The Burglar in Short Order

by Lawrence Block

  And various bibliographic sources agree that “Like a Thief in the Night” appeared in the May 1983 edition of Cosmopolitan. But I’ve never been able to confirm this. I don’t think it ever appeared in a magazine.

  Never mind. It’s here now, and has been included in various collections of my work, and a few anthologies.

  Savvy, incidentally, limped along until 1991. There have been other unrelated publications with that name, in the US and elsewhere. They haven’t published the story either . . .

  The next Bernie Rhodenbarr short story, “The Burglar Who Dropped in on Elvis,” was written during a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 1989. It’s a writers and artists colony, and I’d booked a stay there to work on a Scudder novel. I’d come up with a terrific ending, but wasn’t sure what it was the ending of, and I spent ten days and turned out perhaps 200 pages before realizing that it was not working. I set it aside, and had to figure out what to do with the remainder of my stay at VCCA. Writer colonies are wonderful places to be, but only if you’re working on something.

  So I began writing short stories, and that worked out really well; I kept coming up with ideas and was able to execute them effectively. One of the stories, “Answers to Soldier,” sold to Playboy and introduced a character named Keller, about whom I would go on to write half a dozen books. And Playboy also snapped up “The Burglar Who Dropped in on Elvis” and published it in their April 1990 issue.

  As you can see, “The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke” bears a joint byline—By Lynne Wood Block and Lawrence Block. I was invited to contribute to an anthology of collaborative ventures, crime stories jointly written by established writers and their presumably significant others. I mentioned it to Lynne, and said if she could come up with a full-fledged idea, I could do the heavy lifting and turn the idea into a story.

  While she was thinking this over, we went for a weekend visit to Otto Penzler’s house in Connecticut; he’d had it built fairly recently, and it was a very nice house with an extraordinary library, designed and constructed to house Otto’s definitive collection of mystery fiction.

  On the train ride home, Lynne rattled off her story idea, complete with an original locked-room murder method. I wrote the story, and the lifting involved wasn’t all that heavy. Marty Greenberg took it for his anthology, and I double-dipped by selling magazine rights to the excellent if all too short-lived Mary Higgins Clark’s Mystery Magazine. It was published in the Summer-Fall issue for 1997.

  And now we come to a quintet of occasional pieces, which is to say mini-essays written on one occasion or another, for one publication or another. “The Burglar Who Collected Copernicus” ran in the Chicago Tribune in 2000. “A Burglar’s-Eye View of Greed” was commissioned by New York Newsday in 2002, and subsequently made a second appearance as a limited-edition broadside. “The Burglar on Location” was published in the New York Daily News, though I can’t determine the precise date. “Five Books I’ve Read More Than Once” was compiled for the November 2013 issue of Crimespree Magazine, while “A Burglar’s Complaint” was written at the request of a European publisher for 38 Hours, a New York guidebook for tourists.

  I don’t know that any of these brief essays deserve immortality, even that flimsy shadow of it afforded by publication in this volume. They were, I must admit, very easy to write; the approach of interviewing Bernie and letting him natter on is one I seem to find convenient. And they are, let us acknowledge, the very embodiment of ephemera, misty wisps designed to waft away forever when the sun shines upon them.

  On the other hand (and doesn’t there always seem to be another hand?) Bernie does have a body of followers who make up in enthusiasm what they lack in numbers. They seem to have an unquenchable appetite for more—more novels, more stories, more Bernie.

  So I’ve elected to err on the side of inclusion. They’ll bulk up the volume by a few thousand words, and while that may boost production costs a few cents, it won’t add anything to the retail price. They’re not costing you a penny.

  So that’s it?

  Well, not quite.

  As noted, Bernie’s world didn’t really define itself until Carolyn Kaiser and Barnegat Books turned up in the third book, The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling. There are, to be sure, other continuing elements; Ray Kirschmann, the best cop money can buy, has been Bernie’s frenemy from the very beginning.

  But it wasn’t until the sixth volume, The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams, that he (and we) made the acquaintance of Raffles the Cat.

  And high time, too.

  You know, some years ago Mystery Writers of America had to address the putative problem that, when it came to reviews and recognition, realistic and tough-minded fiction enjoyed an edge over gentler and more lighthearted books, often known as cozies. Someone proposed splitting the Edgar Allan Poe Award into two awards, for the best novel of each persuasion. (And call one the Edgar and the other the Allan? Never mind.)

  There were a lot of things wrong with that idea, but perhaps the strongest argument against it was that you’d have to decide what was hard-boiled and what was cozy, and the gray area was immense. One needed an unequivocal acid test, and I wrote a piece for Mystery Scene proposing exactly that.

  There would be two sorts of books, I suggested. Books With Cats and Books Without Cats. No cat and your book was hardboiled, no matter how many recipes and quilt patterns it might include. Toss in a cat and you’d written a cozy, even if the creature turns out to be the Cat from Hell.

  But my soft-boiled hero, Bernie, didn’t have a cat.

  Oh, there were cats in the books. Carolyn had (and still has) two, Archie, who was named after Archie Goodwin, and Ubi, who was not.

  “The Burglar Takes a Cat” is an extract from The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams that introduces Raffles—to Bernie and then to all the rest of us. After enough readers had asked me in which book they’d first encountered Raffles, and expressed a desire to relive the experience, I went ahead and ePublished it. It’s still available, and readers are still downloading it—so I’m including it here as well.

  Most recently, Stephen Jay Schwartz invited me to contribute an essay to Hollywood vs. The Author. The casting of Whoopi Goldberg as Bernie Rhodenbarr has over the years become a legendary example of Hollywood being Hollywood, and I welcomed the chance to examine the subject in print.

  The book, I might add, is quite a collection, with contributions by a host of distinguished novelists and screenwriters, each with a story to tell. James Brown, Max Allan Collins, Michael Connelly, Joshua Corin, Tess Gerritsen, Lee Goldberg, Diana Gould, Naomi Hirahara, Gregg Hurwitz, Alan Jacobson, Peter James, Andrew Kaplan, Jonathan Kellerman, T. Jefferson Parker, Rob Roberge, Stephen Jay Schwartz, Alexandra Sokoloff . . . I am, as you might imagine, pleased indeed to be in their company.

  And that’s it.

  Except it isn’t, not quite. There’s another piece, “A Burglar’s Future,” written especially for this volume. You’ll find it at the end.

  A Bad Night for Burglars

  The burglar, a slender and clean-cut chap just past thirty, was rifling a drawer in the bedside table when Archer Trebizond slipped into the bedroom. Trebizond’s approach was as catfooted as if he himself were the burglar, a situation which was manifestly not the case. The burglar never did hear Trebizond, absorbed as he was in his perusal of the drawer’s contents, and at length he sensed the other man’s presence as a jungle beast senses the presence of a predator.

  The analogy, let it be said, is scarcely accidental.

  When the burglar turned his eyes on Archer Trebizond his heart fluttered and fluttered again, first at the mere fact of discovery, then at his own discovery of the gleaming revolver in Trebizond’s hand. The revolver was pointed in his direction, and this the burglar found upsetting.

  “Darn it all,” said the burglar, approximately. “I could have sworn there was nobody home. I phoned, I rang the bell—”

  “I just got here,” Trebizond said.<
br />
  “Just my luck. The whole week’s been like that. I dented a fender on Tuesday afternoon, overturned my fish tank the night before last. An unbelievable mess all over the carpet, and I lost a mated pair mouthbreeders so rare they don’t have a Latin name yet. I’d hate to tell you what I paid for them.”

  “Hard luck,” Trebizond said.

  “And yesterday I was putting away a plate of fettuccini and I bit the inside of my mouth. You ever done that? It’s murder, and the worst part is you feel so stupid about it. And then you keep biting it over and over again because it sticks out while it’s healing. At least I do.” The burglar gulped a breath and ran a moist hand over a moister forehead. “And now this,” he said.

  “This could turn out to be worse than fenders and fish tanks,” Trebizond said.

  “Don’t I know it. You know what I should have done? I should have spent the entire week in bed. I happen to know a safecracker who consults an astrologer before each and every job he pulls. If Jupiter’s in the wrong place or Mars is squared with Uranus or something he won’t go in. It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? And yet it’s eight years now since anybody put a handcuff on that man. Now who do you know who’s gone eight years without getting arrested?”

  “I’ve never been arrested,” Trebizond said.

  “Well, you’re not a crook.”

  “I’m a businessman.”

  The burglar thought of something but let it pass. “I’m going to get the name of his astrologer,” he said. “That’s just what I’m going to do. Just as soon as I get out of here.”

  “If you get out of here,” Trebizond said. “Alive,” Trebizond said.

  The burglar’s jaw trembled just the slightest bit. Trebizond smiled, and from the burglar’s point of view Trebizond’s smile seemed to enlarge the black hole in the muzzle of the revolver.

  “I wish you’d point that thing somewhere else,” he said nervously.

  “There’s nothing else I want to shoot.”

  “You don’t want to shoot me.”

  “Oh?”

  “You don’t even want to call the cops,” the burglar went on. “It’s really not necessary. I’m sure we can work things out between us, two civilized men coming to a civilized agreement. I’ve some money on me. I’m an openhanded sort and would be pleased to make a small contribution to your favorite charity, whatever it might be. We don’t need policemen to intrude into the private affairs of gentlemen.”

  The burglar studied Trebizond carefully. This little speech had always gone over rather well in the past, especially with men of substance. It was hard to tell how it was going over now, or if it was going over at all. “In any event,” he ended somewhat lamely, “you certainly don’t want to shoot me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, blood on the carpet, for a starter. Messy, wouldn’t you say? Your wife would be upset. Just ask her and she’ll tell you shooting me would be a ghastly idea.”

  “She’s not at home. She’ll be out for the next hour or so.”

  “All the same, you might consider her point of view. And shooting me would be illegal, you know. Not to mention immoral.”

  “Not illegal,” Trebizond remarked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’re a burglar,” Trebizond reminded him. “An unlawful intruder on my property. You have broken and entered. You have invaded the sanctity of my home. I can shoot you where you stand and not get so much as a parking ticket for my trouble.”

  “Of course you can shoot me in self-defense—”

  “Are we on Candid Camera?”

  “No, but—”

  “Is Allen Funt lurking in the shadows?”

  “No, but I—”

  “In your back pocket. That metal thing. What is it?”

  “Just a pry bar.”

  “Take it out,” Trebizond said. “Hand it over. Indeed. A weapon if I ever saw one. I’d state that you attacked me with it and I fired in self-defense. It would be my word against yours, and yours would remain unvoiced since you would be dead. Whom do you suppose the police would believe?”

  The burglar said nothing. Trebizond smiled a satisfied smile and put the pry bar in his own pocket. It was a piece of nicely shaped steel and it had a nice heft to it. Trebizond rather liked it.

  “Why would you want to kill me?”

  “Perhaps I’ve never killed anyone. Perhaps I’d like to satisfy my curiosity. Or perhaps I got to enjoy killing in the war and have been yearning for another crack at it. There are endless possibilities.”

  “But—”

  “The point is,” said Trebizond, “you might be useful to me in that manner. As it is, you’re not useful to me at all. And stop hinting about my favorite charity or other euphemisms. I don’t want your money. Look about you. I’ve ample money of my own, that much should be obvious. If I were a poor man you wouldn’t have breached my threshold. How much money are you talking about, anyway? A couple of hundred dollars?”

  “Five hundred,” the burglar said. “A pittance.”

  “I suppose. There’s more at home but you’d just call that a pittance too, wouldn’t you?”

  “Undoubtedly.” Trebizond shifted the gun to his other hand. “I told you I was a businessman,” he said. “Now if there were any way in which you could be more useful to me alive than dead—”

  “You’re a businessman and I’m a burglar,” the burglar said, brightening.

  “Indeed.”

  “So I could steal something for you. A painting? A competitor’s trade secrets? I’m really very good at what I do, as a matter of fact, although you wouldn’t guess it by my performance tonight. I’m not saying I could whisk the Mona Lisa out of the Louvre, but I’m pretty good at your basic hole-and-corner job of everyday burglary. Just give me an assignment and let me show my stuff.”

  “Hmmmm,” said Archer Trebizond.

  “Name it and I’ll swipe it.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “A car, a mink coat, a diamond bracelet, a Persian carpet, a first edition, bearer bonds, incriminating evidence, eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape—”

  “What was that last?”

  “Just my little joke,” said the burglar. “A coin collection, a stamp collection, psychiatric records, phonograph records, police records—”

  “I get the point.”

  “I tend to prattle when I’m nervous.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “If you could point that thing elsewhere—”

  Trebizond looked down at the gun in his hand. The gun continued to point at the burglar.

  “No,” Trebizond said, with evident sadness. “No, I’m afraid it won’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “In the first place, there’s nothing I really need or want. Could you steal me a woman’s heart? Hardly. And more to the point, how could I trust you?”

  “You could trust me,” the burglar said. “You have my word on that.”

  “My point exactly. I’d have to take your word that your word is good, and where does that lead us? Down the proverbial garden path, I’m afraid. No, once I let you out from under my roof I’ve lost my advantage. Even if I have a gun trained on you, once you’re in the open I can’t shoot you with impunity. So I’m afraid—”

  “No!”

  Trebizond shrugged. “Well, really,” he said. “What use are you? What are you good for besides being killed? Can you do anything besides steal, sir?”

  “I can make license plates.”

  “Hardly a valuable talent.”

  “I know,” said the burglar sadly. “I’ve often wondered why the state bothered to teach me such a pointless trade. There’s not even much call for counterfeit license plates, and they’ve got a monopoly on making the legitimate ones. What else can I do? I must be able to do something. I could shine your shoes, I could polish your car—”

  “What do you do when you’re not stealing?”

  “Hang around,” said the burglar. “Go out with lad
ies. Feed my fish, when they’re not all over my rug. Drive my car when I’m not mangling its fenders. Play a few games of chess, drink a can or two of beer, make myself a sandwich—”

  “Are you any good?”

  “At making sandwiches?”

  “At chess.”

  “I’m not bad.”

  “I’m serious about this.”

  “I believe you are,” the burglar said. “I’m not your average woodpusher, if that’s what you want to know. I know the openings and I have a good sense of space. I don’t have the patience for tournament play, but at the chess club downtown I win more games than I lose.”

  “You play at the club downtown?”

  “Of course. I can’t burgle seven nights a week, you know. Who could stand the pressure?”

  “Then you can be of use to me,” Trebizond said.

  “You want to learn the game?”

  “I know the game. I want you to play chess with me for an hour until my wife gets home. I’m bored, there’s nothing in the house to read, I’ve never cared much for television, and it’s hard for me to find an interesting opponent at the chess table.”

  “So you’ll spare my life in order to play chess with me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Let me get this straight,” the burglar said. “There’s no catch to this, is there? I don’t get shot if I lose the game or anything tricky like that, I hope.”

  “Certainly not. Chess is a game that ought to be above gimmickry.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said the burglar. He sighed a long sigh. “If I didn’t play chess,” he said, “you wouldn’t have shot me, would you?”

  “It’s a question that occupies the mind, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” said the burglar.

  They played in the front room. The burglar drew the white pieces in the first game, opened King’s Pawn, and played what turned out to be a reasonably imaginative version of the Ruy Lopez. At the sixteenth move Trebizond forced the exchange of knight for rook, and not too long afterward the burglar resigned.