mind. “All right,” I said. “It’s Candlemas.”

  “Way to go, Bern. For the record, you’re formally identifying the man you just saw as Hugo Candlemas, right?”

  If this had been a movie there’d have been an ominous chord right about now, so that you’d know the hero was about to put his foot in it. No, you’d want to cry. No, you fool, don’t do it!

  But would he listen?

  “Ray,” I said, “there’s no question in my mind.”

  CHAPTER

  Ten

  Ray dropped me at the subway and I was in my own apartment with time for a shower and shave before I headed for the Musette. I was there first so I bought two tickets and waited in the lobby.

  I was still waiting when they opened the doors and started letting people take seats. I followed the crowd inside and threw my jacket over a pair of seats halfway down the aisle on the left, then went back to the guy taking tickets. He knew me by now, and why wouldn’t he? He’d been seeing me every night for the past two and a half weeks.

  He said he hadn’t recognized me at first, that he wasn’t used to seeing me without my lady friend. That, I told him, was the problem. I gave him Ilona’s ticket and said she’d evidently been delayed en route. He assured me there would be no problem; he’d let her in and steer her toward where I was sitting.

  I went and bought popcorn. What the hell, I hadn’t had anything to eat since that slice of pizza around noon. It felt strange, though, sitting there with no one next to me, dipping into the popcorn without risk of encountering another hand.

  I glanced around the theater, surprised at what a large proportion of the audience looked familiar to me. I don’t know that there were many diehards like us who never missed a night, but a lot of people came more than once. I guess if you saw one Bogart picture you saw them all, or as many as you could.

  If we ran to type, I couldn’t tell you what the type was. There were quite a few college kids, some with the serious look of film students, others just out for a good time. There were older West Siders, the intellectual-political-artsy crowd you see at the free afternoon concerts at Juilliard, and some of them had probably seen many of these films during their initial run. There were singles, gay and straight, and young marrieds, gay and straight, and people who looked rich enough to bu
y the theater, and people who looked as though they must have raised the price of admission by begging on the subway. It was a wonderfully varied crowd, drawn together by the enduring appeal of an actor who’d died more than thirty-five years ago, and I was happy to be a part of it.

  But not as happy as I would have been if Ilona were sharing my popcorn.

  The thought made the popcorn stick in my throat, but sometimes it tends to do that anyway. I told myself it was a little early to start wallowing in self-pity, that she’d be slipping into the seat beside me any minute now.

  The seat was still empty when they brought the house lights down. I wasn’t surprised, not really. I fed myself another handful of popcorn and let myself get lost in the movie.

  That’s what it was there for.

  The first feature, Passage to Marseille, was made in 1944, not long after Casablanca and obviously inspired by it, although the credits said it was based on a book by Nordhoff and Hall. (You remember them, they wrote Mutiny on the Bounty.) Bogart plays a French journalist named Matrac who’s on Devil’s Island when the movie opens, framed for murder and serving a life sentence. He and four others escape, only to be picked up on the high seas by a French cargo ship. Of course the convicts want to go fight for France—has there ever been anyone as fiercely patriotic as a criminal in a Hollywood movie?—but France has just surrendered, and Sydney Greenstreet wants to turn the ship over to the Vichy government. His attempted mutiny is thwarted, and Bogart and his buddies join a Free French bomber squadron in England. His plane is the last to return from a mission, and after it lands his crewmates bring him off, dead.

  Well, hell, he died for a good cause, and until then he got to spend time with Claude Rains and Peter Lorre and Helmut Dantine and, well, all the usual suspects. It wasn’t the best film he ever made, but it was a quintessential Bogart role, the hard-bitten cynicism shielding the pure idealist, the beautiful loser coolly victorious in defeat.

  A shame she had to miss it.

  When the lights came up I checked with the usher and he shrugged and shook his head. I inquired at the box office, tried her number from a pay phone in the lobby. Nothing. On my way back into the theater the usher asked me if I wanted to cash in my unused ticket. I told him to hang on to it, that she might still turn up.

  At the refreshment stand a tall guy with a goatee but no mustache said, “All by yourself tonight.”

  I’d seen him and his dumpling of a girlfriend just about every night, but this was the first time either of us had spoken. “All alone,” I agreed. “She said she might have to work late. She might still turn up.”

  We talked about the film we’d just seen, and about the one coming up. Then I went back to my seat and watched Black Legion.

  It’s an early one, released in 1937, with Bogart playing a member of the Ku Klux Klan, only they called it the Black Legion and the members wore black hoods sporting white skulls and crossbones. I’d seen it sometime within the past year on AMC, and it wasn’t that great then, and by the time the picture got under way I knew Ilona wasn’t going to show up. It seemed to me that I’d known all along.

  I felt like walking out, but I stayed where I was and got caught up in the film in spite of myself. The film had a neat twist. At the end, with Bogart arrested for murder, it turns out that the Legion was set up by the crime syndicate for commercial purposes. Maybe they had a stranglehold on the hood-and-sheet business. They want Bogart to plead self-defense, but for the sake of his wife’s reputation he turns state’s evidence instead, bringing down the whole Black Legion and saving the day for truth and justice.

  Even so, he winds up with a life sentence. The poor son of a bitch, he must have had the worst lawyer since Patty Hearst.

  Don’t ask me why, but I went across the street to make sure she wasn’t waiting for me over a cup of coffee. And of course she wasn’t. I scanned the room from the doorway, then left and went back to my place.

  I called her number and wasn’t surprised when no one answered. I picked up what I’d come home for and went out again, taking the same combination of subways I take to work every morning but getting off a stop sooner than usual, at Broadway and Twenty-third. I just missed my crosstown bus and was all set to hail a cab, but what was my hurry?

  I walked across Twenty-third Street and tried her number one last time from a pay phone two blocks from her apartment. When my quarter came back I walked the rest of the way and stood on the sidewalk across the street from her building. Simple Pleasures, the ground-floor shop, was closed and dark. There were no lights in the fourth-floor windows, but that didn’t tell me anything. Her apartment was in the back of the building.

  I put my hand in my pocket, felt the burglar’s tools I’d gone home for. It seemed to me that I had no moral right to enter Ilona’s apartment. I evidently didn’t have much in the way of moral fiber, either, but I’d known that for years.

  I looked both ways and crossed the street—it’s a one-way street, but try telling that to the guys on bicycles delivering Chinese food—and then I looked both ways a second time and mounted the half-flight of steps to the vestibule of her building. I checked the buzzers for one marked MARKOVA and couldn’t find it, but there was only one top-floor buzzer with no name on it, and I decided that had to be hers. (This, incidentally, was faulty reasoning; Carolyn’s buzzer on Arbor Court is still marked ARNOW, the long-vanished tenant of record. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but in New York more people have learned anonymity from Rent Control than ever discovered it in a 12-Step program.)

  I leaned on the unmarked buzzer, and either it was hers or it rang in some other empty apartment, because it went unanswered.

  The trouble with front doors is that they’re right out there in public view. A tenant, coming or going, can catch you in the act. A passerby can spot you from the street. The longer you spend mucking about with the lock, the more likely it is that this will happen.

  On the flip side, the nice thing about front doors is they’re rarely very hard to open. They’re just spring locks—if they used deadbolts an upstairs tenant couldn’t buzz anyone in—and the locks see so much action that they become as loose and as yielding as, well, a very old practitioner of an ancient profession, let us say. This one at least had a protective lip so you couldn’t loid your way in with a credit card or strip of spring steel, but aside from that it had precious little going for it. About the only person it could be expected to keep out was a tenant who had lost his key.

  Actually, I told myself, the threshold was not the Rubicon; I could cross it without committing myself. Even if I ran smack into Ilona herself in the hallway, I could explain I’d found the door ajar, or that another tenant had held it for me. The door to her apartment, now that was a different matter.

  A few minutes later, I was standing in front of the door to her apartment.

  No one responded to my knock, and no light showed under her door. The previous night I’d noticed that she only locked two of the three locks, and which way she’d turned the key in each of them. (I can’t help it, I notice things like that. To each his own, I say; Ray Kirschmann had noticed the silver buckle on Tiglath Rasmoulian’s alligator belt.) I took out my picks and had at it. I worked rapidly—one doesn’t want to dawdle—but there was no need to rush. I opened one lock, I opened the other lock, and I was inside.

  I hadn’t brought my gloves and wouldn’t have put them on if I had. I wasn’t worried about fingerprints, for God’s sake, but about making a fool of myself and destroying a relationship almost before it had begun. If I got away clean, no forensic evidence of my visit would harm me; if she caught me in the act, all the gloves in Gloversville wouldn’t help me.

  I drew the door shut right away and stood unmoving in the pitch-dark room, not even troubling to breathe until I’d taken a moment to listen for any breathing other than my own. Then I took a breath, and then I reached for the light switch—I remembered where it was, too—and switched it on. The bare bulb overhead came on and
I blinked at its glare, then looked around.

  I felt like an archaeologist who’d just broken into an empty tomb.

  CHAPTER

  Eleven

  The furniture was still there. The narrow bed nestled against the far wall, unmade, with the rickety night table at its head and the squat thrift-shop dresser nearby. I counted the same three chairs—two unmatched wooden card chairs, one at the little one-drawer desk and one at the foot of the bed, and one armchair with a broken spring, clumsily reupholstered some time back in metallic green velvet. And the rug was there, too, as ugly as ever.

  Nothing besides remained, as Shelley said of Ozymandias. Gone were the plastic milk cartons and the books they’d housed. Gone was the brassbound footlocker and the shrine that had perched on top of it, candles and crystal and icons and animals and all. Gone was the stiff family snapshot of Ilona and her parents, gone too the framed photo of Vlados and Liliana. Gone from the wall was the map of Eastern Europe, gone from its nail the bird calendar.

  Gone whatever the desk and dresser had contained; I checked their drawers and found them empty. Gone, except for three wire coat hangers and a grocery bag collection, whatever the closet might have held. Gone, lock, stock, and barrel. Gone, kit and caboodle. Gone.

  The bed linen remained on the bed, the twisted sheets still holding her scent.

  I walked over to the desk and picked up the phone. I got a dial tone, and if the phone had been equipped with a redial button I could have determined the last call she made before she disappeared. Instead I dialed my own number, which didn’t answer, and then dialed the store and wondered what Raffles would make of the ringing. I dialed Candlemas’s apartment on East Seventy-sixth and let it ring a few times, but there were no cops there this time around and no one answered.

  I cradled the receiver and sat down in the hideous green chair, taking care to avoid the broken spring. It wasn’t terribly comfortable, but it would serve. I had some thinking to do, and this seemed like the time and place to do it.