The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart

by Lawrence Block

  Even so, I saved him for last.

  My first call was to the fat man, and my first thought was that the card was a phony, or that I’d dialed wrong. Because the man who answered didn’t sound fat.

  I know, I know. You can’t judge a book by its cover (but try to get a decent price for it if it’s stained or water-damaged, or, God forbid, missing altogether). Nor can you tell much about a body by the voice that comes out of it, which is a good thing for the phone-sex industry. All that notwithstanding, the voice I heard didn’t sound like one that might have come out of a man who weighed three hundred and fifty pounds, had a beak like an eagle, and wore a white suit. It sounded instead as though its owner never got past the sixth grade, moved his lips on the rare occasions when he read something, spent his most productive hours with a pool cue in his hand, and, when not using that cue for massé shots, was skinny enough to hide behind it.

  I asked to speak to Mr. Tsarnoff, and he asked me what I wanted.

  “Tsarnoff,” I said confidently, “and you’re not him. Tell him it’s the man who wasn’t at the bookstore yesterday.”

  There was a pause. Then a voice—a round voice, a rich voice, a voice that hit every consonant smack on the head and got the last drop of flavor out of every syllable—said, “In point of fact, sir, there is no end of people who were not at that bookstore yesterday. Or at any bookstore, on any occasion.”

  Now this was more like it. This was the kind of voice I’d had in mind, a voice that could have introduced The Shadow.

  “I’m obliged to agree with you,” I said. “Ours is a subliterate age, sir, and the frequenter of bookstores a rare reminder of a better day.”

  “Ah,” he said. “It’s good of you to call. I believe you have found something that belongs to me. I trust you’re aware there’s a substantial reward offered for its return.”

  I asked if he could describe it.

  “A sort of leather envelope stamped in gold,” he said.

  “And its contents?”

  “Diverse contents.”

  “And the amount of the reward?”

  “Ah, did I not say, sir? Substantial. Unquestionably substantial.”

  “Sir,” I said, “I must say I like your style. Were I in possession of the article you seek, I’ve no doubt we could come to terms.”

  There was a pause, but not a very long one. “The subjunctive mode,” he said, “would seem to imply, sir, that you are not.”

  “The implication was deliberate,” I said, “and the inference sound.”

  “Yet one has the sense that there is more to the story.”

  It was a pleasure having this sort of conversation, but it was also a strain. “It is my earnest hope, sir, to be able to report altered circumstances, and indeed to have it in my power to claim your generous reward.”

  “Your hope, sir?”

  “My hope and expectation.”

  “I am gladdened, sir, for expectation promises ever so much more than hope alone. When might this hope be fulfilled, if I might ask?”

  “Anon,” I said.

  “Anon,” he echoed. “A word that makes up in charm what it sacrifices in precision.”

  “It does at that. ‘Shortly’ might be more precise.”

  “I’m not sure that it is, but I daresay it’s a shade more encouraging.”

  “It is my intention,” I said, “to call you later today, or perhaps tomorrow, to suggest a meeting. Will I be able to reach you at this number?”

  “Indeed you will, sir. If I am not at home myself, you may leave word with the lad who answers the telephone.”

  “You’ll hear from me,” I said, and rang off.

  My next call was to my partner, Charlie Weeks. I told him I’d held off calling until he returned from his morning walk.

  “You had an ample margin for error,” he said. “I’m a creature of habit in my old age, I’m afraid. I wake up at the same time every day without setting a clock. I’ve got halfway through the Sunday Times already.”

  “The plot thickens,” I said. “I think you’re right about what happened to Hoberman. I think Candlemas killed him.”

  “It seems the likeliest explanation,” he said, “but leaves us high and dry for the time being, since Candlemas himself seems to have disappeared.”

  “I have some ideas about that.”

  “Oh?”

  “But this is no time to go into them,” I said, “and I wouldn’t want to do it over the phone.”

  “No, I wouldn’t think so.”

  “I wonder if I could come to your apartment. This evening, say? On the late side, if it’s all right with you. Eleven o’clock?”

  “I’ll have the coffee made,” he said. “Or will you want decaf at that hour?”

  I told him I could handle the hard stuff.

  There was nothing for it. I spent another quarter and called Ray Kirschmann’s home number in Queens. When a woman answered I said, “Hi, Mrs. Kirschmann. It’s Bernie Rhodenbarr. Is Ray in? I hate to disturb him on a Sunday morning, but I’m calling from up in New Hampshire.”

  “I’ll see if he’s in,” she said, a phrase I’ve always found puzzling no matter who uses it, a secretary or a spouse. I mean, who are they kidding? Don’t they already know if he’s in or not, and don’t they think I know?

  Her reconnaissance mission took a few minutes, and I wished she would shake a leg. I had plenty of quarters left, but I didn’t want a recorded operator to cut in and ask me for one. It wouldn’t do wonders for my credibility.

  But that commodity turned out to be thin on the ground anyway, as it turned out. “New Hampshire,” were the first words Ray said, and he invested them with a full measure of contempt. “In a pig’s eye, Bernie.”

  “I was going to stay in Pig’s Eye,” I told him, “but all the motels were full, so I wound up in Hanover. How’d you happen to know that, Ray?”

  “The only thing I know for sure,” he said, “is you’re no more in New Hampshire than you are in New Zealand.”

  “What makes you so sure of that, Ray?”

  “You sayin’ so right off the bat, tellin’ my wife so’s she can pass it on to me. If you was really in New Hampshire, Bernie, that’s the last thing you’d do. No, I take that back. It’s the second-last thing.”

  “What’s the last?”

  “Placin’ the call altogether. You’d wait until you got back. You ask me, you spent the night with that sawed-off morphodyke buddy of yours, for all the good either of you could have got out of the experience. An’ then you figured you better call me, an’ you went someplace out of the way in case I trace the call, which how am I gonna do anyway from my home phone?”

  “How you do go on,” I said.

  “I had to guess,” he said, “I’d say you’re across the bridge in Brooklyn Heights. Can you see the Promenade from where you’re standin’, Bernie?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And it looks lovely in the morning mist.”

  “It’s a beautiful day, an’ if there was any mist you missed it, ’cause it burned off hours ago. Anyway, I take it back. There ain’t enough background noise for Brooklyn. It’s Sunday mornin’, right? Be my guess you’re down in Wall Street. You can’t see the Promenade, but I bet you a dollar you can see the Stock Exchange.”

  “You’re amazing, Ray. I swear I don’t know how you do it.”

  “An’ that’s to make me think I’m wrong, but I think I’m right, for all the good it does me. You really want to know how I done it, Bernie, it’s just a case of us knowin’ each other a long time. Not surprisin’ I know you pretty good by now, thinkin’ of all we been through.”

  “The mist hasn’t all burned off, Ray. Some of it’s in my eyes, to go with the lump in my throat.”

  “Got you all choked up, huh, Bernie? Maybe this’ll unchoke you. Couple of uniforms are walkin’ a beat the other day on the Lower East Side, an’ one of the neighborhood kids takes ’em to this boarded-up buildin’ at the corner of Pitt and Madison. That’s Madis
on Street, not Madison Avenue, by the way.”

  “That explains what it was doing on the Lower East Side.”

  “Yeah, but does it explain what they found when the kid showed ’em which board was loose an’ how to get in? Three guesses, Bernie.”

  “Even if I don’t guess,” I said, “you’ll probably tell me.”

  “A dead body.”

  “Not mine, thank God,” I said, “but it’s good of you to voice concern, Ray. I didn’t think you cared.”

  “You want to guess who?”

  “If it’s not Judge Crater,” I said, “it would pretty much have to be Jimmy Hoffa, wouldn’t it?”

  “The watch an’ wallet was gone,” he went on, “which you’d expect, seein’ as kids an’ God knows who else was in an’ out of the buildin’ all along. But under his clothes the guy was wearin’ a money belt, although there wasn’t a whole lot of money in it.”

  “Unless the uniforms helped themselves.”

  He made that sound with his tongue and his teeth, but I don’t think he was trying to say “Tsarnoff.” “Bernie,” he said, “you got a low opinion of the NYPD, which you oughta be ashamed of yourself. If they took a dime off the stiff, I got no way of knowin’ about it, so I’ll just tell you what they didn’t take. How’s that?”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fascinating.”

  “First thing was a passport. Had the guy’s picture on it, so you could tell right off he didn’t lift it off of somebody else. Had his name right there, too.”

  “Passports usually do.”

  “They’d have to, wouldn’t they? Accordin’ to the passport, his name was Jean-Claude Marmotte.”

  “Sounds French.”

  “Belgian,” he said. “Least he was carryin’ a Belgian passport, only it don’t hardly matter what country gave it to him, on account of they didn’t.”

  “Huh?”

  “It was a phony,” he said. “A good phony, or so they tell me, but one thing’s sure and that’s that the Belgians never heard of him.”

  He started to say something else, but the recording cut in, inviting me to deposit more money or hang up.

  “Gimme your number there,” Ray said, “an’ I’ll call you back.”

  I gave that the only answer it required, dropping a fresh quarter in the slot.

  “Now why’d you go an’ do that, Bernie? I was all set to call you back. How often do I get to call anybody in Pig’s Eye, New Hampshire?”

  “How often do I get to hear about dead Belgians in boarded-up buildings?”

  “You didn’t ask how he died.”

  “I didn’t even ask who he was. Sooner or later I’ll get around to asking why you’re telling me all this.”

  “Sooner or later you won’t need to. He died on account of bein’ shot once at close range in the side of the head. Entry was through the ear, matter of fact. Slug was a twenty-two. Very professional job, all in all.”

  “Killed where you found him?”

  “Probably not, but that’s inconclusive because of the mess the kids made of the crime scene. Wherever he bought it, he was a long ways from Belgium when he died. A long ways from New Hampshire, too, but aren’t we all?”

  “There’s a point here somewhere.”

  “There is,” he agreed, “an’ I’m gettin’ to it. Nothin’ in his pockets but lint. No keys, no subway tokens, no nail clipper, no Swiss Army knife. But he’s wearin’ this nice tweed suit, an’ it turns out there’s a secret pocket in the jacket.”

  “A secret pocket?”

  “I don’t know what else you’d call it, bein’ as it ain’t where you’d expect to find a pocket, down near the bottom and around in the back. An’ it’s hard to spot unless you’re lookin’ for it, and it zips open an’ shut, an’ we found it an’ unzipped it, an’ you want to take a guess what we found?”

  “Another passport.”

  “Mind tellin’ me how you happened to know that?”

  “You mean I got it right? It was a guess, Ray. I swear it was.”

  “This one’s Italian, and the name on it is Vassily Souslik.”

  “That doesn’t sound Italian,” I said. “Spell it.” He did, and it still didn’t sound Italian. “Vassily’s a Russian name, or Slavic, anyway. And Souslik sounds like something you’d order at the Russian Tea Room.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said, “not goin’ to fancy places myself. Anyway, it don’t matter, on account of it’s a fake, too. The Belgians never heard of Marmotte an’ the guineas never heard of Souslik. Same likeness an’ description on both of ’em, Bern, an’ they match the dead guy to a T. Who knows, maybe it’ll remind you of somebody you know. Five-nine, one-thirty, DOB fifteen October 1926, hair white, eyes hazel. That’s off the Belgian passport, an’ the Italian’s close enough. They got his eyes as brown, but maybe they haven’t got a word for hazel. Narrow face, little white mustache—this ringing any kind of a bell for you?”

  “Not yet. Why should it?”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” he said. “See, once we found the one secret pocket, we checked on the other side, and wouldn’t you know there was another secret pocket to match?”

  “And to think some people doubt the existence of God.”

  “An’ this one’s got a passport in it, too, an’ this one’s Canadian, an’ it’s no more legit than the other two. Issued at Winnipeg, it says in good old American English, except it was never issued at all, it was made by somebody with no official standing. Same face on the photo, though, an’ whyntcha see if you can tell me the name on the passport?”

  “You tell me, Ray.”

  “Hugo Candlemas,” he said. “Now what do you call that if it ain’t a big coincidence? I mean, the average person lives a lifetime without ever meetin’ up with a single Hugo Candlemas, an’ here I went an’ met up with two of ’em, both in the space of a couple of days. An’ both of ’em deader’n Kelsey’s nuts, too.”

  “If Ripley were still alive,” I said, “and if he were still turning out ‘Believe It or Not’…”

  “This guy don’t look a bit like the Candlemas we got on ice, Bernie.”

  “Not even a faint family resemblance?”

  “Not even related by marriage. You want to explain it to me, Bernie? How you took a good long look at the stiff at the morgue and ID’d him as a guy who turned up dead himself the next day?”

  The recording cut in again, asking me to deposit more money if I wanted to go on talking. That voice speaks those very same words thousands upon thousands of times every day of the year, and how often does its message come as welcome news? Rarely, I’d have to say, but this was one of those rare occasions.

  I glanced at my handful of coins, dropped them back in my pocket. “I’m out of change,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Bernie, I know you’re not in New Fucking Hampshire. Gimme your number and I’ll call you back.”

  “It’s scratched off the dial,” I said. “I can’t make it out. Stay right where you are, Ray. I’ll get back to you.”

  He was saying something else, but I didn’t wait for NYNEX to cut him off. I hung up on him.

  When I called again a little later I didn’t get to talk to his wife. Ray answered the phone himself, and he must have been sitting on it. “It’s about time,” he said, “you son of a bitch.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Neither did he for the longest moment, and then he said, “Hello?” He said it very tentatively, and I let it hang in the air for a beat before I replied.

  “Hello yourself,” I said, “and aren’t you glad to hear my voice? Isn’t it suddenly more welcome in your ear than the commissioner’s, say, or some nosy parker from the Internal Affairs Division?”

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “I’m sorry it took so long, Ray. You wouldn’t believe how long it took to find change of a dollar.”

  “Well, Wall Street on a Sunday. I knew that’s where you were.”

  “You know me
too well,” I said. “But getting back to Candlemas—”

  “Yeah, let’s by all means get back to him.”

  “You remember I was a little uncertain at the morgue.”

  “You told me goin’ in you don’t like to look at dead people. I figured that was it.”

  “I only made the ID to make your life easier. I let you know I couldn’t be sure it was him.”

  “Hey, Bernie, c’mon. It’d be one thing if it was close, but these two stiffs couldn’t look less alike unless one of ’em was missin’ a head. How could you look at the one and say it was the other?”

  I’d given myself time to come up with an answer. That’s why I’d hung up on him earlier. “I met them both at once,” I said. “And they both told me their names at the same time. I wasn’t paying that much attention to which name went with which face. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to their names. But it was the guy you found at Pitt and Madison that I thought was Candlemas, because he was the guy who bought the book from me.”

  “So at the morgue…”

  “At the morgue I got a look at him and it wasn’t the guy I was expecting to see. But it was somebody I recognized, so I figured maybe I got a wire crossed. Maybe I’d been thinking the one man was Hugo Candlemas, while all along it was the other man.”

  “An’ you met both of these winners at your store?”

  “That’s right.”

  “An’ one of ’em bought a book from you, an’ what did the other one do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “They walked in together?”

  “I didn’t even notice. I don’t think they were together, but I could be mistaken.”

  I just knew he was frowning. I could picture it. “Something smells,” he announced. “They’re both in your store, they both introduce themselves to you, and they both wind up dead, only miles apart. An’ the one who isn’t Candlemas winds up in Candlemas’s apartment, an’ the other one winds up on Pitt Street with three different fake passports on him. An’ one of these Candlemases bought a book from you, an’ on the stren’th of that you gave him your touché case to carry it home in. Bernie, I don’t know whether to be insulted you think I’d believe such a load of crap or honored you’d take the trouble.”