Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

Chapter Four

He was a thick-bodied man built rather like a bloated bowling pin. While he wasn’t terribly stout, they’d been out of waists when he reached the front of the line that day. He must have had to guess where to put his belt each morning.

His face was round and jowly, with most of its features generally subdued. His eyes came closer to prominence than anything else. They were large and watchful and put me in mind of a pair of Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses. (With the foil removed.) They were just that shade of brown. His hair was flat black and perfectly straight and he was balding in the middle, his hairline receding almost to the top of his skull. I suppose he was in his late forties. It’s good I’m a burglar; I could never make a living guessing age and weight at a carnival.

I first met him on a Thursday night in a drinking establishment called The Watering Whole. (I’m sure whoever named it took great pride in his accomplishment.) The Whole, which in this instance is rather less than the sum of its parts, is a singles joint on Second Avenue in the Seventies, and unless you own a piece of it and want to inspect the register receipts there’s really only one reason to go there. I had gone for that very reason, but that evening the selection of the accessible young ladies was as dazzling as the dinner menu on a lifeboat. I’d decided to move on as soon as my wineglass was empty when a voice at my elbow spoke my last name softly.

There was something faintly familiar about the voice. I turned, and there was the man I’ve described, his eyes just failing to meet my own. My first thought was that no, he was not a cop, and for this fact I was grateful. My second thought was that his face, like his voice, was familiar. My third thought was that I didn’t know him. I don’t recall my fourth thought, though it’s possible I had one.

“Want to talk to you,” he said. “Something you’ll be interested in.”

“We can talk here,” I said. “Do I know you?”

“No. I guess we can talk here at that. Not much of a crowd, is there? I guess they do better on weekends.”

“Generally,” I said, and because it was that sort of a place, “Do you come here often?”

“First time.”

“Interesting. I don’t come here too often myself. Maybe once or twice a month. But it’s interesting that we should run into each other here, especially since you seem to know me and I don’t seem to know you. There’s something familiar about you, and yet-”

“I followed you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We coulda talked in your neighborhood, one of those joints on Seventy-second where you hang out, but I figure the man’s gotta live there. You follow me? Why shit where the man eats, that’s the question I ask myself.”

“Ah,” I said, as if that cleared things up.

Which it emphatically did not. You doubtless understand, having come into all this in roundabout fashion, but I had not the slightest idea what this man wanted. Then the bartender materialized before us and I learned that what my companion wanted was a tall Scotch and soda, and after that drink had been brought and my own wineglass replenished I learned what else he wanted.

“I want you to get something for me,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“See, I know who you are, Rhodenbarr.”

“So it would seem. At least you know my name, and I don’t know yours, and-”

“I know how you make your money. Not to beat against the bush, Rhodenbarr, but what you are is a burglar.”

I glanced nervously around the room. His voice had been pitched low and the conversational level in the bar was high, but his tone had about it the quality of a stage whisper and I checked to see if our conversation had caught anyone’s interest. Apparently it had not.

I said, “Of course I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I suggest you cut the shit.”

“Oh,” I said, and took a sip of wine. “All right. Consider it cut.”

“There’s this thing I want you to steal for me. It’s in a certain apartment and I’ll be able to tell you when you can get in. The building’s got security, meaning a doorman around the clock, but there’s no alarm system or nothing. Just the doorman.”

“That’s easy,” I said, responding automatically. Then I gave my shoulders a shake-shake-shake. “You seem to know things about me,” I said.

“Like what you do for a living.”

“Yes, just that sort of thing. You should also know that I work alone.”

“I didn’t figure to go in there with you, kid.”

“And that I find my own jobs.”

He frowned. “What I’m doing is handing you a piece of cake, Rhodenbarr. I’m talking about you work an hour and you pick up five thousand dollars. That’s not bad for an hour’s work.”

“Not bad at all.”

“You do that forty hours a week, just go and figure the money you’d make.”

“Two hundred thousand a week,” I said promptly.

“Whatever the hell it comes to.”

“That’s what it comes to, all right. Annually, let me think now, annually that would come to ten million dollars a year. That’s with two weeks off in the summer.”

“Whatever.”

“Or a week in the summer and a week in the winter. That’s probably the best way to do it. Or I could take my vacation in the spring and fall to avail myself of low off-season rates. Though I suppose the savings wouldn’t be significant if I was earning ten million dollars a year. Hell, I’d probably start blowing the bucks left and right. Flying first class. Taking cabs all the time. Buying the Mondavi zinfandel by the case instead of a niggling bottle at a time, and of course you save ten percent by the case but it’s not a true savings because you always find yourself drinking more than you would otherwise. You’ve probably noticed that yourself. Of course the pressure might get to me, anyway, but then I’d have those two weeks of vacation to let it all out, and-”

“Funny,” he said.

“Just nerves.”

“If you say so. You done talking for a minute? I want you to do this thing for me. There’s something I need and it’s a cinch for you to get it for me. And my price is fair, don’t you think?”

“That depends on what you want me to steal. If it’s a diamond necklace worth a quarter of a million dollars, then I’d have to say five thousand is coolie’s wages.”

His face moved into what I suppose was meant as a smile. It failed to light up the room. “No diamond necklace,” he said.

“Fine.”

“What you’ll get for me is worth five grand to me. It’s not worth nothing to nobody else.”

“What is it?”

“A box,” he said, and described it, but I’ve told you that part already. “I’ll give you the location, the apartment, everything, and for you it’s like picking up candy in the street.”

“I never pick up candy in the street.”

“Huh?”

“Germs.”

He waved the thought away with one of his little hands. “You know what I mean,” he said. “No more jokes, huh?”

“Why don’t you get it yourself?” He looked at me. “You know the apartment, the layout, everything. You even know what you’re looking for, which is more than I know and more than I want to know. Why don’t you keep the five thousand in your pocket?”

“And pull the job myself?”

“Why not?”

He shook his head. “Certain things I don’t do,” he said. “I don’t take out my own appendix, I don’t cut my own hair, I don’t fix my own plumbing. Important things, things that need an expert’s touch, what I do is I go and find an expert.”

“And I’m your expert?”

“Right. You go through locks like grease through a goose. Or so I’m told.”

“Who told you?”

An elaborate shrug. “You just never remember where you hear a thing these days,” he said.

“I always remember.”

“Funny,” he said. “I never do. I got a memory with holes in it you could fall through.” He touched my arm. “Place is filling up. What do you say we take our business outside. We’ll walk up and down the street, we’ll work everything out.”

So we walked up and down the street, and though we didn’t pick up any candy we did work everything out. We settled our terms and established that I would keep my schedule flexible for the next week or so. It wouldn’t go more than that, he assured me.

He said, “I’ll be in touch, Rhodenbarr. Next time I see you I’ll give you the address and the time and everything you gotta know. Plus I’ll have your thousand in front.”

“I sort of thought you might let me have that now.”

“Haven’t got it on me. You never want to carry heavy cash on the street at night. All these muggers, these junkies.”

“The streets aren’t safe.”

“It’s a jungle.”

“You could let me have the address now,” I suggested. “And the name of the man who won’t be home when I crack his crib. Give me that much time to check things out.”

“You’ll have all the time you need.”

“I just thought-”

“Anyway, I don’t happen to have the name or address at the moment. I told you about my memory, didn’t I?”

“Did you?”

“I coulda sworn I did.”

I shrugged. “It must have slipped my mind.”

Later that night I spent some time wondering why I’d agreed to do the job. I decided I had two motives. The money was first, and it was certainly not trivial. The certainty of five thousand dollars, plus the security of having the job already cased, outweighed the two-in-the-bush of setting up a job cold and then having to haggle with a fence.

But there was more to it than money. Something about my shmoo-shaped friend suggested that it would be unwise to refuse him. It’s not that there was anything in particular I feared would happen to me if I told him to go roll his hoop. It just seemed unlikely to be a good idea.

And then there was curiosity. Who the hell was he? If I didn’t know him, why did he seem so damned familiar? More important, how did he know about me? And what was his little game all about in the first place? If he was a pro, recognizing me as another pro, why were we circling each other like tropical birds in an involved mating ritual? I didn’t necessarily expect ever to learn the answers to all these questions, but I felt they might turn up if I saw the thing through, and I didn’t have any other work I was dying to do, and the money I had in reserve wouldn’t last forever, and…

There’s a luncheonette I go to once or twice a month on Amsterdam Avenue between Seventy-fourth and Seventy-fifth. The owner is a Turk with an intimidating moustache and the food he serves is every bit as Turkish, if less intimidating. I was sitting at the counter two days after my first meeting with my new-found friend. I’d just finished polishing off an exceptional bowl of lentil soup, and while I waited for my stuffed grape leaves I glanced at a selection of meerschaum pipes in a glass case on the wall. The man with the moustache goes home to Turkey every spring and returns with a satchel full of pipes, which he insists are better than anything you can buy over the counter at Dunhill’s. I don’t smoke a pipe so I’m not really tempted, but whenever I eat there I look at the pipes and try to figure out if there’s a pipe smoker on earth I’m a close enough friend to so that I can buy him one of these beauties. There never is.

“My old man used to smoke a meerschaum,” said a familiar voice beside me. “Only pipe he owned and he musta smoked it five, six times a day. Over the years the thing turned as black as the deuce of spades. He had this special glove he always wore when he smoked it. Just on the one hand, the hand he held the pipe in. He’d always sit in the same chair and just smoke that pipe real slow and easy. Had a special fitted case he kept it in when he wasn’t smoking it. Case was lined in blue velvet.”

“You do turn up at odd times.”

“Then one day it broke,” he went on. “I don’t know whether he dropped it or set it down hard or it just got too old or whatever the hell happened. My memory, you know.”

“Like a sieve.”

“The worst. What’s funny, the old man never got hisself a new pipe. Not a meerschaum, not a briar, not anything. Just quit the habit like it was no habit at all. When I think about it what I always come up with is he just never believed anything would happen to that pipe, and then when it did he realized that nothing on earth lasts forever, and if that was the case he figured the hell with it and he wouldn’t smoke anymore. And he didn’t.”

“There’s a reason you’re telling me this story.”

“No reason at all. Just that it came to mind looking at those pipes there. I don’t want to interrupt your meal, Rhodenbarr.”

“One might say you’ve already done that.”

“So I’ll be on the corner gettin’ my shoes shined. I don’t guess you’ll be too long, will you?”

“I guess not.”

He left. I ate my grape leaves. I hadn’t intended to have dessert but I decided the hell with it and ate a small piece of too-sweet baklava and sipped a thick cup of inky Turkish coffee. I thought about having a second cup but figured it would keep me awake for four years and I didn’t want that. So I paid the man with the moustache and walked to the shoeshine stand on the corner.

My friend told me everything I’d always wanted to know about J. Francis Flaxford and his blue leather box. If anything, he told me more than I wanted to know without answering any of my more important questions.

At one point I asked him his own name. He slid his soft brown eyes across my forehead and treated me to a look of infinite disappointment.

“Now I could tell you a name,” he said, “but then what would you know that you don’t know now? Not too much chance that it would be a real name, is there?”

“Not too much, no.”

“So why should we make complications for ourselves? All you got to know is where and when to get the box, which we just went over, and how and where to give it to me so you can get the other four grand.”

“You mean we’ll plan that in advance? I thought I’d just go about my business and one of these days you’d turn up breathing over my shoulder at the delicatessen. Or maybe you’d be in the basement laundry room when I went down to throw my socks in the dryer.”

He sighed. “You’ll be inside Flaxford’s place nine, nine-thirty. You’ll be outta there by eleven, eleven-thirty the latest. Can’t take too long to take a box out of a desk. You’ll want to go home, have a drink, take a shower, change your clothes, that kind of thing.” And drop off burglar tools and such, along with whatever sundry swag I might happen to acquire. “So you take yourself some time, and then what you do, you go to a place nice and convenient to your apartment. There’s a bar on Broadway and I think it’s Sixty-fourth Street, called Pandora’s. You know it?”

“I’ve passed it.”

“Nice quiet place. Get there, say, twelve-thirty and take a booth at the back. There’s no waitress so what you do is you get your drink at the bar and carry it back to your table.”

“Sounds as though I’d better wear a suit.”

“It’s private and it’s quiet and they leave you alone. You’ll get there at twelve-thirty and you might have to sit there half an hour.”

“And then you’ll turn up around one?”

“Right. Any problem, you wait until half past one and then you take the box and go home. But there won’t be no problems.”

“Of course not,” I agreed. “But suppose someone tries to take the box away from me?”

“Well, take cabs, for Chrissake. You don’t want to walk around at that hour. Oh, wait a minute.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You think I’d knock you over for a lousy four thousand dollars? Why would I do that?”

“Because it might be cheaper than paying me.”

“Jesus,” he said. “Then how could I use you some other time? Look, carry some heat if it’s gonna make you feel better. Except all you do then is get nervous and shoot your own foot off. I swear you got nothing to worry about from me. You bring me the box and you get your four gees.”

“Gees,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Thou, kay, gees. Grand.”

“Huh?”

“Four big ones.”

“What’s the point?”

“You’ve got so many nicknames for money, that’s all. You’re like a thesaurus of slang.”

“Something wrong with the way I talk, Rhodenbarr?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing. It’s just me. My nerves, I guess. I get all keyed up.”

“Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “I just bet you do.”

And now I sat up on Rod’s couch and looked at my watch. It was getting on for midnight. I’d gotten out of the Flaxford apartment with plenty of time to spare, but all the same it didn’t look as though I’d be in Pandora’s by twelve-thirty. My thousand dollars in front money was but a memory and the remaining four big ones were never to be mine, and at one o’clock my nameless friend would be sipping his Scotch and wondering why I’d decided to stand him up.

Oh, sure he would.