The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart

by Lawrence Block

  “Now how could you possibly know about that?” Weeks said. “If I had a letter like that I’d certainly keep it in a locked drawer, wouldn’t I? And you’ve never been in my apartment that I wasn’t constantly in the same room with you.”

  “It’s puzzling, all right,” I said.

  He seemed to shrink under the combined gaze of Ilona and Michael, melting away like the water-soaked Wicked Witch of the West. “It was a strategic decision made at a high level,” he said. “I had no part in the decision and no choice but to implement it.”

  “And the good sense to see that it was the woodchuck who got blamed for it, and not the mouse.”

  “It happened over forty years ago. I won’t apologize for it now, or explain the justification. I was a young man then. I’m an old man now. It’s done.”

  “And the two men Rasmoulian killed?”

  “I never thought that would happen,” he said. “I wanted to know what the hell was going on. Cappy Hoberman called up, came to see me on the flimsiest of pretexts, and was eager to be on his way almost immediately. It never occurred to me he was running interference for a burglar. I thought he wanted something, or was setting me up somehow. For all I knew he’d tumbled to the way it all went kerblooey in Anatruria, and he had some curious notion of revenge.” He shrugged. “The whole point is I didn’t know. I needed to call someone who could tag him and report back. And the redoubtable Assyrian tagged him a little more forcefully than any of us would have preferred.”

  “It is unfair,” Ilona said.

  “Life’s unfair, honey,” Charlie Weeks said. “Better get used to it.”

  “It is unfair that you get away with this, while Tiglath Rasmoulian pays the penalty.”

  “There should be no penalty,” Rasmoulian said. “An accident, an act of self-defense—”

  “I got to tell you,” Ray Kirschmann said. “We got us a problem here.”

  Another silence. Ray let it stretch for a bit, then broke it himself.

  “Way I see it,” he said, “I got enough to arrest Mr. Ras—” He broke off, made a face. “What I’m gonna do is call you TR,” he told Rasmoulian, “which is your initials, and also stands for Teddy Roosevelt, who it just so happens was police commissioner of this fair city before he got to be president of the United States.”

  “Thank you very much,” Rasmoulian said.

  “I got enough to arrest TR,” Ray said, “an’ I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s enough to indict him. He confessed to a double homicide after bein’ Mirandized one or two times, dependin’ how you calculate it. So his confession ain’t admissible, since nobody wrote it down an’ got him to sign it, or had the presence of mind to tape it. But anybody here could testify that he confessed, same as a cellmate can rat out a defendant, sayin’ he confessed, except in this case it happens to be the truth. TR here did confess, an’ we all heard him.”

  “So?”

  He glared at me. “So I can arrest him, an’ as far as the trial’s concerned, well, who knows what’ll happen, because you never know. What I can promise you, though, is he’ll get bail. Was a time nobody made bail on a murder charge, but now they do, an’ my guess is TR here’ll have to post something like a quarter mil max and he’s on the street. And once he’s on the street, citizen of the world that he is, all he’s gotta do is bail out, if you follow me.”

  “Bail out?”

  “Skip the country, forfeit the bond, and go about his business. And what’s even more of a shame is me and my fellow officers’ll be makin’ life hard for all the rest of you, even with TR here off the hook and out of the country. Takin’ testimony from Mr. Weeks, inquirin’ into the source of Mr. Sarnoff’s income—”

  “Tsarnoff, officer.”

  “Whatever. Makin’ sure everybody’s papers are legit. An’ of course there’ll be reporters crawlin’ up everybody’s ass, poppin’ flash bulbs at the king an’ queen of Anna Banana—”

  “Anatruria.”

  “Whatever. Be more important for you people to remember the name of the country, bein’ as they’ll probably wind up sendin’ you back to it. Not Mr. Weeks, though, on account of he’s an American citizen, an’ they’ll most likely want to keep him around so Congress can ask him some questions.”

  He went on in this vein, probably longer than he had to. After all, these people were professionals. They’d played the game before, in the Balkans and the Middle East.

  Weeks said, “Officer…Kirschmann, is it?” He picked up his homburg, balanced it on his knee. “You know, I got a speeding ticket a couple of years ago in the state of Montana. They had to pass a speed limit there, and in order to qualify for federal highway funds it had to be a max of sixty-five on the interstates and fifty-five everywhere else.”

  “That a fact,” Ray said.

  “It is,” Charlie Weeks said. “Now, Montana’s too large and too sparsely settled for those limits to make any sense. And the federal government could make them pass that law, but they couldn’t regulate how they enforced it. So Montana assigned only four state troopers to speed limit enforcement, and you know how large the state is.”

  “Prolly as big as Brooklyn and Manhattan put together.”

  Weeks’s smile spread across his face. “Very nearly,” he said. “The federal government couldn’t establish penalties for violating the speeding laws, either, so Montana set the fine at five dollars per violation. If one of the state’s four traffic cops nails you for doing a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour in a fifty-five zone, it costs you five bucks.”

  “Reasonable,” Ray said.

  “Very reasonable, but here’s the point I’m trying to make. Just so no one’s grossly inconvenienced, neither the motorist nor the arresting officer, the fine may be collected on the spot. You pull me over, I give you five dollars, and I go on my way.”

  “An’ everybody’s happy,” Ray said.

  “Exactly. And the state’s best interests are served. Admirable, wouldn’t you say?”

  “In a manner of speakin’, yeah.”

  “Officer,” Gregory Tsarnoff said, “if the Assyrian is only going to forfeit bond, perhaps he could post it directly, without going through the usual channels.”

  “I’ll tell you this,” Ray said. “It’s irregular.”

  “But expedient, surely.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he said, “but it’d get the job done.”

  “Tiglath,” Charlie Weeks said, “how much dough have you got on you?”

  “You mean money?”

  “No, I’m thinking about starting a bakery. Yes, I mean money. You came here thinking you’d have a chance to bid on those bearer shares. How much did you bring?”

  “Not so much. I am not a rich man, Charlie. Surely you know that.”

  “Don’t dick around, Tiggy, it’s late in the game for that. What are you carrying?”

  “Ten thousand.”

  “That’s U.S. dollars, I hope. Not Anatrurian tschirin.”

  “Dollars, of course.”

  “What about you, Gregorius?”

  “A little more than that,” Tsarnoff said. “But can you possibly be suggesting that I help raise bail money for the Assyrian? He wrote my name in blood!”

  “Yeah, but credit where it’s due, Gregorius. He spelled it wrong. Do I think you should kick in? Yes, I do.” He frowned. “You know what else I think? I think there’s too many people in the room. We need a private conference, Gregorius. You and me and Tiggy and Officer Kirschmann here.”

  “And Wilfred.”

  “If you prefer, Gregorius.”

  “An’ Bernie,” Ray said.

  “And the weasel, to be sure.”

  I steered everybody else to my office in the back. That didn’t seem fair to Ilona and Michael, but they didn’t seem to mind, Ilona smiling her ironic smile while the king looked as though he’d suffered a light concussion. Between them they were less irritated than Carolyn and Mowgli, who were unhappy to be missing the next act.


  I left them admiring the portrait of St. John of God, the patron saint of booksellers, and got back in time to hear Weeks explaining that he had the bearer shares. “Michael’s a nice fellow,” he was saying, “but that family was never loaded with smarts. After I heard about the burglary attempt, I told him I wanted to check the portfolio. I haven’t given it back to him yet, and when I do the shares won’t be in it.”

  Tsarnoff stroked his big chin. “Without the account number—”

  “Without the number the shares are just paper, but who’s to say there’s no one alive who knows the number? For that matter, who’s to say you can’t create a hairline fissure in the rock-solid walls of the Swiss banking system? If the three of us threw in together…”

  “You and I, sir? And the Assyrian?”

  Weeks was smiling furiously. “Be like old times,” he said. “Wouldn’t it, now?”

  “Well, now,” Ray said, and there was a knock on the door. I looked up, and the knock was repeated, louder. I gave a dismissing wave, but the large young man at the door refused to be dismissed. He knocked again.

  I went to the door, cracked it a few inches. “We’re closed,” I said. “Private meeting, not open for business today. Come back tomorrow.”

  He held up a book. “I just want to buy this,” he said. “It’s off that table there, fifty cents, three for a buck. Here’s a buck.”

  I pushed the money back at him. “Please,” I said.

  “But I want the book.”

  “Take the book.”

  “But—”

  “It’s a special,” I said. “Today only. Take it, it’s free. Please. Goodbye.”

  I closed the door, turned the lock. I turned back to the five of them and found they’d made their deal. Rasmoulian had taken off his trench coat and was hunting under his clothes for a money belt. Wilfred handed a manila envelope to his employer, who opened it and began counting hundred-dollar bills. Weeks drew a similar stack of bills from his pocket, removed a rubber band, licked his thumb, and began counting.

  “I wish I knew why the hell I was doing this,” Weeks said. “I’ve got all the money I need. What the hell do you think it is, Gregorius?”

  “You miss the action, sir.”

  “I’m an old man. What do I need with action?” No one had an answer, and I don’t think he wanted one. He finished counting his bundle, collected bundles from the other two, weighed all three in his cupped hands. I gave him a shopping bag from behind the counter and he dropped all the money into it. A few hours ago that bag had contained books, the ones I’d bought from Mowgli for seventy-five dollars. Now it was full of hundred-dollar bills.

  Four hundred of them, according to Weeks, who held it out toward Ray.

  “I don’t know,” Ray said, and shot a quick glance my way. I moved my head about an inch to the left and an inch to the right. Ray registered this, widened his eyes. I met his eyes, then raised mine a few degrees toward the ceiling.

  “Thing is,” he said, “there’s a lot’s gotta be done, a bunch of police personnel gotta be brought in on this. Seems to me forty grand’s gonna spread too thin to cover it all.”

  “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Charlie Weeks said. “I thought we had a deal.”

  “Make it fifty an’ we got a deal.”

  “That’s an outrage. We’d already agreed on a figure, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Put it this way,” Ray said. “You got yourself a real good deal when that trooper stopped you out in Montana. But you ain’t in the Wild West this time around. This here’s New York.”

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-four

  “It doesn’t seem right,” Carolyn said. “Tiggy murdered both of those men. And he winds up getting away with it.”

  It was around four-thirty and we were around the corner at the Bum Rap. Carolyn was staying in shape with a glass of Scotch on the rocks; I was getting back into shape gradually, nursing a beer.

  “Mrs. Kirschmann needs a new fur coat,” I said.

  “And she gets it, and Tiggy gets away clean. But when does justice get served?”

  “Justice gets served last,” I said, “and usually winds up with leftovers. The fact of the matter is there would never have been enough evidence to convict Rasmoulian, even if he didn’t skip the country in advance of trial. He’d never wind up in prison, and this way at least he winds up out of the country, and so do the rest of them.”

  “Tsarnoff and who else?”

  “Wilfred, of course. Getting Wilfred and Rasmoulian out of the country means a saving of untold lives. They’re a pair of stone killers if I ever saw one.”

  “And now they’ll be working together.”

  “God help Europe,” I said. “But there’s always the chance that they’ll kill each other. Charlie Weeks is on his way out of the country, too. He’ll be catching the Concorde as soon as he makes arrangements to close his apartment at the Boccaccio. Between the three of them, they think they’ve got a chance of coming up with the Swiss account number and looting the long-lost treasury of Anatruria.”

  “You figure they’ll get hold of the number?”

  “They might.”

  “And do you think there’s an Anatrurian treasury left for them to loot?”

  “If they ever get that account number,” I said, “I think they’re in for the greatest disappointment since Geraldo broke into Al Capone’s vault. But what do I know? Maybe the cash is gone, depleted by banking fees over the past seventy years. Maybe the stuff in the safe-deposit box is nothing but czarist bonds and worthless certificates. On the other hand, maybe whoever gets in there will be sitting on a controlling interest in Royal Dutch Petroleum.”

  She thought about it. “I think the important thing for those three is to be in the game,” she said. “It doesn’t really matter who wins the hand, or how much is in the pot.”

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “Weeks even said as much. He wants to play.”

  She picked up her drink, shook it so that the ice cubes clinked pleasantly. “Bern,” she said, “I was really glad I could be around for most of it at the end there. I never met a king before.”

  “I’m not sure you met one today.”

  “Well, that’s as close as I expect to come. Mowgli was impressed, incidentally. He said he was seeing a whole new side of the book business today.” She sipped her drink. “Bern,” she said, “there’s a few things I’m not too clear on.”

  “Oh?”

  “How’d you know it was Tiggy?”

  “I knew it was somebody,” I said. “When Rasmoulian turned up at the bookstore, I assumed Candlemas had told him about me. When it turned out Candlemas was dead all along, I figured he must have done some talking before he died, probably to the man who killed him. Rasmoulian knew me by name, not by sight, so he hadn’t followed Candlemas or Ilona to my store, or spotted me with Hoberman and followed me home.”

  “And you knew Charlie Weeks had called him. How did you know that?”

  “When I called Weeks and went over to his apartment,” I said, “he didn’t know what the hell I wanted. He really did think I was some guy named Bill Thompson who’d come up on the elevator with Cappy Hoberman. When I said I wanted to talk to him, he probably thought I’d heard something about Hoberman’s death, but not that I had anything to do with the burglary.”

  “But if Tiggy told him…”

  “Tiggy told him Candlemas had admitted hiring a burglar to break into the king’s apartment. But Weeks didn’t know that burglar was the guy who’d said two words to him in the hallway. Then, once we started talking, he put two and two together.”

  “And?”

  “And he tried to keep what he knew to himself, but he made a slip. When I said how Rasmoulian had known my middle name, he said, ‘Grimes.’ Now where did that come from?”

  “Maybe you told him.”

  I shook my head. “When it was time to leave,” I said, “he was still calling me Bill Thompson, pretending he didn’t have
a clue that wasn’t my real name. If he knew the Grimes part, he’d know about the Bernie and the Rhodenbarr, too. So he knew more than he should, and for all his talk about joining forces he was keeping what he knew to himself. I played along, but I knew then and there that he was more than an old friend of Hoberman’s and a ticket into the building. He was involved clear up to his hat.”

  “And when did you know Candlemas was the woodchuck?”

  “Not as soon as I might have. The names on the passports did it for me. Not Souslik, I had to check some reference books before I found out what a souslik was, but I recognized the word ‘marmot’ even if Candlemas did give it a French-style ending on his fake Belgian passport. Then I looked up ‘Candlemas’ and found out it was just Groundhog’s Day with hymns and incense.”

  “Wilfred’s favorite holiday.”

  “Yes, and wasn’t that a revelation?” I transferred some beer from my bottle to my glass, then from the glass to me. “I should have guessed earlier. On my first visit to Candlemas’s apartment, one of the knickknacks I noticed was what I took for a netsuke.”

  “What kind of a rodent is that, Bern?”

  “You know, those little ivory carvings the Japanese collect. They originally functioned something like buttons for securing the sash on a kimono, but for a long time now they’ve made them as objets d’art. I didn’t look close at the one Candlemas had, but I figured it was ivory, and that it was supposed to be a beaver but the tail was broken off.”

  “And actually it was a woodchuck?”

  “It was still there yesterday,” I said, and took a little velvet drawstring bag from my pocket, and drew Letchkov’s bone woodchuck from it. “If I’d been paying attention I would have known it wasn’t a beaver. It’s a perfect match for Charlie Weeks’s mouse—the bone’s yellowed in just the same way. You know, when Charlie showed me the mouse, I got a little frisson.”

  “That’s a rodent, right?”

  I gave her a look. “It’s a feeling,” I said. “I knew there was something familiar about the mouse, but I couldn’t think what it was. Anyway, Candlemas was the woodchuck, and he kept his carved totem all those years. I guess he had the mouse, too, and gave it to Hoberman to pass on to Weeks.”