The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart

by Lawrence Block

  “There is no telling what it’s all worth,” Rasmoulian said, his spots of color glowing.

  “Indeed, sir. There is no telling what money remains in that numbered account, or what assets the corporation retains. What could old Vlados have drained off? And what about his son, of blessed memory? No one goes through capital like a pretender trying to maintain a pretense.”

  “Vlados had an income,” Weeks said. “Remember, the people who chose him for the throne didn’t pick him off a dunghill. He was a shirttail cousin of the king of Sweden and claimed descent on his mother’s side from Maria Theresa of Austria. Queen Liliana was some kind of grandniece of Queen Victoria. They weren’t rich enough to buy the Congo from Leopold of Belgium, but Liliana never had to shop at Kmart either. They had an income and they lived within it.”

  “And Todor?”

  “Same story for the colt. We didn’t get him back to Anatruria by dangling some dough in front of him. He worked for a living, fronting an investment syndicate based in Luxembourg, but he was comfortable.” He grinned. “We hooked him by the ego. He figured he’d look good with a crown on his head.”

  “He was a patriot,” Ilona said. “That is not ego, to go to the aid of your people. It is self-sacrifice.”

  “How would you know so much about it, little lady? He was long gone from Anatruria before you were born.”

  He didn’t sound as though he expected an answer, and she didn’t give him one. I said, “Let’s flash-forward to the present, okay? I’d like to tell you about a man named Hugo Candlemas. That’s an unusual name, and he was an unusual man, erudite and personable. Earlier this year he came to New York and took an apartment on the Upper East Side. And a matter of days ago he came into this store and introduced himself to me. He persuaded me to break into an apartment a few blocks away from his and steal a leather portfolio.”

  “You, Bernie?” The question came from Mowgli, who may have been the only person in the room who didn’t know what I did when I wasn’t selling books. “Why would he think you’d be up for something like that?”

  “At the time,” I said, “I thought he’d heard my name years ago from a man he mentioned as a mutual acquaintance, a gentleman named Abel Crowe.” Both Rasmoulian and Tsarnoff started at the name, which didn’t much surprise me. “Until he died, Abel Crowe was at the very top of his profession, which happened to be the receiving of stolen goods.”

  “He was a fence, all right,” Ray Kirschmann agreed. “An’ you gotta hand it to him, he was the best wide receiver in the business.”

  “And I was a burglar,” I said. Mowgli, wide-eyed at this news, remained silent, probably because of the elbow Carolyn dug into his ribs. “But I’ve changed my mind about that. I don’t think Abel would have bandied my name about.”

  “Abel was discreet,” Tsarnoff said.

  “He was,” I agreed, “and even if my name did come up, how would Candlemas remember it years later when he happened to need a burglar? I don’t think that’s how it happened.”

  “He must have looked in the Yellow Pages,” Charlie Weeks suggested.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think he followed Ilona.”

  “A couple of weeks ago,” I said to her, “you walked into my store. I tried to figure out how you got here, because I couldn’t believe it was coincidence. But at the time there was nothing for it to coincide with, was there? I’d never met Candlemas or heard of any of the people in this room. I didn’t know Anatruria from God’s Little Acre.

  “And you were just looking for something to read. You picked out a book, and we got talking and found out we shared a passion for Humphrey Bogart. There was a Humphrey Bogart film festival just getting under way, and you knew about it, and we arranged to meet at the theater that night. Before we knew it we were going every night, watching two movies together, eating popcorn from the same container, then going our separate ways.”

  I looked into her eyes, and I thought of Bogart and tried to borrow a little nobility from him. “You’re a beautiful woman,” I said, “and I could have gone for you in a big way if you’d ever given me the slightest encouragement, but you never did. It was clear from the start that you had someone else. And that was okay. I liked your company, and I guess you liked mine, but what we both liked was up there on the screen.”

  There was gratitude in her eyes now, and a touch of relief, and something else as well. Wistfulness, maybe.

  “I don’t know if Candlemas was on your tail when you came into the bookstore,” I said. “Probably not. But if he followed you at all he could hardly help running into me, because we were spending seven nights a week at the movies. He’d want to know who I was, and it wouldn’t have been hard for him to find out. The kind of people he’d have asked would have known about my sideline as a burglar.”

  “It’s the booksellin’ that’s a sideline,” Ray put in.

  I ignored that. “Candlemas needed a burglar,” I said, “and he probably did know Abel Crowe, who spent the war in a concentration camp and knocked around Europe for a few years before he came over here. He would have learned I was a good burglar—”

  “The best,” Ray said.

  “—and he had a name to drop to establish his bona fides. He sounded me out, and when the address he wanted me to burgle didn’t ring a bell, he knew Ilona hadn’t told me about the man who lived there.”

  “And who was that?” Ray wanted to know.

  “The man in her life,” I said. “The man, too, whom Candlemas had pursued to New York. He’s right here. Mr. Michael Todd.”

  “Around the World in Eighty Days,” Mowgli said. “Great flick. But didn’t his plane go down?”

  “Michael Todd,” I said. “You speak good unaccented English, Mike, so why shouldn’t your name be just as American as your speech? But you anglicized it along the way, didn’t you? Why don’t you tell them what it was before you changed it?”

  “I’m sure you’ll tell them,” he said.

  “Mikhail Todorov,” I said. “The only son of Todor Vladov, the only grandson of Vlados the First. And, if there is such a thing, the rightful heir to the Anatrurian throne.”

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-two

  I guess we’re all suckers for royalty. Half the house must have known or suspected Mike’s place in the scheme of things, but all the same a hush fell over the room, and it hung there until Carolyn broke it. “A king,” she said. “I can’t believe it. In my store.”

  “Your store?”

  “Well, it’s almost my store, Bern. Who kept it open over the weekend? Uh, speaking of my store, Your Majesty, I don’t suppose you have a dog that needs washing, but if you ever do—”

  “I’ll most certainly think of you,” he said, whereupon Carolyn looked almost glassy-eyed enough to drop a curtsy. “Mr. Rhodenbarr, I haven’t said anything until now, but perhaps I should. This business of an Anatrurian throne makes me quite uncomfortable. My grandfather’s moment of glory occurred ages ago, and my father’s little adventure took place before I was born, and very nearly cost him his life. That my family had a tentative claim on a putative crown was interesting, even amusing, something to impress a girl or enliven a social gathering. I have my own life, with a small amount of capital and a career in international finance and economic development. I don’t spend time nostalgic for a royal past or dreaming of a royal future.”

  “And yet you came to New York,” I said gently.

  “To get away from Europe and its talk of thrones and crowns.”

  “And you brought a gold-stamped leather portfolio.”

  He sighed heavily. “When my father lay dying,” he said, “he called me to his side and turned over to me the portfolio of which you speak. Until then I did not know of its existence.”

  “And?”

  “He had scarcely spoken to me of Anatruria. You must understand that none of our family had ever lived there. My grandfather was chosen to be king of the Anatrurians, but he was not previously Anatrurian himse
lf. Now, on his deathbed, my father spoke of his deep love for this small mountainous nation, of the loyalty our family commanded there and the responsibility which consequently devolved upon us. I thought he was raving, affected by the drugs his doctors had given him. And perhaps he was.”

  “He was a great man,” Ilona said.

  “I would say so, but then he was my father. Middle-aged when I was born, often absent while I was growing up, but surely a great man in my eyes. With his dying breath he told me of my duty to Anatruria, and passed on the royal portfolio.”

  “What did it hold?”

  “Papers, documents, souvenirs. Shares of stock in a Swiss corporation.”

  “Bearer shares,” I said.

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “Like bearer bonds,” Charlie Weeks said. “The Swiss are nuts about that sort of thing. When they change hands, there’s no need to go through any paperwork to record the transfer. They’re like cash, they belong to whoever is in possession of them.”

  “And with them in your hands,” I said, “you could take possession of all the assets of the corporation.”

  Todd—Mikhail? The king?—shook his royal head. “No,” he said.

  “No?”

  “You need the account number and the shares,” he said. “Believe me, I went to Zurich, I consulted bankers and attorneys there. This corporation was set up in an unusual fashion, and one must be in possession of the bearer shares and know the number of the account in order to lay hands on any of the corporation’s assets. My father passed on the shares, which he had received from his father, but neither he nor his father had been entrusted with the account number.”

  “Out with it, man,” said Tsarnoff. “Who has it?”

  “Probably no one,” Todd said.

  “Ridiculous! Someone must know.”

  “Someone must have known once, some leader of the Anatrurian movement. Perhaps several people knew. You have already said that my father was lucky to get out of Anatruria with his life. Others were not so lucky. So many were taken from their families, only to receive a bullet in the back of the neck and burial without ceremony in an unmarked grave. I would guess that many secrets were buried along with those men, and that the number of the Swiss account was one of those secrets.”

  He sighed again. “I remember sitting at a café after my last meeting with a lawyer and a banker, sitting with a glass of wine and wishing my father had taken the portfolio to the grave with him as some Anatrurian had taken the account number. But instead he’d entrusted it to me. In a sense, he’d pressed a crown on my head, and it was not so easy to lay it aside. I told you how I had never thought of Anatruria. Now I could scarcely think of anything else.”

  “Who could even say how much the wealth might be?” This from Rasmoulian, his eyes wide at the possibilities. “It could be nothing. It could be millions.”

  “The money is the least of it,” the king said. “What am I to do? That is the only question of any importance.”

  Ray didn’t understand, and said so.

  “For decades,” the king said, “the world’s few reigning kings have been anachronisms, while uncrowned royals have been little more than a joke. But all of a sudden this is not so. There are monarchist movements throughout all of the old Eastern Bloc. Portions of portions of nations are all at once reaching out and achieving sovereignty. If Slovenia and Slovakia can join the United Nations, is an independent Anatruria such an impossibility? If Juan Carlos can be king of Spain, and if men can seriously urge a Romanov restoration in Russia—the Romanovs! in Russia!—”

  “Not entirely out of the question,” Tsarnoff allowed.

  “—then who is to say Anatruria cannot have a king? And who am I to deny my people if indeed they want me?” He smiled suddenly, and now the resemblance was unmistakable—to Ilona’s photograph of Vlados, to Mikhail’s own photo of his father resplendent in uniform. “And so I came to New York,” he said, “to get away from Europe, and to decide what I shall do next.”

  “It looks as though Hugo Candlemas followed you here,” I said. “As I said, he picked me to steal the portfolio from you, although I didn’t know what I was stealing or whose apartment I was taking it from.”

  “Not like you, Bernie,” Ray said.

  “I know,” I said. “It wasn’t. I don’t know why I went for it, and all I can come up with is a combination of his charm and all those Bogart movies I was watching. He made the proposition one afternoon, and the following night I was with a man named Hoberman, on my way to…excuse me, but what do I call you? Your Highness? Your Majesty?”

  “‘Michael’ will be fine.”

  “I was on my way to Michael’s apartment.”

  “Hoberman,” Ray said. “That’s a name you mentioned before, Bernie.”

  I nodded. “Cappy Hoberman was the ram, one of the five agents in Anatruria. Candlemas paired me with him because Hoberman could escort me into the high-security building where Michael lives. He could go there on the pretext of visiting another tenant in the building.”

  “Which is where I come in,” Charlie Weeks said.

  “Interesting,” Tsarnoff said. “Of all the buildings in all the cities in America, the young king moves into yours.”

  The line had a familiar ring to it. I had an answer, but Weeks got there first. “No coincidence at all,” he said. “Michael gave me a call as soon as he got to New York. He’d never met me, of course, but I’d kept in touch with Todor ever since I helped him get out of Anatruria two steps ahead of the KGB. Michael needed a place to stay, and I knew there was an owner in the building looking to sublet, and he liked the place and moved in right away.”

  “As it turned out,” I said, “I didn’t steal the portfolio. I’ll admit I tried, Michael, but I couldn’t find it.”

  “There was one night last week when I took it from the apartment,” he said. “Ilona thought a friend of hers should see one of the documents.”

  “I must have just missed it. Meanwhile, Cappy Hoberman went back to Candlemas’s apartment, where somebody stabbed him to death.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ray said. “That’s the guy? Hoberman?”

  “Right.”

  “Cap Hob,” he said, staring hard at me. “Cap Hob. Captain Hoberman.”

  “Right.”

  “But why in the hell would he—”

  I held up a hand. “It’s complicated,” I said, “and it’s probably easier all around if I just tell it straight through. Cappy Hoberman was stabbed to death in the Candlemas apartment. But he lived long enough to leave a message. He printed C-A-P-HO-B in block capitals on the side of a handy attaché case.”

  “Which happened to belong to a certain burglar we all know,” Ray said.

  “Didn’t it,” I said sourly. “He died, and left a dying message that didn’t make sense to anyone. Meanwhile, Hugo Candlemas disappeared.”

  “So this Candlemas killed him,” Ilona said.

  “It seems obvious, doesn’t it? But who was Candlemas? Well, he was someone who knew Hoberman and Weeks, someone who was familiar with Anatrurian history and had come over from Europe to keep tabs on Michael here. And he was someone with a lot of fake ID, because in addition to forged identification in the name of Hugo Candlemas, he also had high-quality counterfeit passports in the names Jean-Claude Marmotte and Vassily Souslik. That gives it away. I should have known before, but—”

  “The last name you mentioned,” Tsarnoff said. “Say it again, sir, if you please.”

  “Vassily Souslik.”

  “Souslik,” he said, and chuckled. “Very good, sir. Very good indeed.”

  “What is so good?” Rasmoulian demanded. “It is good because he has a Russian name? I do not understand.”

  “Now that you mention it,” Ray said, “neither do I. I’m the one told you about those names, Bernie, and they didn’t mean a thing to me, an’ if they meant anything to you I never heard a peep out of you about it. What in hell’s a sousnik, anyway?”

&n
bsp; “A souslik,” I said. “Not a sousnik. And it’s a Russian word, which is why Mr. Tsarnoff understood it and why the rest of us didn’t, although you’ll find it in some English dictionaries and encyclopedias. And it means a large ground squirrel indigenous to Eastern Europe and Asia.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake,” Ray said, “that explains everything, don’t it? A big fat squirrel. That cracks the case wide open, all right.”

  “What it does,” I said, “is identify Candlemas for us. So does his French alias, because a marmot is pretty much the same thing as a souslik. But I should have known earlier on if I’d been paying attention to what he called himself this time around. Candlemas is a church festival commemorating the purification of the Virgin Mary and the presentation of the infant Christ in the temple. But it’s celebrated on the same date every year like Christmas, not tied to the lunar calendar like Easter.”

  Someone asked the date.

  “February second,” I said.

  They met this with mystified silence and shared the silence like Quakers through whom God had, for the moment, nothing to say. Then Wilfred, silent skulking Wilfred, said, “My favorite holiday.”

  Everybody looked at him.

  “Groundhog’s Day,” he said. “Second of February. Most useful holiday of the year. He pops out, he don’t see his shadow, you got yourself an early spring. Bright sunny day, he sees his shadow, forget about it. Six more weeks of winter.”

  I said, “The groundhog, the souslik, the marmot. All names for—”

  “The woodchuck,” said Charlie Weeks, smiling his tight little smile. “Alias Chuck Wood, alias Charles Brigham Wood. Disappeared into Europe after the balloon went up in Anatruria. Some people thought he was killed. The rest of us figured he was the one who sold us out.”

  I let that last pass. “Candlemas was the woodchuck,” I agreed. “I guess he kept tabs on people from afar. He knew where Michael was living, and he knew that his old friend the mouse was in the same building. But he couldn’t approach the mouse himself.”