The Burglar on the Prowl

by Lawrence Block

  But the rest of my audience was growing restive, with here and there an eye glazing over. I tried to hurry it along.

  “Of course the Russians did what they could to squelch the unrest and wipe out the partisan bands. They didn’t give it top priority. If it was enough for the partisans to keep the cauldron simmering, so it was enough for the Soviets to keep a lid on it. Different men had that assignment over the years, all of their efforts falling somewhere between failure and success. Then, sometime in the early Seventies, they gave the job to a man named Valentine Kukarov.

  “Kukarov was a Russian, born in Tashkent around the time the Russian winter was stopping the Nazi advance in its tracks. He was around thirty when they sent him to Riga, and he’d already achieved a high rank in the KGB. He went after the Latvian partisans the way William Gorgas went after yellow fever mosquitoes in Panama. Anyone suspected of anti-Soviet activity was executed as an enemy of the state. Anyone who might have knowledge of such activity was interrogated, and the question-and-answer sessions often ended in death. He wasn’t there long before Latvians started calling him the Black Scourge of Riga, and the name stayed with him when his superiors shifted him to another assignment. He got a promotion, because he’d done what nobody else could do. He didn’t stifle the desire for independence, nobody could have done that, but he left the citizenry in no position to do anything about it. Hundreds of partisans had been killed, hundreds more were shipped to the Gulag, and thousands of ordinary Latvian citizens were relocated to remote regions of the USSR, their places in Latvia taken by Russians more likely to be loyal subjects of the men in power.

  “Somewhere along the way, Kukarov stopped being all that loyal himself. On an overseas assignment, he got turned by an American agent who got him to double. He went on for a few years playing both ends against the middle, until it was clear that his KGB bosses were catching on to him, whereupon he told his CIA control he wanted to defect.

  “They told him lots of luck, but you’re on your own. It was one thing to co-opt the Black Scourge of Riga and make clandestine use of him, but it was quite another to welcome him into the land of the free and help him cram for his naturalization test.”

  “Well, that’s the fucking government for you,” said Michael Quattrone.

  A few heads turned at that, but when he didn’t say anything further they turned back to me.

  “In 1987,” I said, “Kukarov came over on his own. He must have had his pick of fake passports, and an entry visa for the US wouldn’t have been hard for him to arrange. He’d already shaved his heavy black beard, and as soon as he got here he bought himself a blond wig, plucked his bushy black eyebrows, and dyed them to match the wig. He wasn’t worried that the KGB would stay up nights trying to find him. The only thing he had to worry about was the Latvian-American community, and he wasn’t greatly worried, because he’d been careful all his life about not having his picture taken. He was fairly sure nobody had a decent photo of him. They might have a description, but it no longer fit him, so what good would it do them?

  “Then Latvia became independent. And, even worse from Kukarov’s point of view, the Soviet Union collapsed and access to secret KGB files was suddenly a lot easier to come by. And the KGB had several nice clear photographs of him. Of course he was a little older now, and he kept the eyebrows plucked and dyed, and shaved twice a day, and never went anywhere without the blond wig.

  “Add in the fact that more Latvians were finding their way into the country, either as immigrants or as embassy staff. It had been twenty years since the heyday of the Black Scourge of Riga, but that didn’t mean anybody was ready to forgive and forget. If someone who knew him when were to take a hard look at him and got to imagining him with dark hair and bushy eyebrows, well, that wouldn’t be so great. Where could he go, Australia? There were plenty of Latvians in Australia. And he was past fifty, and too old to start over somewhere new.

  “He came up with a way out. Plastic surgery. And which eminent plastic surgeon do you think he picked?”

  Mapes knew this was coming, he must have seen it coming a mile off, but he still winced a little. I was more interested in watching some other faces, only a few of which turned to look at the good doctor.

  “The physician he chose,” I went on, “was a board-certified plastic surgeon with an excellent professional reputation. He did the usual run of nose jobs and facelifts and liposuction and tummy tucks, putting caviar on the table by making the well-to-do a little easier to look at. He also did a good deal of reconstructive surgery on burn victims and accident survivors and children born with facial birth defects. A lot of his work with kids was what lawyers would call pro bono. I don’t know if doctors would call it that or something else, but whatever you call it he didn’t get paid for it.”

  I glanced over at Marty, who appeared surprised. Nobody, I’d have to tell him, can be a shitheel a hundred percent of the time. It’s too exhausting.

  “Somewhere along the way,” I said, “this doctor became first acquainted and then involved with what we might call the criminal element. Maybe he found criminals fascinating. Many of us do. Or maybe he just saw a way to turn an extra dollar, a dollar to be paid in cash, and one he could thus forget to report when he filed his tax return.”

  The two government men tried to keep straight faces, but they weren’t very good at it. I had their attention now, and it showed.

  “He did some favors. Took out bullets and cleaned the wounds without making a report, the way the law says you have to. Maybe he wrote out a few death certificates, putting down cardiac arrest as the cause of death. Well, it always is. If somebody cuts your throat or puts a bullet in the back of your head, you die when your heart stops beating. So he wasn’t exactly lying…

  “Still, he was heroically overqualified for that sort of work, and it was only a question of time before someone made better use of his abilities. He became the man to see if you wanted to change your face to one the law wouldn’t recognize. The people who needed his services would pay big money, and they’d pay it in cash, and wouldn’t try to deduct it from their own taxes, either. And there was no hospital cutting into the pie, because he had to do the work in the privacy of his own office. That was generally safe enough with facial surgery, and if anything went wrong, well, he could just fill out the death certificate appropriately. But why should anything go wrong? Nothing ever did, and it wasn’t long before he’d paid off the mortgage on the big house in Riverdale and had a nice cash cushion in the bargain.”

  That got some heads to turn. Whoever hadn’t already figured it out now knew that their host for the afternoon was the very doctor I was talking about.

  So why not call him by name?

  “One day,” I said, “Dr. Crandall R. Mapes had a visitor, referred by one of his associates in the world of organized crime. The man wore a blond wig and explained the steps he’d already taken to alter his appearance. But he still had the same face underneath it all, and he wanted a new one.

  “Dr. Mapes agreed to take him as a patient, and the two settled on a price. Mapes took pictures, as he always did for every client, a group of shots showing the subject’s face from various angles. He studied the photographs at length, devised a plan, and, on the appointed day, performed the first of a series of surgeries upon the face of Valentine Kukarov.”

  “You’re slandering me in my own home,” Mapes said, “in front of a roomful of witnesses.”

  “They say it ain’t bragging if it’s true,” I told him, “and the same thing holds for slander.”

  “You can’t prove any of this.” He got to his feet. “Allegations, nothing but allegations. I’m damned if I’m going to listen to allegations.” I don’t know if he was going for the front door or the dining room, but his body language was saying See ya later, Allegator.

  He didn’t get very far. Before he could take the first step, the two feds rose to their feet, while the two trios of cops and goons at the room’s two exits all but linked arms to b
lock his flight. That gave him pause, and then Michael Quattrone said, “Sit down, Mapes,” and he sat.

  “The operations,” I said, “were a success. Dr. Mapes gave Kukarov a new nose and refigured his jawline. He shaved his cheekbones to make him look less Slavic, and took ten to fifteen years off his appearance by lifting what had begun to droop, tightening the loose skin on the neck, and doing a little work around and under the eyes. He got rid of a scar at the side of Kukarov’s mouth. Nobody knew about it back in Latvia, he’d grown the beard to hide it, but it was a distinguishing mark in the American version of Kukarov, and Mapes got rid of it for him. He pitched the blond hairpiece, reworked the hairline with a combination of surgery and electrolysis, improved the eyebrows permanently with some more electrolysis, and taught his patient to dye his hair and eyebrows a light brown that was becoming enough while less attention-getting than what he’d had. Besides”—I glanced pointedly at Mapes, who glow-ered back from beneath his rug—“sooner or later someone recognizes even the best wig for what it is, and starts wondering what you’d look like without it.”

  “So he fixed him up good,” Ray said. “Then what?”

  “Then he took some more photographs,” I said, “and collected the balance of his fee, and sent the Black Scourge of Riga on his way.”

  “Excuse me,” said Grisek, the man from the Latvian embassy. “Kukarov allowed him to retain these photographs?”

  “Certainly not. He’d always been cautious to the point of paranoia on the subject of photos, and now that he had a new face he certainly didn’t want pictures of it floating around.”

  “Ah.”

  “Mapes insisted on taking the photos,” I said, “because he needed them for reference while the work was in progress. The surgeries took months, and he took more shots along the way to chart his progress. And he snapped a last batch upon completion as well, so that he and his patient could view them side by side, Before and After, and see just how substantive a change Mapes had worked in Kukarov’s appearance.”

  “That’s standard,” Mapes said. “Everyone in the field does it.”

  “That’s what you told Kukarov. And he let you do it because you assured him that, when your work was over, all copies of the photos would be destroyed.”

  “The man insisted.”

  “As other men had insisted before him. And you agreed, as you had agreed before. But you didn’t keep your word, did you? You held on to four photos, mug shots, really. Before and after, full-face and profile. Just as you kept of all your patients, legitimate and criminal.”

  He winced a little at the last word, then rallied to tell me what a valuable, even essential, reference library the photos constituted.

  “Pardon my Latvian,” I said, “but that’s a load of crap. You kept the pictures to feed your ego. You knew you shouldn’t have the pictures, so you didn’t keep them with the rest. Instead you Scotch-taped them to the pages of a book and stuck it on the shelf in your office. Maybe you got a kick out of it, having it right out in plain sight, where anybody could pick it up and page through it. But of course nobody did. Principles of Organic Chemistry, Volume Two. Sounds like a real page-turner, doesn’t it?”

  “They were readily available for reference,” he said, “yet secreted so that no one would find them. You said it yourself, Rothenberg.” I didn’t correct him. The man was hopeless. “Even if you were searching the place, you’d never pick up that book. And no one would stumble on it by accident.”

  “Suppose they’d read Volume One, and didn’t want to miss the sequel? Never mind. Let’s say the photos were safe there. But you didn’t just drool over them in private. Every once in a while you couldn’t resist pulling the book down and showing off. Every now and then you just had to impress some sweet young thing by showing her the dangerous men whose faces you’d rearranged.”

  “They didn’t know the men, they weren’t going to tell anybody, it was perfectly safe…”

  His voice trailed off. Everyone was staring at him now, except for Marty, who was gazing thoughtfully at Marisol, and Marisol, who was examining her feet.

  “If it was so damn safe,” I said, “how come we’re all here? How come four people are dead?” I sighed. “It might have been safe. Unethical, dishonest, illegal, but safe. Except you forgot one thing. You forgot the long arm of coincidence.”

  Thirty-Eight

  I liked the phrase enough to say it again. “The long arm of coincidence. The law has a proverbially lengthy arm, but so does coincidence. I checked my Bartlett’s this morning, and a fellow named Haddon Chambers coined the phrase back in 1888, in his play Captain Swift. He was born in 1860 and died in 1921, and except for his one immortal line, that’s as much as I know about Haddon Chambers. Of course you could go and Google him, and you’ll probably get his blood type and his mother’s maiden name, along with Whittaker Chambers and Haddon’s Notch, New Hampshire.

  “The long arm of coincidence. There’s a hand at the end of that arm, and it’s left its fingerprints all over this business. Starting with the time a couple of weeks ago when Mapes took Volume Two down from the shelf to show off to his latest girlfriend.”

  “That’s terrible,” Lacey Kavinoky said. “On top of everything else, the man cheats on his wife.” She colored, embarrassed by her outburst. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pipe up like that.”

  “How could you help it? It’s shocking, and we’re all shocked. Still, there’s a fair amount of it going around. What’s coincidental is that the woman in question was the daughter of a Latvian immigrant.”

  “And he showed her Cuckoo’s pitcher anyway?” Ray said. “Not too bright, is he, Bernie?”

  “Not the sharpest scalpel in the autoclave,” I allowed, “but all he knew about Kukarov was that he was Russian. The man wouldn’t have mentioned the Riga connection, let alone that he was the Black Scourge thereof. ‘Now this man,’ Mapes told her, ‘came here from Russia to make a new life for himself, and thanks to me he doesn’t have to look over his shoulder for KGB operatives.’ The pictures didn’t mean a thing to her, Before or After. But she knew the name. There aren’t too many Latvians—or half-Latvians, for that matter—who wouldn’t recognize the name of Valentine Kukarov.”

  Grisek said something in an undertone, but even in an overtone I wouldn’t have understood it, because he was speaking in his native tongue. I found out later that it was something along the lines of May the fires of Hell consume him, starting at the toes and taking eternity to reach his cursed head. I’d have pardoned his Latvian, but nobody asked me to.

  “Marisol was the girl’s name. That doesn’t sound Latvian, but don’t worry about it. She’d heard her father talk about Kukarov, and would have gone to him for advice, but he was back home in Oakmont, Pennsylvania. But she had an aunt and uncle in Bay Ridge, and they agreed that she had to get hold of those photographs.

  “But how? She’d been to her lover’s office once, at his invitation. There was no reason for him to invite her again, and no plausible way she could invite herself. The way things stood, if the book disappeared he’d never suspect her; he’d put it back himself before ushering her out of the office. But if she were to pay him another visit, and then the book went missing…

  “Her cousin Karlis came up with the answer. An artist with a loft in Williamsburg, he made an appointment with Dr. Mapes. He showed up twenty minutes early, looking perfectly respectable in his weddings-and-funerals suit, and when the receptionist was out of the room he pulled down Principles of Organic Chemistry and popped it in his tote bag. He could have torn out the four pages with Kukarov’s photos on them, but maybe that would have taken too much time.”

  “I never saw the man,” Karlis said. “Or the photos. So how would I know which ones to take?”

  “But when you showed the book to your cousin, she could point out the photographs Mapes had identified as Kukarov’s.” He nodded. “Once she did, why not tear out those pages and return the book?”

  “What, go
to his office again? The one time I saw him I had to make up a reason. I couldn’t think of anything. He asked me what I wanted. ‘Look at me,’ I said. ‘What do you think?’ Well, he tells me, my nose is crooked, and my ears stick out a little, but these are all things he can fix. Up until then I thought I looked fine. Now every time I pass a mirror I turn my head the other way. I should go back there? Hey, Doc. You know what? Screw you!”

  “Your ears do stick out,” Mapes said, “and your nose is crooked, and I never asked you to come to my office in the first place.”

  “The book,” I said. “Principles of Organic Chemistry. After Marisol identified Kukarov, you took it home and gave it to your father.”

  “So?”

  “And he showed it to a man who was living under the name Rogovin, but who’d been calling himself Arnold Lyle. I don’t know what his name was originally, or what scam Lyle and his wife or girlfriend were working at the time.”

  “Hard to say,” Ray put in. “He was a guy who took what came along. When opportunity came knockin’, he opened the door, even if it was somebody else’s apartment.”

  “The Lyles had sublet a place in Murray Hill,” I said, “and whatever they had going on, they were glad to make room for Kukarov. Lyle was a Latvian, after all, and he’d gladly do his part to give the Black Scourge of Riga what he deserved. But Lyle didn’t see why they couldn’t turn a profit on the deal. Not from their fellow countrymen, but from some parties who might be interested in some of the other fellows who’d posed for Mapes’s candid camera.

  “So he got the word out, letting a few interested parties know what he had to sell. I believe you were one of those parties, Mr. Blinsky.”

  I looked at him, and he looked back at me, and I could feel myself shrinking under his gaze. If you wrote a play called The Black Scourge of Riga, he’s the guy you’d cast in the title role. His clothes were all black, and so was his hair and beard, and his whole affect was decidedly scourge-like. I was going to tell him he hadn’t answered my question, but then I realized that I hadn’t asked one, and I decided to move on.