by Otto Penzler
“I told you to stay behind me,” growled Remy. His voice came to me through a fog.
At the moment, my brain had feathers in it and my throat too sore to reply. All I could do was stare at Sallambier’s body stretched out at my feet as if he were sleeping. However, upon seeing the growing lump on the side of Sallambier’s head, I was fairly sure that if the gargoyle were sleeping, then he’d had some assistance in the matter from Remy.
A strong hand grasped my shoulder.
“We’ll have to move him to another part of the tunnels. You grab his feet.”
I wanted to protest my condition, but soon found myself struggling with a pair of familiar looking worn boots. As much as my end of the hulk weighed, Sallambier must have stuffed himself with food during all his waking hours. In the end, I have no idea which part of the labyrinth we stashed his sleeping form in, nor where Remy left me while he cleaned up any evidence of our passing. I do remember Remy coming back with a canvas bag over his shoulder. His way was lighted by the bull’s-eye lantern, and the extinguished torch was under his arm. He also paused at each turning of the tunnels to erase any white chalk marks.
At the top of the stairs, the Chevalier locked the staircase door behind us. We slunk out of thechurch like thieves in the night and headed home.
Remy quickly roused Josette from her slumbers. For a celebration is how he termed it. For my part, I didn’t know what we had to celebrate. I had no coins for my efforts, and I vaguely remembered Remy tossing Sallambier’s key to the staircase door into one of the garbage pits on our way back to the villa. No cache of holy liquor for us to sell to tavern keepers on the back streets. When I’d inquired about the key, Remy replied, “No gentleman steals from the church.”
I could have believed him better, except for the clinking of glass bottles in the canvas bag he carried on his shoulder. Sure enough, to help us celebrate, Remy dragged a couple of bottles of Benedictine out of the bag and opened the tops. I reminded him about his statement concerning not stealing from the church.
“Stealing, my boy?” He laughed loud. “No, no, these few bottles are merely payment which I’m sure the monks, had they known, would have gladly given me for rescuing their entire Benedictine cellar from the greed of King Jules.”
As I grew older, I was beginning to realize how full-grown people rationalized their behavior based upon their desires of the moment. The only distinction among them being that different persons used varying degrees of ethics in their decision making, whether it was King Jules or the King of France. Still in my youth, I didn’t have this problem yet, but it meant I’d have to keep a closer eye on the Chevalier in future dealings. As for Jules, I’d left his chief assassin lost in the long twisting tunnels of the Roman quarries. That would serve as partial payment for Jules’s debt to me. Remy was another matter.
And then I remembered. My leather pouch. I reached desperately for my belt.
“What are you doing so in such a frantic manner?” inquired Remy. “You act as if you had lost something.”
“My pouch,” I exclaimed. “It contained all my valuables.”
“What could a poor pickpocket like you possibly have of value?”
“I had a length of blood sausage,” I retorted before I recalled what I was going to use it for.
Remy laughed.
“Boudin noir? In these hot autumn days? You’re lucky you didn’t eat it. Even the ancient Greeks knew this dark pudding became poisonous if it set in the heat too long. It’s pig’s blood, cereal, and seasonings stuffed into the intestines of an animal. Better you forgo this delicacy until cooler weather.”
Well, that did explain the lingering odor it had. But since Sallambier now had the blood sausage in his possession, that meant I’d not be able to slip it into Remy’s evening soup and get some measure of revenge on him.
Then I pictured Sallambier and his constant appetite. When he awoke in the dark and spent hours trying to feel his way out of the stone labyrinth, he would no doubt be hungry. And when he rooted through my leather pouch stuffed into his jerkin, he would recognize the feel of a length of sausage.
At least I wouldn’t have to worry about making amends to Sallambier and his pitted blade one dark night. No, years from now some Benedictine monk off course in the tunnels below Val-de-Grâce Church would probably find no more than rat-gnawed bones, a rusted knife, and some tattered clothes.
I was sure that the Chevalier wondered why the sudden smile on my face, but as I saw the situation, it was one down and two devils to go. I had all the time in the world to get even.
Rogue: Bernie Rhodenbarr
Like a Thief in the Night
LAWRENCE BLOCK
MANY MYSTERY WRITERS have been described as prolific, but few have been as versatile and as accomplished as Lawrence Block (1938– ), who has produced more than a hundred full-length books and countless short stories and articles, many on the art of writing. While most authors are happy to create one series character that is popular enough to engage a wide readership, Block has somehow managed to give literary birth to a half dozen, the second most successful (after his iconic private eye Matthew Scudder) being Bernie Rhodenbarr, a reasonably successful burglar and a slightly less successful bookseller.
Bernie owns the nice little bookshop called Barnegat Book on the border of New York City’s Greenwich Village on East Eleventh Street, between Broadway and University Place, not far from New York University. He is a mild-mannered fellow given to good-humored quips and observations about life’s foibles. He enjoys his bookshop but also enjoys breaking into people’s homes and stealing. Admittedly, he has been pressured into it for altruistic reasons on more than one occasion, but there’s no denying he’s proud of his skill. His bad luck is that on too many occasions he comes across murder as frequently as he does treasures.
His best friend is a lesbian dog groomer, Carolyn Kaiser, with whom he often shares a nice dinner and a bottle of wine. The first book in the series, Burglars Can’t Be Choosers (1977), served as the basis for a dreadful film titled Burglar (1987) that starred Whoopi Goldberg as Bernie (I could not make this up) and Bobcat Goldthwait as Carl Hefler, her whacky dog groomer best friend.
“Like a Thief in the Night” was originally published in the May 1983 issue of Cosmopolitan; it was first collected in Block’s Sometimes They Bite (New York, Arbor House, 1983).
LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT
Lawrence Block
AT 11:30 the television anchorman counseled her to stay tuned for the late show, a vintage Hitchcock film starring Cary Grant. For a moment she was tempted. Then she crossed the room and switched off the set.
There was a last cup of coffee in the pot. She poured it and stood at the window with it, a tall and slender woman, attractive, dressed in the suit and silk blouse she’d worn that day at the office. A woman who could look at once efficient and elegant, and who stood now sipping black coffee from a bone-china cup and gazing south and west.
Her apartment was on the twenty-second floor of a building located at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street, and her vista was quite spectacular. A midtown skyscraper blocked her view of the building where Tavistock Corp. did its business, but she fancied she could see right through it with x-ray vision.
The cleaning crew would be finishing up now, she knew, returning their mops and buckets to the cupboards and changing into street clothes, preparing to go off-shift at midnight. They would leave a couple of lights on in Tavistock’s seventeenth floor suite as well as elsewhere throughout the building. And the halls would remain lighted, and here and there in the building someone would be working all night, and—
She liked Hitchcock movies, especially the early ones, and she was in love with Cary Grant. But she also liked good clothes and bone-china cups and the view from her apartment and the comfortable, well-appointed apartment itself. And so she rinsed the cup in the sink and put on a coat and took the elevator to the lobby, where the florid-faced doorman made a great sh
ow of hailing her a cab.
There would be other nights, and other movies.
—
The taxi dropped her in front of an office building in the West Thirties. She pushed through the revolving door and her footsteps on the marble floor sounded impossibly loud to her. The security guard, seated at a small table by the bank of elevators, looked up from his magazine at her approach. She said, “Hello, Eddie,” and gave him a quick smile.
“Hey, how ya doin’,” he said, and she bent to sign herself in as his attention returned to his magazine. In the appropriate spaces she scribbled Elaine Halder, Tavistock, 1704, and, after a glance at her watch, 12:15.
She got into a waiting elevator and the doors closed without a sound. She’d be alone up there, she thought. She’d glanced at the record sheet while signing it, and no one had signed in for Tavistock or any other office on seventeen.
Well, she wouldn’t be long.
When the elevator doors opened she stepped out and stood for a moment in the corridor, getting her bearings. She took a key from her purse and stared at it for a moment as if it were an artifact from some unfamiliar civilization. Then she turned and began walking the length of the freshly mopped corridor, hearing nothing but the echo of her boisterous footsteps.
1704. An oak door, a square of frosted glass, unmarked but for the suite number and the name of the company. She took another thoughtful glance at the key before fitting it carefully into the lock.
It turned easily. She pushed the door inward and stepped inside, letting the door swing shut behind her.
And gasped.
There was a man not a dozen yards from her.
—
“Hello,” he said.
He was standing beside a rosewood-topped desk, the center drawer of which was open, and there was a spark in his eyes and a tentative smile on his lips. He was wearing a gray suit patterned in a windowpane check. His shirt collar was buttoned down, his narrow tie neatly knotted. He was two or three years older than she, she supposed, and perhaps that many inches taller.
Her hand was pressed to her breast, as if to still a pounding heart. But her heart wasn’t really pounding. She managed a smile. “You startled me,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone would be here.”
“We’re even.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I wasn’t expecting company.”
He had nice white even teeth, she noticed. She was apt to notice teeth. And he had an open and friendly face, which was also something she was inclined to notice, and why was she suddenly thinking of Cary Grant? The movie she hadn’t seen, of course, that plus this Hollywood meet-cute opening, with the two of them encountering each other unexpectedly in this silent tomb of an office, and—
And he was wearing rubber gloves.
Her face must have registered something because he frowned, puzzled. Then he raised his hands and flexed his fingers. “Oh, these,” he said. “Would it help if I spoke of an eczema brought on by exposure to the night air?”
“There’s a lot of that going around.”
“I knew you’d understand.”
“You’re a prowler.”
“The word has the nastiest connotations,” he objected. “One imagines a lot of lurking in shrubbery. There’s no shrubbery here beyond the odd rubber plant and I wouldn’t lurk in it if there were.”
“A thief, then.”
“A thief, yes. More specifically, a burglar. I might have stripped the gloves off when you stuck your key in the lock but I’d been so busy listening to your footsteps and hoping they’d lead to another office that I quite forgot I was wearing these things. Not that it would have made much difference. Another minute and you’d have realized that you’ve never set eyes on me before, and at that point you’d have wondered what I was doing here.”
“What are you doing here?”
“My kid brother needs an operation.”
“I thought that might be it. Surgery for his eczema.”
He nodded. “Without it he’ll never play the trumpet again. May I be permitted an observation?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“I observe that you’re afraid of me.”
“And here I thought I was doing such a super job of hiding it.”
“You were, but I’m an incredibly perceptive human being. You’re afraid I’ll do something violent, that he who is capable of theft is equally capable of mayhem.”
“Are you?”
“Not even in fantasy. I’m your basic pacifist. When I was a kid my favorite book was Ferdinand the Bull.”
“I remember him. He didn’t want to fight. He just wanted to smell the flowers.”
“Can you blame him?” He smiled again, and the adverb that came to her was disarmingly. More like Alan Alda than Cary Grant, she decided. Well, that was all right. There was nothing wrong with Alan Alda.
“You’re afraid of me,” she said suddenly.
“How’d you figure that? A slight quiver in the old upper lip?”
“No. It just came to me. But why? What could I do to you?”
“You could call the, uh, cops.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“And I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“I know you wouldn’t.”
“Well,” he said, and sighed theatrically. “Aren’t you glad we got all that out of the way?”
—
She was, rather. It was good to know that neither of them had anything to fear from the other. As if in recognition of this change in their relationship she took off her coat and hung it on the pipe rack, where a checked topcoat was already hanging. His, she assumed. How readily he made himself at home!
She turned to find he was making himself further at home, rummaging deliberately in the drawers of the desk. What cheek, she thought, and felt herself beginning to smile.
She asked him what he was doing.
“Foraging,” he said, then drew himself up sharply. “This isn’t your desk, is it?”
“No.”
“Thank heaven for that.”
“What were you looking for, anyway?”
He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “You’d think I could come up with a decent story but I can’t. I’m looking for something to steal.”
“Nothing specific?”
“I like to keep an open mind. I didn’t come here to cart off the IBM Selectrics. But you’d be surprised how many people leave cash in their desks.”
“And you just take what you find?”
He hung his head. “I know,” he said. “It’s a moral failing. You don’t have to tell me.”
“Do people really leave cash in an unlocked desk drawer?”
“Sometimes. And sometimes they lock the drawers, but that doesn’t make them all that much harder to open.”
“You can pick locks?”
“A limited and eccentric talent,” he allowed, “but it’s all I know.”
“How did you get in here? I suppose you picked the office lock.”
“Hardly a great challenge.”
“But how did you get past Eddie?”
“Eddie? Oh, you must be talking about the chap in the lobby. He’s not quite as formidable as the Berlin Wall, you know. I got here around eight. They tend to be less suspicious at an earlier hour. I scrawled a name on the sheet and walked on by. Then I found an empty office that they’d already finished cleaning and curled up on the couch for a nap.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Have I ever lied to you in the past? The cleaning crew leaves at midnight. At about that time I let myself out of Mr. Higginbotham’s office—that’s where I’ve taken to napping, he’s a patent attorney with the most comfortable old leather couch. And then I make my rounds.”
She looked at him. “You’ve come to this building before.”
“I stop by every little once in a while.”
“You make it sound like a vending machine route.”
“There
are similarities, aren’t there? I never looked at it that way.”
“And then you make your rounds. You break into offices—”
“I never break anything. Let’s say I let myself into offices.”
“And you steal money from desks—”
“Also jewelry, when I run across it. Anything valuable and portable. Sometimes there’s a safe. That saves a lot of looking around. You know right away that’s where they keep the good stuff.”
“And you can open safes?”
“Not every safe,” he said modestly, “and not every single time, but—” he switched to a Cockney accent “—I has the touch, mum.”
“And then what do you do? Wait until morning to leave?”
“What for? I’m well-dressed. I look respectable. Besides, security guards are posted to keep unauthorized persons out of a building, not to prevent them from leaving. It might be different if I tried rolling a Xerox machine through the lobby, but I don’t steal anything that won’t fit in my pockets or my attaché case. And I don’t wear my rubber gloves when I saunter past the guard. That wouldn’t do.”
“I don’t suppose it would. What do I call you?”
“ ‘That damned burglar,’ I suppose. That’s what everybody calls me. But you”—he extended a rubber-covered forefinger—“you may call me Bernie.”
“Bernie the Burglar.”
“And what shall I call you?”
“Elaine’ll do.”
“Elaine,” he said. “Elaine, Elaine. Not Elaine Halder, by any chance?”
“How did you—?”
“Elaine Halder,” he said. “And that explains what brings you to these offices in the middle of the night. You look startled. I can’t imagine why. ‘You know my methods, Watson.’ What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t be frightened, for God’s sake. Knowing your name doesn’t give me mystical powers over your destiny. I just have a good memory and your name stuck in it.” He crooked a thumb at a closed door on the far side of the room. “I’ve already been in the boss’s office. I saw your note on his desk. I’m afraid I’ll have to admit I read it. I’m a snoop. It’s a serious character defect, I know.”