The Burglar who thought he was Bogart

CHAPTER Twenty-two

I guess we’re all suckers for royalty. Half the house must have known or suspected Mike’s place in the scheme of things, but all the same a hush fell over the room, and it hung there until Carolyn broke it. “A king,” she said. “I can’t believe it. In my store.”

“Your store?”

“Well, it’s almost my store, Bern. Who kept it open over the weekend? Uh, speaking of my store, Your Majesty, I don’t suppose you have a dog that needs washing, but if you ever do-”

“I’ll most certainly think of you,” he said, whereupon Carolyn looked almost glassy-eyed enough to drop a curtsy. “Mr. Rhodenbarr, I haven’t said anything until now, but perhaps I should. This business of an Anatrurian throne makes me quite uncomfortable. My grandfather’s moment of glory occurred ages ago, and my father’s little adventure took place before I was born, and very nearly cost him his life. That my family had a tentative claim on a putative crown was interesting, even amusing, something to impress a girl or enliven a social gathering. I have my own life, with a small amount of capital and a career in international finance and economic development. I don’t spend time nostalgic for a royal past or dreaming of a royal future.”

“And yet you came to New York,” I said gently.

“To get away from Europe and its talk of thrones and crowns.”

“And you brought a gold-stamped leather portfolio.”

He sighed heavily. “When my father lay dying,” he said, “he called me to his side and turned over to me the portfolio of which you speak. Until then I did not know of its existence.”

“And?”

“He had scarcely spoken to me of Anatruria. You must understand that none of our family had ever lived there. My grandfather was chosen to be king of the Anatrurians, but he was not previously Anatrurian himself. Now, on his deathbed, my father spoke of his deep love for this small mountainous nation, of the loyalty our family commanded there and the responsibility which consequently devolved upon us. I thought he was raving, affected by the drugs his doctors had given him. And perhaps he was.”

“He was a great man,” Ilona said.

“I would say so, but then he was my father. Middle-aged when I was born, often absent while I was growing up, but surely a great man in my eyes. With his dying breath he told me of my duty to Anatruria, and passed on the royal portfolio.”

“What did it hold?”

“Papers, documents, souvenirs. Shares of stock in a Swiss corporation.”

“Bearer shares,” I said.

“Yes, I believe so.”

“Like bearer bonds,” Charlie Weeks said. “The Swiss are nuts about that sort of thing. When they change hands, there’s no need to go through any paperwork to record the transfer. They’re like cash, they belong to whoever is in possession of them.”

“And with them in your hands,” I said, “you could take possession of all the assets of the corporation.”

Todd-Mikhail? The king?-shook his royal head. “No,” he said.

“No?”

“You need the account number and the shares,” he said. “Believe me, I went to Zurich, I consulted bankers and attorneys there. This corporation was set up in an unusual fashion, and one must be in possession of the bearer shares and know the number of the account in order to lay hands on any of the corporation’s assets. My father passed on the shares, which he had received from his father, but neither he nor his father had been entrusted with the account number.”

“Out with it, man,” said Tsarnoff. “Who has it?”

“Probably no one,” Todd said.

“Ridiculous! Someone must know.”

“Someone must have known once, some leader of the Anatrurian movement. Perhaps several people knew. You have already said that my father was lucky to get out of Anatruria with his life. Others were not so lucky. So many were taken from their families, only to receive a bullet in the back of the neck and burial without ceremony in an unmarked grave. I would guess that many secrets were buried along with those men, and that the number of the Swiss account was one of those secrets.”

He sighed again. “I remember sitting at a café after my last meeting with a lawyer and a banker, sitting with a glass of wine and wishing my father had taken the portfolio to the grave with him as some Anatrurian had taken the account number. But instead he’d entrusted it to me. In a sense, he’d pressed a crown on my head, and it was not so easy to lay it aside. I told you how I had never thought of Anatruria. Now I could scarcely think of anything else.”

“Who could even say how much the wealth might be?” This from Rasmoulian, his eyes wide at the possibilities. “It could be nothing. It could be millions.”

“The money is the least of it,” the king said. “What am I to do? That is the only question of any importance.”

Ray didn’t understand, and said so.

“For decades,” the king said, “the world’s few reigning kings have been anachronisms, while uncrowned royals have been little more than a joke. But all of a sudden this is not so. There are monarchist movements throughout all of the old Eastern Bloc. Portions of portions of nations are all at once reaching out and achieving sovereignty. If Slovenia and Slovakia can join the United Nations, is an independent Anatruria such an impossibility? If Juan Carlos can be king of Spain, and if men can seriously urge a Romanov restoration in Russia -the Romanovs! in Russia!-”

“Not entirely out of the question,” Tsarnoff allowed.

“-then who is to say Anatruria cannot have a king? And who am I to deny my people if indeed they want me?” He smiled suddenly, and now the resemblance was unmistakable-to Ilona’s photograph of Vlados, to Mikhail’s own photo of his father resplendent in uniform. “And so I came to New York,” he said, “to get away from Europe, and to decide what I shall do next.”

“It looks as though Hugo Candlemas followed you here,” I said. “As I said, he picked me to steal the portfolio from you, although I didn’t know what I was stealing or whose apartment I was taking it from.”

“Not like you, Bernie,” Ray said.

“I know,” I said. “It wasn’t. I don’t know why I went for it, and all I can come up with is a combination of his charm and all those Bogart movies I was watching. He made the proposition one afternoon, and the following night I was with a man named Hoberman, on my way to…excuse me, but what do I call you? Your Highness? Your Majesty?”

“‘Michael’ will be fine.”

“I was on my way to Michael’s apartment.”

“Hoberman,” Ray said. “That’s a name you mentioned before, Bernie.”

I nodded. “Cappy Hoberman was the ram, one of the five agents in Anatruria. Candlemas paired me with him because Hoberman could escort me into the high-security building where Michael lives. He could go there on the pretext of visiting another tenant in the building.”

“Which is where I come in,” Charlie Weeks said.

“Interesting,” Tsarnoff said. “Of all the buildings in all the cities in America, the young king moves into yours.”

The line had a familiar ring to it. I had an answer, but Weeks got there first. “No coincidence at all,” he said. “Michael gave me a call as soon as he got to New York. He’d never met me, of course, but I’d kept in touch with Todor ever since I helped him get out of Anatruria two steps ahead of the KGB. Michael needed a place to stay, and I knew there was an owner in the building looking to sublet, and he liked the place and moved in right away.”

“As it turned out,” I said, “I didn’t steal the portfolio. I’ll admit I tried, Michael, but I couldn’t find it.”

“There was one night last week when I took it from the apartment,” he said. “Ilona thought a friend of hers should see one of the documents.”

“I must have just missed it. Meanwhile, Cappy Hoberman went back to Candlemas’s apartment, where somebody stabbed him to death.”

“Wait a minute,” Ray said. “That’s the guy? Hoberman?”

“Right.”

“Cap Hob,” he said, staring hard at me. “Cap Hob. Captain Hoberman.”

“Right.”

“But why in the hell would he-”

I held up a hand. “It’s complicated,” I said, “and it’s probably easier all around if I just tell it straight through. Cappy Hoberman was stabbed to death in the Candlemas apartment. But he lived long enough to leave a message. He printed C-A-P-HO-B in block capitals on the side of a handy attaché case.”

“Which happened to belong to a certain burglar we all know,” Ray said.

“Didn’t it,” I said sourly. “He died, and left a dying message that didn’t make sense to anyone. Meanwhile, Hugo Candlemas disappeared.”

“So this Candlemas killed him,” Ilona said.

“It seems obvious, doesn’t it? But who was Candlemas? Well, he was someone who knew Hoberman and Weeks, someone who was familiar with Anatrurian history and had come over from Europe to keep tabs on Michael here. And he was someone with a lot of fake ID, because in addition to forged identification in the name of Hugo Candlemas, he also had high-quality counterfeit passports in the names Jean-Claude Marmotte and Vassily Souslik. That gives it away. I should have known before, but-”

“The last name you mentioned,” Tsarnoff said. “Say it again, sir, if you please.”

“Vassily Souslik.”

“Souslik,” he said, and chuckled. “Very good, sir. Very good indeed.”

“What is so good?” Rasmoulian demanded. “It is good because he has a Russian name? I do not understand.”

“Now that you mention it,” Ray said, “neither do I. I’m the one told you about those names, Bernie, and they didn’t mean a thing to me, an’ if they meant anything to you I never heard a peep out of you about it. What in hell’s a sousnik, anyway?”

“A souslik,” I said. “Not a sousnik. And it’s a Russian word, which is why Mr. Tsarnoff understood it and why the rest of us didn’t, although you’ll find it in some English dictionaries and encyclopedias. And it means a large ground squirrel indigenous to Eastern Europe and Asia.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake,” Ray said, “that explains everything, don’t it? A big fat squirrel. That cracks the case wide open, all right.”

“What it does,” I said, “is identify Candlemas for us. So does his French alias, because a marmot is pretty much the same thing as a souslik. But I should have known earlier on if I’d been paying attention to what he called himself this time around. Candlemas is a church festival commemorating the purification of the Virgin Mary and the presentation of the infant Christ in the temple. But it’s celebrated on the same date every year like Christmas, not tied to the lunar calendar like Easter.”

Someone asked the date.

“February second,” I said.

They met this with mystified silence and shared the silence like Quakers through whom God had, for the moment, nothing to say. Then Wilfred, silent skulking Wilfred, said, “My favorite holiday.”

Everybody looked at him.

“Groundhog’s Day,” he said. “Second of February. Most useful holiday of the year. He pops out, he don’t see his shadow, you got yourself an early spring. Bright sunny day, he sees his shadow, forget about it. Six more weeks of winter.”

I said, “The groundhog, the souslik, the marmot. All names for-”

“The woodchuck,” said Charlie Weeks, smiling his tight little smile. “Alias Chuck Wood, alias Charles Brigham Wood. Disappeared into Europe after the balloon went up in Anatruria. Some people thought he was killed. The rest of us figured he was the one who sold us out.”

I let that last pass. “Candlemas was the woodchuck,” I agreed. “I guess he kept tabs on people from afar. He knew where Michael was living, and he knew that his old friend the mouse was in the same building. But he couldn’t approach the mouse himself.”

“I’d had enough of him in Anatruria,” Weeks said.

“So he used Hoberman as his cat’s-paw,” I said, and frowned at the metaphor, an inappropriate one among all these rodents.

“And when Cappy had served his purpose,” Weeks said, “the woodchuck killed him.”

“In his own apartment?”

“Why not?”

“And on his own rug? Candlemas might sacrifice an old friend, but why throw in a valuable rug?”

“How valuable?” Ray wanted to know. I couldn’t tell him, and Tsarnoff suggested dryly that we consult the rug peddler in our midst for an evaluation.

“Stop that!” Rasmoulian said. “Why does he do that? I am not an Armenian. I know nothing about carpets. Why does he say these things about me?”

“The same reason you call me a Russian,” Tsarnoff said smoothly. “Willful ignorance, my little adversary. Willful ignorance founded on malice and propelled by avarice.”

“I shall never call you a Russian again. You are a Circassian.”

“And you an Assyrian.”

“The Circassians are legendary. The women are exquisite whores, and the males are castrated young and make great gross eunuchs.”

“The Assyrians at their height were noted chiefly for their savagery. They have dwindled and died out to the point where the few in existence are wizened dwarves, the genetically warped spawn of two millennia of incestuous unions.”

We were making progress, I was pleased to note. For all the verbal escalation, neither Rasmoulian’s hand nor Wilfred’s had moved so much as an inch toward a concealed weapon.

“Candlemas didn’t kill Hoberman,” I said. “Even if he didn’t care about the rug, even if he had some dark reason to want Hoberman out of the picture, the timing was all wrong. Would he risk having a corpse on the floor when I got back with the royal portfolio?”

“He’d kill you, too,” Weeks said.

“And write off another rug? No, it doesn’t make sense that way. It’s a shame, too, because Candlemas makes a very convenient killer.”

“That’s the truth,” Ray said. “Tell ’em why, Bernie.”

“Because he’s dead himself,” I said, “and can’t argue the point. He died within hours of Hoberman, but he took longer to turn up. The cops found him in an abandoned building at Pitt and Madison.”

“That’s the place to find one,” said Mowgli, as one who knew. “A corpse or an abandoned building. Or both.”

“How was he killed?” Tsarnoff wanted to know.

“He was shot,” Ray said. “Small-caliber gun fired at close range.”

“Two different killers,” Tiglath Rasmoulian suggested. “This woodchuck stabbed the ram, and was shot by someone else.”

“If this happened in Anatruria,” Ilona said, “you would know that the woodchuck was shot by a son of his victim, or perhaps a brother. Even a nephew.” She shrugged. “But you would not inquire too closely, because this would not be a police matter. It is merely blood avenging blood, and honor requires it.”

“There’s no honor here,” I said. “And a good thing, too. There was only one killer. He followed Hoberman when he left the Boccaccio, tagged him to the woodchuck’s apartment a few blocks away, and stabbed him right off. Then he abducted Candlemas, took him down to Pitt Street -”

“ Pitt Street,” Mowgli said. “You’re down there, you might as well be dead.”

“-and killed him when he’d learned all he could from him. Or maybe he took him somewhere else, killed him after interrogating him, and took the dead body to Pitt Street.”

“Coals to Newcastle,” Mowgli said.

“Then someone was watching my building,” Michael said.

“No.”

“You mean this Hoberman was under surveillance all along?”

I shook my head. “The ram was visiting his old friend, the mouse. They hadn’t seen each other in years. And when the mouse told me about that visit, he made a real point of saying how the ram was in a hurry to get out of there.”

“Ah,” Charlie Weeks said. “You mean he was going to meet somebody on his way back to the woodchuck’s place.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not what I mean.”

“It’s not?”

“It’s not,” I said. “What I mean is that you wanted me to know that Hoberman was hardly in your apartment for any time at all. That way it wouldn’t occur to me that you had plenty of time to get him settled in with a cup of coffee and excuse yourself long enough to make a quick phone call.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you knew something was up. You didn’t know what, but you were the mouse and you smelled a rat. You couldn’t tag along with Hoberman. He’d be on guard. But you could call a confederate and stall Hoberman long enough for the man you called to post himself within line of sight of the Boccaccio’s front entrance. Whether or not he knew Hoberman by sight, you could supply a description that would make identification an easy matter.”

“Oh, weasel,” Charlie Weeks said. “I’m disappointed in you, coming up with a wild theory like that.”

“You deny it, then.”

“Of course I deny it. But I can’t deny the possibility that somebody followed Cappy home. It seems a little farfetched to me, but anything’s possible. Thing is, I don’t see how you’re going to guess who it was.”

“And if you had called someone, I’d just be guessing as to his identity, wouldn’t I?”

“Since I didn’t call anyone,” he said, “the question’s moot. But we can say that you’d just be taking a shot in the dark.”

“Wait a minute,” Carolyn said. “What about the dying message?”

“Ah, yes,” I said. “The dying message. Could Hoberman have left a clue to his killer? We know what his message was.” I walked over to my counter and reached behind it for the portable chalkboard I’d stowed there earlier. I propped it up where everybody could see it and chalked CAPHOB on it in nice big block caps. I let them take a good long look at it.

Then I said, “Cap hob. That’s what it looks like. That’s because we’re in America. If we were in Anatruria it would look entirely different.”

“Why’s that, Bernie?” Ray asked. “Have they got their heads screwed on upside down over there?”

“I could show you in the stamp catalog,” I said. “The Anatrurians, like the Serbs and the Bulgarians, use the Cyrillic alphabet. This is an important matter of national identity over there, incidentally. The Croats and Romanians use the same alphabet we do, while the Greeks use the Greek alphabet.”

“It figures,” Mowgli said.

“The Cyrillic alphabet was named for St. Cyril, who spread its use throughout Eastern Europe, although he probably didn’t invent it. He did missionary work in the region with his brother, St. Methodius, but they didn’t name an alphabet after St. Methodius.”

“They named an acting technique,” Carolyn said. “After him and St. Stanislavski.”

“The Cyrillic alphabet is a lot like the Greek,” I said, “except that it’s got more letters. I think there’s something like forty of them, and some are identical in form to English letters while some look pretty weird to western eyes. There’s a backward N and an upside-down V and one or two that look like hen’s tracks. And some of the ones that look exactly like our own have different values.”

Carolyn said, “Values? What do you mean, Bern? Is that like how many points they’re worth in Scrabble?”

“It’s the sound they make.” I pointed to the blackboard. “It took me forever to think Cappy’s dying message might be in Cyrillic,” I said, “and for two reasons. For one, he was an American. Early on I didn’t know the case had an Anatrurian connection, or that he’d ever been east of Long Island. Besides, all six of the letters he wrote were good foursquare red-blooded American letters. But it so happens they’re all letters of the Cyrillic alphabet as well.”

“I do not know this alphabet,” Rasmoulian said carefully. “What do they spell in this alphabet?”

“The A and the O are the same in both alphabets,” I said. “The Cyrillic C has the value of our own S. The P is equivalent to our R, just like the rho in the Greek alphabet. The H looks like the Greek eta, but in Cyrillic it’s the equivalent of our N. And the Cyrillic B is the same as our V.”

In a proper chalk talk, I’d have printed a transliteration of the Cyrillic on the slate. Instead I gave them a few seconds to work it out for themselves.

Then I said, “Mr. Tsarnoff, I don’t know which alphabet Circassians favor, but certainly you’ve spent enough time in the former Soviet Union to be more familiar than the rest of us with Cyrillic. Perhaps you can tell us what message the gallant Hoberman left us.”

Tsarnoff stayed in his chair, but just barely. His face was florid and his eyes bulged; if Charlie Weeks wanted an animal name for him, you’d almost have to go with bullfrog.

“It is a lie,” he said.

“But what does it say?”

“S-A-R-N-O-V,” he said, pronouncing each letter separately and distinctly, as if pounding nails into a coffin. “That is what it says, and it is a lie. It is not even my name. My name is Tsarnoff, sir, T-S-A-R-N-O-F-F, and that is not at all what you have written there, in Cyrillic or any other alphabet known to me.”

“And yet,” I said, “it strikes one as an extraordinary coincidence. I suppose you would pronounce it Sarnov, and-”

“That is not my name!”

“Tsue me,” I said. “It’s not that far off.”

“I never met your Captain Hoberman! Until this moment I never heard of him!”

“I’m not sure that last is true,” I said, “but we’ll let it go. The point you’re trying to make is that you didn’t kill Hoberman, and you can give it a rest, because I already know that.”

“You do?”

“Or course.”

“Then why did Hoberman write his name?” Ray asked.

“He didn’t,” I said. “He didn’t write a damn thing. That’s a dying message, whether you pronounce it Caphob or Sarnov, and Hoberman was doing the dying, and it was his blood that formed the letters and his forefinger that traced them. I don’t know if Hoberman even knew Cyrillic after so many years away from the region, but it certainly wasn’t second nature to him, and what he’d automatically turn to in his haste to name his killer before his life drained out of him.”

“Then who left the message?” Carolyn wanted to know. “Not what’s-his-name, the groundhog-”

“The woodchuck. No, of course not. The killer left the message as a diversionary tactic. He probably chose Cyrillic because he knew little about his victim beyond the fact that he was somehow connected to Balkan politics. He wrote what he did because he wanted to implicate you, Mr. Tsarnoff, and he misspelled your name because his familiarity with Cyrillic was tenuous. So what do we know about our killer? He is not Anatrurian, he did not know his victims from the days of the Bob and Charlie Show, and he has a murderous antipathy toward Mr. Tsarnoff.”

“Piece of cake,” said Ray Kirschmann. “Gotta be Tigbert Rotarian, don’t it? Only thing, if he’s in the rug business, why’s he want to ruin a good carpet like that?”

Rasmoulian was on his feet, his face whiter than ever, his patches of color livid now. He was protesting everything at once, insisting he was not in the rug trade, he had killed no one, and his name was not whatever Ray had just said it was.

“Whatever,” Ray said agreeably. “I’ll make sure I got the name right when we get down to Central Booking. Main thing’s did he do it or not, an’ I think you still got your touch, Bernie. Tigrid, you got the right to remain silent, but I already told you that, remember?”

Rasmoulian’s mouth was working but no sound was coming out of it. I thought he might go for a gun, but his hands stayed in sight, knotted up in little fists. He looked like a kid again, and you got the sense that he might burst into tears, or stamp his foot.

The whole room was silent, waiting to see what he’d do. Then Carolyn said, “For God’s sake, Tiggy, tell ’em it was an accident.”

Jesus, I thought. What could have induced her to come out with a harebrained thing like that?

“It was an accident,” Tiglath Rasmoulian said.