The Burglar who thought he was Bogart

CHAPTER Twenty-four

“It doesn’t seem right,” Carolyn said. “Tiggy murdered both of those men. And he winds up getting away with it.”

It was around four-thirty and we were around the corner at the Bum Rap. Carolyn was staying in shape with a glass of Scotch on the rocks; I was getting back into shape gradually, nursing a beer.

“Mrs. Kirschmann needs a new fur coat,” I said.

“And she gets it, and Tiggy gets away clean. But when does justice get served?”

“Justice gets served last,” I said, “and usually winds up with leftovers. The fact of the matter is there would never have been enough evidence to convict Rasmoulian, even if he didn’t skip the country in advance of trial. He’d never wind up in prison, and this way at least he winds up out of the country, and so do the rest of them.”

“Tsarnoff and who else?”

“Wilfred, of course. Getting Wilfred and Rasmoulian out of the country means a saving of untold lives. They’re a pair of stone killers if I ever saw one.”

“And now they’ll be working together.”

“God help Europe,” I said. “But there’s always the chance that they’ll kill each other. Charlie Weeks is on his way out of the country, too. He’ll be catching the Concorde as soon as he makes arrangements to close his apartment at the Boccaccio. Between the three of them, they think they’ve got a chance of coming up with the Swiss account number and looting the long-lost treasury of Anatruria.”

“You figure they’ll get hold of the number?”

“They might.”

“And do you think there’s an Anatrurian treasury left for them to loot?”

“If they ever get that account number,” I said, “I think they’re in for the greatest disappointment since Geraldo broke into Al Capone’s vault. But what do I know? Maybe the cash is gone, depleted by banking fees over the past seventy years. Maybe the stuff in the safe-deposit box is nothing but czarist bonds and worthless certificates. On the other hand, maybe whoever gets in there will be sitting on a controlling interest in Royal Dutch Petroleum.”

She thought about it. “I think the important thing for those three is to be in the game,” she said. “It doesn’t really matter who wins the hand, or how much is in the pot.”

“I think you’re right,” I said. “Weeks even said as much. He wants to play.”

She picked up her drink, shook it so that the ice cubes clinked pleasantly. “ Bern,” she said, “I was really glad I could be around for most of it at the end there. I never met a king before.”

“I’m not sure you met one today.”

“Well, that’s as close as I expect to come. Mowgli was impressed, incidentally. He said he was seeing a whole new side of the book business today.” She sipped her drink. “ Bern,” she said, “there’s a few things I’m not too clear on.”

“Oh?”

“How’d you know it was Tiggy?”

“I knew it was somebody,” I said. “When Rasmoulian turned up at the bookstore, I assumed Candlemas had told him about me. When it turned out Candlemas was dead all along, I figured he must have done some talking before he died, probably to the man who killed him. Rasmoulian knew me by name, not by sight, so he hadn’t followed Candlemas or Ilona to my store, or spotted me with Hoberman and followed me home.”

“And you knew Charlie Weeks had called him. How did you know that?”

“When I called Weeks and went over to his apartment,” I said, “he didn’t know what the hell I wanted. He really did think I was some guy named Bill Thompson who’d come up on the elevator with Cappy Hoberman. When I said I wanted to talk to him, he probably thought I’d heard something about Hoberman’s death, but not that I had anything to do with the burglary.”

“But if Tiggy told him…”

“Tiggy told him Candlemas had admitted hiring a burglar to break into the king’s apartment. But Weeks didn’t know that burglar was the guy who’d said two words to him in the hallway. Then, once we started talking, he put two and two together.”

“And?”

“And he tried to keep what he knew to himself, but he made a slip. When I said how Rasmoulian had known my middle name, he said, ‘Grimes.’ Now where did that come from?”

“Maybe you told him.”

I shook my head. “When it was time to leave,” I said, “he was still calling me Bill Thompson, pretending he didn’t have a clue that wasn’t my real name. If he knew the Grimes part, he’d know about the Bernie and the Rhodenbarr, too. So he knew more than he should, and for all his talk about joining forces he was keeping what he knew to himself. I played along, but I knew then and there that he was more than an old friend of Hoberman’s and a ticket into the building. He was involved clear up to his hat.”

“And when did you know Candlemas was the woodchuck?”

“Not as soon as I might have. The names on the passports did it for me. Not Souslik, I had to check some reference books before I found out what a souslik was, but I recognized the word ‘marmot’ even if Candlemas did give it a French-style ending on his fake Belgian passport. Then I looked up ‘Candlemas’ and found out it was just Groundhog’s Day with hymns and incense.”

“Wilfred’s favorite holiday.”

“Yes, and wasn’t that a revelation?” I transferred some beer from my bottle to my glass, then from the glass to me. “I should have guessed earlier. On my first visit to Candlemas’s apartment, one of the knickknacks I noticed was what I took for a netsuke.”

“What kind of a rodent is that, Bern?”

“You know, those little ivory carvings the Japanese collect. They originally functioned something like buttons for securing the sash on a kimono, but for a long time now they’ve made them as objets d’art. I didn’t look close at the one Candlemas had, but I figured it was ivory, and that it was supposed to be a beaver but the tail was broken off.”

“And actually it was a woodchuck?”

“It was still there yesterday,” I said, and took a little velvet drawstring bag from my pocket, and drew Letchkov’s bone woodchuck from it. “If I’d been paying attention I would have known it wasn’t a beaver. It’s a perfect match for Charlie Weeks’s mouse-the bone’s yellowed in just the same way. You know, when Charlie showed me the mouse, I got a little frisson.”

“That’s a rodent, right?”

I gave her a look. “It’s a feeling,” I said. “I knew there was something familiar about the mouse, but I couldn’t think what it was. Anyway, Candlemas was the woodchuck, and he kept his carved totem all those years. I guess he had the mouse, too, and gave it to Hoberman to pass on to Weeks.”

“Why did he need Hoberman? If he was the woodchuck, he knew Weeks as well as Hoberman did. Why couldn’t he sneak you into the Boccaccio himself?”

“I’m not positive,” I said. “He may have been afraid of the reception he’d get from Weeks. Remember, Weeks had spread the story that Candlemas had sold out the Anatrurians. Candlemas knew he hadn’t, but he couldn’t afford to find out if Weeks really believed it. Either way, he might not get a warm reception from the mouse.”

“So he figured he’d be safer using Hoberman.”

“But not safe enough,” I said.

She had more questions and I had most of the answers. Then she started to order another round and I caught her hand on the way up. “No more for me,” I told her.

“Aw, come on, Bern,” she said. “It’s been weeks since we had drinks together after work, and on top of that it’s a holiday. Get in the spirit of it, why don’t you?”

“We’re supposed to remember the war dead,” I said, “not join them. Anyway, I’ve got somewhere to go.”

“Where’s that?”

“Guess,” I said.

In The Big Shot, Humphrey Bogart plays Duke Berne, a career criminal who’s trying to go straight because a fourth felony conviction will put him in prison for life. But he can’t stay away from it, and goes in on the planning of an armored-car heist. The head of the gang is a crooked lawyer, and the lawyer’s wife is Bogart’s old sweetheart. She won’t let Bogie risk his life, and keeps him from participating in the robbery by holding him in his room at gunpoint. A witness picks him out of a mug book anyway, which strikes me as questionable police work, but that’s my professional point of view showing.

The lawyer’s jealous, and screws up Bogie’s alibi, and he winds up going down for the count. There’s a prison break, and Bogie gets away, but one thing after another goes wrong, until finally Bogie hunts down the rat lawyer and kills him. He’s shot, though, and dies in the hospital.

That was the first picture, and I’d never seen it before. I got caught up in it, too, and maybe that was why I didn’t eat much of the popcorn, or it may have been because I’d been munching peanuts at the Bum Rap. Either way, I had more than half a barrel left at intermission. I had to use the john-beer’s like that-but I went and came back without hitting the refreshment counter.

I didn’t feel like seeing the guy with the goatee, or any of the other regulars I’d gotten to know by sight. I just felt like sitting alone in the dark and watching movies.

The second picture was The Big Sleep, and whoever put the program together had been having fun, combining two pictures with near-identical titles. But of course this was the classic, based on the Chandler novel with a screenplay by William Faulkner, starring Bogie and Bacall and featuring any number of good people, including Dorothy Malone and Elisha Cook, Jr. I won’t summarize it for you, partly because the plot’s impossible to keep straight, and partly because you must have seen it. If not, well, you will.

Ten minutes into the picture, at a moment when I was really immersed in what was happening on the screen, I heard the rustle of cloth and got a whiff of perfume, and then someone was settling into the seat beside me. A hand joined mine in the popcorn barrel, but it wasn’t groping for popcorn. It found my hand, and closed around it, and didn’t let go.

We both watched the screen, and neither of us said a word.

When the movie ended we were the last ones to leave the theater, still in our seats when the credits ended and the house lights came up. I guess neither of us wanted it to be over.

On the street she said, “I bought a ticket. And then the man told me to get my money back. He said you left a ticket for me.”

“He’s a nice man. He wouldn’t lie to you.”

“How did you know I would come?”

“I didn’t think you would,” I said. “I didn’t know if I would ever see you again, sweetheart. But I thought it was worth a chance.” I shrugged. “It was just a movie ticket, after all. It wasn’t an emerald.”

She squeezed my hand. “I would take you to my apartment, but it is not mine anymore.”

“I know. I was there.”

“So you will take me to yours.”

We walked, and neither of us spoke on the way. Inside, I offered to make drinks. She didn’t want one. I said I’d make coffee. She told me not to bother.

“This afternoon,” she said. “You said we went to the movies together, but that we were no more than friends.”

“Good friends,” I said.

“We went to bed together.”

“What are friends for?”

“Yet you did not let anyone know we went to bed together.”

“It must have slipped my mind.”

“It did not slip your mind,” she said with cool certainty, “nor will it ever slip from mine. I will never forget it, Bear-naard.”

“It made such an impression on you,” I said, “that you emptied out your apartment and moved right out of my life.”

“You know why.”

“Yes, I guess I do.”

“He is the hope of my people, Bear-naard. And he is my destiny, even as Anatrurian independence is my life. I came here to be with him, and to…to strengthen his commitment to our cause. To be a king, to have a throne, all that is nothing to him. But to lead his people, to fulfill the dreams of an entire nation, that stirs his blood.”

Play the song, I thought. Where the hell was Dooley Wilson when you needed him?

“And then you came along,” she said, and reached out a hand to touch my face, and smiled that smile that was sad and wise and rueful. “And I fell in love with you, Bear-naard.”

“And once we were together…”

“Once we were together we had to be apart. I could be with you once and keep you as a memory to warm me all my life, Bear-naard. But if I had been with you a second time I would have wanted to stay forever.”

“And yet you came here tonight.”

“Yes.”

“Where do you go from here, Ilona?”

“To Anatruria. We leave tomorrow. There’s a night flight from JFK.”

“And the two of you will be on it.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll miss you, sweetheart.”

“Oh, Bear-naard…”

A man could drown in those eyes. I said, “At least you won’t have Tsarnoff and Rasmoulian and Weeks getting in your way. They’ll be off playing hopscotch with the gnomes of Zurich, trying to find a way into a treasure your guy already gave up on.”

“The real treasure is the spirit of the Anatrurian people.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” I said. “But it’s a shame you don’t have much in the way of working capital.”

“It is true,” she said. “Mikhail says the same thing. He would like to raise funds first so we will have money on which to operate. But the time is now. We cannot afford to wait.”

“Hang on a minute,” I said. “Just wait here, okay?”

I left her on the couch in the living room and paid a quick visit to my bedroom closet. I came back with a cardboard file folder.

“Weeks had these,” I said. “He slipped them out of the portfolio along with the bearer shares, and I scooped them up this morning when I was in his apartment. I figured it was safe to take these because I don’t think he paid much attention to them. His whole orientation is politics and intrigue. As far as he’s concerned, these were just a propaganda device.”

She opened the folder, then nodded in recognition. “The Anatrurian postage stamps,” she said. “Of course. King Vlados received a complete set and passed them on to his son, and they have come down to Mikhail. They are pretty, aren’t they?”

“They’re gorgeous,” I said. “And this isn’t a set, it’s a set of full sheets.”

“Is that good?”

“They’re a questionable issue from a philatelic standpoint,” I said, “or else they’d be damn near priceless, considering their rarity. As it is, they’re still valuable. They’re unpriced in Scott, but Dolbeck prices provisional and fantasy issues, and the latest Dolbeck catalog has the full set at twenty-five hundred dollars.”

“So these stamps are worth over two thousand dollars? That is good.”

“If you’re selling,” I said, “you generally figure on netting two-thirds to three-fourths the Dolbeck value.”

“Two thousand, then. A little less.”

“Per set.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “That is very nice.”

“It’s nicer than you realize,” I said. “The stamps are printed fifty to a sheet, so you’re holding fifty sets. That’s somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars.”

She stared. “But…”

“Take it before I change my mind,” I said. “There’s a man at Kildorran and Partners who specializes in this kind of material. He’ll either buy it from you or arrange to sell it for you. He’s in London, on Great Portland Street, and his name and the firm’s address are written down on the inside of that folder you’re holding. I don’t know if you’ll get a hundred grand. It may be more, it may be less. But you’ll get a fair price.” I extended a forefinger, chucked her under the chin. “I don’t know how your flight’s routed tomorrow night, but if I were you I’d change things and take a day or two in London. You don’t want to wait too long with those things. You might make a mistake and use one to mail a letter.”

“Bear-naard, you could have kept these.”

“You think so?”

“But of course. No one knew you had them. No one even knew they were valuable.”

I shook my head. “It wouldn’t work, sweetheart. The hopes and dreams of a couple of little people like you and me don’t add up to a hill of beans next to the cause you and Michael are fighting for. Sure, I could use the money, but I don’t really need it. And if I ever do I’ll go out and steal it, because that’s the kind of man I am.”

“Oh, Bear-naard.”

“So pack them up and take them home with you,” I said. “And I think you’d better go now, Ilona.”

“But I thought…”

“I know what you thought, and I thought so too. But I went to bed with you once and lost you, and I don’t want to go through that again. One time is a good memory. Twice is heartbreak.”

“Bear-naard, I have tears in my eyes.”

“I’d kiss them away,” I said, “but I wouldn’t be able to stop. So long, sweetheart. I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll never forget you,” she said. “I’ll never forget Twenty-fifth Street.”

“Neither will I.” I took her arm, eased her out the door. “And why should you? We’ll always have Twenty-fifth Street.”